August 2019 - International Bookshelf: Women in Translation

WITMonth Week Four

To close Women in Translation Month, I’m reviewing what is arguably the most discussed world literature book of the year: Marilyn Booth’s translation of Omani writer Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies. The first Arabic-language winner of the Man Booker International Prize had a few surprises in store for me.

When starting this cryptic work, I quickly discovered that it’s best to do so with no expectations. Because of its blurb about three sisters—Mayya, Asma, and Khawla—who marry for motives including “duty” and rebounding from a “heartbreak,” I anticipated an Omani comedy of manners. Yet this text is a complex family saga spanning decades, its huge scope encompassing brief but telling character studies. While Celestial Bodies’ keen social consciousness offers a unique perspective, its considerable time leaps and shifts between third- and first-person narration make a convoluted impression.

The novel begins when Mayya marries a wealthy man—Abdallah, the son of Merchant Sulayman—after a disappointing first love. Mayya, however, is not the de facto heroine. As the only first-person speaker, Abdallah provides a reprieve from an otherwise cool and poetic omniscient third voice, drawing attention to issues ranging from domestic violence to autism to slavery (Oman outlawed slavery in 1970). He spends much of the narrative haunted by his unrequited love for Mayya, wondering: “You keep up this aura of friendly care, but what are you really thinking and feeling…” But he also reflects on Zarifa, his father’s slave and “long-time mistress” who served as his stand-in mother. After an argument, Abdallah’s father “abandoned her and married her off to the most aggressive and eccentric slave he had.” In Oman, at least, the abuses of slavery are not so easily dismissed as distant historical fact.

The family’s dysfunctional dynamic appears to continue with Mayya and Abdallah’s three children: London, Salim, and Muhammad. Abdallah proves a caring father when eldest daughter London escapes an abusive marriage, declaring, “You are a successful physician and you have your freedom and a good social life and he doesn’t deserve even a stray thought.” His desperation with youngest son Muhammad, who is autistic and continually slams a single door in their house, feels immediate and real. Though pushed to the background, Mayya’s sisters Asma and Khawla face their own familial challenges and unsuccessful marriages. Khawla, who waited for her ne’er-do-well fiancé to return home from Canada, accepts defeat and asks for a divorce: “She was at peace, so her heart stopped forgiving…Every night, the portrait of the Canadian girl on the key ring got bigger, and went to sleep on Khawla’s pillow.” Poignant snapshots of domestic disillusionment emerge as the novel’s strongest aspect.

Despite its refreshing approach and setting, Celestial Bodies is far from flawless. The sprawling family tree on the first page is a critical resource, and parts of the translation are confusing. Abdallah describes Mayya as his ethereal “air hostess,” which sounds more like an outdated term for a flight attendant than an otherworldly being. Huge time jumps made it difficult to follow the narrative. In one section, London is a newborn and her family is arguing about her unusual name. In the next, she is an adult and a physician. With such a large cast of characters, the experimental timeline is an added challenge that is difficult to overcome.

I enjoyed reading Celestial Bodies, but admit that its shortcomings left me wanting more. From generational tension to the burden of history, it has been a memorable Women in Translation Month. The latest works show how much progress the publishing industry has made, but there’s a long way to go.

Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies, trans. Marilyn Booth (Sandstone Press, 2019)

Photo Credit: George Desipris via Pexels.

WITMonth Week Three

Though this book made the Man Booker International Prize short list, I had planned to review it later, considering my recent post about Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez. But revisiting South America with Sophie Hughes’s translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder is more than worthwhile.

This unusual novel explores the legacy of Southern Cone dictatorships through its three protagonists: Felipe, Iquela, and Paloma. Shared family history unites them, as their parents formed a resistance cell during the Chilean dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. Felipe and Iquela are childhood friends, but when Paloma arrives back in Santiago to bury her mother, it triggers a madcap chain of events in which all three set off for Argentina in a hearse to retrieve the body. The Remainder’s two great strengths are its alternating narrators, allowing for effective shifts in tone, and its experimental form, which uses language and typography to examine loss, remembrance, and generational tension.

Normally I’m distrustful of multiple narrators, as they can be jarring. Here, this fractured style fits the characters’ struggles. Felipe, who narrates his sections as a single run-on sentence, opens the novel with macabre mathematics: “…how can I reconcile the death toll with the actual sum of the dead? by deducting…by using this apocalyptic maths to finally, once and for all…subtract them.” This calculus of absence fails to impose order upon a tangled web of remainders. Iquela’s mother, the sole survivor of the cell, is a recluse; Felipe’s grandmother frequently succumbs to despair; Paloma, who lives in Berlin, often seems bewildered by her parents’ home country.

While Felipe persists in this grim task, Iquela’s account orients us with a clear progression. Paloma’s parents escaped to Germany during the dictatorship era, but her mother recently died of breast cancer. She ships her body to Chile, but the plane is diverted to Argentina because of raining ash in Santiago. Unwilling to wait, she convinces the others to travel there in a rented hearse. If Felipe’s perspective falls well within the realm of South American gothic, then Iquela adds a humorous element that almost satirizes that genre. She mocks Felipe as “Mr. Light and Breezy” and describes how he sings “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” as they leave Santiago. For all their closeness, their relationship has a terrible precedent. During a time of torture and forced disappearances, one narrator’s father informed on the other, creating an orphan.

In The Remainder, form is crucial. Felipe’s chapters descend from 11 to 0, while Iquela’s are designated by open parentheses: “().” That blank space complements these three, whose lives often seem a disjointed afterthought to their parents’ activism. At one point, the parentheses are filled with a repeated sentiment from Iquela’s mother, whose memory is a “topography of her dead”: “(I do all of this for you I do all of this for you…).” Unlike the famed photographs of the disappeared, survivors’ histories feel surprisingly mundane; many older figures in The Remainder have gone into exile, divorced, or died of natural causes. Yet their children carry terrible knowledge, a realization that ‘a rat’ wasn’t a rodent, ‘a movement’ wasn’t an action, and ‘the front’ wasn’t the opposite of ‘the back.’” Sophie Hughes navigates these linguistic challenges expertly, depicting Paloma’s distinctive Spanish and the cell’s militant language in a way that English-language readers can understand and appreciate.

Coming of age under unique social and political pressure is a powerful theme emerging in this Woman in Translation Month series. As one of a generation of Chilean writers reckoning with a dark history, Zerán raises a compelling question: Do children who bear the weight of their parents’ past have a future? Sophie Hughes’ thoughtful rendition of this dilemma merits every accolade it has earned.

Alia Trabucco Zerán, The Remainder, trans. Sophie Hughes (Coffee House Press, 2019)

Photo Credit: Suddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo.

Throughout Women in Translation Month, I’m reviewing recent, acclaimed translations. Read previous editions here and here.

WITMonth Week Two

Considering our recent discussion about the lack of Chinese women writers in English translation, I turned my attention to the only Chinese work on the 2019 Man Booker International Prize long list: Annelise Finegan Wasmoen’s translation of Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium. Can Xue is the pen name of Deng Xiaohua, an enigmatic novelist who worked as a tailor before embarking on her writing career; Wasmoen has translated many of Can Xue’s works.

Love in the New Millennium poses a unique reading challenge in two ways. First, it focuses on a vast network of characters, among them Cuilan, her lover Wei Bo, former factory workers A Si and Long Sixiang, antiques dealer Mr. You, and Chinese medicine practitioner Dr. Liu. Keeping track of these figures, their pasts, and ever-shifting relationships with one another requires some patience. Second, this novel revels in tonal discord, playfully mismatching events and their consequences; topics like hard prison labor and sex work receive light, sometimes humorous, treatment here.

Reviews note how Love in the New Millennium’s characters embrace changing identities. It’s true that their interactions with one another and even with the natural world are fluid; at one point, a woman seems to transform into a cicada. The novel begins with Cuilan, a widow, in the midst of a heated affair with soap factory worker Wei Bo. But those anticipating a simple love story should proceed with caution. We have yet to meet A Si and Long Sixiang, other figures from his love life, not to mention his wife, Xiao Yuan, and her fixation with Dr. Liu. As Xiao Yuan reminds Wei Bo, “People can change themselves into forms they could never imagine in dreams.”

What is the effect of this strange fantasia? Oddly enough, reading Love in the Millennium reminded me of the “Wandering Rocks” section of Joyce’s Ulysses. After several dense episodes focused on protagonists Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, “Wandering Rocks” forces us to turn to marginal figures obscured by the narrative’s lens until then. Can Xue’s approach is even more democratic; no single character is a privileged focal point. Without a sole protagonist to orient ourselves, everyone in the text possesses equal significance.

Love in the New Millennium also experiments with rapid swings in tone and genre. The city in which much of the novel takes place provides two career options for women: a mill or prostitution at the local hot springs. But grim social realism isn’t in the cards; Long Sixiang frets that she is “too old” to join the sex workers at the hot springs, while A Si happily buys a new apartment with assistance from Wei Bo and her other lovers. When Wei Bo finds himself serving a “three-month [prison] sentence” for no particular reason, his attitude is one of indifference rather than terror: “Hauling sand not only tempered his body; he was also sleeping much better.” A fellow inmate describes hard labor as “addicting.” Although these tonal shifts sound flippant, their impact is stronger, encouraging readers to question their assumptions about everything from gender roles to surveillance and detention.

It’s a bitter irony to discuss Love in the Millennium’s egalitarian style when Can Xue is one of the few Chinese women writers available in English. If anything, its widespread acclaim reveals how much we need more translations—and soon.

Can Xue, Love in the New Millennium, trans. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Yale Margellos World Republic of Letters, 2018)

Photo Credit: 玉潘, Meixi Lake, Changsha, Hunan, China, from Pixabay.

Throughout Women in Translation Month, I’m reviewing recent, acclaimed translations. Read last week’s edition here.

WITMonth Week One

Throughout Women in Translation Month, I’m taking a closer look at recent translations gaining attention and acclaim. Jennifer Croft’s translation of Wioletta Greg’s Accommodations follows 2017’s Swallowing Mercury, Greg’s previous autobiographical novel. (I’m late to Greg’s work, and am eager to read this novel’s predecessor.) In 1994, Wiola leaves her rural Polish village to attend college in Częstochowa, a neighboring city. Accommodations is a lingering meditation on the relationships between individual and community, especially how those connections can serve as a conduit for cultural trauma.

Early reviews of Accommodations observed how it dangles the possibility of one genre before the reader, then proceeds full speed in the opposite direction. But its narration is more subtle than any bait-and-switch ploy. The novel opens with Wiola recounting her bus ride to the college town on “Friday, September 30, 1994.” After a disturbing encounter with a drunken man, she lugs her suitcase through the city’s outskirts, past “a lumber yard” and “faded graffiti v[ying] along the wall for attention: ‘Soviet = with you from birth.’” By orienting us in such a specific time and place, Accommodations implies a clear path forward; we’re beginning a campus novel about a young woman coming of age in the post-Communist era. There’s little indication yet of the diverse cast of characters about to burst on the scene.

So where and why does this work take a sharp left turn? Once Wiola settles into a grungy hostel, her college life fades into the background, beyond a brief mention of falling asleep in class or a short conversation with a classmate. A wide range of other voices take over: hostel manager Waldek, two young Russian men, petty criminal Scurvy. When her time at the hostel reaches an abrupt end, Wiola takes up residence at a convent, where she encounters a nun haunted by the Holocaust. Far from a linear narrative about a young woman’s experiences, it begins to feel as if Wiola is a minor character rather than a protagonist. She may be dragging a suitcase around Częstochowa, but the emotional baggage she bears is not her own.

This approach risks alienating the reader. In one sense, a young woman taking a backseat in her own story hardly feels innovative. But like a graduate student who had visited her village, Wiola often seems a participant observer in her own culture, bearing witness to unforgotten atrocities of the Second World War and the Soviet period. From Scurvy, we learn that Waldek, who waxes sentimental about his long lost love, endured a savage beating from paramilitaries who scared “even the biggest thugs” in a communist prison. In another scene, she sees a homeless man who once went to prison for attempting to steal butter. The Mother Superior of the convent recalls how her father and brother were massacred during the Nazi occupation. None of these memories can be erased by a hectic new era of prosperity, “a time of privatization, acquisitions, cable TV, securities, the issuing of bonds.” The novel ends with a primal scream, a fitting tribute to this collision between a woman and her community: “…I scream—tentative at first…then louder and louder, until finally it’s so loud the whole building can hear me, and all three Avenues and Jasna Góra combined.” Jasna Góra, a local monastery and site of pilgrimage, feels analogous to Wiola’s own journey through suffering and young adulthood.

Accommodations provides a thought-provoking take on the transmission and emotional toll of cultural memory, and is worthy of a top spot on your reading list.

Wioletta Greg, Accommodations, trans. Jennifer Croft (Transit Books, 2019)

Photo Credit: twarezak via Pixabay.

Translating Poverty and Vibrancy in Rio

I live in the Washington, D.C. area, and it’s difficult to imagine iconic Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector here. Irrepressible and charismatic, Lispector and her depictions of Rio seem as out of place in the D.C. suburbs as a bird of paradise stifled in a temperate climate. Yet she spent much of the 1950s in Chevy Chase, Maryland as the (mostly unhappy) wife of a Brazilian diplomat. Her D.C. years were just one chapter of a restless life; the daughter of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants to Brazil, she also resided in Italy, England, and Switzerland.

Though she’s widely considered Brazil’s greatest modern writer, reading Lispector is no simple task. Her stream-of-consciousness style is reminiscent of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Her translator and biographer, Benjamin Moser, insists she isn’t any easier in the original: “Paradoxically, the better one’s Portuguese, the more difficult it is to read Clarice Lispector…her subtle rearrangements of everyday language are so surprising that they often baffle the reader.” An unusual narrator and heroine in Moser’s translation of her short final novel, The Hour of the Star, provide a taste of Lispector’s quirky style.

The Hour of the Star’s narrative style is leisurely. For a story about a typist in Rio, its starting point feels off-base: “All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.” The reader seems to be in for a tedious ride, but not so. This odd statement introduces the novel’s manic narrator: writer Rodrigo S.M. His story about a poor girl is supposedly best told by a “male writer,” because a woman would make it “weepy” and “maudlin.” His narration feels neither macho nor removed, though. He admits that he’s “put[ting] off the poverty of the story” because he’s “scared,” but this character demands to be heard: “She’s accusing me and the way to defend myself is to write about her.” As he assures us that “a plangent violin played by a thin man right on the street corner” accompanies this narrative, his detours take on a humorous, whimsical quality. This Russian doll nesting—Clarice Lispector channeling a male writer channeling a Brazilian woman—turns readers into detectives, peeling back layers of language to find meaning.

When she finally appears, protagonist Macabéa defies explanation. Her life may be dogged by unrelenting poverty, but she isn’t a tragic figure. She lives in Rio on “rough Acre Street amongst the prostitutes who served sailors, coal and cement warehouses.” However, circumstances don’t define her. Rodrigo reflects that “she had what’s known as inner life and didn’t know it…when she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams.” Her first boyfriend proves an ominous man who has committed murder “since killing made him a Man with a capital M,” and Macabéa’s story seems recognizable again; a poor girl with a rural background encounters danger in the city. But even when she meets a sudden fate, she is not a little girl lost, but “finally free of herself.” She never conforms to any expectations of genre fiction, even when it clouds her identity.

Why read this cryptic work? Beyond the refreshing prospect of a young woman who eludes stereotypes, The Hour of the Star forces us to confront our limits as readers. We may want to know more, but the chaotic narrative prevents a full picture of Macabéa’s life and motives. Rodrigo struggles to understand her, and Lispector had thirteen alternate titles for this novel. Though it creates more questions than answers, this winding tale welcomes us to face uncertainty with humor and exuberance.

Photo Credit: David Mark, “Rio De Janeiro Brazil City,” on Pixabay.