Rereading Klaus Merz’s Jakob schläft as Dreaming Jack
by John Taylor
A fundamental dreamy strangeness characterizes this tale.
Merz, Klaus. Dreaming Jack: A Lyric Novella, translated from the German by Marc Vincenz. Spuyten Duyvil, 2026. ISBN 978-1-963908-96-1. 280 pages. Paperback $20.00.
Many years ago, my dear Swiss friend, Marion Graf, who (among many other accomplishments) is the French-language translator of Klaus Merz (b. 1945), gave me a tip: “It seems to me that you would like Merz’s work!” In my several long conversations with Marion about literature and translation, she had already made excellent suggestions about French-language Swiss writers (no less than three of whom I ended up translating extensively). So I asked: “What would be a good book to begin with?” She replied: “Jakob schläft, a novella that I translated into French as Frère Jacques.”
I forthwith read the German original. Fascinated by the vivid unsettling imagery of the author’s sentences, I jotted down numerous quotations on a piece of scratch paper which, as I write this, is still inserted in my Fischer Verlag paperback. (The first edition of Jakob schläft was published by Haymon Verlag in Innsbruck in 1997, and the same publishers have subsequently produced a magnificent edition of Merz’s collected works.)
Marion Graf’s choice of Frère Jacques for the French title of course refers to the well-known song “Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?,” which in German goes “Bruder Jakob, schläfst du noch?” and in English, I daresay, sometimes with a different first name: “Are you sleeping, Brother John?” The title of the book thus derives from the song, which is cited in the story, and this connection is all the more poignant in that Jakob is the name that was supposed to have been given to the narrator’s older brother, who died at birth. Announced on the first page, this event lies at the heart of the narrative. The German title literally means “Jakob sleeps” or “Jakob is sleeping.”
All this comes back to mind because I have just received Marc Vincenz’s new translation of the novella, which he titles Dreaming Jack. In fact, we now have two fine, very different, English translations of this modern German-language classic. Tess Lewis translated the story as Jacob Asleep for Seagull Books nine years ago, in a bigger volume by Merz titled Stigmata of Bliss: Three Novellas.
It would be fastidious and confusing to compare the two English versions sentence by sentence, but let me dwell for a moment on names, a crucial thematic issue to which I have already hinted above. In French, Graf shifts “Jakob” to “Jacques”; in English, Lewis transforms “Jakob” to “Jacob,” and Vincenz “Jakob” to “Jack.” Moreover, as the narrator explains when recalling his older brother, “since there was never an official baptism, my parents compulsively stuck to the official namelessness of their eldest.” This older brother is therefore at once nameless, imagined as “Jakob” (that is, “Jack” in Vincenz’s version), and, to compound matters, above the cemetery crucifix, which has been removed and is now rotting “against the woodshed next to the pigsty,” a sign designates the deceased baby as merely “Renz Infant.”
“Renz” is a near-anagram of “Merz.” Furthermore, the narrator remarks that, when he was a child, he had learned how to read from the ten letters spelling out “Renz Infant.” Reading, and thus writing, stem from this death; that is to say, from absence, from the haunting presence of this missing brother.
In fact, the multilayered onomastic quandaries continue and ultimately enlighten. The narrator’s name is Lukas (an anagram of Klaus) and he has a younger brother nicknamed “Sol” (in Vincenz’s version), who suffers from hydrocephalus. “Sol” recalls Merz’s pun, in German, between “Sohn” (son) and “Sonne” (sun), the latter being the German nickname for the character. (Lewis uses “Sunny” for the younger brother’s name.) There is also a passing reference to the biblical story of Jacob’s fight with the angel, although re-situated in the mother’s “soul,” in which the “battle with the angels had probably long been lost, even before Jack’s birth.” And, as we thumb through Genesis to track down other potential Biblical allusions, let us not forget Jacob “dreaming” of a ladder down which angels are descending.
Dreaming, indeed. Vincenz boldly transforms “sleeping” to “dreaming” in the title that he gives to his translation, which is conceived in several of its facets as a tour de force. His interpretation can seemingly be construed in two ways. On the one hand, the narrator is dreaming of Jack (and, in the process, remembering his own childhood in the early 1950s and 1960s, the period graphically evoked in the novella) and, on the other hand, it is also perhaps Jack who, although dead, is somehow dreaming, rather as we imagine our deceased loved ones as active in a parallel, here oneiric, world. The latter possibility would suggest that the narrator, Lukas, has put himself inside his dead older brother’s dreaming mind and that he is thus reliving his childhood at one remove, from Jack’s standpoint in the netherworld. Lukas had, of course, never known Jack. In any event, the narrator often imagines Jack physically in his midst, shouting out “Damn you, Jack!” to him at one point, watching him pull back a heavy curtain in another passage, elsewhere letting him “stroke his eyelids,” then admitting towards the end: “Because he slept in the darkness, I couldn’t really place Jack anywhere.”
To be sure, a fundamental dreamy strangeness characterizes this tale and makes the reader ponder the removes from which reality, however deftly rendered by Merz’s stylistic exactitude, seems to stand. Yet by pointing to this paradox, I by no means wish to suggest that the “fiction,” clearly based on autobiographical sources, veers away from all too human truths that have been painfully felt. Merz had a handicapped brother, Martin Merz (1950-1983), who (like Sol in the novella) suffered from hydrocephalus. The oft-compelling details in the book are unquestionably based on the author’s personal knowledge and observation. “A couple of months after his birth,” explains the narrator for example, “in order to constrict the rapid growth of his skull, they countersunk two holes in the back of Sol’s head. In that countersunk light, you could see a heart thumping beneath his sparse, fuzzy hair.” As edited by Klaus Merz, Haymon Verlag published Martin’s own poems and prose writings as Zwischenland in 2003. It occurs to me that “Zwischenland,” literally an “in-between land,” applies to Klaus Merz’s novella as well in that the story unfolds between reality and a dreamworld, between fiction and autobiography, and between three brothers, one of whom is dead, another ill, and the third one their chronicler.
Shifting “sleeping” to “dreaming” in the title is not the only provocative decision made by Vincenz. In German, Merz uses the subtitle Eigentlich ein Roman (“Actually a Novel”), whereby he underscores the necessary fictional ambiguity of any literary approach drawing on personal subject matter. This is another ironic paradox in that the subtitle probably increases the reader’s suspicion that there are crucial autobiographical elements involved—which is the case. Vincenz transforms this subtitle into “A Lyric Novella” and then dares to place each paragraph (nearly always short and sometimes only one sentence in length) on successive separate pages. In the process, a novella made up of twenty-two short chapters of narrative prose essentially becomes twenty-two sequences of short prose texts, even, arguably in some cases, of prose poems or, at least, of what might be termed poetic-prose entities. The sequences are of course connected by the same overarching narrative structure, as are the chapters in the original book, but reading the sequences and the corresponding chapters side-by-side induces different effects, at least in this reader.
Personally, this page layout choice astonished me when I perused the first few chapters. However, I persisted, all the more so in that Vincenz’s English is very engaging. I gradually perceived how his unorthodox, debatable decision was renewing my reading of a favorite novella that I remembered very well. The new page layout focused me on single sentences, on vignettes, on images, that is, not on a continuous, conscientiously constructed plot, but rather on the oft-discontinuous fragments that truly compose, for better or worse, our memories of childhood. Without a doubt, the original conception of the book also conveys this effect through Merz’s skillful handling of transitions, or the lack thereof, between thoughts, perceptions, and direct discourse, but Vincenz intrepidly underscores this aspect and gives it potency.
As Merz depicts a distraught Swiss family unable to get past mourning and get on with living, he shows how the father, the mother, Sol, and the narrator himself are obsessed by this death, to the extent that intimate aspects of their heterogenous daily experiences remain informed by it. Their psychological entrapment is all the more inescapable because of a family secret which is revealed late in the novella: “Roughly and boorishly, with steel forceps, the doctor manhandled Mother’s private parts and snapped the healthy boy’s neck at birth.”
And when it is not death, it is sickness that rules their lives. “Sickness always been front and center in our family,” avows the narrator, adding: “And, after Grandmother trudged barefoot through the snow in a religious fit and was carried out of the house during the first spring storm (she was as delicate and ancient as brittle autumn leaves), my brother Sol was once again the sickest in the house; so sick, in fact, that everyone happily and generously tended to his every whim.”
As above with the grandmother, odd details, isolated and distilled, as it were, on each separate page of this new translation, keep the narrative slightly askew, even hallucinatory—or, once again, oneiric. The narrative is not constructed as an “argument” demonstrating something. It is a kind of map of memory, with that same double effect that maps can give us when we open them: lots of discrete points and then, from another vantage point, lots of discrete points connected by itineraries. More precisely, looking back at our past, from adulthood, can conjure up one of those connect-the-dots puzzles, but now with quite a few dots smudged out or shifted elsewhere, and with new (imaginary) ones added arbitrarily. Vincenz’s translation makes me sense this.
When I was about halfway through this translation, I came across a passage that now strikes me as an excellent summary of this unforgettable novella. I hadn’t noted it down on the piece of scratch paper kept in my old German edition, but I was much younger back then. It is a kind of caveat, pointing to the consequences of reminiscing, of living in the past, of dwelling on childhood:
When I couldn’t sleep after those events in the Wild West, I took the precaution of enquiring about Lot’s wife in order to prepare myself, should the subject come up in discussion during Sunday school.
I just couldn’t understand why God had set the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in motion so mercilessly. He hadn’t even spared the children. Above all, I couldn’t understand why he had let Lot’s wife turn into a pillar of salt.
All she had done was glance back.
John Taylor is an American writer, poet, critic, and translator who has long lived in France. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, and Modern Greek), he has brought the work of several European poets into English for the first time. His recent translations include books by Pascal Quignard, Philippe Jaccottet, Charline Lambert, Veroniki Dalakoura, Béatrice Douvre, and Franca Mancinelli. His most recent book of poetry is What Comes from the Night (Coyote Arts, 2024). His book A Little Tour through European Poetry (Transaction Publishers, 2015, now available from Taylor & Francis) opens with his essay “On the Strassenbahn with Klaus Merz’s Poetry.” He also reviewed Marc Vincenz’s translation of Klaus Merz’s poetry collection, Out of the Dust, in The Arts Fuse on 16 June 2015.
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
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