Zsuzsanna Gahse: Mountainish review - seeking refuge

Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters. Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire in Prototype’s English-language edition, a narrator travels in the Swiss Alps across disparate fragments of prose, converging occasionally with five central characters.

Gahse captures conversations in mountain refuges, in cars traversing steep cliffs, on journeys to ragged quarries or distant hikes across granite. Many of these notes are gestural. Note 229, for instance, reads, in full, "I am more of an observer of mountain silhouettes." The sightline of Gahse’s project widens and contracts, dancing around the scale of its subject and, throughout Mountainish, Gahse pays attention to the destabilising potential of mountain landscapes. With humility and care, she unfolds a detailed picture of how we interact in the shadow of these geological mammoths.

A central theme of Mountainish is the disintegration of linguistic certainty. This erosion is apparent from the onset of reading, or before even opening the front cover. The original title of Gahse’s Bergisch teils farblos appears in Derbyshire’s translation as Mountainish. "Teils" means "in part" or "partly", and Derbyshire chooses to exchange this word for the English suffix "-ish". This suffix betrays a gap between the meaning expressed in the English, and the meaning that remains in the German. The subject of the book is unstable. "-Ish" implies a lack of semantic orientation, a confession that meaning is free to roam like sheep in an alpine pasture. In German, Bergisch can mean "mountainlike", a green colour, or the place-name of a low mountainous area in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Farblos can mean "colourless". Bergisch teils farblos might literally translate to "mountainlike partly colourless". Derbyshire has zipped the title tightly into one word, and dropped the negation of colour. Meaning falls away, scree cascading down the edge of a cliff.

Just as something wanders free in the valley between the German and English titles, language diverts between the mountain ranges described in Gahse’s work. That is, Mountainish is a striking exploration of the linguistic and emotional complexity of our confrontation with alpine space. Mountains are dangerous, volcanic, vivid; they resist human interference and cannot be cultivated by any amount of technological sophistication. Avalanches and rockfalls are continuous. However, channels of language flow in the ridges between these vast forms, dialects blossoming from refuge to refuge. A friend of the narrator, Manu, describes someone detecting a slight difference in another’s voice or language, and asking where they come from. In the Alps, it may be the case that "the respondent had their language instilled in them five kilometres away from the enquirer. People have ears for the smallest of difference." Communities are knitted by a shared preservation of a minority dialect.

Outsiders might be alienated and ostracised. At times, Gahse points towards the failure of comprehension, noting how often we become lost in the rocky terrain of definition. She writes that, "I would like to dedicate an ode to etymologists. Without their pointers I would often lack orientation, not only in the Alps." In note 55, Gahse’s narrator sits in a mountain cabin, speaking with the hut warden, and reflects on the vast spectrum of Alpine Swiss German: "mere slivers, occasionally syllables that perhaps make up an entire word fly past without me making sense of them, and that shreds the meaning of the sentence." However, the attempt to communicate across this difference is continually approached by Gahse’s narrator with care and fascination, as this linguistic diversity expands the horizons of semantic potential. Gahse revels in the vibrancy of language that dances just out of reach, reinventing itself at the onset of each valley.

Indeed, minor languages blossom in mountain communities, like the varied German dialects of the Swiss Alps. The vicissitudes of these landscapes enclose and sustain linguistic diversity. In this book, the upward or downward motion of speech and rock are held in comparison, and Gahse’s reflections on ascent and avalanche appear alongside those on language. At one point, Gahse explores the singular of "brother" in the Swiss German spoken in parts of the Uri Alps, "Briäder". Note 57 reads, in full:

Briäder, then. The vowels fly through the mountain skies, scraping against the higher rocks so that an ü changes into an i, a u to an ü, an au to a long a, an i into a clear i+e or i+ä, so instead of lieb the word is then li-äb, and the consonants incline away from the vowels or plummet and fall.

Linguistic formations concentrate and collapse, transmuting as snow slips into meltwater. The book beautifully captures the rise and fall of voice, the tremors of the larynx, cave-like, trapping air, oscillating continuously. Words, and their definitions, are in continual flux. Mountainish captures the wonder of linguistic variety. Gahse writes in one early note, "In some languages, said Manu, everyone's throat has to switch over to start singing, and in other languages singing is always present, lurking in wait." A precarious movement of voice sweeps across this book. Like fossils unearthed from volatile rock, or Siberian bacteria surfacing in an arctic thaw, Gahse beautifully excavates vivid textures of dialogue. Mountainish pays attention to the intricate, ever-changing strata of human expression.

Meaning is alive and undone in the mountain range. Towards the end of this slight, thoughtful book, Gahse writes that "languages are repeatedly destabilised". These linguistic erosions are mirrored in the volatility of a mountain terrain. Mountains are sites of trepidation or chaos. One of Gahse’s opening lines is "All mountains have in mind is collapse". The peril of mountain travel is starkly present; images of frozen corpses and falling bodies permeate the landscape. On the precipice of danger, language is continually shifting, starting and stopping, like the fleeting interactions between visitors to mountain huts. Gahse’s narrator travels this cold landscape, "seeking people". Sam, a friend, keeps tape recordings of people’s voices, tracking how language contorts in mountain communities. His photographer sister Manu, too, seeks people, cataloguing a collection of smiles: "She doesn’t comment, has no wish to interpret anything into the images…a simple categorisation is not possible, only mixed categorisations: another reason why we will never come to the end of our conversation." Gahse captures the continual echo of intimacy, an unfolding movement towards other people.

In Mountainish, all natural forms are in constant communication: the snow, the air, the rock, the sheep and the hiking communities. Of climbing mountains, Gahse writes, "people clamber up to overcome the sky. And all along, the mountains driven into the sky are actually in dialogue with the goings-on in the Earth’s interior; as such: in dialogue with the depths." Mountains are disruptions of the earth’s crust, the inside of the world bursting outward. Tectonic change is a brutal reminder that nothing in the world is set in stone, for even stone itself is slowly shifting and evolving. Likewise, language evolves as a velocity beyond reach. Gahse’s narrator exclaims, "it is said that there are four thousand languages in the world today, or a hundred times that or even more, and then one could claim that there are currently exactly as many languages as people." It is our task to reach towards others, across the gulf of understanding.

Mountains, here, in this book, are spaces of redefinition and disintegration, where failure and mortality are visible. Catastrophic events on mountains are combatted with the intense, fleeting encounters of their inhabitants. Throughout the work, Gahse pays attention to the vivid hues and forms of language. Her words burst into presence, avalanche-like, pouring from a geological depth. Elements erupt from the hillside: "other colours come to play inside the stone. Emerald, topaz, agate... I recently heard about a yellow world. Sour-lemon world and honey-yellow sunrise through fog, acrid yellow all around the world." Mountainish honours the disparate intimacies that converge in a diverse and rough-textured landscape. Gahse senses the many threads of connection flowing through the earth. The seasons shift and the glacier melts, and the traveller continues her forward movement. On her way, she observes a bright world of yellow sunlight, lacing the rocks.

• Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse, trans. Katy Derbyshire (Prototype, £12)
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