France | French | Novel (excerpt)
October, 2020Eugène Sue owed his immense popularity to the series of sensational novels of Parisian low life he began in 1842 with Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). The book appeared as a serial novel, or feuilleton, in the conservative newspaper Le Journal des Débats. It provided readers with an examination of working-class and criminal Paris that no novel had until then portrayed. With its portraits of prostitutes, criminals, and villains of all stripes, who speak in their own language and move about in their own milieu, the book caused a scandal upon its release. Unlike his contemporaries, Sue abandoned the drawing rooms of the beau monde for the dive bars and cabarets of central Paris, the Ile de la Cité, where the story is set.
There had, of course, been fictional descriptions of urban life before, but their focus had been on the Parisian bourgeoisie and its interaction with the remnants of the French aristocracy. Sue upset the codes of contemporary action and introduced a dark, violent underworld, a secret Paris as exotic, as foreign as any city portrayed in Sue’s popular maritime novels. Although colorful characters and cunning criminals were not unknown in French fiction, Sue’s brand of insistent realism was more in keeping with the methods of a social worker or journalist. His gritty depictions of the poor and the criminal classes eschew the elements of the fabulous and the burlesque to portray characters in their natural setting. There are elements of Dickens in his work, but without the latter’s good-natured bonhomie and humor. And while our attitudes of what is acceptable or appropriate in literature have broadened considerably since the 1840s, there was nothing picturesque about the book at the time of its appearance. The scandal was real, and Sue was reviled by conservative literary critics of his day for having shoved their noses into the gutters of Paris. He was also accused of literary speculation and said to have profited from a depiction of the poor and the downtrodden. This was to be expected. Elements of the socialist press took Sue at his word, however, and championed the book as a denunciation of poverty and a plea in favor of the common man, those who were referred to as les classes populaires.
- Robert Bononno
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the excerpt from the novel.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
July, 2020Eugène Sue owed his immense popularity to the series of sensational novels of Parisian low life he began in 1842 with Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). The book appeared as a serial novel, or feuilleton, in the conservative newspaper Le Journal des Débats. It provided readers with an examination of working-class and criminal Paris that no novel had until then portrayed. With its portraits of prostitutes, criminals, and villains of all stripes, who speak in their own language and move about in their own milieu, the book caused a scandal upon its release. Unlike his contemporaries, Sue abandoned the drawing rooms of the beau monde for the dive bars and cabarets of central Paris, the Ile de la Cité, where the story is set.
There had, of course, been fictional descriptions of urban life before, but their focus had been on the Parisian bourgeoisie and its interaction with the remnants of the French aristocracy. Sue upset the codes of contemporary action and introduced a dark, violent underworld, a secret Paris as exotic, as foreign as any city portrayed in Sue’s popular maritime novels. Although colorful characters and cunning criminals were not unknown in French fiction, Sue’s brand of insistent realism was more in keeping with the methods of a social worker or journalist. His gritty depictions of the poor and the criminal classes eschew the elements of the fabulous and the burlesque to portray characters in their natural setting. There are elements of Dickens in his work, but without the latter’s good-natured bonhomie and humor. And while our attitudes of what is acceptable or appropriate in literature have broadened considerably since the 1840s, there was nothing picturesque about the book at the time of its appearance. The scandal was real, and Sue was reviled by conservative literary critics of his day for having shoved their noses into the gutters of Paris. He was also accused of literary speculation and said to have profited from a depiction of the poor and the downtrodden. This was to be expected. Elements of the socialist press took Sue at his word, however, and championed the book as a denunciation of poverty and a plea in favor of the common man, those who were referred to as les classes populaires.
- Robert Bononno
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the excerpt from the novel.
Austria | German | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2020Alfred Döblin singled out the young Viennese cultural activist Robert Müller (1887-1924) as a “dazzling wordsmith.” Yet for over half a century after his suicide, this remarkable Expressionist writer was forgotten. Only in 1990 did his major novel Tropics: The Myth of Travel (1915) reappear in print, and only in the last decade or two have Germanist academics and critics begun to give serious attention to his writings. (The collected works now cover 14 volumes!)
Tropics is an extraordinary tour de force. Ostensibly a report from a German engineer about an expedition by three white men (Slim the Yankee, Van den Dusen the Dutch colonial officer, and Brandlberger the German) to the upper Amazon in search of lost Conquistador gold, it quickly blossoms into increasingly manic disquisitions on “civilisation” vs. “barbarism, ”European “normality” vs. the life-ways of “primitives,” Freudianism vs. “healthy instincts,” benevolent imperialism vs. murderous plunder, reason vs. mysticism, reality vs. illusion. It draws heavily on reports from the Amazon by the German anthropological explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924), only to subvert their subtext of western superiority.
This excerpt occurs about halfway through the novel, when the three westerners have spent long enough in an Indian village to lose their aura of superiority, and have become figures of some scorn to the Indians.
- C D Godwin
Novel (excerpt) | Serbia | Serbian
March, 2020Death of Descartes (1996) is a late novel of the Serbian writer, philosopher, and public intellectual Radomir Konstantinović, increasingly considered to be his literary masterpiece and swan song. Konstantinović finished writing the text in 1993, during the height of internationally imposed sanctions on Serbia and a series of brutal wars in the neighboring Yugoslav republics, although the idea of exploring larger philosophical ideas through the relationship between father and son originated much earlier in the 1960s. Described by Konstantinović’s biographer Radivoj Cvetićanin as a “postmodern family novel” and a companion piece to his last literary work, Beckett, A Friend (2000), Death of Descartes freely combines fiction, biography, and philosophical reflection while retaining a taut dramatic structure. In many ways, the novel represents Konstantinović’s temporary withdrawal from anti-nationalist and anti-war political engagement in order to interrogate the common places of modern western philosophy, rooted in the apparent autonomy and rationality of the ego. As such, the novel partakes in the broader postmodern project to renegotiate the foundations of human subjectivity on the basis of our shared bodily vulnerability and openness to one's own and other's mortality. The text offers particular challenges to any attempts at translation because Konstantinović, first of all, inflects and estranges the Serbian language with classical French stylistic forms while--in a modernist register--radically breaking down conventional syntax.
- Vladislav Beronja
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2020Ulrike Draesner is one of Germany’s most prominent authors. She is particularly interested in societal and scientific discourses, multilingualism, and the inner tensions of the modern human subject. I communicated with her throughout this translation project.
This extract is the final chapter of her novel Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt (Seven Leaps from the Edge of the World, 2014), which deals with the forced migration and expulsion of Germans from, and Poles to, Silesia in 1945, and the trauma inherited and expressed by subsequent generations. It is a multi-narrator novel told from nine different first-person perspectives. Its main focus is a German family evacuated from the small town of Oels near Breslau in Silesia. Lilly and her sons, Eustachius (14) and Emil (23), flee from Oels in January 1945 in the direction of Bavaria. Their father has to remain in Breslau and fight for the Wehrmacht. Emil, who is fascinated by the SS, has learning and speech difficulties and a clubfoot, but his parents have managed to evade the authorities and prevent his euthanasia as part of the Nazi eugenics programme. His forced sterilisation is alluded to but not explicitly narrated. He goes missing on the night of April 8-9, 1945 during the family’s flight to the West as they are trying to get through Sondershausen, a town in Thuringia in Germany, which is undergoing severe aerial bombardment. He is presumed dead, although his disappearance is unresolved and unnarratable. None of the characters who were with him that night are able to articulate what happened. This loss is the central trauma in the novel, a blind spot symbolic of the many refugees who lost their lives, the trauma of expulsion, and the loss of homeland. Emil appears only indirectly, reflected and refracted through the other characters’ narratives, until here in the final chapter we hear his voice–the gap and silence he represents is performed in the form of a prose poem, a letter he writes to his father from the bombed-out streets of Sondershausen, on the night he goes missing.
His letter marks a shift from prose to something that looks like poetry. The lines extend and retract, sometimes flowing, sometimes erupting into monosyllabic stuttering. The shape is unsettling and strange. I had to resist the temptation to clarify the punctuation: sentences are running together, coming quickly, not bound by rules. Emil has a learning disability–he is different; he represents a challenge to his family, society, the orderly, homogeneous National Socialist worldview, and the reader.
Another temptation was to abstract the vocabulary or make it more coherent. My first translation of “auf den Straßen passierte ein Massenungeheuer” was “There was a mass atrocity on the streets.” In the end, I went for something more literal and physical and kept the oddness of the verb: “A mass monster happened on the streets.” The line is now more bodily, disconcerting, and harrowing; it is this concreteness and urgency, I believe, that draws readers to Draesner’s work.
- Marielle Sutherland
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
January, 2020The premise of Dual Nationality is nonconformist: take the (im)migrant’s identity crisis, but make it . . . funny. It’s a rare approach. Displacement, whether willing or unwilling, is usually handled soberly as a literary topic, in strains of melancholy, drama, or even bitterness. Nina Yargekov is unusual in that she brings no small amount of irreverence to her narrative. The quest for identity in the novel is rendered satirically literal: our protagonist is an amnesiac who wakes up in an airport with two passports, two wallets, two phones, two sets of keys, no memory of who she is or where she’s going, and the suspicion that she’s dolled up like the walking stereotype of a prostitute. What she sees is what she knows. Thankfully, she’s blessed with excellent reasoning skills, and what emerges is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure story, a mental escape room, as our protagonist gropes for clues about her life and her belonging.
Her name, we discover at the same time as she does, is Rkvaa Nnoyeig. She’s thirty-one years old. She works as (what else?) a translator. She’s the dual national of two countries that may or may not be real, depending on where she’s quite literally standing. Rkvaa’s world is a barely exaggerated caricature of a global order revolving around the split between West and East, between winners and losers, between first-world countries and immigrant underdogs. She, as a child of political refugees, as a bilingual translator-interpreter, uneasily has a foot in each camp. She spends the novel trying to meticulously reject one in favor of the other–striving, naturally, to solve her identity crisis, to feel uncomplicated and whole.
Despite the novel’s sustained tone of irony, I read it as coming from a place of deep empathy. There is great and genuine concern at the novel’s core: how does one act like an engaged, empathetic global citizen in a world that’s coming apart at the seams, complicating identities all around and making the concept of belonging a much more tenuous one? It’s not surprising that the Algerian War of Independence weaves in and out of the plot like a leitmotif, and that, towards the end of the book, we get a scene of the 2015 migrant impasse in Budapest’s train station. Perhaps the most troubling question the novel raises is how to reconcile your love for your country with the wrongs your country has committed–and whether it’s even possible to do so.
Dual Nationality grasps the big things in a completely subversive and comical way. As a Russian-American, I find lots to cackle at. Perhaps, in these times, it’s essential to not only empathize and worry, but also to be able to laugh a little–at ourselves, at the world’s absurdities, at our deepest questions and searches for meaning, and of course at our mortal inability to arrive at definite answers.
- Daria Chernysheva
German | Novel (excerpt) | Switzerland
August, 2018Quarter Past Never (Original title: Viertel Nach Handgelenk) began as a series of blog posts written while the author was in rehab. First published in 2008, it became a cult success, selling out its first printing. It now stands as a document of not-so-carefree youth in the mid-2000s, a chronicle of excess set against the incongruous backdrop of sleepy Switzerland. The sheer exuberance of Wigglesworth's prose masks in an artful manner the deep melancholy of the novel as the narrator, Pippin, spirals further and further into addiction. David Foster Wallace once wrote that “one of the saddest times...is the invisible pivot when the party ends.” Quarter Past Never turns on that pivot.
- Marshall Yarbrough
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
May, 2017In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens (Into the Woods of the Human Heart) (2016) follows a number of women (and a couple of men) as they travel throughout Europe and to the American West Coast. The oscillation between countries and sexes sparks a wild curiosity between the lovers and friends, while the book stages a larger exploration of borders--between nations, people, and sexes.
Woven through their travels are discoveries of new sexualities, dissolutions of classical ideas of love and gender, and encounters with the majesty of the natural world, the beauty of another person, and the exquisiteness of true self-discovery. This masterful, global novel is a powerful portrait of matters of the heart.
- Festival Neue Literatur Reader
Chinese | Novel (excerpt) | Taiwan
February, 2017Based on the experiences of Luo Yijun’s immediate and extended families in Taiwan and China, Moon Descendants relates a story spanning four generations. A large part of the narrative pivots on Luo’s father, who joined hundreds of thousands of Chinese men in fleeing China to Taiwan after the Nationalist Party’s defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. What seemed to be a temporary retreat became a permanent exile, with a ban on traveling between China and Taiwan in place for the following half-century.
As in most writings of exile, memories play a significant role in Moon Descendants. How do memories intervene in an estranged life? How do memories construct time and how does time change memory? In Moon Descendants, narrative time is shuffled by the memories not only of Luo’s father but also of the author-narrator and other characters. The chapters are arranged as if they were a hand of playing cards. According to Luo, the conception of the story came from the imaginative practice of freezing time in fiction, i.e. stopping the time of a decisive moment, prying open the seam of the suspended time, and wriggling into an elaborate, spectacle-filled instant. In this way, Luo presents remembrances as different clocks of the narrative present, turned on and off by memories. These clocks make the time they mark circular like clock faces (as another part of the story portrays). The circular times sometimes intersect with one another, forming overlapping portions that, far from being in sync, trap the narrative present in conflicting arcs and movements of the past.
The translated excerpt is the sixteenth of the novel’s twenty-one chapters, a self-contained piece titled “The Flood” that explores the twists and turns behind the union of the narrator’s parents, with his mother coming from a lineage of adoptive daughters and his father leaving behind a wife in China. In the second half of the excerpt, these two lines of development merge—or submerge—in a flood caused by one of the biggest typhoons to hit Taiwan. Inundating the whole of Taipei and turning streets and alleys into waterways, the flood creates a transient world for the family’s history to rise to the surface of the water. Its effect is not so much to straighten things up as it is to flatten time momentarily and break down the border between past and present.
- Elaine Wong
Hebrew | Israel | Novel (excerpt)
July, 2016Crossing a River Twice presents the basic translator's dilemma: how to tell a story set in a specific time and place in a way that is universally relevant. This problem is compounded in the first three chapters with the character of Itamar, who is alienated from modern society in a way that readers worldwide will recognize, but has a distinctly Israeli way to express this alienation. His stream of consciousness, often undistinguishable from the narration, is comprised of Israeli-specific references and expressions, and he has a habit of using these references and expressions in a literal and figurative sense at the same time. The solution I found was to have Itamar use slightly altered versions of English idioms. This way, צרת רבים חצי נחמה (literally, "there's consolation in shared troubles") became "there's comfort in numbers" rather than "misery loves company," since Itamar emphatically does not want company. Similarly, וטובה שעה אחת קודם ("and better an hour sooner") became "an hour saved is an hour earned," rather than "the sooner the better," since Itamar means exactly one hour.
The story is set in Tel Aviv, and Itamar's attachment to the city, and specifically the Yarkon River, is a major aspect of his character. To emphasize this (and to add some clarity for readers not familiar with Tel Aviv and Israel) I added subtle reminders throughout the text. For example, מישור החוף ("the coastal plain") in the second line of the prologue I translated as "Israel's coastal plain" to provide an early point of orientation for the international reader. Similarly, I added terms for terrain and infrastructure features (e.g. river, bridge, interchange) that will be obvious to the Israeli reader but perhaps necessary for the international reader. Ultimately, I tried to achieve a translation that would not sound foreign to the international reader, but that would engage their curiosity towards the setting.
- Tom C. Atkins
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