Tag Archives: translation

Herta Müller’s Passport

Posted on 4 May 2013 | Leave a comment

Herta Müller, The Passport (1986, translation by Martin Chalmers 1989, Serpent’s Tail 2009)

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I got hold of this book via BookMooch soon after Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Possibly because the press response wasn’t exactly encouraging (which of course it won’t be until a US writer wins), the book sat on my bedroom bookshelf for four years as a shining testament to pious intentions. I finally picked it up now because I’d read two books in translation, and decided to make it three of a kind.

It’s a very short book, just 92 pages, and it’s made up of short sentences. Here’s a random paragraph:

The skinner had given the stuffed animals to the town museum as a gift. He didn’t receive any money for them. Two men came. Their car stood in front of the skinner’s house for a whole day. It was white and closed like a room.

Sentence after sentence. Page after page. It proceeds in that staccato way. It doesn’t quite say what it’s saying. People do things, and say things, and see things. There are snippets of folklore, a bawdy song, symbolic objects, similes and metaphors as odd as the white room in that quote. You have to fill in the gaps, decode the descriptions. Only a handful of characters have names, the rest being known only by their professions or relationships. It took me until page 42 to realise I was in the middle of a narrative that I hadn’t been following. I started over. I’m glad I did.

It’s a terrible tale of the German-speaking minority in a village in Ceauçescu’s Romania. Uneducated, superstitious, despised by the Romanian majority, they live lives of quiet desperation and degradation. The village miller sets out to secure from the corrupt system a passport that will enable him, his wife and daughter to leave for West Germany.

I hated a lot of this as I was reading it: I just wanted to be told the story, to have a spade called a spade, rather than a headache being called a grain of sand moving around behind the forehead (at least, I assume that was a headache). But there is something mesmeric about it. I’m amazed that now I intend to immerse myself in that world again – not immediately, but when enough time has passed that I will be revisiting it rather than extending the current visit.

A couple of scrappy notes about the translation:

  • The English title draws attention to the plot, such as it is. The original German, taken from something the miller says at his lowest point, translates as ‘A man is nothing but a pheasant in the world’, and signals the sometimes enigmatic narrative mode.
  • There is a three-word glossary up the back. I could have done instead with a brief note at the start informing us that the original was written in German, that the action takes place in Romania (something that I’m guessing is obvious in the original but doesn’t become evident in the translation until we’re well under way), that most (all?) of the characters are German-speakers – in other words, filling us in on some things that are almost inevitably lost in translation.
  • There are one or two places where I completely didn’t know what was being described, and would love to know if it was because of the translation or the original. In particular, there’s a scene in which a woman is pleasuring herself or discovering she has some terrible disease – I’ll refrain from going into detail of the description here, but my confusion is genuine, and her husband’s comment, ‘So that’s how it is with your bladder, my lady,’ doesn’t make any sense either way. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that people mean when they say Herta Müller writes surrealism.

I suspect that this book is another that was a nightmare to translate, and it’s wonderful what a distinctive voice comes through in the telling.

PS: When I had uploaded all that I went to LibraryThing to post a version of it as a review there. And behold there was a very interesting post by Meisterpfriem, who had loved the book in German and been surprised at its lukewarm reception in Engish translation. I recommend it.

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Mercè Rodoreda’s In Diamond Square with the Book Group

Posted on 2 May 2013 | 2 comments

Mercè Rodoreda, In Diamond Square (1962, Translation by Peter Bush, Virago 2013)

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Before the meeting: I came to this book with inaccurate expectations. Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes it on the cover as ‘the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War’, which I misread, lazily, as ‘about the Spanish Civil War’. True, the action of the novel spans the years of the Civil War, which is a major element in the story, but it would be quite a stretch to say the novel is about the war. The novel tells the story of Natalia, a naive, uneducated young woman from Gracia, then a poor area of Barcelona rather than what the internet now calls ‘one of the city’s hippest areas’. She marries a volatile young man whose entrepreneurial ambition fills their apartment, bizarrely and malodorously, with pigeons. The Civil War disrupts their family life when her husband and their male friends joins the militia – we see none of the combat, and none of the reasons for the war are discussed or explained, but we stay within Natalia’s narrow horizons, following her through wretchedness, deprivation, despair and unexpected happiness (though, to save spoilers, not necessarily in that order).

It’s a gripping story, with some brilliant images, but the thing that struck me most strongly was the language. Natalia is the narrator, and her voice is what makes the novel what it is. She begins:

Julie came to the cake-shop just to tell me they would be raffling coffee pots before they got to the lucky posy; she’d seen them and they were lovely, an orange split in two, showing its pips, painted on a white background. I didn’t feel like going to the dance or even going out, after I’d spent the whole day selling cakes and my fingertips ached from tying all those gilded raffia knots and handles. And because I knew Julie could manage on as little as three hours’ sleep and didn’t mind whether she slept or not.

She begins as she plans to go on, with leaps in logic (from the coffee-pot design to the question of whether she will go out or not, omitting to mention that Julie had come to take her there), syntax that doesn’t quite cohere (‘And because’ – huh?), attention to details that lead nowhere (‘an orange split in two’ etc), lack of orientation (who is Julie?), unexplained cultural references (are we supposed to know what ‘the posy’ is?), and so on. Then it took me a moment to figure out that the third they was a different they from the first two, that Julie is talking about the coffee pots, not the people who were raffling them, and because that tiny awkwardness feels like the kind of thing that happens in translation, I lost confidence as a reader , and as I read on I couldn’t tell how much of the narrative voice was Natalia’s and how much was the sound of Peter Bush wrangling the transition from Catalan into English. I wasn’t necessarily critical of the translation: perhaps this is one of those books that defies translation – as I imagine Malcolm Knox’s The Life to be. (A literal translation of DK’s ‘Well yeah … but no’ would probably leave Catalan readers floundering, but how else do you translate it?)

I read on, enjoying the book, but my unease about the translation persisted, and about a hundred pages from the end I turned to the Internet for help. I don’t know what I expected, but I found an excellent article from the British journal The Translator, ‘Language and Characterization in Mercè Rodoreda’s La Plaça del Diamant‘ by Helena Miguélez Carballeira, which discusses the language of the book in the context of two previous translations. According to Ms Carballeira, Natalia’s discourse is what the boffins call escriptura parlada – spoken writing. Mercè Rodoreda sets out to ‘trace the discursive peculiarities’ of the uneducated Catalan working-class. Her speech is also full of features that mark it as peculiar to Barcelona, and is full of the euphemism, attention to detail and diminutives that mark stereotypically feminine speech. More than that, Carballeira argues (and I’m persuaded) that

Natàlia is a woman who feels uneasy with the very act of speaking. … The characteristics of [her] conversational, unmediated speech as a discursive device in the novel are rather predictable: there is an extensive use of idioms and colloquialisms, interjections and onomatopoeias. This yields a constant, highly idiomatic, non-straightforward use of language.

That is to say, Natalia is at least as big a headache for a translator as Knox’s DK.

A gauge of the difficulty of the task is the differences between translations. Carballeira discusses a number of fascinating examples. Here’s just one, quoted in a discussion of Natalia’s use of euphemism:

The original Catalan (1962):

I mentre em dedicava a la gran revolució amb els coloms va venir el que va venir, com una cosa que havia de ser molt curta.

From Eda O’Shiel’s The Pigeon Girl (1967):

And while I devoted my energies to the grand revolt against the pigeons, there took place what had to take place, and it seemed as if it would be over quickly.

From David H Rosenthal’s The Time of the Doves (1986):

And while I was working on the great revolution with the doves the war started and everyone thought it was going to be over quickly.

From Peter Bush’s In Diamond Square (2013):

And while I was waging my big revolution against the pigeons, what was brewing came, that they said would be a two-day wonder.

Having read this article when I was struggling, part way through the book, I had a much better time with the rest. Some of Peter Bush’s decisions had confused me. For example, he names Natalia’s husband Joe, possibly as what Carballeira calls a domesticating strategy, but when I read that his name is Quimet in the original I realised that the discord between his English name and his Catalan context had niggled away at the edge of my mind, creating a sense of unreality like the one in some CGI movies, where figures don’t quite seem to touch the ground. And another example: Joe/Quimet refuses to call Natalia by her name but calls her Pidgie, without explanation of where the name comes from – to my ear that sounded a bit like Piggsy, and so vaguely insulting, and it was a long way into the story that I realised it was short for Pigeon, and that Joe/Quimet was obsessed with those birds; in the original he calls her Columeta, which my computer translates from the Catalan as, you guessed it, Pigeon. Maybe to a British ear ‘Pidgie’ sounds more affectionate than ‘Pigeon’, but ‘Pigeon’ would have worked fine for me.

This experience makes me suspect that if I’m going to read books in translation a little bit of research will make the whole experience go better. As it happens I’ve been to Barcelona, so quite a few of the local references – Tibidabo, Parc Güell, etc – made immediate sense to me. If I hadn’t been there, I doubt if I would have bothered to get out a map, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea. (I do think I was right, though, not to read the author’s spoilerish 1982 ‘Prologue’ until after I’d read the book.)

The meeting: We were astonishingly unanimous in our responses to the book. We’d all enjoyed it; we’d all been at least mildly disconcerted by the language, though when someone read a short passage aloud, its ‘written speech’ qualities were obvious; we’d all engaged with Natalia and formed strong opinions about Joe/Quimet; and I think we’d all had our heartstrings / tear ducts activated. There was an attempt to get someone to read the last couple of pages, which are full of sweet, kind-of-sexual tenderness, but no one was up for the challenge. We enjoyed the book so much we contemplated staying with Catalonia for our next meeting, and reading The Sun Also Rises, Homage to Catalonia and perhaps something by Colm Toibín. (We decided against it, and will be heading off to Norway instead with Karl Ove Knausgaard.)

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Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Lonely Monarch

Posted on 9 Apr 2013 | 4 comments

Sunil Gangopadhyay, The Lonely Monarch (2005, translated from Bengali by Swapna Dutta, Hachette India 2013)

IMG_0723 My high school French and Latin teacher, Brother Gerard, taught us a healthy respect for the art of translation. When he wrote ‘Excellent attempt’ in the margin of one of my exercises, he explained that it was high praise, that all anyone could aspire to was an attempt at translation – the thing itself must remain forever elusive: if you stay too close to the original, your translation won’t sound like natural English, and if you produce something that feels natural in English you will have lost the feel of the original. Kumārajīva (343–430 CE), one of the sub-continent’s great translators of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit to Chinese, said that translation was like ‘chewing rice for others, which would not only lose its original taste, but also make people feel like vomiting’. (Translations of his statement differ.) So translators are heroic people who serve the common good, building bridges between cultures that might otherwise remain dangerously ignorant of each other, but they do so knowing that page after page, book after book, they must fail.

I don’t know any Bengali at all, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of Swapna Dutta’s translation of Sunil Gangopadhyay‘s Nihsanga Samrat. But it gave me that delicious sense of access to a place that would have remained closed to me without her labours. The eponymous lonely monarch is Sisirkumar Bhaduri (1889–1959), a pioneer of Bengali theatre, or at least a fictional stand-in for him, as this is a fictional rendition of the real Sisirkumar’s life. His theatrical project was to Bengal roughly what Louis Esson’s  Pioneer Players were to Australia, not quite a national theatre but a profound influence on audiences’ tastes, though the comparison underplays the significance of Sisirkumar. The theatre as he found it was ruled by Western conventions, women actors were generally prostitutes, the emphasis was on spectacle. He and his colleagues reached for a theatre that incorporated traditional jatra forms; his partner Kankabati was an educated woman who became even more acclaimed as an actor than he was; his plays were often adaptations from serious novels.

Calcutta (as it is called here) had a thriving theatre scene in the 1920s and 30s, rich with artistic ambition, greed, brilliant collaboration, vicious competition, surprising acts of generosity, sweet loyalty, despair, alcoholism, romance … Sisir, as he was known to his friends, was at the heart of it as an actor–producer. In a postscript to her translator’s note, Swapna Dutta gives brief introductions to twenty characters who were important personalities of the time ‘whom people outside Bengal might not know’: poets, artists, playwrights, scholars, political figures. Without this help, the sense of a flourishing cultural scene would still have been vividly realised, but for foreign readers like me the names would have passed in a blur (actually, they still mostly did, but now I knew the nature of the blur!). Some names didn’t need a note: the great Rabindranath Tagore is partly a kind of tutelary deity whose approval is beyond price for the younger generation, and partly the esteemed elder whose mould they need to break; Sunil Gangopadhyay himself makes a brief appearance as a young man among Sisir’s admirers; and Satyajit Ray, Bengali director of many great films including Pather Panchali, has a moment towards the end of the book.

Sisirkumar takes a troupe of actors to New York in 1930. The trip has its disastrous moments, but it starts with a rapturous welcome. A young Indian man living in New York explains:

Ordinary Americans hardly ever come across Indians. Most of them are under the impression that Indian women are either kept under lock and key or burnt as a sati; that young children who enter the river are devoured by crocodiles; that the roads in India are packed with sadhus and yogis, tigers and snakes. They are clueless about our art, culture, literature or music.

Although there’s no whiff of an instructional intention in this book, I’m at least a little less clueless for having read and enjoyed it.

(Sisirkumar Bhaduri does have a Wikipedia entry, but it doesn’t say very much, and IMDb lists the eight films that he directed and acted in, which were very much a sideshow to his career in the live theatre.)

Full disclosure: Swapna Dutta is a friend of mine, though we’ve never met in person. She contributed a number of elegant stories to The School Magazine when I was editor, including retellings from Hindu and Buddhist classics as well as original stories, and we have stayed in touch by email since. Hachette India sent me a complimentary copy of this book.

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By Swapna Dutta

Posted on 10 Aug 2011 | 1 comment

My friend Swapna Dutta is a writer, translator and editor, mainly of children’s literature, who lives in Bangalore, in southern India. The School Magazine published some of her stories when I was editor, and she and I have kept in touch over the intervening years. Swapna mentioned in a recent email that she had translated a children’s book, The Arakiel Diamond, from Bengali into English, and asked if I’d like a copy. Of course I was interested, and a couple of days later it arrived in my letter box, with three other books. It’s been a treat and an education to read all four.

Swapna Dutta and Geeta Vadhera, The Sun Fairies (National Book Trust, India 1994, 2001)

The Sun Fairies is a tiny picture book that plays around with science and fantasy. That is to say, it’s a fanciful account of the origin of clouds – some fairies who live in the sun build castles in the sky so it won’t be so bare and empty – that ends up being a decorative but accurate account of how the water cycle works: the cloud castles are made from water, air and dust, and when they get too heavy they fall to the earth as water. The fairies have discovered ‘a never-ending game’. The illustrations, by Geeta Vadhera, are fabulous. I see from the Internet that Ms Vadhera has gone on to international renown. This may be her only children’s book.

Swapna Dutta, Plays from India, illustrated by Baraan Ijlal (Rupa & Co 2003)

In some ways each of the other books is a work of translation. In Plays from India three episodes from Indian history are shaped into dramas suitable for performance by school students. In my ignorance I don’t know whether the stories would be familiar to most Indian students, so I can’t tell whether the history or the theatre is the main point. I was interested in both.

Swapna Dutta, Folk Tales of West Bengal , illustrated by Neeta Gangopadhya (Children’s Book Trust 2009)

Folk Tales of West Bengal retells sixteen tales. Swapna has an article at papertigers from which I learned that what the Grimms were for Germany, and Moe & Asbjørnsen for Norway, the imposingly named Dakshinaranjan Mitra-Mazumdar was for what is now Bangladesh and West Bengal. At least some of the tales here were collected by him in the first decades of last century. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has entered the woods of Re-enchantment, there’s a lot in these stories that’s familiar to a reader brought up on European-origin fairy stories: kings and princesses, talking animals, metamorphoses, riddles, lost and found children, supernatural beings who reward the humble and punish the greedy. There’s also a lot that’s different: the heroine of the first story, for instance, is not a seventh child but a seventh wife. This blending of familiar and unfamiliar makes for a delightful read.

Sucitrā Bhaṭṭācārya, The Arakiel Diamond, translated by Swapna Dutta and illustrated by Agantuk (Ponytale Books 2011)

The Arakiel Diamond is the only book in my swag that is not Swapna’s original work. It’s a detective story for young readers, one of a series featuring a Bengali housewife and her niece. A wealthy man dies. His most precious possession, the eponymous diamond, has gone missing, and almost everyone in his household – and there are many – has had motive and opportunity to steal it. The plot has exactly the twists you’d expect, but the detectives’ relationship and the details of their domestic life are well captured, and I learned a lot about the Armenian community in Calcutta, in a way that reminds me of grown-up detective writers (Sarah Paretsky comes to mind) who take us to a new subculture in each novel.

The four books had me reflecting on multiculturalism in children’s literature. We make fun of the way US children’s publishers, apparently believing that their intended readers would shrink from anything not immediately recognisable as of the US, re-edit books from elsewhere in the English-speaking world to remove unsightly exotica. They don’t just want a world where British characters spend dollars and cents, or Australians walk on a pavement, weird as such a world might be. I remember hearing of a New Zealand novel whose publisher suggested the book’s Maori issues might be more accessible to US children if the setting was changed to California – that author held firm and the book still found readers, even got made into a movie.

I wish now to acknowledge that I’m a bit of a kettle to the US publishers’ pot. Though I enjoyed the slight cultural disorientation I felt as I read these books, I caught myself thinking young readers would be put off by it. To make the books accessible to Australian 11-year olds, the unexamined internal argument went, you’d have to do something about lakh and crore, lunghi, salwar shameez and rakhi, not to mention the nitty-gritties of the game of chess or a casual use of thrice in conversation. On reflection, I think that argument profoundly misunderstands how young people read. The only thing that universally distinguishes young from adult readers is that the young ones are younger. One result of this is that they know they don’t know everything about the world, and mostly when they read there are words they don’t recognise but have to guess from the context. (I loved and understood pulverise and invulnerable in Superman comics long before I could define them.) So you might not know what a lunghi is, but the context tells you it’s an article of clothing, and there’s even an illustration to help. Likewise, lakh and crore are obviously big numbers, and that’s all you need to know. As I remember back to my own childhood reading, I think such things would have added spice to the book: if I was young now, I might even have fun googling them. As for nitty-gritties and thrice, I do think we can trust young readers to recognise when a word or a turn of phrase belongs to a different place. (Both my sons say zed in spite of seeing quite a lot of Sesame Street when young.)

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The book group go to Bleak House

Posted on 14 Jul 2011 | 3 comments

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852, Project Gutenberg version, prepared by Donald Lainsman with revision and corrections by Thomas Berger and Joseph E Loewenstein)

Unless you count comics or movie and TV adaptations, just about anything by Dickens is likely to win me a game of Humiliation (rules at the link). When someone suggested him for our next Book Group title I was happy, and even happier when we settled on Bleak House: Neil Gaiman has been going on about it on his blog recently, and my friend Cassandra Golds says it is a huge presence in two of her recent novels.

Before the meeting:
This is the first book I’ve read on iPhone and iPad, and it was a good experience. The iPad is more satisfyingly book sized, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the sense of continual progress that comes with the iPhone. One of the book’s 8041 screens had to be ‘turned’ every couple of seconds – so many words, but in such tiny portions!

I was probably out of harmony with the spirit of the book, not so much because of the electronic devices as because I read it in just a few weeks. It was originally published as a serial over 20 months: if you read one of its 67 chapters a week you would have kept pace. I doubt if anyone much reads at such a leisurely pace any more, and we’re probably the poorer for it. Anyhow, it’s a truly wonderful book which I recommend for when you’re in the mood for sustained, leisurely reading.

I’m confident I have nothing at all original to say about the book itself, so I’ll presume on a little of your time by ruminating on translation issues. Every now and then someone writes an article saying that each generation needs its own translation of [insert name of classic work here]. The idea is that we need to have ancient Latin or Renaissance Spanish served up in contemporary language. By this logic, Italian or Spanish readers need a fresh translation of Dickens every 50 years or so. If so, doesn’t it follow that we need an updating in English just as regularly? After all, the language has changed in the last 150 years, and early 21st century English speakers have a very different, and more diverse, take on the world than their mid-19th century equivalents. Where Dickens could assume that literate English speakers shared a vast set of references – the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Shakespeare and classical mythology come to mind, and there’s plenty of each in Bleak House – we can no longer do that. Just for the heck of it, I thought I’d see how a hypothetical translator might tackle the opening:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

I thought ‘translating’ this would be a straightforward bit of fun, but by the second word I was in trouble. When I was at university we had three terms, Lent, Trinity and Michaelmas, but surely Dickens isn’t talking about university here? Did the English courts have terms? (Do they still?) What is Lincoln’s Inn Hall, and who is the Lord Chancellor again? And so on. None of this worried me at all when I read the book, but a translator might feel obliged to do something like:

London. The year coming to an end, and the nation’s most eminent judge, the Lord Chancellor, hearing cases in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the Flood had just withdrawn from the face of the earth, and it would not be surprising to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling up Holborn Hill.

There, now that’s more accessible, isn’t it? (No need to gloss the Megalosaurus for 21st century readers, I thought, but the edgy play on biblical and palaeontological versions of prehistory does need clarifying.) It’s not quite Dickens, but then what translation is? Interestingly enough, even being facetious I couldn’t bear to touch what comes next:

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

In short, I found the novel irresistible, especially for the way it wallows in language. And Cassandra is right – it’s full of echoes of Clair de Lune and The Museum of Mary Child.

After the meeting:
It’s winter in Sydney, and half of us were away, either home sick or visiting warmer climes. Of the five who showed, three had read the whole book, one was a hundred or so pages from the end, and the last confessed up front that he’d picked up a copy in a bookshop, and then thought, ‘Nah!’, though it turned out he had read it 20 or so years ago.

It was a good book to discuss. We talked about Mr Guppy’s withdrawal of his proposal, the death of Little Jo, the use of catchphrases (‘Discipline must be maintained!’), the pleasure of reading bits aloud. Someone knew that the appalling Mrs Jellyby was based on Caroline Chisolm, and the execrable Skimpole on an actual person. We wondered about the politics, the anti-Jewish nastiness (‘Smallweed is a Jew’), the depiction of industrialisation. Someone had thought about this book in comparison to the other Great Works we’ve read, Anna Karenina and The Tree of Man, and found it suffered from the comparison. I don’t know what I think of that. I know I enjoyed it at least as much as the Tolstoy and quite a lot more than the White, but I suppose enjoyment isn’t everything.

I haven’t been deliberately secretive about this blog and its reports on the group, but nor have I deliberately drawn people’s attention to it. If anyone from the group does drop in, welcome! Please add a comment.

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I’ve been published in Turkish

Posted on 25 Sep 2010 | 2 comments

Well, only by Google. But I did enjoy this:

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Sunset Oasis

Posted on 17 Apr 2010 | Leave a comment

Bahaa Taher, Sunset Oasis (2007. Translation by Humphrey Davies, McClelland and Stewart  2009)

This won the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008. If successive winners are as good as this, then it’s a prize to watch. Set in the late nineteenth century, mostly in the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, the narrative centres on Mahmoud Abd el Zahir, who is sent to the oasis as government representative, and his Irish wife, Catherine, who accompanies him on this dangerous assignment (previous government representatives have been murdered by the oasis-dwellers) because of Siwa’s historical connection with Alexander the Great – she dreams of discovering his tomb there. There’s a vivid sense of the time and place, of the complex politics of an Egypt recently occupied by the British, now in effect passing on the mistreatment to the ethnic minority in the oasis, of the challenges of intercultural relationships, of Egypt’s multi-layered past. Catherine and others are fascinated by antiquity, Mahmoud struggles to come to terms with his own experience in recent upheavals, the people of the oasis have their own internecine history. In the oasis, Easterners and Westerners have a long history of self-perpetuating warfare, and various ones of their leaders are convinced that peace can come only when one side of the struggle or the other is completely wiped out. It’s hard not to read this as a sly reference to our current global clash between Easterners and Westerners.

The book is beautifully written, and constantly fresh and surprising. It’s narrative switches effortlessly between Mahmoud, Catherine and a number of other characters including, brilliantly, Alexander the Great. I was initially disappointed by the ending (it’s all right, no spoilers), but on reflection I realised that it opened the narrative out to great depths of meaning.

After all my recent whingeing about reading works in translation, I’m glad to report that Sunset Oasis reads beautifully in English. So much so, I needed to remind myself regularly that it was originally written in Arabic. I found a wonderful interview with Humphrey Davies, the translator, at The Quarterly Conversation, which ends:

The first draft of a book is very heavy lifting. It hurts my eyes in particular; it’s a real strain on my eyes. At the end of the day, I’m pretty gobsmacked. The most pleasurable part is when the first draft comes back from the editor with questions, and then you can see the shape of it. You can start fine tuning and tweaking and coming up with nice little things.

So there you go. This translator gets to have an editor go over his first draft in detail, and is then paid good money to refine the work. This reader considers that extra money well spent – and, take note publishers, that opinion may well translate into sales. Both Bahaa Taher and Humphrey Davies are on my list of people to trust.

I’m posting in a bit of a rush, because this book was a Book Club borrow, and the meeting where I’m to return it is due to happen in about  15 minutes. So here you are, just ahead of the deadline. [I’m returning three books. The other two I couldn’t get past 100 pages. So it’s not only a joy but a relief to have enjoyed this so much.]

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Bête/beast du/of the marais/Camargue

Posted on 8 Apr 2010 | Leave a comment

Xavier-Marie Bonnot, The Beast of the Camargue (translation Ian Monk, Maclehose Press 2009)

Maybe I’m turning into a horrible person, because here’s yet another book I’ve laid aside, this time just before page 100. It was a big hit in France, so it might be that I’ve lost all sense of what makes a good read. But it’s a murder mystery, and very little had happened by the time I parted company from it – the body of an extremely rich man who has been missing for a fortnight or so has finally been found in a swamp, so it feels as if the story might be about to start. An unnamed man who is probably a psychopathic serial killer has made a couple of lacklustre appearances. There’s a cop with enough idiosyncrasies to make him interesting, a romance that will probably stay unconsummated, and a beautiful, rich widow with something she’s not telling. There are English-speaking tourists, wandering with their cameras through places where evil lurks. Oh, and there are hints that the evil might be in some way occult. In other words, it’s familiar territory, and there evidently wasn’t enough in it to engage this reader.

Two things kept me reading even this long: the setting and the translation. The action takes place in parts of France I visited last year (as one of those gormless tourists), and I was hoping there would be pleasure in revisiting them – but the sense of place, it turns out, isn’t very strong. I was fascinated by the translation. When Gregory Rabassa was working on his translation of A Hundred Years of Solitude, an interviewer asked him if he knew enough Spanish for the task. He answered, ‘The question isn’t whether I know enough Spanish, the question is do I know enough English.’ I have no doubt that Ian Monk’s French was well up to the challenge of translating this book, much much better than mine I expect, but his English is disconcertingly uncomfortable in its own skin. A quick google just now turned up this sentence from the original:

‘Sortez du problème, les gars. Allez fourrer votre nez là où personne n’irait jamais le fourrer.’

As luck would have it, I knew where to find the English version (on page 83):

‘Move outside the problem, lads. Go and stick your nose where no one else would stick it.’

The French, advice that a wise old cop once gave our hero, looks to be casual speech, but the English is oddly stilted. Sortir is ordinary language for leaving or going out (of something), but who says, Move outside (something)? And how could anyone else stick the lads’ nose anywhere? How about:

Step outside of the problem, lads. Stick your nose in places where no one else would think of sticking theirs.

That’s just nit-picking, of course. My eye glided over that sentence when I read it in context. I noticed its awkwardness now because it’s the only sentence from the book I’ve seen the French for, so it’s the one I was stuck with to consider here. But the cumulative effect of such small misfires is both fascinating (as in, I’d love to study this closely because it shows a lot about language) and unpleasant (as in, I keep being jolted ever so slightly out of the world of the story).

Actually, I think Ian Monk is probably a very good translator. I spent maybe ten minutes playing around with that one sentence. He had to earn a living. Translators aren’t exactly paid at merchant banker rates, and you do what you can in the time you’ve got.

Anyhow, Commandant Michel de Palma may be the French reading public’s equivalent of John Rebus, but he couldn’t keep me reading past page 98.

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Shambhala Chinese Poetry

Posted on 27 Mar 2010 | 5 comments

J P Seaton (editor, & translator of most poems), The Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry (Shambhala 2006)

This was a present for my 60th birthday. I was delighted to receive it but obviously, given that I’m now 63, I was slow to actually read it. Seymour Glass’s passion for Chinese poetry and wisdom is what provided the necessary extra spur (I mean, who was that poet who wanted to be a dead cat? And why?).

The anthology opened a space in my head. It didn’t answer the question about the dead cat (the dead cat poem is absent), but it raised many more. It covers 3000 years of Chinese poetry in 246 pages, including notes. It would hardly be fair to expect more than a taster. What’s more, it would be unrealistic for someone as ignorant of Chinese history and culture as I am to expect more than broad-brush help with interpretation. Despite J P Seaton’s lucid introduction and notes, I confess that many if not most of the poems eluded my grasp – all those proper names and elliptical allusions to Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian traditions amounted to little more than mystifying clutter to my uneducated brain. I could appreciate some lines, like Li I’s wonderfully cinematic

Three hundred thousand men, among these rocks,
this once, as one, together turn: gaze on the moon.

I was moved by some whole poems. But all too often I felt as if I was reading a coded message or a paraphrase, missing the actual poetry, roughly an equivalent of ‘Will I compare you to a day in summer? / You are prettier and cooler: / Strong winds rustle May’s lovely blossoms, etc). Once I caught myself thinking, ‘I hope I get to read that poem one day.’ It became obvious to me that if I am to understand and enjoy this poetry I need to devote a lot more time to it. And maybe I will one day. For now I’ve decided to play around in one poem, ‘Thoughts of a Quiet Night’ by Li Po (701–762). I went searching and found an image of the actual poem, on the China the Beautiful site:

That’s 20 characters. On the Poetry Kit site, Li Po’s biographer An-Lee Chang Williams gives a literal one-word-per-character version:

Bed  fore  bright  moon  light
Doubt  is  ground-on  frost
Raise(d)  head   gaze  clear  moon
Dropp(ed)  head  reminisce  home  country

It’s starkly obvious that a translation has to do more than give such a word-for-word rendering. (Incidentally, I notice that even here, if my copied image is correct, the same character has been rendered as ‘bright’ in line 1 and ‘clear’ in line 3.) In his introduction, J P Seaton discusses the visual qualities of the Chinese:  the first line ‘contains among its five characters a moon (the pictograph for moon) and two more moons, one in the compound ideograph bright and another shining dimly and insistently out of the character for the preposition before.’ He comments, ‘The writing system lets Li Po literally fill his little poem with moonlight.’ He doesn’t mention the difficulty of reproducing the musical effects of a tonal language, or the complexities of navigating the distance between the two grammar systems, or what to do about deeply ingrained terms of reference or understandings of poetic form (though he does discuss form elsewhere).

Translating  a poem from Chinese to English will probably never be straightforward. The sound and look of the words cannot be decanted unchanged from one language to the other. From one point of view all a reader can expect is an honest paraphrase. But when you paraphrase a poem, you’ve lost the poetry, so perhaps one ought to hope for a little more: perhaps a poem in English that corresponds as closely as possible to the original, which means taking liberties. On page 90 of this anthology, the poem becomes:

Before the bed, bright moonlight.
I took it for frost on the ground.
I raised my head to dream upon that moon,
then bowed my head, lost, in thoughts of home.

So much has, perhaps inevitably, been lost, and if An-Lee Chang Williams’s list of words is correct, so much has been added.

China the Beautiful and the An-Lee Chang interview give more than a dozen translations between them. And I just found more. Seeing all these attempts to translate 20 words gives a fascinating glimpse of the art of translation and the nature of poetic composition. It also allows for a deeper grasp of this particular poem, as one person after another tries to capture it in all its suggestive particularity. Here’s An-Lee Chang Williams, who inserts less than J P Seaton (she offers us no emotional guidance as Seaton does with ‘dream’ and ‘lost’, but interestingly changes tense from past to present) without being any more lossy (it’s interesting that both of them have avoided the repetition of ‘bright moon’ in line 3 of  the Chinese):

Bright moonlight by my bed:
First I thought it was ground frost.
I gaze up at the moon,
Bow my head, remembering my homeland.

And here, at the further extreme of adding stuff, is L Cranmer-Byng’s art song version from the early 20th century:

Athwart the bed
I watch the moonbeams cast a trail
So bright, so cold, so frail,
That for a space it gleams
Like hoarfrost on the margin of my dreams.
I raise my head,
The splendid moon I see;
Then droop my head,
And sink to dreams of thee –
My father land, of thee!

And how about this, by someone whose name I can’t read, which goes too far on its own merry way to be called a translation as such, but which brings out a meaning of that ‘dropped’ in line 4 that none of the others seemed to notice or even allow:

A splash of white on my bedroom floor. Hoarfrost?
I raise my eyes to the moon, the same moon.
As scenes long past come to mind, my eyes fall again
on the splash of white, and my heart aches for home.

The very first poem in the book is from at least the fourth century BCE. J P Seaton describes it as ‘certainly an honourable expression  of the ideals of democracy as well as a perennial feminist one’. I don’t read it that way at all, but I agree that it captures something profound:

The Peasant’s Song

Sunups, we get to work;
Sundowns, we get our rest.
Dig wells and drink,
plough fields, to eat:
what has some ’emperor’
to do with us?

Now that’s a poem I’d like to read when I have the time.

Fortuitously, this quote from Jorge Luis Borges turned up in my RSS reader while I was drafting this entry:

Not knowing Greek and Arabic allowed me to read, so to speak, the Odyssey and The Thousand and One Nights in many different versions, so that this poverty also brought me a kind of richness.

(From Fernando Sorrentino’s Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges via The Literary Saloon)

Note: I’ve Australianised the spelling in the quoted passages.

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The Happiness of Kati

Posted on 16 Mar 2010 | Leave a comment

Jane Vejjajiva, The Happiness of Kati (2003, translation by Prudence Borthwick, Atheneum 2006)

This book is a rarity: a children’s book written in Thai and translated into English. Perhaps that’s why it was recommended to me. It’s short, and I decided to read it as a gap-filler while waiting for another Book Group member to finish with my copy of Truth. This may not have been a mistake, but I do regret the disrespect: the book certainly wasn’t written to be a gap filler.

At the start of the book Kati is nine years old and living with her grandparents. Her parents are noticeably absent, and the absence of her mother is particularly stark because each of the first several short chapter headings has a subheading that mentions her. The first chapter, for instance, is ‘Pan and Spatula’ with a subheading, ‘Mother never promised to return.’ The chapter has quite a lot to say about the pan and spatula Grandmother uses to cook rice, but is silent about Mother. Just as one is beginning to think Mother must be dead, it turns out that she is very ill, and there’s the possibility of visiting her. It’s a very effective device – and the complete silence about Kati’s father, which lasts quite a bit longer, gains power from it.

I don’t think it’s too spoilerish to say that Kati’s mother has motor neurone disease (or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, as it’s called in this US translation), and that she dies. I won’t go further into spoiler territory, except to say that if this were an Australian or US book, there would very probably be a big emotional death scene towards the end of the book, but here the death happens so quietly that I wasn’t sure it had happened until a couple of paragraphs later, and it comes at about two-thirds of the way through the book. This unexpected structure, as much as the unfamiliar food, plants and family relationships, made me aware I was engaging with a mind from a different culture. I enjoyed it and I’m glad it slipped through the net to reach English-speaking young people – though I notice that my copy was withdrawn from the Albany NY Public Library less than four years after publication without much wear and tear, suggesting that it didn’t reach very many of them.

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