In Translation

by Annamarie Jagose

This moving novel of love and betrayal follows Helena as she learns to cope with being abandoned by her lover—renowned translator Navaz Nicholson—after traveling to an unfamiliar country to be with her. With her stubborn pride refusing to allow herself to return home, Helena begins to intercept installments of the Japanese novel that Navaz is currently translating. Gradually altering words and phrases, Helena begins to take over completely, writing Nishimura's novelistic love-triangle beyond its own ending.

Genres: Fiction

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Annamarie Jagose is a writer of academic and fictional works.

She gained her PhD (Victoria University of Wellington) in 1992, and worked in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne before returning to New Zealand in 2003, where she was a Professor in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland and Head of the department from 2008 to 2010.

Since 2011, she has been the Head of the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney.

In 1994 she won the NZSA Best First Book Award for In Translation. In 2004 Slow Water won the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, as well as the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the Australian Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winner of the Pen Award for Best First Fiction and the NZSA Best First Book Award in 1994 In Translation, at 190 pages only just scrapes into my definition of a novella as between 100-200 pages.  It's the debut novel of Annamarie Jagose, who subsequently wrote that marvellous novel Slow Water which won multiple awards in2004 including the 2004 Deutz Medal for Fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards;  the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Australian Miles Franklin Literary Award. (See my review here). Alas for her readers, these days Professor Annamarie Jagose is the University of Sydney's Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor and as far as I can tell she has published extensively in academia, but there have been no more novels.

Unfortunately, it may be hard to get hold of In Translation.  It seems to be out of print.

Moving backwards and forwards in time and place, In Translation is the story of a love-triangle.  A young woman called Helena arrives in Wellington fresh from a scandal involving her high school teacher.  Her parents have offloaded her to her aunt , a woman who shares a smell with her house, a mustiness of old carpet and thighs clenched shut for too long.  This aunt soon departs for overseas travel, sending Helena postcards of herself, (imprudently) leaving Helena to reconstruct the house to please herself.  Helena shoves most of the furniture in the back of the house, sells the rest and then repaints the front rooms and carpets them with sand in the style of a Japanese garden...

The neighbours, Lillian and Navaz, invite her to a party.  Lillian is an artist who stages artistic photographs while Navez is a translator.  Helena embroiders the story of the scandal which brought her to her dreary work in Wellington as a bank teller, and before long they invite her to move in.  And In due course, Helena displaces Lillian as Navaz's lover.

The women fly out to India where they are shown the sights by a guide called Prakash, and then, when they are in London, Navaz abandons Helena.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/11/19/i...

[Laurence · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting mix of responses. I loved the economical criting style and the effectiveness of the pen portaits. And the settings were interesting and intertwined and familiar.

But I was just not gripped and it was a chore to read more than 10 pages at a sitting.

It does make me want to try and find the award winning Slow Water by the same author