Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "translation"

Some of the most interesting novels are coming today from Eastern Europe. Three such recent books have caught my eye: Kornél Esti (New Directions, 2011, trans. by Bernard Adams) by the Hungarian writer Dezsö Kosztolányi (1885-1936), Coming from an Off-Key Time (Northwestern University Press, 2011, trans. by Alistair Ian Blyth) by the Romanian writer Bogdan Suceava (b. 1969), and All This Belongs to Me (Northwestern University Press, 2009, trans. by Alex Zucker) by the Czech writer Petra Hulová (b. 1979).

Kosztolányi is one of the greatest (alas, unknown) 20th century writers, a writer so versatile he could pen a novel in the realist, lifelike style of Flaubert (Skylark) or write in the absurdist tradition of his Viennese contemporary, Peter Altenberg (Kornél Esti). In the latter, each chapter can be read separately, like a vignette, or like a dialogue between the narrator/writer and his friend and alter ego, Kornél. In one of these dialogues, Kornél travels by train in Bulgaria, and although he only knows a few Bulgarian words, he decides to have a “real” conversation with the Bulgarian train guard, without betraying himself as a foreigner. What follows is one of the most hilariously absurd dialogues ever written.

Suceava’s novel describes the turmoil of the early nineties, immediately after the fall of communism, in Romania’s capital, Bucharest. The novel focuses on two of the mystical-nationalist sects that had appeared at the time: The Tidings of the Lord, whose leader is Vespasian Moisa; and the Stephanists, whose leader is a reincarnation of Stephen the Great (famous Moldavian 15th century prince, who won forty-six of forty-eight battles against the Turks). One of the founding members of the Tidings of the Lord, a professor of history, believes that Romanian language is a chosen language that conceals a code, and another one believes that this code encloses in it the cure to baldness!

Petra Hulová’s novel was published in the Czech Republic when she was in her early twenties, documenting her experience during the time she’d spent in Mongolia. It is written in the voices of five women from the same family, who belong to three different generations, and it depicts the conflicting interactions between them, and those between a traditional, rural world and the modern (albeit poor), urban world of Ulaanbaatar. The English translation was awarded the 2010 translation prize of the American Literary Translators’ Association.

I was happy to find some of my favorite publishers: New Directions, NYBR Books, Overlook Press and Europa Editions. (Speaking of Europa Editions, the book I am reading now is published by them: The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by a young German novelist of Russian origin, Alina Bronsky. I haven’t been so totally immersed in a novel in a long time—this is a hilarious, engrossing novel, one of those rare books that can appeal to a very diverse readership.)

My best BEA moments today were two sessions, both on literature in translation: “Spanish and Latin American Fiction in Translation” and “Translating Italy.” In my experience, translators are the most interesting—definitely the most intelligent and knowledgeable—creatures one can meet at literary events. This is not by accident since a translator is, by definition, someone who attempts to inhabit someone else’s mind. By the way, at the session on Italian literature, the first question asked by the moderator was: “What is a translator?” Anne Goldstein’s definition was the one I liked best: a translator is someone who solves puzzles—but the puzzles don’t have a good or wrong answer; there could be a hundred good ways of solving a translation puzzle. The other two translators at the Italian session were Jonathan Galassi, who has recently published a much talked-about rendition of Leopardi, and Michael F. Moore. One piece of good news was that today, in Italy, the majority of books on the best-sellers lists are not only by authors of Italian origin, but also by writers of literary fiction (rather than genre fiction, as is usually the case).

The session on Spanish literature was very good too, though, unfortunately, I only caught the last half. Among the panelists were the ubiquitous Chad Post, editor of Three Percent (one of the best online literary magazines of reviews on books in translation), and celebrated translator Natasha Wimmer (who confessed that every single book she has translated was a book on which the publishers lost money, in spite of the fact that the authors were world-famous—this statement alone speaks volumes about the situation of books in translation in this country).

In an effort to increase their cultural visibility in the States, The French have been sponsoring for a number of years various translation prizes, and helped the winning translators find publishers. This year the reception celebrating the finalists and the winners was on Tuesday, May 24th, and since I was in the City for the BEA, I was more than happy to honor the invitation I’d received. David Bellos—celebrated translator of Ismail Kadare and Georges Pérec—was Master of Ceremonies.

There were two fiction and two non-fiction prizes: in the former category, the winners were Mitzi Angel for Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novella 03, and Lydia Davis for Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; in the latter category, Frederick Brown for Tocqueville’s Letters from America, and Jane Marie Todd for Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon. Surprisingly, Mitzi Angel is not a professional translator; in fact, she has never translated before, but the book had a strong supporter in a Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor. Lydia Davis wasn’t there, so John Siciliano from Penguin accepted the prize on her behalf. I had met John before, when he was working with my other half, poet and translator Stephen Kessler, on the editing and translation of Borges’s Complete Sonnets. He is a charming, intelligent young man, and it gives me some hope to see that there are still people in his generation—he is barely thirty—who are so devoted to books and serious literature. Jane Marie Todd--whom I didn't know before--gave a great speech. She started with a list of all the things she doesn’t have as a translator: no regular paycheck, no library and interloan privileges, no promotion, no sabbatical, no title; and yet, she said, whenever she thinks of all the things she had to put up with while working in academia, she considers herself fortunate. Now she works at home in her pajamas, reads and translates whatever it pleases her and satisfies her intellectual curiosity, and she doesn’t need to specialize. I am not a hugger, but I felt like hugging her.

After this intellectual feast, we were offered wine and (some very good) champagne. Not to mention the delicious appetizers: they were international in origin (Chinese rolls, crab fried puffs, salmon sandwiches, Mediterranean feta pastries) but the chef must have been French. A fabulous reception!

Five Spice Street (Yale UP, 2009) by the contemporary Chinese writer Can Xue is one of the strangest, most original novels I’ve ever read. It also happens to be one of the worst translations. There is a difference between deliberate strangeness—Can Xue is known for her unusual writings—and a strange feeling resulting from a bad translation. Spice Street is strange, I’m afraid, in both ways.

The novel’s deliberate absurdness resides in its way of “telling a story” (the novel is full of ironic quotes, by the way). The “story” revolves around a few questions: Who is Madame X? What is her relationship with Q? Do they even have a relationship? For 329 pages, a series of picturesque characters from Five Spice Street—a widow proud of being both very sexy and virtuous, a coal miner infatuated with Madame X, a female friend jealous of Madame X, several male characters with dubious intentions, Madame X’s sister, who ends up living in a shed surrounded by…shit, and others—give us their points of view on Madame X. These perspectives intersect, complement or contradict each other in a way that is voluntarily absurd. The story takes the shape of a maze or of a diagram that is unrolled and undone before the reader’s eyes. The novel could be described as a “meta-story,” but unlike other such narratives, this one is very funny, and the writer doesn’t escape Can Xue’s ironic eye either. Unlike most classic novels about writers in which the character-writer is almost a copy of the author-writer, here, the writer is not even the same gender as the author (i.e., Can Xue). In fact, writers in general are made fun of as “geniuses” who are “usually sitting on a deserted mountaintop or the roof of a thatched cottage,” having dialogues with the gods.

One could also look at this novel as a sort of upside-down “comedy of manners” in which the author (Can Xue), using the research done by the character-writer and all the other characters on Five Spice Street, gives us a study of the sexual behavior of “our people.” There are many hilarious passages, but the comic is not always obvious, sometimes because of the translation, other times because of the grotesque element in many of the scenes, or because the comic of the language is based on a parody of Communist slogans. Some of the scenes seem in the tradition of the slapstick (or that of traditional Chinese theater): “they reached the granary [where they usually had sex] and he was kicked in the butt and fell. This was a good kick, very educational. He was kicked back to reality, and began to fulfill a male’s responsibilities.”

Since the translation of a novel from the Chinese is no easy feat, I am willing to give the two translators (Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping) some credit for their hard work, but still, I cannot but deplore the result. Here are a few (very few!) examples: “how could that person shout so loud as to scare a person?”; “I’m so confused inside” [rather than “outside”?]; “Everyone knew he was a doll” [in the context it’s clear the author meant “a puppet”]. And yet, in spite of the translation, the novel is worth reading. If someone at Yale UP reads this, please try to edit this novel and reprint it! The author deserves it.

For an unfinished novel, José Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale is surprisingly polished and well structured. Credit should be given to the editor, Julio Ortega, and the translator, Suzanne Jill Levine. I haven’t read the Spanish, but a glimpse at the title in Spanish is enough to give one an idea of the translator’s ingenuity. The title means, literally, “lizard without a tail,” but the translator and the book designer have created a word play in English that doesn’t exist in the original. The book cover features a lizard whose cut tail is replaced by the words “The Lizard’s Tale.” This is an example of “unfaithfulness” in translation that not only doesn’t contradict the spirit of the novel, but it complements it. It also shows that a book’s meaning comes not merely from its “content,” but from everything, including the cover.

The novel’s protagonist, Antonio, is a Spanish painter who abandons art and Barcelona’s bohemian world, “as a lizard sheds its tail,” and retires to the isolated village of Dors, a place of untouched architectural beauty, whose many old houses go back hundreds of years. The flashbacks of Antonio’s previous life with their focus on the “informalists” are reminiscent of scenes from Cortazar’s Hopscotch, or Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and its “visceral realists.” The latter, however, was first published in 1998, while Donoso’s novel, written in 1973, was set aside and published for the first time in 2007.

Antonio—and through him, Donoso—laments the commercialization of tourism “which brings in foreign currency but destroys all identity,” and which is merely an extension of the prostitution that characterizes modern art in general, and the “informalist” movement in particular. Although most readers wouldn’t disagree, like me, they might find tiresome these repeated laments, which might have been more original in the early seventies when Donoso wrote them. I was afraid the novel might turn into some kind of homage to rustic, authentic life versus the corrupt life of the city—and I was wrong. Not only doesn’t Donoso idealize the former, but his description of the villagers is rather cynical (and, as such, is closer to reality than any kind of sugary idealization). As it happens, the villagers despise these old houses, and all they want is to sell them and move into modern, functional, interchangeable apartment buildings. While this desire might be justified by practical reasons, the villagers’ relationships among themselves and their status in the community are less justifiable: as in most communities, the big players in the village are the most ruthless and unscrupulous ones. As a consequence, as soon as he arrives in Dors, Antonio succeeds in making enemies, and it is by creating enemies that he becomes part of the community—an irony that is, certainly, not accidental.

When people from Antonio’s previous life begin to show up in the village—his latest lover, her daughter (who becomes his lover too), the lover’s doctor, Antonio’s former wife, their son, and the wife’s entourage, whose eccentricity brings to mind Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—a new air infuses the village. Antonio—and with him, the reader—is confronted with a paradox: the intruders will, no doubt, destroy the peaceful, traditional life of the village, for which he’d come there in the first place; at the same time, the intruders, whose tastes are similar to his, are the only ones who can help him preserve the old houses by buying and renovating them. The salvation and the destruction of the past seem to come from the same source.

This conflict is very much a reframing of The City and the Mountains by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós, in which the conflict is between technological progress or civilization, on the one hand, and nature, on the other. Eça de Queirós’s novel is, however, slightly less ambivalent, as the narrator’s preference goes definitely toward nature. The city—which happens to be Paris, where the writer wrote this novel in 1895—is described as an infinite source of pointless agitation, a place where one can find all the pleasures imaginable, but which in the end have one result: tedium. When the novel’s rich protagonist is called by a business emergency to his rural property in Portugal, the narrator describes his new life in the mountains as that of a “benefactor” who proceeds to remedy some of the local poverty by implementing urban technologies that would make the peasants’ lives better. Thus, the city finds its way into the mountains in the same way the attempt of Donoso’s protagonist to protect the village ends up opening it to the outside world.

Little by little, a story focused on an artist who runs away from one kind of community (that of Barcelona’s artistic bohemia) to a rural community that ends up rejecting and ostracizing him, turns into a philosophical reflection on the impossibility of any kind of community. As in a Greek tragedy, Antonio becomes the scapegoat the villagers feel they have to excommunicate in order for the village to return to its previous harmony. And when a young man dies, Antonio is declared guilty of a crime he hadn’t committed, and has to run away again. At the end of the novel—in the form given to us by its publisher—Antonio is hiding in an apartment in Barcelona, but we don’t know what the “real ending” is since the writer never finished it. In an interesting parallel, de Queirós never finished revising his novel either, and the ending to his novel—a little too naively enthusiastic for the “eternal” beauty of “gentle” nature—was chosen by another writer.

"A Notebook of Clouds" by Pierre Chappuis translated from the French by John Taylor, followed by "A Notebook of Ridges" by John Taylor (Odd Volumes/The Fortnightly Review, 2019)

John Taylor is without a doubt the most prolific American translator of poetry from French into English, and certainly one of the best. He also happens to be one of the most insightful literary critics I know and an impressive poet in his own right. One of his latest translations is "A Notebook of Clouds" by Pierre Chappuis, a Swiss poet and essayist from the same generation with French-language poets Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Réda and Philippe Jaccottet (another Swiss writer extensively translated by Taylor). "A Notebook of Clouds" comprises verse poems, poetic prose and fragmentary notes, creating a coherent whole in spite of its apparent heteroclite character, a form that is both lyrical and philosophical. The Notebook is literally made of “leftovers” from Taylor’s previous translations of Chappuis, which haven’t made it into the collection Like Bits of Wind: Selected Poetry and Poetic Prose 1974-2013 published by Seagull Books in 2016. Added to these are some other excerpts translated from a second, similar notebook, “Preliminary Notebook for the Notebook of Clouds, 1979-1984.” But the most surprising aspect is the book’s second part, “A Notebook of Ridges,” a long prose poem written by Taylor in response to Chappuis’s “Notebook of Clouds.” Thus, we have a book that contains work by two different authors, the second author being the translator of the first one, and his piece being inspired by the poetic prose of the translated author. "A Notebook of Ridges" delves into Taylor’s childhood memories from the flatlands of Iowa and replicates the philosophical mood of Chapuis’s collection. The dedication, “for Pierre Chappuis, because a cloud sometimes looks like a ridge,” gives us a hint about Taylor’s possible reasons for choosing the ridge: there is an obvious analogy between their shape, but the ridge seems almost like an inverted cloud.

The unusual nature of A Notebook of Clouds is transparent even at the most obvious visual level through changes in font type and size. As for the content, one can find anything from poetic meditations on the names of clouds (“Clouds, cloudlets, halos/stratus, nimbus, cumulus (scholarly pig Latin)”—74) to food descriptions (“Like entangled noodles which, softened and whirling, would come undone little by little in the cooking water”—20 or “Like the crackled film of cream on heated milk, with its bulges, folds, little craters, scars”—36). We don’t have access to the French original, but Taylor’s translation, especially the latter quote, gives us a remarkable phonetic association made of alliterations and assonances. One can almost taste the heated milk cream on one’s tongue.

Taylor’s gift at capturing sound patterns comes across especially when he is forced to translate certain provocative expressions, such as “luminous sphincter”—48 or “nipple-hilled”—21) but also when, through his choices, he allows what one might call “linguistic chance” to create a text that has gained something in translation: “Clocks and Clouds” (49) for what I suppose must have been “Horloges et nuages.”

Anyone interested in contemporary American poetry and essay-writing should read Taylor’s "Notebook of Ridges," not only because it is very good poetry (or poetic prose, depending on the terminology), but because it is a fascinating example of what happens when cultures and languages mix. Although Taylor is American, his writing—at least in this instance—has very little to do with contemporary American poetry. The structure of thinking behind this Notebook is French, while the emotional and linguistic modulations are American. Like the French, Taylor often goes back to a word’s origin in order to meditate on a certain topic: “The etymology of ‘ridge’ runs, like a ridge, from meaning ‘back’ and ‘spine’ to ‘cross,’ ‘curved,’ and ‘crown’” (85).

He posits an association between the word “ridge” and childhood memories and adolescent aspirations, and as a consequence, he takes the reader back to his childhood mornings in Wyoming and summers in Iowa. Attempting to “turn topography into topology” (92), Taylor uses the topos of the “ridge” to reflect on things that are essential to him: his childhood, geography, but also writing itself: “Ideally, writing takes the writer each time out onto a ridge” (91).

At a philosophical and conceptual level, "A Notebook of Ridges" represents a synthesis between the inspiring poet (Chappuis) and the inspired translator-poet (Taylor), a mixing of “clouds” and “ridges” into a third element. This quote from Japanese introduces—ironically—a third cultural reference and language: “A fluttering fan/in the actor’s rising hand/the ridge of a cloud” (103).

Having been born of a translation from the French, "A Notebook of Ridges"—a poetic work written in English—keeps within itself the record if its origin and goes back to it: “La crête se détache toujours. The ridge always stands out and is ‘detached’” (105).

In the above example, we have a sentence (“La crête se détache toujours”) written in French by an English-speaking author, who then, proceeds to translate it into English. Taylor’s creative impulse is to go back to the origin of his prose poem, an origin that resides not only in the content of "A Notebook of Clouds," but in the language itself in which the latter has been written.

Like Chappuis—and, generally, in the French tradition of fragmentary-poetic-philosophical meditation—Taylor quotes various French writers who have written on the topic at hand, and incorporates their thoughts into his own writing: “Sainte-Beuve forged the image of a ‘brilliant ridge of syllables’ when he was analyzing Chateaubriand’s style” (113); or: “The pauses or blank spaces between fragments, maxims, or notes whose words form, to recall Yves Bonnefoy’s phrase, ‘the ridgeline of a silence’…” (114). It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to state that "A Notebook of Ridges" is, in its very form and language, the result of a masterful collaboration between two languages and structures of thinking, a hybrid and hybridized Franco-American collection of poetic prose:

“Look and listen in English. Then in French. Then in English once again.
Clearness. Clarity. Clarté. Clarée. Clearness” (127).

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