The first page of Srikanth Reddy’s Underworld Lit ends with a minatory reversal familiar from Soviet Russia jokes:
“Contrary to the accounts of Mu Lian, Madame Blavatsky, and Kwasi Benefo, et al., it is not customarily permitted to visit the underworld. No, the underworld visits you.”
A journal interrupted by a picaresque, spliced with satire and with what looks like found poetry, Underworld Lit does visit literal hells: its inset story time-travels through several underworlds. And in its frame narrative, the underworld also visits someone partly resembling Reddy himself. This narrator — or speaker, depending on whether one wants to emphasize the prose or poem or prose poem — is living in the uncertain, tense period after treatment for skin cancer. As a middle-aged, tenure-track academic, he is also about to enter the protracted limbo of assessment. Preparing a new undergraduate seminar, he decides to translate a Chinese tale previously existing only in French. His long, embellished mistranslation sets off the picaresque winding through the book.
A shorter, more dutiful translation is given in the final pages of Underworld Lit, as a kind of coda. In that version, a minor bureaucrat named Chen, summoned to a trial concerning a massacre he failed to prevent in a former life, defends himself in court: his former self didn’t kill the rebels, indeed he wrote a memo attempting to stop it. But as the judge declares, he had power to do more, according to Ming law: “You failed your duty, Chen. At best, you were negligent.”
Each of the book’s strands returns again and again to war, and to the ideas of guilt or complicity, of being “at best … negligent.” In the embedded mistranslation that the Reddy-like character is presumably writing and which takes over every few chapters, Chen journeys first through Xibalba, the Mayan underworld. Its death gods have become fused with the late 20th-century Guatemalan military government, and now sport “wraparound Ray-Bans, battered flip-flops, matching ‘United Fruit Company’ baseball caps.” The Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh are two boys looking for their father, one of the indigenous K’iche’ people killed by the government with aid from the US.
In turn, the consequences of the 2003 Iraq invasion seep through the passages set in the 2010s. War filters through the news and warps one’s way of seeing: tanks, first mentioned as having crushed Babylonian ruins in the invasion, give the speaker a simile for the look of his Chinese source text — its dense, inky, vertical columns of characters seem to be “falling like black snowflakes or the tread of an M1 Abrams tank.” Reddy’s professor visits iraqbodycount.org, scrolling through the entries of “those who have died in my name.” He listens to the news, and at one point he makes an offhand remark about getting ready for “the protest,” as if to suggest both a wishful view (of the protest, the one that will do something) and a cynical one (each day a new protest, or rather countless protests).
When a belligerent student asks this professor about his worldview, he replies, awkwardly, “Pro-recycling, anti-genocide?”; the attempted joke, complete with question mark, suggests a self-doubting or self-disgusted view of the university. Why should you, or how do you, keep teaching and publishing given what you see in the news each day? Those questions help explain all the lines caricaturing higher education (“The goals of the seminar are to introduce students to the posthumous disciplinary regimes of various cultures, and to help them develop the communication skills that are crucial for success in today’s global marketplace”), as well as all the allusions to ultra-famous poems like The Waste Land. Academia seems to be half necrotic, half grotesquely evolving. The professor sees it as a zombie movie, somewhat viciously imagining “decomposing extras … at an MLA convention cash bar.”
While being “pro-recycling” sums up well-meaning but blinkered individual practices in the contemporary US, Underworld Lit recycles continuously in broader, more productive senses. For instance, near the beginning of the book, Reddy uses what first seemed to me an odd, overly precious simile for the way the exams he is grading are ruffled by passing traffic: the “pages flutter and settle like a stunned wren rearranging itself on my lap.” Much later, though, as he and his spouse — “making home improvements to our sunlit underworld” — fix the silhouette of a raptor onto their glass door, the simile gains resonance. The raptor silhouette is itself an temporary and ineffective way of stopping birds from colliding with windows; there will be more “stunned wren[s].” And besides, just as they put it up, the couple hears a “feathery thud” at a neighbor’s window. In this “sunlit underworld,” one individual’s best intentions aren’t enough to stop death, even in its smallest forms.
On a second reading, one begins to notice more birds, all marked by the Anthropocene: the one buried in the yard to teach the daughter about death, the initially bizarre metaphor that compares a pyramid to “the broken black beak of a badly buried bird,” the papers that “fluttered out like hurt birds from the window.” Through the idea of extinction (at one point, Reddy lists the now-tragicomic names of species like the Darling Downs hopping mouse), death permeates the book on yet another scale. Underworld Lit registers — movingly and softly — an afterlife we are making.
Recycling is at work on other formal levels as well. Most obviously, Chen is translated into body after body: minor official in the Ming dynasty, 20th-century Mayan farmer, Middle Egyptian. And his text takes new form in one language after another.
Central to Reddy’s interest in translation is the idea of error: errors help make Underworld Lit, which from my description so far might seem mainly a grim satire, into something resiliently strange. At the beginning of Léon Wieger’s 1909 French translation, printed in full near the end of the book, Chen “faisait la sieste dans son cabinet de travail”; Reddy turns this nap into a “cabinet of pain,” a perfect kenning for an office. The French “satellite” that summons Chen to his trial (and which has among its definitions both Objet astronomique en orbite and Escalier motorisé de l’aéroport) becomes an airport staircase: picture the stair car of Arrested Development, driving steadily through Xibalba’s river of blood.
Such mistakes are fun; they can also be revealing. For example, “I lost in dark would,” a struggling undergraduate’s attempt to translate Dante into contemporary English, is at once: a candidate for the most overtly avant-garde line in this book of prose poetry; a cartoon of the gap between a traditional literature class and its students; and an emblem for velleities (though contemporary Americans may be “anti-genocide” we may also be lost in woulds, in a lack of action). Asking your phone for information on “Wieger” — whose English-language Wikipedia page is currently a scant two sentences long — may prompt the phone to begin reading you a definition of Uyghur, eventually leading you an entry on the wrongful detainment of Abu Bakker Qassim.
These pointed errors, determinedly strange in and of themselves, are central to how the book balances between tones, modes, and genres. Underworld Lit has four sections (“Fall Term,” “Winter Term,” and so on), and the first three of these sections have a Christological 33 subsections, about a page long. Within this visibly orderly framework, a given subsection might take place in the introspective, quasi-autobiographical plot of the 2010s, or in the rangier story that takes off from the translated tale of judgment.
Both of those plots have the cadences of a relatively straightforward prose narrative. But such chapters are interrupted — and sometimes invaded — by language that is less straightforward, less linear. These passages lack an “I,” and usually mimic a nonliterary genre. One chapter, for instance, consists of Cyrillic versions of the Wong-Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale, accompanied by hypothetical torments: “5) Shit forever. 6) Hold up the sky.” Other chapters are made up of quizzes. Many have lists — of genocide victims, of names for the Milky Way in other languages, of the MLA’s dwindling Job Information List (complete with the printout of text of “0 saved jobs | New search / Viewing 1-10 of 9 [0.282 seconds]”). There are also children’s drawings, movie stills, digitized scans from Wieger’s Folk-lore chinois moderne, Rorschach tests, maps of China that look like Rorschach tests, and a set of grainy, Sebaldian photos of Rorschach and Brad Pitt (who look alike). Rorschach returns again and again in stains, blurs, blotches, birthmarks, jaguar’s spots; their unreadable or unstable patterns work as figures for reading — reading literary texts, the world in general, CT scans.
These non-narrative kinds of discourse open the book’s rueful satire to something more disorderly. The line between such modes is ragged, and some invasions are slight: take the interpolations that stem from basic Humanities 101 instructions, like “Please print clearly and remember your name,” or “Please, no talking. Hurry,” where bland exam instruction is tinged with something more minatory. Others are chapter-length. Section III, subsection III begins by printing a bare, page-wide outline of Iraq. It reads in full:
The names are those of brightly colored plastic horses from the My Little Pony toy line, owned by the narrator’s young daughter. Here they are linked to canonical European languages, then to a refrain common to both the canonical children’s book Goodnight Moon and The Waste Land. You may see the western edges of Iraq as a horse’s muzzle, and be reminded of mǎmiàn or Horse-Face, an underworld guardian in Chinese myth (when Chen meets this guardian, she has a “glossy pink mane” and “thermoformed plastic muzzle”). Or you may recall a passage that initially seemed to transcribe a conversation between psychoanalyst and patient:
Examiner: Feel free to rotate the image. Most people see more than one thing.
Subject: Um, a pony?
Examiner: Sorry. I don’t see it.
Subject: Just the head. [Points to center left.] She nibbles on a flower.
Examiner: Oh, now I see. But where is the flower?
Subject: It’s not there, Daddy. You have to imagine it.
These passages exist firmly in their own weirdness, while accumulating meaning. They stretch the book into a realm that spans prose and poetry; they ask for pause amid the momentum of plot. The line drawing of Iraq and the little phrases that follow it start to vibrate further: national devastation and nuclear family; pathos and tweeness and grimness; things loved, lost, or bought; language borrowed, revived, translated.
[Published by Wave Books on August 4 2020,