Some thoughts on translation

Posted on by Josh Nudell

In A Splendid Conspiracy (reviewed here), the police informant and intellectual of the streets, Rezk, covets foreign books, which he diligently reads at the pace of a page a day even though he frequently finds phrases that are beyond his comprehension. At the same time, Medhat, who works the for the town’s newspaper, dismisses the idea of reading books in other languages because people are the same everywhere and the books are going to share the perversity in any language so why bother working so hard.

In The Russian Girl Richard Vaisey stubbornly resists teaching courses in translation because the students cannot then claim to read Russian novels, but only a pale image of the real thing.

Years ago I had a conversation with a friend who declared that he doesn’t read books in translation. In contrast, almost forty percent of my non-academic reading in the past four years has been translated into English. My friend’s concern was over the quality of the translation and I must admit that I have read some book where the translation was distinctly antiquated in such a way that it distracted. Sometimes the issues with the translation are with the translator, but sometimes they is with the original text. But even that dichotomy is too simple. To wit, all translation is going to itself be an art, with decisions about how to render turns of phrase, but where some syntax tracks well with English, some languages do not, while some books like Tyrant Banderas flow between multiple different dialects with varying levels of complexity and each with its own external symbolism in its diction.

The proper solution would, for Richard Vaisey, to read the book in the original. There is a value to this, which I can quite attest to in my academic work with Greek texts, but since there are multiple purposes for reading, translations are usually satisfactory so long as it is realized what they are.

I like explanations for particular word choices, as Alyson Waters offers in her translation of A Splendid Conspiracy, but generally trust publishers to employ capable translators. As a rule, cut some slack on purely aesthetic judgements of the text since it is being passed through a medium. The problem is trickier when there are dueling translations, but thankfully Google provides a service that allows easy access to reviews of the different translations. At the most granular level each will probably have its virtues, but, being interested in collecting stories, I prefer readability to a word-for-word translation. While I appreciate authors who have enough English to work closely with their translators like Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk have done, but the truth is that I greedily want access to these stories and (usually) lack the facility with the original language so I happily settle for the translation.

I will likely soon pick up one or more novels in French just to work toward fluency with that language, but I don’t consider it necessary to appreciate a book as a work of art. I believe that one of the things reading enables is to unlock all sorts of people and places, world views and experiences that are not normally available, particularly to someone living in the United States. To reject works in translation is to apply blinders to a whole range of cultures, not mention willfully denying oneself great art.

The Russian Girl – Kingsley Amis

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This is a somewhat belated review because I finished the book a little bit ago and was then on the road for a bit more than a week.

Everywhere in the world literature is in retreat from politics and unless resisted the one will crush the other. You don’t crush literature from the outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish, though as we’ve all seen you can make a big fuss and have a lot of fun trying. You do better to induce them to destroy themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes…

As soon as originality became important, the days of artistic merit or excellence were numbered. The question Is it any good? had always been hard to discuss, and only to be settled after a lapse of time and by the judgement of the wider public. This irritated intellectuals, who found it easier and more agreeable to ask Is it new?, together with What does it mean? and Is it art?, questions easy to discuss and never to be settled.

Richard Vaisey is a cantankerous but generally respected professor whose academic work is the study of Russian literature. On the surface, his life is great. He has a good job, but is able to live above his pay because he is married to the wealthy Cordelia who, particularly, allows him to indulge in his taste for sports cars. However, this life is turned upside down when the Russian poet Anna Danilova comes to London asking his help. Her brother is in prison, but in the tumultuous years around 1990 she believes that if she can make a name for herself as a poet in London, a public petition would force the government to release him. She just needs Richard’s help introducing her to people and, importantly, making people see the importance of her poetry. There is just one catch: in Richard’s (and most everyone else’s) opinion, her poetry is an offense against literature.

Of course the wretchedness of the poetry does not stand in the way of Richard falling in love with Anna, which leads to the story tumbling toward a potentially explosive conclusion.

The main choice that Richard has to make is between the two women, his wife and Anna. As mentioned above, he hates Anna’s poetry, but falls in love with her force of personality (which he notices at a poetry reading) and with her for more generic reasons. In contrast, everyone in the story considers Cordelia a monster. Richard’s friends repeatedly ask him why he married her since, in their descriptions, she is beautiful, but selfish and talks with a obnoxious cadence that they like to mimic. They repeatedly ask him whether he married her for the money or for the sex. Cordelia and Anna are conspicuously constructed as opposites, but, while some of Cordelia’s actions are genuinely monstrous, the people around her are mean in their own right.

The Russian Girl is a curious book. Like other Amis novels I have read, including Lucky Jim, there is a familiar hook of one “sane” individual amid a maelstrom of chaos. Similarly, it is liberally sprinkled with observations about the decline of the academy and London society. Some of these are insightful or funny, but some cross into mean-spirited or are so specific about a context I don’t know well enough to connect with. The result is that while I liked passages in the novel, I did not like the overall story to the extent that I had hoped.

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Next up, I finished Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear and Patrick O’Brian’s The Far Side of the World while I was traveling. I am also nearly finished with Roberto Arlt’s brilliant The Seven Madmen, a feverish Argentinian story in the vein of Dostoevsky.

Treason’s Harbour – Patrick O’Brian

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Treason’s Harbour, the ninth installment of the Aubrey-Maturin series, picks up very nearly where the Ionian Mission leaves off, skipping only the denouement Aubrey’s mission to capture a Balkan harbor. This time both his ships, the H.M.S. Worcester and the H.M.S. Surprise, are stuck in harbor and potentially never to set sail again, so the action shifts to the spymaster Maturin and his duel with French intelligence agents in Malta. The scenes there are interspersed with a brief foray to the Red Sea and several port-ventures where the French activity has preceded the British arrival, with Aubrey narrowly avoiding ambush on more than one instance. Along the way there are more mundane concerns as Captain Aubrey worries about his personal finances (which he is dodging) and the future of the midshipmen under his care.

Even more than the Ionian Mission, Treason’s Harbor is a serial installment, picking up where the last left and leaving off in preparation for the next without much care for an individual story arc. For many series this would frustrate me to no end, not least because I often want to see some further resolution in each story, but here I think it works. For one thing, O’Brian is quite good at creating cliff-hangers. For another, the story and recurring cast of characters brings to life the British Navy in a way that is almost domestic. The fighting scenes are well-written and therefore exhilarating, but the bulk of the books are the mundane interactions of swabbing the decks. What’s more, he can get away with this by building affection for the characters through their competence and general goodness in contrasted with other people in the navy. For instance, Jack Aubrey loves his wife Sophie and cares for his crew, even though he is not a particularly good person in many instances. In fact, he is a rather bad husband and, while he is good at keeping his people alive, he is capable of grating with other people who might be annoying but also have legitimate grudges. Yet, Aubrey’s genial benevolence and distaste for corporal punishment endears him to the reader.

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Next up, I am currently about halfway through Kingsley Amis’ The Russian Girl, a farce about terrible people and worse poetry.

December 2014 Reading Recap

Posted on by Josh Nudell

A bit later than I intended, but things happen. Vacation isn’t really a vacation.

the Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargas Llosa
Reviewed here, an excellent historical novel detailing the collapse of Trujillo’s reign in the Dominican Republic.

Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
Rarely do I read a book and come away flummoxed by what I read. I did with this book. Happenstance causes Paul Pennyfeather to be expelled from university and without other recourse he becomes a school teacher. Error after error leads him all the way back around. The synopsis on the back cover described Decline and Fall as a good nonsense novel, but I think the unfamiliar (to me) setting caused the nonsense to be exacerbated beyond comfort. It had its moments, but I liked Scoop much better.

The Alteration– Kingsley Amis
What if Arthur Tudor and Catherine of Aragon had a child? What if, also, the reformation never took place, but Martin Luther successfully purified the church and himself became Pope? According to Amis, the church rules, science is a dirty word, and technological development has stalled. This is the setting for The Alteration. Hugh Anvil is ten and has the most divine singing voice in Europe–and the pope would like to keep it that way. There is only one way to keep Hugh’s voice from breaking, but as he becomes aware of what he will give up in service to the church, he decides that he would like to live life. The Alteration is a marvelous work of alternate-history, working in references to other alternate-history works such as Man in the High Castle and historical personages such as Heinrich Himmler and Lavrentiy Beria. Unfortunately I preferred the world to the story.

The Professor’s House– Willa Cather
Pitched as an exploration of introspection, a man in crisis at the onset of old age while at the height of his intellectual powers. There is an element of truth to this and the professor is in a crisis about his move from his old house to a new one and finds respite in working in his old office. But the heart of the story and the root of his family’s crisis is his former student Tom Outland, whose charisma and brilliance create the money and the jealousy that are tearing his family apart.

By far, my favorite of the four was The Feast of the Goat, which is going to appear on my updated favorite novels list. I am currently reading The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk.

November 2014 Reading Recap

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I am in disbelief that December is upon us. For a variety of reasons, some of which aren’t even related to my dissertation, life has gotten v. hectic, but here’s a quick rundown of my November reading.

Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andric

Andric’s masterpiece (one of the trilogy for which he won the Nobel Prize) is a story about the onrush of modernity in a small Balkan town. The town is rural, the inhabitants in the the various hamlets vaguely aware of the goings on in the world at large–particularly when the time comes to pay dues to the Ottomans. Then a Vizier orders the construction of the eponymous bridge. The town grew up around the bridge, expanding with time and subjected to the pressures modernity up to the first World War, including rebellion, occupation, war, railroads, and nationalism. The one constant is the bridge.

The book is of the high-literary variety and drags at times, but also has a penchant for evocative imagery, including a gruesomely graphic description of a man who gets impaled on a spike and suffers for a long time. I came away with an active interest in something like this not happening to me–as opposed than the standard disinterest in painful punishment.

The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho

A hero’s journey story that caused my brother to express disbelief when I told him I hadn’t already read it. Santiago is a young Andalusian shepherd who is encouraged to follow his dreams and go to the Pyramids in Egypt in order to unlock his Personal Legend. Along the way he meets obstacles, some of which are pleasant, that threaten his journey. He stays on course and writes his own legend. The story is simplistic in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t invalidate the points made. I liked but didn’t love the book, but could see including it in a list of books read to fairly young children, ones who should be reminded that there is a time to wander and that personal legends are there to be written, chased, and that a decent portion of luck is about putting oneself out there. Then again, we can all use that reminder sometimes.

The Lives of Tao – Wesley Chu

Reviewed here, The Lives of Tao is a fun book about an unlikely hero who gets inhabited by a millenia-old alien named Tao who once helped make Genghis Khan into a world-conqueror. Ultimately, it is an alt-history action-adventure, martial arts story. Admittedly, I am a sucker for stories about the hero’s journey and while there were certain elements of the story that I found youthful and might have found problematic in other books, I had enough fun reading The Lives of Tao that that sensation overrode any problems I had. It was my favorite read for the month.

Noted above, my life is crazy right now and I haven’t started a new book yet, but I’ve been carrying around Kingsley Amis’ The Alteration, so that will probably be the next one I read.

December 2013 Reading Recap

Posted on by Josh Nudell

My progress through Herman Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund has slowed, so I thought to write this post up a bit early. Sometime in January I also plan to revisit my top novels post I did once before.

  • Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis – Reviewed here, Lucky Jim is a comedy of errors. On some level, James Dixon is alienated from teaching at the university because he is surrounded by insane people, but on another he is a college instructor who is wholly unsuited for the position. I had a particularly strong negative reaction to this novel, which is reflected in the review, but the more I reflect on it the funnier the story is and it is likely to appear on my updated list of top novels–even if I still have misgivings about the moral presented about people in academia and what contingent faculty should do with themselves.
  • The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Junichiro Tanizaki – reviewed here, Tanizaki “explains” on the basis of several fictional sources the rumored, but unknown, sexual desires that drove the eponymous Lord of Musashi to become a successful warlord. I enjoyed the book, although I did note that it seemed to be a solid addition to a secret history genre, rather than a great novel in its own right.
  • Scoop, Evelyn Waugh, a novel satirizing news media, public consumption of news, journalism, and foreign correspondents. John Boot, an author, pulls some strings to get a job as a correspondent in Ishmaelia, an African country on the brink of civil war, so that he can escape a persistent women. But the newspaper hires the wrong Boot, William, a homebody whose writing consists of stories about country fauna. William does take the job and goes to Ishmaelia, where he is a fish out of water. Waugh has some wicked insights about what news is and the absurdities of journalism.
  • The Stranger, Albert Camus – Mersault works hard, he is seeing a woman from work who he might marry, and he gets to go swimming. His mother has just died, but other than that his life could be described as good. Mersault might not say so, though. Life is. His pattern of life changes drastically when he shoots an unknown Arab man on the beach.
  • The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway – One of Hemingway’s incomplete posthumous novels that was heavily pruned from the manuscript form (something like 2/3 of manuscript was cut to create the story in its published form). David Bourne and his wife Catherine are on their honeymoon along the Mediterranean coast of France. The couple is in love and, in typical Hemingway fashion, most of their time is spent eat, drinking, and swimming, sleeping, and having sex. The erotic games really begin when Catherine begins to alter her appearance to more resemble her husband and take control of their relationship and then when she brings a new woman into her marriage. There is an emptiness to this story that is more pronounced than usual, probably because the story was incomplete and because it was so thoroughly trimmed. There are still some things to recommend The Garden of Eden–Catherine is a fuller, more powerful female character than most Hemingway created, he creates a powerful sense of place for a beautiful setting, and the story that remains has some rich irony given the background of manuscript.

As noted above, I will finish Narcissus and Goldmund in the next few days, and after that I don’t know what I will read. As of this writing, tomorrow is a new year and the possibilities are endless.

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

Posted on by Josh Nudell

James Dixon is an English World War Two veteran and a young contingent faculty member at a small university in the UK midlands. He specialized in medieval history not because he felt a particular vocation, but because it was easy and spends most of his time trying to avoid teaching unless the class is composed of attractive women. Jim’s career is in limbo, with an article out for review being delayed and he is unable to get a direct answer from the head of his department as to his status for the upcoming year. His love life is no better, as he takes care of and feels beholden to his colleague, Margaret, who has recently had an issue with anxiety and had to be institutionalized. In short, Jim is in a state of limbo. The story proceeds from here, picking up steam when Jim meets Christine, a young woman who piques his interest and the girlfriend of Bertrand, the son of the head of Jim’s department.

Jim pisses off just about everyone around him, often by trying to white-wash his mistakes. In return, Jim is annoyed by everyone around him, people who he finds annoying, superficial, narcissistic, etc. Only Christine is exempted.

More than in any book I have read, I simultaneously sympathized with and was utterly repulsed by the main character, Jim and so went my opinion of the book.

First, the good. Jim seems like a generally decent person and he usually tries to do the right thing despite his uncertain position. In my current position as a graduate student I certainly sympathize with his financial and academic stresses. Additionally, while Amis tends to telegraph the catastrophes Jim walks into, his plans go awry in funny ways that escalate to a grand climactic implosion.

Then, the bad. When I decided to read Lucky Jim, I was led to believe that the protagonist was just a man whose efforts to do good failed in increasingly spectacular ways. The general plot is recognizable in that construction, but I found Jim much less benign than the blurb implied. For one thing, as a student who feels some measure of vocation both for my chosen topic, I was annoyed with Jim’s decision to specialize in a topic because it was easy. Likewise, I was irritated with his primary teaching interest to be to avoid eager male students and to collect attractive female ones. This general apathy about his profession and superficial interests also manifested itself in Jim’s interest in Catherine. He doesn’t pursue her primarily because she interests him as a person, as he seems to want the reader to believe, but mostly because she is prettier than Margaret, with a dash of spite towards Bertrand.

To my mind, Jim is a generic, generally cowardly schmuck. His saving grace is that everyone around him is significantly worse than he is. There are duplicitous women, elitist professors, arrogant artists, womanizers–Jim is not a particularly good person, but he is justified that he is better than they are. It is easy to demonstrate examples in the story of Jim being wronged, how he is being supportive toward Margaret, and how he is acting gallantly toward Christine by saving her from Bertrand who is just using her. But what jumped out to me is that Jim is just as superficial and often as petty as these other people are as he desperately tries to cover up his mistakes and “saves” Christine from Bertrand because is attracted to her.

I may be too harsh on some of the gender dynamics given that the book was published 1954. Nevertheless, I found the dissonance between Jim’s claims to benignity, his somewhat superficial motivations, and the awfulness of almost everyone else in the story frustrating. I sympathized with Jim, both because of bad things happening to him and because some of his circumstances struck close to home, but too many of his actions and behaviors were among my personal pet peeves. My sympathy waned as the book wore on and Jim’s actions piled up and when his career in the academy resolved, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief for everyone involved.

Lucky Jim is a comedy of errors created by putting Jim in an environment he is largely unsuited for and surrounding him with awful people. The main drawback I had (if you were previously unable to guess) is that I found Jim off-putting. Beyond that, it was distasteful to me, though not entirely unwarranted, that the people worse than Jim in the story were the rest of the people connected to the academy.

Next up, I am about halfway through Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and am taking Camus’ The Stranger and Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden with me over the holidays.