Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Virginia Woolf – Diaries, Vol. One: 1915-1919

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Usually, when I read an author from start to finish, I try to avoid biography. It isn’t that I believe biography doesn’t or couldn’t inform my study of their work, but I prefer to take the work on its own terms first. I chose not to do this, however, with my Virginia Woolf read, mainly because her journals are so detailed, and really, they are as significant a contribution to her oeuvre as her fiction writing. (I have not taken on her essays or letters… yet. I’m tempted to integrate them now, especially as she consistently references both her reading and her critical writing.)

I’ve just finished Volume One of her diaries, which covers 1915 to 1919. What strikes me first and foremost about her diary writing is how different it is, on the whole, from her fiction. She has a very sharp and perceptive mind, that is evident in both, but she must have worked extremely hard to maintain her particular style in fiction. All writers have a “style,” of course, but Woolf was experimenting and so she breaks with traditional narrative structures and chronologies, even rhythms of language and thought. And then when you read her diary and see how concise it is, how succinct and detail-oriented her personal narration was—and I can only assume that personal narration is a writer’s most natural and instinctive voice—it only serves to highlight the affect of her fiction style.

The other thing I find interesting is that before reading her diaries, I might have been inclined to put her in the mad-genius category. This is a category of artist I am wary of because I do not believe that genius requires madness. To be fair, it is also a stereotype that is often imposed upon an artist by others and while some might enjoy the label there are those who fight it. I admit that I was curious to see how Woolf negotiated this tension, or whether it was even an issue for her in her lifetime. So it is curious to me that there is very little self-reflection upon her depressive tendencies, at least in these early diaries, even after the long depression she suffered between 1915 and 1917, during which she could not write at all. The first few months of entries written after this illness are markedly different from her usual journaling style, but she does not comment on the lapse herself except obliquely, and only on a few rare occasions.

I don’t know how frequently Woolf lost herself completely to depression—perhaps it began to happen more often or maybe she writes more about it as she grew older. I’ll be curious to see how the subject evolves throughout her diaries. I know about, but haven’t yet read her essay “On Being Ill” and I suspect she concentrates her thoughts here (another reason to order her complete essays!)

Going back to where I started, I’m happy to find that reading her diaries doesn’t interfere in any way with the experience of reading her fiction. It is easy to maintain a line between the two forms, and there is just so much to admire in her diaries – character portraits, anecdotes, thoughts on writing, exquisite descriptions of nature.

I do wonder about one thing, however, and maybe some of you know: do Woolf scholars believe that Woolf wrote her diaries knowing they would be public some day? How personal are they?

 

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giving up the crazy

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When I first started writing about books and reading back in 2006, I fell into a rhythm almost immediately, writing three times a week and keeping up with several reading projects at the same time. Not to mention the hours I spent reading and commenting on other literary blogs and, in general, being engaged in the online literary community. For any of you who visit this space regularly, you might have noticed that things became very quiet late last spring.

The obvious reason for my blogging slowdown has to do with a certain wonderful little girl who has just turned two. Parenthood has put the crunch into timecrunch for me and I’m still adjusting to the shock. I should also mention that Switzerland, for all its lovely scenery, good food and fun people, isn’t as social as many of its neighbors. Many women in Switzerland stop working when they have their children, and most only continue part-time. Child care structures are rare and hard to get into. We waited a year and a half to get 1.3 days at our local daycare and made do with a part-time nanny so that I could work 2.5 days a week. Since August, I’ve had three full days of child care and this has felt like a luxury. (A luxury that won’t last very long – our nanny is moving on in January and our daycare cannot pick up that extra day. Did you all hear that yelp of frustration?)

However, I know I’m not the only parent in the world with this kind of problem, and the details of juggling parenthood and profession isn’t what I wanted to write about, even if it’s related.

I read an article last week over at Salon called “How to say ‘Balls of Gold’ in French?” (I’m not linking to it because they don’t need to see my personal rant here about childcare and literary passions, but if you’re interested in issues of translation, I’d highly recommend it). The article basically reminded me what a futile struggle I’ve been engaged in for the last few years as I pursue both a fiction writing career and literary translation work.

Everyone knows that making it (whether financially or critically) as a writer of literary fiction is extremely hard, maybe even sometimes impossible. OK, I accept that. Fiction writing is for the extra hours. But somehow I missed the memo on realistic literary pursuits and so went ahead and added literary translation to the mix of “extra hours” work, as if this could somehow become the day job to keep my writing afloat. Ha! In the Salon article, translator David Bellos says, “You can’t really live as a literary or book translator in the English-speaking world as a full-time job and also sleep.”

And he’s talking about people who actually get book contracts—not aspiring translators (ahem, that’s me) who have only published a few short story translations and spend half their time querying publishers with samples we’ve completed in our free time, in the hopes of getting a ridiculously low-paid book contract. Before having my daughter, I had enough time to keep up with both paid work and my unpaid literary passions. Being a freelance commercial translator and editor (and teaching the occasional scientific writing class) meant that I could contribute to my household income as well as have two or three hours a day to write fiction and translate any number of writers I hoped to see make their way into the English-speaking world.

But since then – goodness, I’ve been running on a lot of hope and not much reality. I suspect I’m not alone in this tendency, but I’ve spent the first two years of my daughter’s life thinking I could keep up the same level of activity as I had before she was born. I never told my commercial clients that I was working half-time (because they would have found another translator), and so there were many weeks that I crammed 5 days of work into 2.5 days. On the days that I didn’t have childcare, I literally raced to my desk anytime she went down for a nap, and then worked most evenings after she was in bed and every morning before she would wake up. I even took a Dictaphone on walks—I would find a very quiet country road near the farm, let the dog roam, prop my Ramuz or whoever up onto the stroller, and dictate a translation while my daughter watched the trees and listened to the story. This may seem romantic, but it’s also a little crazy.

And amid all of this, I finished a novel and took on more reviewing work than I’ve ever done before. I’m sure you can see where this is headed—somehow all these different candles reached the end of their wicks this summer and I’ve been cutting back on superfluous activities ever since, this blog included.

But the realization I came to after reading the Salon article was that I’ve been engaged in a double impossibility for the last few years—it’s sad for me to admit, but there is simply very very very little chance that I’ll ever make it as both a literary fiction writer AND a literary fiction translator. And all the more so because I’m dividing my increasingly restricted time between the two. And each requires infinite dedication, infinite patience, an extremely thick skin, and a willingness to continue even though very little money will ever get made.

So, obviously, I need to make a choice. And really, when I think about it, there is no choice. When I get to the end of my day, if I haven’t written any fiction, I get a little panicked. Even if it’s only 500 words, even if it gets deleted the next day, writing fiction is the only professional accomplishment that means anything to me. And publishing is notoriously hard; no one is going to go waltzing into my hard drive and pick up the stories and books I’ve got sitting there. The work required to get published is nearly equal to the work involved in actually creating the story and getting the words onto paper.

Now, I’m not even going to start discussing the insecurities involved in sitting on two, soon to be three, novel manuscripts that no one seems interested in publishing. Suffice it to say that I’m perfectly aware of the fact that to give up literary translation in favor of writing fiction means I’m giving up something I love to focus on something that may never work either. This reality has occasioned many a sleepless night.

In a perfect world (or my version of a perfect world), literary translation would be a valued profession and there would be hundreds of publishers around the world jumping at the chance to make literature available in as many languages as possible. Even with the recent noticeable upswing in interest in translated literature in the US, I don’t see it becoming easier to make a living as a full-time literary translator. So I am ducking out—for now. Maybe, hopefully, someday I’ll try again.

Now, before this post devolves entirely into a pity party for me (too late, yes, I know). I will point you toward an essay written over the summer by Alison Anderson, one of the most accomplished French-English translators working today (and a really lovely person to boot). Anderson presents a sound analysis of the problem underlying the difficulty/impossibility of literary translation as stable career. Her essay is both thoughtful and invigorating.

I can only hope that because this issue is getting raised (by Anderson, by Salon, by the report that Anderson references in her essay), thus proving that the literary world is at least paying attention, maybe something will change in the future.

 

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Melinda Moustakis – Bear Down, Bear North

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This week at Necessary Fiction I write about Melinda Moustakis’s début collection of short stories, Bear Down, Bear North:

Make no mistake, nature is no friend to the people in these stories, but their most savage confrontations are with each other and with themselves. The natural world is only an accessory, and very often a witness, to their conflicts. In this way, Bear Down, Bear North is much more than a book about Alaska, or about people living in Alaska. It is a book about people, period. These are stories that dig deep into the fragile and difficult spaces of human experience.

You can find the whole review here.

 

 

Woolf project: quick thoughts on Jacob’s Room

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While on holiday in September, I made some progress on my Virginia Woolf project and finished up Jacob’s Room. This is a title that isn’t spoken of much and although I really enjoyed it, I can easily see why. It isn’t the kind of book that makes anything easy for you—not that ease of reading or ease of understanding is a measure of a book’s worth—but I find it difficult to know exactly how to file this particular novel away onto my mental bookshelf. It fits on the Woolf shelf, but resists most other comparisons or associations.

Jacob’s Room is about Jacob Flanders: his family, his schooling, his friendships and romances, his movement into adulthood. The book moves forward more or less chronologically, but it isn’t at all concerned with fixing the reader into any real time line. We watch Jacob watching the world, and at the same time watch the world watching Jacob. The intensity of the reader’s focus gets caught up in the tension between these two perspectives.

Compared to both The Voyage Out and Night and Day, Woolf pushes her literary experiment much further with Jacob’s Room. Looking at the short stories she published around the same time, it is much of a piece with “The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens” and my favorite, “The Unwritten Novel”. All very impressionistic with an unspecified narrator shifting in and out within a scene. I quite like it when Woolf puts her energy into representing the movement of the mind and its perceptions instead of focusing on actual story. She does both just fine, but she is so skilled at exploding a character’s thinking into that lovely/strange mixture of feeling and thought.

The book feels light in many ways, on the one hand because Woolf’s writing is so lively and quick but also because it skims through conversations and holidays and dances, all the while hinting at being a coming-of-age novel, but there is too much darkness in Jacob for this passage from young man to adult to work out so easily. Woolf wrote Jacob’s Room during the First World War, although the book is set in pre-war London and Europe. But this impending war hovers over much of the novel, this idea that humanity has taken a wrong turn.

This is a novel to be read several times—I suspect that much would come from a second and third read. There is so much going on in each scene, each jump of thought. Like all of her fiction, when I’ve finished something, I usually want to start right over again at the beginning.

So the project is moving slowly— if I continue reading chronologically, then I need to catch up to 1922 in her diaries (I am currently in April of 1919) and then read the next set of short stories published between 1922 and 1925. And then I’ll happily pick up Mrs. Dalloway for a re-read.

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Reviewed: the stinging fly issue 18

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On Monday I reviewed Issue 18 of the Irish journal the stinging fly over at Necessary Fiction. Until a lovely reviewer copy landed in my mailbox (along with Fighting Tuesdays, a collection of short stories I requested for another reviewer), I had never heard of this journal. There are so many literary journals out there it sometimes feels hard to keep up, let alone subscribe to the many I would like to, but I’m very excited to have discovered this one. I thoroughly enjoyed each of the eight pieces of fiction – they were all really different – in tone or voice – but the quality of the writing and the storytelling was excellent. Here is my summary of the stories collected in Issue 18:

Whether slow-burning or urgent, these are all stories of personal emergency. Not disaster or tragedy, but the panic that follows a startling emergence. The unexpected appearance of an emotion, understanding or action. This is fiction that takes up with specific personal reactions to the unforeseen.

One of the issue’s best stories was a ‘spin-off’ from Jane Eyre that gave life to Grace Poole – the nurse who takes care of the first Mrs. Rochester up in the attic. Reading a story like this made me think of Brontë and then Jean Rhys and how good fiction lives on forever. And I can’t think of Jean Rhys without thinking of her quote about literature being this big vast ocean fed by great rivers and small rivers and that it doesn’t matter the size of the tributary because the important part is for the ocean to be fed.

Living for reading is pretty much the best hobby.

Read the full review here.

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an unexpected disagreement

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Something very interesting happened last night at my French book club. We are accustomed to small differences in opinion; this is probably what makes us all come back month after month, the idea that we will discuss and debate a work of fiction, not simply admire it. But last night went far beyond a small difference in opinion. I was especially looking forward to our discussion yesterday evening because I had suggested the book – Robert Pagani’s Mon roi, mon amour (The Princess, the King and the Anarchist, tr. Helen Marx) and was eagerly waiting to hear how much everyone loved it. But last night we got settled in to our seats at the carnotzet at one of our local wine bars, pulled the book out of either a purse or other bag, placed it on the table, and before I could say, “Wasn’t it fantastic?” four other women had torn it to pieces. They didn’t just not like it: they called it worthless, they said it was badly written, there was eye rolling and a symbolic tossing of the book away in disgust.

I was speechless, which is rare for me. And we hadn’t even yet received our wine so there was nothing for me to do but take an imaginary gulp and then charge forward to defend what I considered a lovely, unique work of fiction. I suggested it was not supposed to be read as historical fiction, I brought up theories of monarchy/anti-monarchy conflict and mythology, I said Pagani wasn’t writing stereotypes but ironic caricatures, I argued that it was laugh-out-loud funny. I even tried to read passages aloud in a meaningful voice. Nothing uprooted their disdain.

Now these are intelligent women – clever, articulate, worldly, multi-lingual, fantastically well-read. In short, absolutely entitled to their opinion, however greatly it varied from my own.

So why this huge difference in judgment? I was particularly unsettled by the charge of “badly-written” and so started to think back over my experience reading the book. Which reminded me that by a very strange twist of fate,* I had actually read the English translation of Pagani’s book and not the French original.

My memory of the English text is its delightful simplicity. It reads much like a fable. On the surface there is a lot to laugh at – the narrator very gently mocks each of the characters. But is it possible the English version was better written than the French? Is it possible that Helen Marx, an extremely accomplished translator, might have smoothed any awkwardness out of Pagani’s prose? I cannot say until I’ve read the French. I started last night and in all honesty, I do not find his writing flawed at all. Like the English, it is playful and simple.

But there is another difference between the French version and the English version – a thoughtful introduction opens the English version. And contrary to what I usually do, I actually read the introduction before reading the book. So before I even started, I had some notion of Pagani having deeper but subtly portrayed intentions. I firmly believe the book has a lot to it, as I wrote in my review at The Quarterly Conversation, but I can’t help wondering how influenced I may have been by the introduction. And also by the fact that I had just finished reading Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s The New Moscow Philosophy, which brought me to this idea of literature being a more useful and beautiful copy of life’s first rough draft, an idea which applied so wonderfully to Pagani’s novel as he takes an historical event and then creates a vibrant fictional tale around it.

On the whole I’m amused by our disagreement last night and sometimes this just happens, so there may be no reason behind it, but as a translator I am now very curious how the French version and the English version might be wholly compared, not just in terms of the faithfulness of the English version, but in their aesthetic and textual presentation.

Recently, at Necessary Fiction, in a review of Lily Hoang’s unique story collection Unfinished, one of our regular reviewers, Jess Stoner, wrote about the importance of the paratexts that surround a piece of literature and how this information influences our reception of the text. Just a quick comparison of Mon roi, mon amour with The Princess, the King and the Anarchist brings an easy list of possibly significant differences: title, cover art, font choice, introduction, back cover text. All of this peripheral data sets the reader up for a certain aesthetic experience of the book. I could argue that the English version book with its black and white fairytale wedding photo gave me a sense of romance (like an independent arthouse film) that the French version with its stark white background and tiny wedding carriage (almost cartoonish) did not.

But this is just guessing, with a tiny measure of self-justification. Unfortunately, I cannot go backward and experience Mon roi, mon amour with fresh eyes so I’ll never really be able to resolve this question. But it will continue to fascinate me.

*I had requested the translation from the American publisher for a reviewer who was interested in reviewing it for Necessary Fiction, but once I had it in my possession I just couldn’t resist reading it quickly before passing it along. I fully intended to read the original before meeting with my book group but, as it happens, sadly never found the time.

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Jacob’s Room & second hand book treasure

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I had grand illusions of sitting down and writing about Jacob’s Room today, which I finished while on holiday, but jetlag has turned my brain to mush so it will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that Woolf’s third novel was both bewildering and clunky but overall an extremely beautiful work of fiction. Part of me wonders if this book, instead of To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway better accomplishes what Woolf was trying to do in terms of fictionalizing pure consciousness… but I’ll save that thought for a longer post.

In other news, I had a disappointing rejection of my novel manuscript come through while I was on holiday. And so to cheer myself up I have been hitting 2nd hand bookshops with a vengeance. This morning I stopped in to one of my favorites and found some excellent books:

  • The Selected Poems of Robert Frost
  • The Penguin Book of English Short Stories (It starts with Dickens in 1812 and moves forward with about one story per decade—Hardy, Conrad, Kipling, Wells, etc.—finishing up with “Raspberry Jam” by Angus Wilson (whom I’ve never heard of) in 1912.
  • Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death
  • Czeslaw Milosz’s Enfant d’Europe
  • Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
  • Ramuz, Notre Parrain (A biography by Hélène Cingria)

But the crowning jewel of this morning’s book hunt was a facsimile copy of a manuscript page from Ramuz’s La Beauty Sur la Terre. It was just sitting there on top of a pile of dusty Ramuz novels, just waiting to make my day.

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Robert Pagani – The Princess, the King and the Anarchist

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Also while I was away, The Quarterly Conversation published my review of Swiss writer Robert Pagani’s The Princess, the King and the Anarchist:

Which is better? An imagined literature which takes a true historical event as its beating heart? Or a richly-detailed but otherwise straightforward account of that same occasion?

Robert Pagani’s The Princess, the King and the Anarchist raises this question in the subtlest and sneakiest of ways, offering itself up as a piece of evidence for the truth of the former. Its claim is based on the idea that every history has an unrecorded element, the part of the moment that can never be precisely known. That element remains hidden in the minds of the witnesses and participants. Historical fiction, by daring to go inside the minds of its characters, can work to uncover this truth, to present certain possibilities, to offer a possible consciousness to what are otherwise facts and chronologies.

This beautiful gem of a book, translated and published by the late Helen Marx in 2009, did not get much attention when it came out and will probably fade away in relative obscurity. That would be very sad. So here is my attempt to give it a little more of the press it deserves.

Click here to read the full review.

short story: A Simple Task

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Just before I headed to Japan, the lovely Atticus Review published one of my short stories. It was quite a treat to see this piece finally find a home somewhere. I wrote it nearly eight years ago and have taken it out nearly once a year since then and revised it, working it over again and again until it finally took this final shape. Here is an excerpt:

The car windows consume an endless stream of brown fields and dry grassland as she continues forward and faster. The scenery has turned violet in the darkening light. Anne has wanted to come out this way for a long time, wanted to see the part of the state that doesn’t live in the green and the damp or with the ocean as a constant companion. But now that she’s here she just recognizes the unfairness of geography. It really is more beautiful where she comes from.

She passes a mobile home propped up on cinder blocks; its screen door lurches forward aggressively toward the highway. The front half of a windscreen-less car sticks out from behind the trailer and piles of tires mark the far edge of the property.

How sad, she thinks, knowing her mother would never settle for such a mundane expression of sympathy. She would summon up proper indignation: “That’s just tragic,” or, “It’s a crime to let people get that far behind.”

The urn has been sitting on the back seat since Anne left Aberdeen yesterday. She can’t keep ignoring her, although she is aware that addressing her dead mother’s ashes would be an indication that she isn’t coping.

Click here for the full story.

 

Patrick Michael Finn – From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet

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Before leaving on holiday, I reviewed (at Necessary Fiction) Patrick Michael Finn’s excellent collection of short stories, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet:

The eight stories in Patrick Michael Finn’s collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, are so thematically and stylistically cohesive they create a story collection that reads very much like a novel. These are not linked stories, not in the traditional sense; they do not share characters or even strict time periods. But they do share Finn’s rigorously consistent narrative style, his delight in intense sensory description and a firm geographic anchor in the city of Joliet, Illinois.

Together, these miniature novels create an unsettling fictional world of mid-western America, a detailed and vivid narrative rendering of the outcome of the area’s immigrant, industrial and social history.

I make it very clear in the review how much I enjoyed this collection. Finn’s writing is wonderfully consistent and although his narrative voice transforms itself for each story to create a unique perspective or voice, it also maintains a really satisfying stylistic harmony. Also, these are long stories. Stories that take time to get through, that draw you inside a detailed and complicated world. Each piece felt like it could easily be expanded into a full-length novel and I loved that about each one.

Find the full review here.