Isak

Translation and Biography and Magic

The New Yorker's new Page-Turner section quickens my heart with another brilliant look at the purpose and possibilities of literary translation, this time featuring Judith Thurman's thinking. I knew Thurman from her famous biography of Isak Dinesen ("the life of a storyteller"), which won a National Book Award; I had no idea that she is a translator from Spanish and French as well. She's magicked her way through the poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Louise Labé; she saw her biography of Dinesen translated into languages she cannot read; she is reading Lydia Davis's rendition of Madame Bovary in English for the first time.

She has things to say. And she offers asides about Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and second-wave feminism along the way. She pairs a close reading of a a few lines from Davis's Madame Bovary with a panoramic look at the art of twinning a writer.

Translation is a mysterious process, and just as the noun “mystery” is religious in origin, so is the verb “to translate.” Its first meaning is “to remove the body or relics of a saint or hero from one place of internment or repose to another.” Its second meaning is “to carry or convey to heaven without death.” That, of course, is what one aspires to do when one translates a work of literature: to convey a vital essence, which has been buried in the crypt (encrypted) of an alien lexicon, to a place in the light where it can endure.

Biography and translation are related enterprises. In neither case does a literal transcription produce the most desirable result: it refuses the risks—the deep adventure—of the poetry. The transcription school sticks timidly to the shore of fact, accounting for every petty quarrel, doctor’s appointment, cup of coffee, thank-you note, orgasm, and pair of gloves. Such biographies may be useful to the scholar, but they cheat a lay reader of something more vibrant and sensuous, which only comes through an imaginative connection. When one translates the story of another life—an epic with many ellipses, lost passages, and obscure references—it is always into one’s own sentences, and if the essential question of biography is Who are you?, the only way to hold a steady course toward the answer is to keep asking, at frequent intervals, Who am I?

The First Line of The Stranger

Albert Camus's strange little novel bears an evocative and famous first line: "Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Ryan Bloom takes a look at how various translators have rendered the sentence into English in The New Yorker, with particular attention two the two decisions that they seem to keep getting wrong. One of them stretches back to the original English translation:

Stuart Gilbert, a British scholar and a friend of James Joyce, was the first person to attempt Camus’s “L’Étranger” in English. In 1946, Gilbert translated the book’s title as “The Outsider” and rendered the first line as “Mother died today.” Simple, succinct, and incorrect.

In 1982, both Joseph Laredo and Kate Griffith produced new translations of “L’Étranger,” each opting for Gilbert’s revised title, “The Stranger,” but preserving his first line. “Mother died today” remained, and it wasn’t until 1988 that the line saw a single word changed. It was then that American translator and poet Matthew Ward reverted “Mother” back to Maman. One word? What’s the big deal? A large part of how we view and—alongside the novel’s court—ultimately judge Meursault lies in our perception of his relationship with his mother. We condemn or set him free based not on the crime he commits but on our assessment of him as a person. Does he love his mother? Or is he cold toward her, uncaring, even?

First impressions matter, and, for forty-two years, the way that American readers were introduced to Meursault was through the detached formality of his statement: “Mother died today.” There is little warmth, little bond or closeness or love in “Mother,” which is a static, archetypal term, not the sort of thing we use for a living, breathing being with whom we have close relations. To do so would be like calling the family dog “Dog” or a husband “Husband.” The word forces us to see Meursault as distant from the woman who bore him.

Collecting Our Thoughts on Carlos Fuentes

Mexico's great literary legend, Carlos Fuentes, died today at age 83. The prolific author and winner of the Cervantes Prize published his first novel at age 29; his final book will come out next year. His imaginative life was twinned with his political one: he was a sharp critic of corruption, censorship, and policies that perpetuate and criminalize poverty. He wrote nonfiction and journalism, but his critique of Mexico's drug wars came in the form of the novel Destiny and Desire, which is narrated by a severed head (and translated into English by Edith Grossman). Fuentes is also a former ambassador in France -- a position he resigned in protest of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz being named ambassador to Spain; Díaz Ordaz had been Mexico's president in 1968 when national troops opened fire on student protesters. In Fuentes's double life as a diplomat and fierce writer, he reminds me of Pablo Neruda, and makes me think of "Politics and the English Language" a touch differently: holding in my mind these men who danced with language wearing very different gowns.

From Anthony DePalma's remembrance of Fuentes in the New York Times:

Mr. Fuentes was one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s, known as El Boom. He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love.

And this is fascinating (emphasis mine):

Mr. Fuentes received wide recognition in the United States in 1985 with his novel “The Old Gringo,” a convoluted tale about the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a best seller north of the border ...

El Universal in Mexico has an enormous banner retrospective on Fuentes, which includes gathering the reflections of other writers. Jorge Volpi named him "el mayor novelista de México." Xavier Velasco said this:

Es un golpe muy fuerte, no creo que estemos a tiempo de hacer la mínima reflexión que nos acerque a aquilatar lo que acabamos de perder ... Es el novelista más grande que ha dado México, es el hombre que nos puso en el mapa, sin Carlos Fuentes no se donde estaría"

We can thank Dalkey Archive Press for being one of the publishers who has been key to bringing Fuentes' books into English, including Terra Nostra (reissue edition), Christopher Unborn, Where the Air is Clear, and Distant Relations. Dalkey will publish a Vlad, a novella, this summer ("Where, Carlos Fuentes asks, is a modern-day vampire to roost?") and Adam in Eden, another novella, in autumn. Next year -- and I cannot wait for this -- it will have for us "Fuentes's ambitious survey of Latin American fiction," called, of course, The Great Latin American Novel.

Weetzie Bat Wonders

I remember the first time I uncovered Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books: it was sometime in the early 1990s, it was an old worn paperback on a friend's shelf that I began paging through while said friend was off doing something else. (Aside: this kind of chance wonder is one of the unique purposes of print books.) Brief and strange, brimming with leaps and language that dances as language, this kind of writing is hard to shake off. And while the books are intended for young adult audiences, they seem to sit on rare air that we all would do well to breathe. Lesser known than Block's Weetzie Bat is The Rose and the Beast, her "fairy tales retold." The one called "Snow" begins like this:

When she was born her mother was so young, still a girl herself, didn't know what to do with her. She screamed and screamed -- the child. Her mother sat crying in the garden. The gardener came by to dig up the soil. It was winter. The child was frost-colored. The gardener stood before the cold winter sun, blocking the light with his broad shoulders. The mother looked like a broken rose bush.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has an audio interview with Block, complete with Iggy Pop music. And Bennett Madison has an accompanying essay on "Weetzie Bat Meets the Genie," in which he celebrates the breathless stories set squarely in "Los Angeles Rococo."

Russian Writers in Evolution

Too often, people seem to associate the phrase "Russian writers" with the past tense, a conflation that boils down the literary lights of the great north country with heavyweights like Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, and Tolstoy, or brilliant Soviet-era satirists like Ilf/Petrov and Bulgakov. But today's Russian writers made themselves very much part of the present -- nay, the future -- in yesterday's peaceful protest to Vladimir Putin's policies in Moscow's Pushkin Square (natch).Twelve writers -- ranging from a poet to a detective novelist to a literary celebrity -- organized a “test stroll" to, according to the New York Times, "determine whether it was possible to spend an afternoon walking en masse from one city park to another “without being blocked, beaten, poisoned with gas, detained, arrested or at least subjected to stupid molestation with questions.”

Ten thousand people joined them. They did not have a permit. The police allowed them to pass by.

More reporting from the streets:

"We see by the number of people that literature still has authority in our society because no one called these people — they came themselves,” said Lev Rubinstein, 65, a poet and one of the organizers. “We thought this would be a modest stroll of several literary colleagues, and this is what happened. You can see it yourself.”

“I don’t know how this will all end, but I can say that no one will forget it,” he said.

Russian history is full of confrontations between leaders and writers, whom Stalin once described as the “engineers of the human soul.” Sunday’s march alluded to this, beginning at a statue of the poet Aleksandr S. Pushkin — who was sent into exile by Czar Alexander I — and ending at a statue of Aleksandr S. Griboyedov, a playwright whose sendup of the Moscow aristocracy was not released by czarist censors until after his death.

Among the other Russian writers affirming themselves and their people to be creators of their future as well as of their literature are Dmitri L. Bykov, a poet, critic, and novelist; Irina Yasina, a journalist; Lyudmila Ulitskaya, a novelist; and Boris Akunin, that writer of detective novels.

Poem: "The Trees"

The Trees
By Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

 

"The Trees" was written in 1967, published in 1968, and collected in Philip Larkin's High Windows (1974), as well as in Collected Poems. Larkin was born in Warwickshire, England, and graduated from Oxford during the war. He became the longtime librarian and the University of Hull, working there and writing poems until his death in 1985.

 

About the Image: Off Brookside Lane in Nairobi.

Speaking: Gertrude Stein

 

“You have to know what you want to get. But when you know that, let it take you. And if it seems to take you off the track, don’t hold back because this is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry."

-- Gertrude Stein

 

Gertrude Stein was born in Pittsburgh in 1874 and and died in France a year after the end of World War II. She graduated from Radcliffe College, studied embryology at a lab in Massachusetts, and spent two years in the John Hopkins Medical School before moving to Paris in 1903, where she lived for the rest of her life. She was a pheonomenal art collector, choosing work by Gaugain, Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Picasso (who would later paint a famous portrait of Stein). She authored numerous unconventional books, including Three Lives (inspired by a portrait of Madame Cezanne), The Making of Americans (which she unabashedly compared to Ulysses), Ida: A Novel, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her greatest success. It's worth noting that Stein introduced Toklas, her partner, to Picasso while he was in his studio working on "Le Demoiselles d'Avignon." Stein hosted a famed salon that brought writers ranging from Ernest Hemingway to Thornton Wilder to Ezra Pound to Paul Bowles her home, which was shrouded in avant-garde art. Stein became the godmother to Hemingway's son, Jack. In 1933, following the success of Toklas, Stein began a major lecture tour of the United States. Stein is also the author of Q.E.D., published after her death as Things As They Are; it was written in 1903 and is known as one of the earliest coming-out novels. Throughout her life, Stein experimented with rhythmic writing and automatic writing to produce fiction that is understood more by sound and flow than, necessarily, by plotting.

 

About the Image: Stein is pictured writing in 1932. That's her dog, Pepe, looking at the camera from the corner.

Destination for the Book

 

The headline on the piece I wrote for Publishing Perspectives asks: "Is America's Forgotten Flyover a Gold Mine for Publishers?" As fewer and fewer authors are going on book tours, and fewer yet are celebrating their books outside major metropolitan centers, a bookish program in northern Michigan is drawing in huge audiences, huge sales, and re-imagined literary conversations.

Traverse City is a bayside town of 15,000 people — the largest city in the 21 counties of northern Michigan. But the community has cultivated cosmopolitan appeal with a lively arts community that includes a major film festival founded by Michael Moore, the celebrated City Opera House, and an outsized literary culture heralded by the National Writers Series.

NWS spotlights authors, journalists, and other storytellers in monthly one-on-one conversations that are successful enough to make northern Michigan a prime venue for any author’s book tour; it has been known to draw up to 700 people to events, charging $20-25 at the door (discounts for educators and students). At the same time, it spearheads a multi-platform media blitz for each visiting author. The current NWS season includes conversations with Jodi Piccoult, Alan Cheuse, Michael Sandel, Anna Quindlen, and Natalie Bakopoulos — more women are intentionally featured to balance the many male authors in last year’s line-up. Founded in 2009 by Doug Stanton, himself a bestselling author, NWS calls itself “a year-round book festival” that’s dedicated to enlivening the connection between readers and writers – even as some have left the book tour for dead.

Billy's Caine Prize Shortlist

Wonderful news: Billy Kahora is a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Billy is the managing editor of Kwani?, which is where I worked with him (I wrote a bit about what it was like in the magazine that published last year's Caine Prize winner). In the above photo, we're at Nairobi Java House, and he's wearing a shirt that reads: "It's not that I forget... it's that I just don't care!" Rarely have I seen a slogan so perfectly suit a personality: Billy has little patience for nonsense, preferring to focus his incredibly intelligent mind and bemused humor on fiction. He is an excellent reader and one of the hardest-working writers I know. Billy's nominated for "Urban Zoning," a story published in McSweeney's. Here is the full list of finalists, culled from 122 entries from (only!) 14 countries, with links to download the stories (PDF):

• Rotimi Babatunde (Nigeria): 'Bombay's Republic' from 'Mirabilia Review' 
• Billy Kahora (Kenya): 'Urban Zoning' from 'McSweeney's'
• Stanley Kenani (Malawi): 'Love on Trial' from 'For Honour and Other Stories' published by eKhaya/Random House Struik 
• Melissa Tandiwe Myambo (Zimbabwe): 'La Salle de Départ' from 'Prick of the Spindle' 
• Constance Myburgh (South Africa): 'Hunter Emmanuel' from 'Jungle Jim'

The winner will be announced on 2 July and receive a £10,000 prize. The Caine Prize has seen some change in leadership recently: Nigerian novelist Ben Okri was announced last week as its new vice president and Lizzy Attree is in her first year as administrator.

Kwani? itself owes something to the Caine Prize: it was founded in the wake of Binyavanga Wainana's win in 2002. Billy Kahora is the author of The True Story of David Munyakei, and his writing has appeared in Granta, Chimurenga and Vanity Fair. He is a judge for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and received his M.Sc. in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Billy is a past resident of the University of Iowa's amazing International Writing Program. His novel-in-process is on Juba, South Sudan.

Hilary Mantel's 'maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting'

I fell down the rabbit hole of Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall about a year ago. Here is what I wrote about it:

This is a novel of dark and glimmering brilliance, a novel of edges and shadows, a novel that revels in unabashed strangeness and in the pacing of a dream. It is elemental -- that is, it is fueled by a storytelling that fixates on the earth and fire, water and wind, of England -- and it lures the reader into the unsteady, seasick, rhythm of terror.

Yes, Wolf Hall is historical fiction -- it follows Thomas Cromwell in particular, with King Henry IV VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas More weighing heavily on the pages. But that's a genre classification that does not seem to do justice to Mantel's Booker Prize-winning masterpiece; it implies that Mantel is only narrating history, perhaps with an imaginative leap or two in order to put a bit of flourish on a well-trod epoch. That is not what Mantel wrote. Wolf Hall is, if I may quote myself, a novel of "politics and prayer, bread and Body, wine and blood," a brilliantly constructed book that establishes Mantel as one of the most -- I'm not afraid to say -- most gifted living writers.

And so.

Since the journey into the rabbit hole, I have been looking forward to Mantel's follow-up novel, a continuation of Cromwell's strange story. And here it is: Bring Up the Bodies, published in a matter of days (and with a US cover that is so much less appealing than the British version, but ... everything: we can't have it, can we?). Like Wolf Hall, this new book unfolds in present-tense and situates itself on the knife-edge of class, the tilt between civilization and savagery.

James Wood simmers with Mantel and Bring Up the Bodies in The New Yorker. It appears to be the first lengthy reflection from a critic. I'm particularly interested in his take on how Mantel's imagination approaches matters of historical fact:

Where much historical fiction gets entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity, Mantel bypasses those knots of concoction, and proceeds as if authenticity were magic rather than a science. She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case. In effect, she proceeds as if the past five hundred years were a relatively trivial interval in the annals of human motivation.

Wood goes on to compare this with how other talented fiction writers mine history, with less fiery results:

If you want to know what novelistic intelligence is, you might compare a page or two of Hilary Mantel’s work with worthy historical fiction by contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd or Susan Sontag. They are intelligent, but they are not novelistically intelligent. They copy the motions but rarely inhabit the movement of vitality. Mantel knows what to select, how to make her scenes vivid, how to kindle her characters. She seems almost incapable of abstraction or fraudulence; she instinctively grabs for the reachably real. Her two most recent novels concern famous historical events—Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, her execution at the King’s orders, the English split from the Roman Church and the authority of the Pope—but they make the stories fragile again, with everything at suspenseful risk.

In short, this novelist has the maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting.

Writing Baseball

 

With spring breaking open with the slap of screen doors and the shine of early morning sun, I am writing about baseball. Over at Grantland, just after the Detroit Tigers cut Brandon Inge, I discuss why this decidedly average player (albeit, a good guy) has incited so much irrational emotion from fans. (After the piece was published, word came that the newly-available Inge got picked up by the Oakland A's.) I also got the chance to talk with Jim Abbott -- former pitcher for the Angels and the Yankees -- for a piece in the Detroit Free Press. Abbott, a native of Flint, can boast of pitching a no-hitter, an Olympic gold-medal, and being recruited for the big stage before he spent a day in the minor leagues. He also happens to have been born without a right hand; a fact, he told me, that has colored every day of his life. He has a new memoir out called Imperfect: An Improbable Life. And he is a genuinely nice guy.