Transcending Nationality?

Before I’d read a single page of this week’s selection, Ru by Vietnamese-Canadian writer Kim Thúy, it had already taught me an intriguing lesson about categorizing authors by nationality. While reading an enjoyable review of Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind last year, I noticed that at least one reader was curious about younger, postwar Vietnamese novelists. (Huong is arguably Vietnam’s most notable author from the war era, and I’m planning to review her work on the site at a later date.) I thought I had discovered the answer in Thúy, a young woman who came of age in Montreal after her family fled Vietnam. Yet in a Condé Nast Traveler article last fall featuring book recommendations from ambassadors, Kirsten Hillman touted Ru as the epitome of Canadian inclusiveness. So how does that book evoke the crossroads between two nationalities so convincingly? This novel’s careful exploration of language—the parallels and divergences between Vietnamese and Canadian French—and its unusual structure provide a unique perspective on exile and belonging.

Compellingly, the book’s title evokes the dissonance of translation; the word “ru” alternately refers to a lullaby in Vietnamese or a stream in French. Far from a simple transition, the bridge between the narrator’s two nationalities is painstakingly built, constructed through memory, longing, and regret. When her parents flee Vietnam as refugees, first to Malaysia and then to Canada, she finds herself grappling with culture shock and frantically paced French and English courses. Though her life seems governed by a Vietnamese proverb—“life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat”—her native language has become “useless” in this new life. Perhaps because of this rapid change, her development is uneven. She describes how her guidance counselors are puzzled when she can sing “the national anthem but not ‘The Chicken Dance’ or the birthday song” or recognize “the word ‘surgeon’ but not ‘darling’ or ‘tanning salon’ or ‘horseback riding.’” Interspersed with this account of her adjustment to Canadian life are vivid memories of her childhood and family history in Vietnam. She recalls her affluent politician Uncle Two, whose title honors the “South Vietnamese tradition to replace the names of brothers and sisters with their birth order, beginning with the number two.” A figurehead of a pro-American party, Uncle Two is a “happy-go-lucky” man who inspires the narrator’s interest in French language and culture as he “travel[s] through memories of being a foreign student in Paris” and “talk[s] about Proust while he ate madeleines.” The greatest strength of this novel is its depiction of the organic development of vocabulary, the connective tissue between words and lived experience.

Even as it forms a love letter to two languages, Ru’s form is also intriguing. On the surface, it seems to be a series of vignettes separated by a drop cap in the translation. Yet they lack the mini-short story format that many other writers use in this vein—Duanwad Pimwana’s Bright, for instance. In keeping with the novel’s hazy but sumptuous narration, these imagistic fragments evoke a dreamscape, drifting back and forth between countries, family members, schools, and jobs. This structural choice both affirms and challenges the narrator’s assertion that immigrants travel light, as she sifts through brief flashes of memory to comprehend her identity. Her account reveals how the immigrant story—her lifelong effort to transcend nationality through knowledge and hard work—is not without consequences. When she returns to Hanoi as an adult, she attempts to speak Vietnamese with a local waiter, who tells her she is “too fat to be Vietnamese.” Though seemingly humorous, she recognizes the undertone of his rebuff: “I no longer had the right to speak Vietnamese because I no longer had their fragility, their uncertainty, their fears.” Like her transnational life, this uneven structure can come at a cost. Though it echoes a transient lifestyle, the anecdotes can curtail meaningful characterization. For instance, we learn of her nonverbal autistic son, Henri, early in the novel, but he makes few other appearances throughout—making it difficult to connect to the story arc of the narrator’s motherhood, which she introduces in the first pages. Despite its flaws, Ru sheds light on the consequences of war, the significance of language when coming of age, and the hardships and beauty of life on the cusp of two nationalities.

Kim Thúy, Ru, trans. Sheila Fischman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012)

Photo Credit: Huỳnh Mai Nguyễn from Pixabay.

Translating Childhood

Although I try to represent numerous cultures here, I notice a pattern among works that reach wide circulation in English.  Many works feel urgent and serious, filled with metaphors of political instability and violence—and they add much to our personal libraries, increasing our awareness of new voices.  But this week’s selection, Mui Poopoksakul’s translation of Duanwad Pimwana’s Bright, is both a charming portrait of a unique childhood and a refreshing change of pace.  It’s the first novel by a Thai woman to appear in English translation and is groundbreaking on multiple levels.

In a series of slice-of-life vignettes, Bright tells the story of Kampol Changsamran (his family name means “bright” in Thai, hence the English title), a small boy whose parents abandon him in a rundown cluster of tenement houses.  The synopsis sounds grim, but the execution is anything but.  An entire community, from a wise grocer to young schoolchildren, team up to provide Kampol with food, shelter, and some semblance of a happy childhood.  Widely praised for its depiction of Thailand’s communal culture, Bright’s closest parallel in English would be Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, bringing a community alive through a meaningful cast and vibrant snapshots.  Meticulous characterization and a thoughtful portrayal of childhood make it worth your time.

From the first page, Pimwana warns us not to expect sweeping tropes or epic journeys. Instead, she describes Mrs. Tongjan’s tenement community, which is “so unextraordinary that memory can hardly be bothered to register it.”  Its main feature is “an open lot that’s perfect for turning around without having to reverse.”  Despite this unremarkable setting, richly imagined characters keep the reader turning the page.  After fierce arguments and an eviction, Kampol’s parents leave him to fend for himself; their neighbors grill him for details but are also eager to show off their generosity.  Among the adults, there’s Mon, an overworked seamstress; Dang, a drunken bicycle repair man; and Bangkerd, an irascible mortician.  Yet shopkeeper Chong, a grocer of Chinese descent, emerges as resident philosopher and Kampol’s primary caregiver.  When others forget to feed him, Chong cooks Kampol fried rice and reads him poetry.  When the boy becomes lost at a crowded shrine gathering, convinced he saw his parents, Chong is waiting to carry him home on his back.  His empathy renders the mundane moving throughout the novel.  In one vignette, a mentally disabled girl writes a birthday greeting for her grandmother; though he knows it’s illegible, Chong (one of the few literate adults) “pretends” to read an elaborate message while her family praises her.  Such moments of kindness are appealing, creating emotional investment in what might otherwise be a tale of grinding poverty and misery.

Words Without Borders noted how much of the novel’s power lies in its ability to recreate a sense of “childlike innocence.”  Yet its portrayal of childhood is more nuanced, contributing to a keen sense of humor.  However sweet they seem, these children live in a world where cash is king—and they are the keenest hustlers of all.  Two local stores competing for business allow the children to set up a flea market in their respective parking lots, immediately drawing shoppers who had “fallen for the adorable little kids.”  One manager tries to lure them inside to sell more of his merchandise, but “they weren’t interested” because, “they were doing brisker business outside…than in.”  Kampol tries numerous schemes, from collecting phone service fees to breeding crickets, to make money.  When his school principal visits him and pities his situation, Kampol tries to make money for a fellow street child selling rice, asking between tears if someone could buy him some.  He is not above using his situation to help himself and others, a key point that drives the novel’s strong characterization and narration. Those who find themselves abandoned or alone are never victims in Pimwana’s hands.  Kampol has suffered, but in doing so, learned self-sufficiency and resilience. Pimwana’s ability to combine poignant moments of connection with the ruthlessness of survival is both unusual and unmatched.  Bright is a portrait of childhood I won’t soon forget—and, I hope, a beacon of more to come.

Duanwad Pimwana, Bright, trans. Mui Poopoksakul (Two Lines Press, 2019)

Photo Credit: hasse42 via Pixabay.

Translating Survival

This week’s novel portrays issues that have become all too familiar in recent weeks: long lines and shortages at grocery stores, ruthless price gouging, and grim acts of violence.  As timely as such topics may be in the era of COVID-19, Elizabeth Bryer’s translation of Karina Sainz Borgo’s It Would Be Night in Caracas turns to Venezuela, where an unfolding economic crisis has transformed daily life into a fight for survival.  One of the first works of fiction to emerge about Venezuela’s current calamity, It Would Be Night in Caracas compels us to ask: What does it take to survive in a world where law, order, and social cooperation are in dangerously short supply?

As Anne Applebaum’s Atlantic article noted last month, Venezuela has long served as convenient straw man for various political agendas in the developed world.  It Would Be Night in Caracas renders the conceptual real through the dilemma of Adelaida, burying her mother in the midst of rampant chaos and corruption.  Since she lived alone with her mother, any tenuous connection to community seems lost.  Another death, this time of an old friend and neighbor, may give her the means to escape Venezuela.  While reading this novel, I was struck by how it chronicles a journey from language and thought to action and how it handles complex historical and political circumstances.

The novel opens as Adelaida stands graveside at her mother’s burial, grappling at once with personal loss and the hellscape that surrounds her.  The first university graduate in her family, her mother once taught “private tutorials” for students, obsessively “outlin[ing] the basics: subject, verb, and predicate…”  At first, Adelaida emphasizes language in her approach to widespread scarcity: “We could only watch as everything we needed vanished… ‘Lose’ became a leveling verb, and the Sons of the Revolution wielded it against us.”  But when dealing with paramilitaries, protesters, or looters, this type of linguistic currency holds little sway.  Her apartment, once a safe haven of books and her mother’s memory, is overtaken by a female gang.  Tellingly, their ring leader destroys a volume of poetry, assuring Adelaida that the only word that matters is “hun-ger” as she knocks her out with a gun.  Survival means traveling light, discarding sentimental or intellectual baggage along the way.

What does this journey from ideas to action signify?  Because the plot involves mistaken identity, NPR describes it as The Talented Mr. Ripley without the thriller elements.  But a closer (if older) corollary is Greek tragedy, Antigone refusing to abandon her brother’s body.  Similar to The Remainder, a disconnect between the living and the dead drives conflict, but Adelaida has neither friends nor the luxury of defiance.  When she breaks into the apartment of her neighbor, Aurora Peralta, and finds her dead, taking over her space is the only option.  She crosses paths with Santiago, the younger brother of a close friend, but she cannot save him.  “Santiago could be anything: a martyr, a killer, an informant…I realized I was utterly alone.”  In a world of murky motives and ruthlessness, her survival leaves no room for memory or past ties.  Instead, her future lies in Aurora’s closet, where she finds a Spanish passport application.

This perspective could be grim, but instead, it’s a compelling slow burn that reveals the measures to which we resort when a sense of community is no longer possible.  Some reviewers took issue with the lack of political context, yet that raises an intriguing question: To what extent must the novelist serve as historian?  In contrast to some abstract playground of geopolitics, this depiction of Venezuela plays upon the nerves rather than the brain.  As Adelaida contemplates leaving, she looks out at Caracas and observes how “electric currents of misery and beauty were shooting through the city.”  In these troubled times, this terrifying and explosive city offers a cautionary tale about the consequences of unchecked selfishness and greed.

Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas, trans. Elizabeth Bryer (HarperVia, 2019)

Photo Credit: Car burning during 2014 Venezuelan protests via Alamy.

Translating Cliché?

I’ve kept a close eye on South Korea throughout this journey into works by women in translation.  Bolstered by state-funded initiatives like the Literature Translation Institute, South Korean novels have staked a strong position in the English-language publishing market.  Furthermore, South Korean female novelists have risen to international prominence in recent years, including Man Booker Prize winner Han Kang, Kyung-Sook Shin, and Han Yu Joo.  Yet this week’s selection may come as a surprise: Chi-Young Kim’s translation of Ji-Min Lee’s The Starlet and the Spy, critically derided as cliché-ridden and convoluted.

The premise of The Starlet and the Spy (also published as Marilyn and Me) is certainly compelling; in the grim aftermath of the Korean War, a traumatized woman named Alice J. Kim serves as Marilyn Monroe’s translator during her USO tour.  Yet Monroe’s appearance feels like more of an occasional cameo as episodic flashbacks reveal key aspects of Alice’s life, from studying art in Japan to an ill-fated love triangle with a Korean Communist and an American agent.  Observing how this latter story arc irritated reviewers compels me to ask: Can clichés ever be used effectively in a novel?

South Korean films and television dramas have been a longtime interest of mine, so I was surprised to discover that author Ji-Min Lee is a screenwriter who’s worked with prominent actors like Gong Yoo and Lee Byung-hun.  Portraying tropes like doomed love, revenge, and family discord against a high-stakes backdrop—the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Korean war—is a common move in South Korean films, a way of accessing complex historical events.  Lee’s application of these clichés to both Alice’s character and the Korean War is worth a second look.  Her failed affairs illustrate how the conflict poisons everyday life with inauthenticity, while her trauma at serving as a propagandist confronts the relationship between the artist and the state.

In Age of Shadows, a 2016 film co-written by Ji-Min Lee, actor Gong Yoo (center left) plays a member of the Korean resistance against Japanese occupation during the 1920s.

After living through the horror of a refugee camp and near starvation, Alice looks back on her prewar naiveté with self-deprecation.  She recalls walking through “the streets of Seoul that were brimming with memories of colonization” on the way to meet her lover. Finding herself in the jaws of history, Alice reveals grim parallels between a romantic tailspin and chaotic interplays of Cold War ideologies.  Her lover, a married man named Yo Min-Hwan, is “a Communist working for the American military government.”  As he becomes more invested in Communism, he remains unable to perceive Alice’s artistic and linguistic talents, regarding her only as “ruled by animalistic instinct.”  Despite her insistence on their true love, Alice admits that “he wasn’t aware that I was secretly filled with strong artistic opinions and positions.”  Oddly, her predicament seems to echo that of Monroe, whose resentful new husband does not accompany her USO tour.

Tired of being a middle-aged man’s dirty secret, Alice betrays him with Joseph Pines, an American agent fronting as a missionary.  When they encounter each other again during Monroe’s tour, she realizes that he was using her to learn Korean; both feel formal and detached despite their prior passion.  “Even though we had loved each other, ‘we’ never existed; everything had been based on falsehoods.”  Alice acts a part, seen as the silly girl or the wronged woman while the men in her life use her for their own ends.

The Starlet and the Spy shines through a key aspect that many reviews gloss over.  Alice’s art plays as much of a role in her disillusionment as her disappointment in love.  She works as a propaganda artist prior to the war, producing posters that “valued a concise, economic line and a balanced composition.”  Any hopeful illusions are destroyed after she’s forced to develop propaganda for the Communists during the war. A “loyal dog with a talent for drawing,” she draws dozens of Stalin portraits for the People’s Army until she cannot draw ever again.  In one respect, her predicament aligns with Monroe’s lighter plight, determined to be a serious actress while the troops revel in her sexpot image.  Yet this connection between artistic identity and ideology has been an ongoing theme in notable novels about twentieth-century Asian conflict, including Nobel laureate Kasuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World.  Don’t be too quick to dismiss the clichés of this novel, as they contain hidden depths.

Photo Credit: Marilyn Monroe on her USO tour via Pixabay.

Ji-Min Lee, The Starlet and the Spy, trans. Chi-Young Kim (Harper, 2019)

Exciting News!

When reading women in translation, I realize that many international authors may not fit that description. For instance, many writers from African nations, the former British Commonwealth, and elsewhere publish in English. Because translations still don’t get the attention they deserve, I stand by that emphasis on our site, but have been submitting reviews of books that may fall into this blind spot elsewhere.

I’m happy to announce that my review of Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş’s novel Walking on the Ceiling has been featured on The Lit Pub. Founder Molly Gaudry has created a site that is both warm and intellectually rigorous, including impressive contributors like recent Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr. I hope you’ll enjoy the review and check out The Lit Pub.

Photo Credit: Pixabay.

Translating Pain

In the midst of gift giving, traveling, and the general chaos of the holidays, I always take time to catch up on my reading.  This week’s selection, Sondra Silverston’s translation of Zeruya Shalev’s Pain, provides a unique view of the “out with the old, in with the new” attitude of the new year.  A decade after suffering horrific injuries in a terrorist attack, Jerusalem school principal Iris has a surprising encounter with the first love who broke her heart years before; he is now an appropriately titled “pain specialist” at a local clinic.  Should she shed her failing marriage and rekindle their relationship?

Recent reviews have noted how Pain offers an intriguing take on the Madame Bovary formula of the bored, unfulfilled wife.  While reading, I was struck by a careful, textured perspective on its subject.  In one sense, pain refers to the mental anguish of middle age, as Iris attempts to reclaim her youthful identity amid increasing alienation from her husband and children.  Yet it also registers as physical suffering and political turmoil.  Shalev makes it clear that Pain takes place in a city where bombings are part of everyday life, and where inclusion initiatives at Iris’s school are charged with urgency.

In the novel’s early pages, many of Iris’s concerns seem at once banal and understandable.  She and her husband, Mickey, sleep in separate rooms, and work such long hours that their house is little more than a place to “rest a tired body.”  She’s always been closer to her wild child son, Omer, and cannot relate to her daughter, Alma, who lives in Tel Aviv.  Iris is also among the most respected school administrators in Jerusalem, well known for working miracles with the most difficult students.  Yet this account of a hardworking woman staring down the barrel of a midlife crisis has dark undertones.  Even as she contends with long-term health consequences, she remains haunted by former boyfriend Eitan, who abandoned her after she helped him recover from a parent’s death.

This memory of lost love, what might have been a minor plot point in another novel, becomes the connective tissue between Iris’s past and uncertain future.  When I began reading Pain, all I knew was that its protagonist had survived a terrorist attack, and I wasn’t sure what to expect: Would it be a politicized account about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or a medical mystery about her illness?  This domestic drama, subtly interweaving the bombing’s aftermath with familial tension, was a pleasant surprise.  Its most sinister moments arise from the manipulative power charismatic men hold over the women in their lives.  Though she insists that the “pain he caused her belongs to her former life,” Iris finds herself back in Eitan’s orbit with troubling results.  He’s left a trail of divorces and angry children in his wake and grows increasingly resentful of her reluctance to give up her husband and family.  Meanwhile, her daughter Alma has fallen under the spell of her own Svengali, a cultish figure named Boaz who controls her sexually and financially.

How do story arcs about emotionally abusive men and bombings belong together?  In Silverston and Shalev’s capable hands, they are a perfect fit.  Were it not for her ongoing medical treatment, Iris would never have been reunited with Eitan, and she may not have become so estranged from her young daughter in a haze of pain pills and physical therapy.  By attempting to bring her daughter back into the fold, she is forced to come to terms with her former self: “Love has many faces, sometimes it’s cut off from life like a kite without a string.  You know it’s gliding in the sky, but you have to let it go because you don’t want other things that are more important to you to fall.”  Extramarital affairs are well-trodden literary territory, but I was impressed by how Pain made the old new.

Zeruya Shalev, Pain, trans. Sondra Silverston (New York: Other Press, 2019)

Photo Credit: Kranich17 via Pixabay.

Translating Community

Mini pop-up libraries are one of the great joys I’ve discovered during my free time.  Appearing in the oddest locations—perched outside an imposing office building or on a well-tended front lawn—they have added many unusual treasures to my bookshelf, everything from a fashion guide to Kafka’s short stories.  Occasionally, these editions bear traces of their previous owners: a note in the margin, a scrawled address on the title page.  This week’s book, Ros Schwartz’s translation of Christine Féret-Fleury’s The Girl Who Reads on the Métro, provides a compelling but uneven snapshot of a similarly quirky community of book lovers.

Parisian Juliette, dissatisfied with her office job as a real estate agent, develops a fascination with her fellow commuters’ reading materials on the way to work each morning.  Their eccentricities are intriguing; a man in a green hat only reads about insects, one woman reads a cookbook, and a young girl cries each time she reaches a certain page.  Seeking a reprieve from routine (a milder form of the escapist fantasy in The Pine Islands), she exits at a different train stop and encounters a mysterious bookseller, spiraling ever deeper into his strange realm of dusty books and eclectic readers.  While the novel offers a powerful take on Juliette’s loneliness and longing for companionship, it falls short in terms of character development, overshadowing the community it seeks to illuminate.

Juliette’s ennui and solitude are convincing, compelling her to seek alternate forms of connection.  For those who have ever sat across from someone staring at a phone, her failed attempt to sell a house to an entitled upper-middle-class couple feels especially poignant; they continue scrolling through email as she enthusiastically lists the house’s selling points, ignoring her as she chases after them with her business card.  When she encounters Soliman, a bibliophile of Middle Eastern descent, she also discovers an occupation that is a much better fit. Soliman hires her as a passeur, a cross between a people-watcher and a bookseller, who matches members of the public with books based on intuition.  As Juliette sets out on this ragtag mission, we seem to be headed toward a cozy ending in which she finds a meaningful life purpose, fulfilled by fellow book lovers.

Despite all indications to the contrary, the narrative took a few sharp turns into dark territory that left me puzzled.  After only a short acquaintance, Soliman abruptly tells Juliette that he must go “away” for a while and asks her to move in and care for his daughter, Zaide.  We also learn that the woman with the cookbook on the train was not only a fellow passeur, but also has committed suicide recently.  Leonidas, the man in the green hat, was secretly in love with her and becomes a friend to Juliette.  Yet another death close to home forces Juliette to confront her feelings of alienation.  The unusually high body count in what seemed a whimsical, brief novel (it clocks in at 175 pages in English) comes at a high price.  Though The Girl Who Reads on the Métro poses as a love letter to book lovers, it never really offers a nuanced characterization of this intriguing community beyond a few surface impressions.  I enjoyed reading it—lighter fiction is rarely on offer in translation—but it left me wishing for a stronger portrait of its unusual characters.

Christine Féret-Fleury, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro, trans. Ros Schwartz (Flatiron Books, 2019)

Photo Credit: ninocare via Pixabay.

 

Translating Disaster

I recently returned from a trip to Switzerland.  While admiring the holiday lights, I was reading a book wildly incongruous with the beautiful scenery: a gripping account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  Immediately after the tragedy, Belarusian journalist (now Nobel laureate) Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of witnesses.  n+1 editor Keith Gessen translated this work as Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster in 2005. Though its topic makes for an unlikely book club choice, Voices—the primary source material for a recent  Emmy Award-winning HBO series—raises compelling questions about trauma and accountability.

Alexievich’s previous works tackled the Nazi occupation of Belarus and the Soviet-Afghan War, but Chernobyl seems a particularly hard sell.  Abandoned ghost towns, cancer-stricken firefighters, genetically mutated infants: such devastation can numb the reader quickly.  In his translator’s note, Gessen warns of the “obscene” horror that lies in wait, but also marvels at how the everyday collides with the unspeakable. I was struck by how the interviews (which read more like dramatic monologues) fulfill two key roles.  On one hand, they portray the personal consequences of the tragedy in empathetic, poetic language.  Yet they also grapple with the political backdrop: How was Soviet ideology complicit in this horrific accident?

The interviewees form a demanding Greek chorus: widowed wives, sick liquidators (the clean-up crew for the reactor and surrounding countryside), re-settlers who refused to evacuate.  Among the cacophony, one story captures the loss in quietly eerie terms: the account of Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the young wife of a firefighter.  They are “newlyweds” expecting their first child when he is sent to the explosion in shirtsleeves.  She spends her family’s savings to follow him to a radiology hospital in Moscow.  Concealing her pregnancy to gain admittance, she arrives to watch him disintegrate from radiation sickness.  As his hair and skin fall off, she cannot stop visiting him.  After his death, her baby dies four hours after birth, compelling her to ask, “Why are these things together—love and death…Who’s going to explain this to me?”  This elegiac prologue exemplifies one of the book’s great strengths: the strong wives of liquidators who struggle with the all-encompassing destruction of radiation.  They confront the vagaries of science and Soviet pretension, contending with their husbands’ suffering and the measly compensation of a few thousand rubles or a medal.

Voices from Chernobyl sucked me into its dark vortex with these deeply personal musings, but historical questions remain: Why did officials conceal the disaster’s effects under a haze of deceptive, reassuring propaganda?  To answer, Alexievich turns to the intelligentsia—scientists, politicians, and scholars who offer a battery of explanations.  An environmental inspector observes that “everyone found a justification for themselves,” while a historian points to a fatalist Soviet mindset.  A former Communist bigwig insists his superiors didn’t understand that “the world is built on physics, not on the ideas of Marx”: “I’m a product of my time.  I’m not a criminal.”  Vasily Nesterenko, a physicist turned heroic whistleblower, sums up this position succinctly. “People feared their superiors more than they feared the atom.”  In an era when globalization and the decline of the nation-state have become common buzzwords, we would do well to remember how powerful a political collective consciousness can be.

These lingering ideas about blame and responsibility have been a recent talking point due to the miniseries about the disaster, which casts scientists in the role of confrontational heroes.  In a New Yorker article, Masha Gessen (translator Keith Gessen’s sister) notes how this formula ignores the apathy and resignation that defined Soviet life.  After reading, I’m not sure she gives enough credit to scientists like Nesterenko, who never stopped sounding the alarm despite death threats and imprisonment.  Don’t let the terrifying topic scare you away—this book is a tough but rewarding read, and will stay with you long after the last page.

Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, trans. Keith Gessen (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005)

Photo Credit: Amort1939, Pripyat, Chernobyl, via Pixabay.

Translating Memory and the Strange

Just in time for changing leaves, trick-or-treaters, and tales of horror, I sat down to reread a book that has stayed with me for a decade: Edith Grossman’s translation of Carmen Laforet’s Nada.  A strange gem of a novel, Nada explores the plight of Andrea, a college student grappling with her bizarre family in Franco-era Barcelona.  Portraying a diverse cast haunted by the memory and legacies of the Spanish Civil War, Nada manages to terrify without a single ghost or ghoul.

I’ve noticed that the most effective translations meld tones and narratives seamlessly, making no sudden movements that leave the reader bewildered.  Nada is no exception, carefully balancing Gothic and coming-of-age genres; Andrea must reconcile her memory of her well-to-do Barcelona family with the horror they’ve become.  In a plot device similar to my recent take on The Other Woman , we get a compelling glimpse of a female friendship with ulterior motives—a connection that, oddly enough, works to the narrator’s advantage.

When I first read Nada, I was about Andrea’s age and dealing with a rough transition to college life, so the alternately scary and amusing depiction of her relatives had a lasting impact.  Despite some difficulties on her trip to Barcelona, Andrea arrives in good spirits, excited to begin university—until she knocks on her family’s door and “it all seem[s] like a nightmare.”  This twisted family reunion includes her befuddled grandmother; her disapproving aunt, Angustias; her uncle Juan, whose face resembles a “skull” alongside his “disheveled” wife, Gloria; and her second uncle, Ramón, a charismatic violinist with a shady past.

Far from the opulent hospitality Andrea expected, this ragtag crew is so grotesque as to be humorous.  When Andrea asks to wash up after her trip, her aunt’s severity is ridiculous: “You’d dare to take a shower this late?”  She despairs, thinking that even the bathroom seemed like a “witches’ house” complete with a “macabre still life.”  Even worse, her family is quick to draw her into their ugly dysfunction.  Juan is unstable, frequently punching Gloria while she is holding their baby.  Ramón seems especially sinister, shifting between charm and underhanded opportunism; there’s some suggestion he’s a former spy who was tortured during the Civil War.  Angustias watches Andrea like a hawk, convinced she must chaperone her to protect the family’s reputation.

In spite of her miserable home, Andrea creates a content life for herself by forming a friendship with Ena, a fellow student with a magnetic personality.  She first approaches Andrea to meet her “famous violinist” uncle, Ramón, but she and Andrea rapidly become close.  Ultimately, Ena begins an affair with Ramón, but cuts it off abruptly.  As Andrea soon learns, Ena’s mother was once obsessed with Ramón, who accepted money from her wealthy father to abandon her; her daughter’s affair enacts revenge for this humiliating memory.  Juan’s wife, also tormented by a love triangle with Ramón, reports his black market dealings to the police.  Rather than face police torture and ruin, Ramón ends his life and a dark battle of the sexes simultaneously.

Though these cycles of hurt and retaliation seem momentous in scope, Andrea also indulges in fun and experimentation.  She regularly parties with a would-be Bohemian crowd, college students who pride themselves on “imitating” Picasso and whose prosperous circumstances are a far cry from her poverty.  Eager to carve out her own identity, she accepts when Ena’s father offers her a job in Barcelona: “…I’d go back to Madrid with him.  We’d travel in his car.”  A friendship begun for retribution creates an escape route.

Mario Vargas Llosa and other writers have observed how Carmen Laforet was a little-known breath of fresh air, a respite from pompous Franco-era literature. Nada presents the seamy underbelly of that rigid society: the loss of cultural and individual memory, fractious relationships, broken art. Andrea’s determination to survive is the triumph that makes this novel worth reading.

Carmen Laforet, Nada, trans. Edith Grossman (Modern Library, 2007)

Photo Credit: Image by Daria Nepriakhina from Pixabay.

Translating Exile

When reading translations, we tend to focus on the positive aspects of international exchange, triumphs of art across linguistic borders.  Yet exile and dislocation can prove a dark side to this cosmopolitan outlook.  John Fletcher’s translation of Maria NDiaye’s Three Strong Women grapples with those who struggle in various forms of limbo between Paris and Senegal.  Despite some weaknesses in structure and characterization, this book provides a unique window into French and Francophone cultural tensions.

Well known in France as the first black woman to win the Prix Goncourt award, NDiaye channels dilemmas of identity through three fractured narratives. The first part introduces us to Norah, a Paris-based lawyer who travels to Senegal and contends with a domineering father, estranged brother, and a murder scandal.  By far the longest section, the second part focuses on the eroding marriage between Rudy and Fanta, a Senegalese exile and former teacher deeply unhappy in France.  The final part depicts the story of Khady Demba, a distant relative of Fanta’s whose life rapidly descends into poverty.

Be forewarned that the connection between these three women is tenuous.  Norah’s father once founded a prosperous holiday resort that makes an appearance in Rudy and Fanta’s story, and Khady Demba was once a servant in his household.  Since I anticipated more direct connections between the three women, a snapshot approach blindsided me.  This kaleidoscopic structure has advantages, creating room for a range of perspectives that challenge stereotypes.  Assumptions about prosperous European cities and impoverished African nations don’t apply here, as both Norah’s father and Fanta achieve economic prosperity in Dakar.  Each section also ends with an intriguing “Counterpoint” paragraph, focused on the psyche of an antagonist from the previous narrative.

The whiplash of switching between narratives with no resolution takes its toll on character development.  Norah’s traumatic account of an “implacable” father, who abandoned her mother in France to make his fortune in Senegal, proved an immediate draw.  In an already dysfunctional family, her brother is facing serious prison time for murder. Can she step in as his defense counsel?  Suddenly, after a brief “Counterpoint” from her father, the scene shifts to Rudy and Fanta’s marriage, never to return to Norah’s crisis.

Rudy feels helpless and bitter about his wife’s aimless exile; she no longer considers their “ramshackle” house a home, cannot secure a teaching position in Paris, and is disturbed by his mother’s blatant racism.  While his corrosive resentment leaps off the page in third person limited narration, this grim take on an interracial marriage felt claustrophobic without Fanta’s perspective.  Run-on sentences—one sentence was often an entire paragraph—made it more difficult to navigate. To be fair, I was expecting some sort of legal/criminal story from Norah’s part, so I was less charitable when reading his rather vicious monologue.

In what feels like the thinnest part of the novel, Khady Demba, a widow who faces a life of prostitution and desperate poverty, provides an even darker impression of migrant life in France. To complement Rudy’s unflattering portrayal, she is abandoned and betrayed by an unstable young man during her journey.

Though its flaws are stark, Three Strong Women does mirror the confusing lives of those caught between belonging and alienation, between national identities and personal conflict—a compelling experiment from a prestigious author.  

Maria NDiaye, Three Strong Women, trans. John Fletcher (Vintage, 2012)

Photo Credit: Cherilyn Derusha, Dakar, Senegal, via freeimages.