W. J. Davies talks to Catherine Schelbert, translator of Hugo Ball’s Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor, on the occasion of a new radio play edition of the novel.

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ugo Ball, founder of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and author of sound poems that encapsulate the ambitious experimentation of the Dada movement, said in a letter to his sister about his novel Flametti oder Vom Dandysmus der Armen (Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor), published in 1918 and written two years prior, that it “contains my whole philosophy on 200 pages. Love for those who are on their knees. For the outcasts, the crushed, the tormented.” Flametti is in many ways a companion to Ball’s “Dada Manifesto”, also of 1916: a depiction of the kinds of lives Ball saw imperiled by the calamitous nationalism and bloody militarism of the First World War.

Ball’s novel, translated into English by Catherine Schelbert and first published in 2014 by Wakefield Press, is the story of Max Flametti, manager of a Zurich vaudeville troupe. Flametti is desperate for work. He needs to settle debts, pay his performers, and somehow make a name for himself so he might get out of the gutter once and for all. The gaggle of artists he gathers around him are greedy, grasping, despairing, and ridiculous. Their big win, Flametti thinks, will come from a new play, The Indians, in which he plays a Native American chief. It is a role that affords Flametti a feeling of status and power missing from his daily life, underscored by the perception that such cultures involve a primal, raw state of being lost by industrialism.

Flametti, likely based on Tristan Tzara, one time Dada fellow-traveler turned rival to Ball, is not a hero. He is a conman, drug dealer, fisherman and, amid all of that, an actor and troupe manager. It is difficult to say he is successful at any of his pursuits (he lands a fish, but his chosen fishing spot is a polluted city river). He is a tragic figure, a rogue, charming yet unlikable as such characters (real and fictional) often are. Ball’s tale, particularly in Schelbert’s translation, as often leaves us cheering Flametti’s triumphs as it does pitying him as a prisoner of his flaws.

Ball’s letter to his sister encapsulates who he intended to valorize through his writing and through Dada. Poverty is central to Flametti. It was how Ball spent most of his life. He lived with his wife, the poet and Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Emmy Hennings, in often terrible conditions. That sensitivity to the life of the poor, which Flametti expresses in all its hardship, cruelty and humor, is a powerful artistic driver for more famous works that would follow Ball’s. Flametti is a clear forerunner to something like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, for example, itself a product of Beckett’s impoverished wartime experiences and Dada-adjacent apprehensions about the solidity of language and the certainty of reason. If Ball’s Flametti has not become a household name like Godot or, to take a German example, the works of Kafka, it is perhaps because Flametti is very much of the moment in which it was written, enlivened by the peculiar sights, sounds and smells of Zurich and environs in 1916. If that is a testament to the staying power of Beckett’s and Kafka’s delocalizing art, it is also a reminder that a novel like Flametti is a striking portal into a time and place in which art drew its nourishment from defying forms of conflict and cruelty operating on a newly globalized scale. Ball and the Cabaret Voltaire artists’ enemy was the industrialized destruction modernity announced itself with in 1914.

Flametti, as Schelbert alludes to in her remarks here, is quite different from the works Ball is better known for, above all the slim collection of sound poems which for many admirers are quintessentially Dada. Yet, as the quotation above suggests, Ball saw Flametti as a novel in which he had worked through much of his thinking about the socio-economic conditions of avant-garde culture. In this sense, Flametti is not dissimilar to the early texts of writers like Beckett or James Joyce, rich with ideas and intuitions, often expressed with the certainty of youth, yet missing the formal experimentation which makes for the more challenging yet distinctive reading experiences we associate with them. Flametti is a realist novel drawn from Ball’s life as an impoverished performer. We can read it, much like we might read Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist or Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks, both for its own merits and for the kernels it contains that illuminate the more famous works, as well as the titillating autobiographical insights it offers.

It would be remiss not to acknowledge that in Flametti we also see hints of Dada’s more troubling dimensions. As well as Max’s disquieting obsession with his role in The Indians, Flametti features frequent casual sexism and racism. These are products of the age Ball lived in and the world in which his novel takes place, certainly, but they also manifested in particular ways in Dada. While Hennings and other female Dadaists in Zurich were able to play significant roles in the movement, Dada broadly was decidedly male and exclusionary, often casting what it opposed––what it called “machine culture”––as female. Likewise, though Dada embraced art practices from beyond the Anglophone world in ways alien to mainstream culture, the ambition to shock and create rupture with the staunch rationalism Dadaists saw both in dominant art forms and the industrial logic of the First World War was fueled in part by a regressive primitivism that presumed the irrationality of the cultures they borrowed from. Nevertheless, Dada was legitimately inspired by the plight of the repressed, represented by the victims of poverty and war in Europe, and intended as a howl against the forces which ground such people down. This is vital to understanding Ball’s views and his impulses for Dada, and what gives them both currency still. Above all, from Flametti, we can learn about the world that convinced Hugo Ball of the necessity of Dada.

This interview with Catherine Schelbert was conducted to mark a new edition of Flametti, released by edition fink and Fucking Good Art in 2024. Schelbert’s reading of the novel is backed by a soundscape developed by Robert Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma. It is available digitally and comes with a read-along paperback and (optionally) a 10-inch vinyl record. What is most exciting about this new edition of Flametti is that it celebrates through sound the novel’s fundamental vitality, its raucous energy, and the splendid drama of the troupe Flametti fails to control.

Alongside Dada and the Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball is most well known for his manifesto and sound poetry. How does Flametti fit in? What was it like to translate?

Fit in? It doesn’t. He wrote profoundly theoretical works, he translated Bakunin, he wrote sound poetry, he co-founded Cabaret Voltaire. Flametti is uncharacteristically humorous and light-hearted. It essentially describes what it was like for him, trying to scrape enough money together to survive. Here’s what we wrote on the flap of the read-along paperback: “Flametti, or the dandyism of the poor is a dark satirical comedy about an impoverished vaudeville company and the rise and fall of its director Max Flametti, a figure of tragic proportions entangled in his inescapable self.” A closer reading reveals the gravity of the issues he raises. In fact, it’s got the works: the First World War, police repression, drugs, MeToo, poverty, power struggles, Indians, and black culture in the form of jazz embraced and appropriated by vaudeville (and Dada).

Hugo Ball is above all known for his Dadaist sound poetry, which is so crazy and onomatopoetic that it works as it stands in any language written in the Latin alphabet. So Flametti is surprising for being relatively straightforward though gloriously hellish to translate. What inspired me and kept me going was Ball’s language, the fact that he proves maybe even more than anything I have ever translated, that you cannot translate words. He proves how inadequate dictionary definitions are when you’re translating, how inadequate it is to define words, i.e. use other words to say what they ‘mean’ and, in contrast, how VERY important it is to understand their context, all the other words that keep their company. Words are like people, they never stand alone. Practically everything Ball says is fraught with layers of meaning.

Is there a particularly memorable translation challenge you can recall?

Oh, sure. An example: in the novel, Lydia is in a melodramatic, hysterical tizzy, convinced that her husband, who has gone to war (though he is probably still happily sitting in the barracks, playing cards and drinking up a storm), is “lying mangled and mutilated on a grassy bank in Siberia as fodder for ravens, crying out to her, ‘Here Lydia, here, come to me!’”

It seemed odd for Lydia to talk about a “grassy bank.” That’s not something I would ordinarily associate with Siberia; the clichés are flat grasslands, biting winds, and cold winters. So I started looking for the German word Rasenbank on the Internet and found it in a song that was popular in the teens of the 20th century. Could Ball have been making a subtle, or maybe in those days not so subtle, reference to that song? Yes, he could. Some ten pages later, Fiddling Marie (not yet 20, scrawny, and wearing a pince-nez) plays Die Rasenbank am Elterngrab when she auditions for Flametti’s Vaudeville company. The combination of grassy bank and Siberia demonstrates Ball’s frequent use of double entendre, his humor and irony. The song’s refrain reads:

Der liebste Platz, den ich auf Erden hab,
Das ist die Rasenbank am Elterngrab.
(My favorite spot on all the earth / is the grassy bank at my parents’ grave.)

There’s another twist. Many’s the time I have struggled with a phrase, trying one thing out after another, only to come full circle and return to my starting point. Rasenbank, grassy bank, no, not bank, bench, of course, because the German word bank means bench. I started hunting all over again, trying to trace the meanings of the word, this time in books, in volume 14 of the German dictionary compiled by the Grimm Brothers (1893). There, to my (Dadaist) delight, coincidence would have it illustrated by the following quote from a poem by L. H. C. Hölty (1771):

hier taumelt er von ball zu ball,

vergasz der rasenbank,

wo, beim getön der nachtigall

sein mädchen ihn umschlang

(here staggered he from ball to ball / forgot the grassy bank, / where, to the nightingale’s song, / his lassie did embrace him)

We can use language to talk about most fields, say architecture or plumbing, but when it comes to language itself, we are cursed by having to use the same medium that is the subject of our study. Like a dog chasing its own tail.

Flametti is not well known today compared to Ball’s other works. You mention the novel is pretty straightforward in terms of form and content. Could that have something to do with its obscurity?

‘Everybody’ has at least heard of Hugo Ball and Dada and maybe even of his weightier works, like his Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz or Byzantisches Christentum, but the novel is a blank spot in his biography, even among people well acquainted with Dada. I have been belaboring everybody I run into with the novel’s existence. Nienke Terpsma & Rob Hamelijnck, designers, makers, musicians, initiators of the audio project, have also been spreading the word, not only in Rotterdam where they live but wherever they are underway as artists—in the south of England, all over Switzerland, Germany, Italy . . .

At times I almost felt the novel was being blackballed. It is straightforward, not strictly Dada, but certainly a bravura demonstration of Hugo Ball’s huge vocabulary and an extremely atmospheric revelation of life among the down and out in Zurich in those days. Cabaret Voltaire, which still exists as a bar and cultural venue, albeit renovated to death, was the birth of Dada in the old town of Zurich. As part of many events organized to celebrate the centenary of Dada in 2016, Adrian Notz, the then director of the Cabaret Voltaire, issued a map pinpointing all the places in Zurich of relevance to the movement. The map did not include the Krokodil Bar, where Flametti and his troupe present their vaudeville shows and where Ball himself actually played the piano for the vaudeville director Flamingo, a real-life somebody who is Flametti’s namesake. The Krokodil still exists as well, blissfully oblivious to its numinous past.

Flametti is clearly semi- if not completely autobiographical. Just how neatly does it map on to Ball’s life?

Ball came from a bourgeois family in Pirmasens, Germany. Like many compatriots, the rose-colored glasses he wore when volunteering to fight for the German cause in the First World War were instantly shattered. He did not pick up the pieces; he just picked himself up and fled to Zurich to the dismay of his family who cut him off without a cent. He lived from hand to mouth and, as mentioned, played the piano in vaudeville theaters. Meyer, the pianist in Flametti’s troupe, reflects Ball’s experience, but he is certainly not a self-portrait. In fact, I think it’s autobiographical primarily in the sense that he drew from his own life experience in writing the novel.

Maybe it tells of his disillusionment? Most of the characters in the novel are steadfast and uncompromising in the pursuit of their own interests, regardless. That is not Hugo Ball.

Ball seems keen to exult the artistic possibilities of poverty. He subtitles Flametti with “the dandyism of the poor.” In the novel, he describes in rather Wildean terms the dandy as “a man of the world” who has the “superior, contradictory intelligence of one who is above being disappointed by reality.” How important was this idea of the dandy to Ball? Does the power of poverty feature in his other social or political writings?

I don’t know. But Ball wrote a foreword for Flametti, which has survived as a handwritten, unedited manuscript. It was published in German for the first time 100 years later (Nimbus Verlag, 2016 and is so far unpublished in English. In it he writes:

“Deep down, they [the characters in his novel] do not want to be immoral Indians, Apaches. They want to be noble Indians, magnanimous bourgeois Indians . . . They speak in a precious style. They want to be dandies, at least among themselves.”

In a long inner monologue in the first chapter, Flametti muses, “Flametti had the most reputed ensemble, though by no means the most reputable performers. On the contrary: that’s where his genius lay, in ferreting out quality, in conjuring something out of nothing. The members of Flametti’s troupe were . . . interesting. He had an eye for spotting talent. He had no time for agents, critics, and reputability. Decide for yourself! Aces were what he needed, personalities. Talent came second. The talent might be flawed, the voice might be flawed, the figure might be flawed. What did he care, so long as the bloke himself had substance and something to say.”

And Lucinda Guy, who wrote the text that is wrapped around the cover of the read-along paperback thanks to Nienke Terpsma’s beautiful design—I’m squeezing a lot into this sentence—anyway, Lucinda invites us to recognize “the instability and joys of an artistic existence” and “to find our own dandyism.”

The First World War looms in the background of Flametti. Characters are called up, smuggling is rampant, and the trenches never feel quite far enough away. How important is the war to understanding Flametti and the ideas Ball was keen on exploring?

Ball suffered terribly. “When will one laugh again! and dance! And hold a delicate, sweet, capricious cadence far worthier of living and dying for than this idiocy, this brutality, this beastly visage of war!”

In the novel, it’s a fact. The backdrop. It’s just around. He almost makes light of it. Members of the troop read the headlines in the papers. Leporello, the contortionist in Flametti’s troupe, has been conscripted, writes lugubrious letter to his beloved Lydia, with whom he ordinarily bickers nonstop, begging her to send him warm socks, cigarettes and chocolate. None of which they could afford. He appears to be sitting in barracks somewhere in Switzerland because he has practically no teeth and can’t eat.

How did you come to Flametti?

I didn’t come to Flametti, he came to me, through Harpune, a publisher in Vienna. They initially asked me to translate it and in 2011, they helped me apply to PEN America to get a grant for a translation in progress. I did, upon which, to my surprise, five publishers showed an interest in Flametti. Mark Lowenthal of Wakefield Press was the only one who did not keep me waiting for months and he’s a small publisher. I like that. He published it in 2014 with drawings by Tal R, who also did the artwork for Harpune’s bibliophile, letterpress publication, which we are, incidentally, planning to show when we introduce our audio project at a literary venue in central Switzerland in January.

The new edition out with edition fink and FGA is published alongside an extraordinary audio performance. While it includes the book read aloud, by yourself and quite wonderfully, it is far more than an audiobook. It is very much in the radio play tradition. Flametti is such a sensory novel, so the audio is a perfect accompaniment to the text. Could you tell me how the audio project came about and what the recording process involved?

That’s a fun story. Rob and Nienke are full of ideas and will try out anything that piques their curiosity. Rob said (I am literally quoting him), “Hey, Catherine why don’t we record Flametti?” So we did. Starting out with a lousy microphone, no studio, no decent soundproofing, no nothing but a hell of a lot of gumption. They would come when other work brought them to Switzerland from the first try-outs in 2018 to the last corrections. Nienke and Rob discovered that our small library had the perfect acoustics. We would squeeze in there with Rob recording and Nienke, who’s a book designer too, editing and correcting the reading.

We worked so hard on the audio project, or more precisely, I sat and read with the iPad propped up on my music stand (incidentally, the most beautiful music stand on the face of this planet, over 100 years old and made of lightweight wood: it folds into a neat little 30-cm-long package). Whenever we had a recording session, Nienke and Rob would set up their equipment and then walk across the hallway into my so-called office with a view of Lake Lucerne and gently invite me to join them. They did all the work. By the time they really got into it, they were practically professionals. They would return to Rotterdam, there combining text and music, including sounds found on the road. They were intrigued, for example, by someone playing the organ in a cathedral in Switzerland and later discovered that it was the renowned, erstwhile organist of Chartres Cathedral. Or meeting a trained soprano who hadn’t sung for 20 years and turning her into a singing angel at the very end of the audio book. It was a labor of love. Back in Rotterdam, Rob and Nienke involved Nina Hitz, a cellist and multi-instrumentalist. Rob plays many instruments, too. Nienke’s instrument is the laptop: cutting, pasting, editing and layering, arranging and rearranging. They created and collected materials to find the right sound and tunes for Flametti, peppering the soundscape with field recordings from their archives. The result is indeed a hybrid of audiobook and radio play. It was such an adventure. They’d never made anything like this in audio before. And neither have I. I’m so happy you like it, Will.

A real collaboration it seems. How did it feel at the time when you were working on it?

The music did surprise me. It developed so slowly and so piecemeal. Nienke and Rob would send me snippets. I had the feeling that it was invasive, at times even drowning out the reading. All of that changed thanks to the proficiency that Nienke acquired in dealing with the complexity of layering sounds and understanding how sound and silence contribute to the dramatic impact of the spoken word. The soundtrack has become partner to the reading. By the time they finished, I felt that Flametti is told not only in words but in sound as well.

Has revisiting Flametti like this changed your sense of the novel itself?

It has. I became more sensitive to how contemporary readers might react to assumptions that were self-evident back then, such as the role of women or racial clichés. And more sensitive to the desperation underlying all the silliness, as when a dancer ends up in a heap on stage after the tightrope collapses in the middle of a performance, much to the raucous amusement of the audience.

What do you think Ball and Dada’s legacies are now? Are there any artists or performers you see these legacies alive in?

Yes, actually, there’s always been Dada—in every generation. Think of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy about which Samuel Johnson commented in 1776 that “Nothing odd will do long.” Or Leigh Bowery of the 1970s and ‘80s, a Dadaist par excellence, who, in the words of dominatrix Reba Maybury (from an unpublished conversation with artist Lucy McKenzie), “would look like a normal person. Except to him a normal person wore extra-long trousers with heels slotted into sneakers, so he was absurdly tall. Then he would wear two wigs and it was just about as uncanny as you could get.” He flew in the face not just of everything bourgeois, but of social mores across the board.

And the Talking Heads recorded a new version in 2021 of their 1979 song “I Zimbra” based on Ball’s famous sound poem “Gadji beri bimba.” On stage, David Byrne says that Dada uses nonsense to make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense, and quotes Ball, who wrote that Dada’s artistic aim was “to remind the world that there are people of independent minds—beyond war and nationalism—who live for different ideals.”

What next, Catherine? Will you stay with Ball and his world at all?

I want to start work on Ruf und Echo, the book that Ball’s wife, Emmy Hennings, wrote about her life with him. There’s a wonderful anecdote in it. She writes about being in his hometown of Pirmasens in 1920, for a poetry reading. Hecklers in the audience disrupted their performance, possibly because they despised him for criticizing Germany in his book Deutsche Intelligenz. On leaving the venue, Hennings and Ball were confronted with the hecklers who prepared to throw stones at them. Hennings bent down and picked up some stones herself. She took the wind out of their sails when she started juggling them not just in front of her but even around her body as she had learned to do in vaudeville, remarking, as she did so, that it is not easy to stone her.