Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

another quick word on Gordimer

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On Saturday I said there were two other articles I wanted to mention besides the wonderful Barnes piece from The London Review of Books. The first of these is a short, (nearly infuriatingly so) piece on Nadine Gordimer from The Guardian. The occasion of the article was a lecture she gave in England a few weeks ago, after which the journalist was able to ask her a few questions, and the subject was her life and her newest book, the complete collection of her non-fiction writings, Telling Times, Writing and Living, 1954 – 2008.

The article is worth a skim, especially if you are a fan of Gordimer like me, but it served more to remind me to start reading Telling Times. Which I did right away, and which is about as delightful as going through her fiction again. I like that I’ve read all of her fiction before now experiencing her non-fiction essays. I feel I have a sense of what she tried to accomplish through her literature, and I have judged and admired that on its merits, and so now I can go back and discover her personal voice.

I believe, although I could be wrong, that most people think of Gordimer as a strictly political writer. And so, in some sense, despite her Nobel Prize, despite her other awards and general prestige, her work actually gets overlooked by many readers who might be intimidated, or simply not interested, or putting it off for the right time. But I think that keeping her in such a strict classification is a gross mischaracterization of her work. Yes, all of her novels have some social-political element to them, that fact cannot be pushed aside, but they are all novels of people more than anything else.

In an essay from 1963 on how she came to writing, she says:

I was looking for what people meant but didn’t say, not only about sex, but also about politics and their relationship with the black people among whom we lived as people live in a forest among trees. So it was that I didn’t wake up to Africans and the shameful enormity of the colour bar through a youthful spell in the Communist Party, as did some of my contemporaries with whom I share the rejection of white supremacy, but through the apparently esoteric speleology of doubt, led by Kafka rather than Marx. And the ‘problems’ of my country did not set me writing; on the contrary, it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of ‘the South African way of life’.

I loved reading these lines, especially the first and last sentence, because they confirm to me how Gordimer approaches writing. It is simply the essential fact of her existence, the first fact. Other facts have layered themselves around this first one, perhaps the greatest is having been born and raised in South Africa. But Gordimer would have written, and written superbly, had she come from anywhere else.

a review of the new Madame Bovary translation

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I’ve recently come across three excellent articles, all about matters close to my own heart. I’ll mention the first one today and get to the two others either tomorrow or Monday.

The first is Julian Barnes’ Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer from last week’s London Review of Books. This is not only a thorough and excellent review of Lydia Davis’ much-celebrated and much-discussed new translation of Madame Bovary, it is also a careful discussion of what literary translation is all about and what kind of choices translators must make.

With careful and good-natured severity (the best kind), he explains many of Davis’ choices and compares them to other, previous English versions of Madame Bovary. These comparisons are wonderful for a details enthusiast like me, as each reveals how the various translators interpreted or compromised the original.

I haven’t read Madame Bovary in translation, and I didn’t really plan to until reading this article, but as a translator I am now extremely interested in the choices that its previous translators have made. One choice that Davis made came as a surprise to me – she wanted to mirror Flaubert’s grammar and sentence structure as much as possible. This is a curious choice. Often a French sentence is a little turned around compared to an English sentence, not in terms of subject/verb or the big important parts of the sentence, but in terms of the little clauses and the commas. This is part of the musicality of French, and something that English doesn’t necessarily have.

As Barnes suggests, and I would agree, to keep Flaubert’s grammar in English is a risky decision. It keeps the translation accurate in one sense, but opens up a separate claim to inaccuracy. If a sentence reads awkwardly once it has been transformed into another language, this is a deep betrayal of a writer like Flaubert whose prose is anything but awkward. Which obviously makes Flaubert a most difficult writer to translate.

Barnes’ final critique of Davis is that she isn’t a great fan of Madame Bovary and he wonders whether it is possible to create a truly masterful translation when you are “out of sympathy” with the work. This is an excellent question. I would tend to say no. If you cannot find the beauty of the work in the whole, and not just on a sentence per sentence basis, I suspect your readers won’t either. But Barnes is ultimately fair with Davis, however, calling her translation “more than acceptable.”

For those of you who have read Davis’ translation, or any others, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

Iris Murdoch – Under the Net

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If you had asked me to describe Iris Murdoch a few months ago, when all I had read of her fiction was The Sandcastle and The Nice and the Good, I would have described her as skilled at sharp, biting domestic fiction. The kind of writer who picks apart personal relationships – friendships, marriages, sibling dynamics – with careful and sometimes frightening acuity. I would have tempered those two statements with a comment on her ability to render her characters with sympathy, with shades of gray, with feeling and with compassion.

But now, after reading Under the Net, I realize she is not so easily categorized. With Under the Net I must add humorist and satirist to her accomplishments. It isn’t every writer who can do both straightforward fiction and satire, and I was very impressed to get into the novel and realize how different it was from the other books of hers I had read.

Under the Net is about Jake Donaghue, a struggling novelist who translates French potboilers on the side. Jake is about as self-absorbed as you can get. But he is also wonderfully clever and likeable. He has a personal philosophy against work, so he does a lot of sponging off of friends and girlfriends.

This personal philosophy is what sets the entire book in motion. His current girlfriend, Madge, has decided to kick him out. So Jake and his friend Finn (most excellent character, by the way, a kind of Jake-shadow, who chimes in from time to time with many of the novel’s best lines) must move. Their options are limited, and Finn suggests Jake go look up an ex-girlfriend named Anna. The suggestion appears to unmoor our poor Jake.

One of the aspects of the book I enjoyed so much is Jake’s constant hyperbole. Suddenly, although we’ve never heard of her before, although he hasn’t mentioned her until now, suddenly Anna is the lost love of Jake’s life. And finding her, getting her to love him back, sends him on a series of wild capers across London and all the way to Paris and back. And many of these capers raise a measure of doubt as to whether Jake really cares for Anna at all. But of course Under the Net isn’t just about Anna and Jake.

If I had to hazard a statement to sum up in one line what the novel is about, I’d say it’s about poking fun at that pervasive myth of the artistic temperament. Jake, who is so committed to his writing that he’s willing to live in relative poverty in order to devote himself to his typewriter, doesn’t write a single word for the entire book. And he considers himself a deep, intellectual and perceptive person but most of the novel’s action results from his misunderstandings.

Now, despite the humor of the book, there is a subtle philosophical discussion running its way through Jake’s antics. About friendship and politics and about the individual. I think this works and never gets heavy because Jake remains so completely likeable. I think if I were to meet someone like Jake in person I’d want to throw him off a bridge, but within the universe of the novel, I followed him with great sympathy and support. As a reader, I wanted Jake to eventually succeed. I leave it to anyone else who reads the book to determine whether they think he does.

book group enlightenment and a project

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Hello Friday. Very happy to see you. I had my favorite book group last night in our lovely wine caveau. As we enjoyed one of the local wines and nibbled on some gruyère, we discussed John Berger’s To the Wedding. Not only was this a lively, thoughtful and somewhat emotional discussion, it brought me to realize something about the book that I (stupidly) hadn’t understood before. I can’t say what it is here because it might ruin the book for someone who hasn’t read it, but suffice it to say that it changes everything. In a good way. It elevated the novel from what was already a delicate, beautiful story into something more intimately connected to human compassion. To our desire to correct the wrongs of the world. I love how a book can become something else entirely through discussion with other involved readers.

Changing gears a little bit, I would like to put out a small request to my readers. Now, some of you, I believe, are non-Anglophone and some of you, I also believe, are writers as well as readers. I have a fun project coming up with a literary journal later this winter. I’m going to be their writer-in-residence for a month and I will be focusing on literature in translation. To do this properly, I’m looking for some French or Japanese writers who would be interested in submitting their short fiction to me for translation. If you, or someone you know, would like to submit a story, please let me know and I’ll give you more details. And for those of you who are not writers, but avid readers and enjoy my posts on translation, I’ll let you know when the month begins and where to follow along. I hope it will be interesting for everyone.

And with that, have a good weekend. I’ve just started Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands, set in America of all places, and Woolf’s second novel Night and Day. Looking forward to finishing both over the next two days.

John Berger – To the Wedding

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I like a good story and distinctive imagery in the books that I read, but I am always impressed with unique narrative texture. Give me a book that does something different with its narrative perspective and I’m immediately interested in understanding how that unique narrator influences the story as a whole. Books like Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy or That Night with their strangely effaced first person narrators telling a story which belongs to someone else, or Gordimer’s The Conservationist with its acute third person speaking directly to another character are some favorite examples.

When I first read John Berger’s To the Wedding several years ago it was this aspect of the book that first caught my attention. One of the narrators, the one who completes the story in full, is a blind street peddler the main characters cross paths with only once while visiting Greece. The effect is then layered because they encounter him at an advanced point in their story. Although it isn’t presented that way to the reader, of course. We meet this narrator right away, and then he moves us backward with omniscient powers to catch the reader up.

I mentioned before that there is a magical, almost fairytale-like quality to this novel, and this mainly comes from this narrator and his godlike ability to see the past and future actions of the novel’s characters. I wondered a lot when I first read the book why Berger would use such a perspective, mainly because at first glance it seems an almost arbitrary choice. Why involve an outside character as a narrator, especially a character who has one conversation with another character and then remains completely outside the story? In another country even.

To get further into this, it is important to know a bit more about the story. When the novel opens, Jean is at a market stand buying a tamata, a kind of healing charm and prayer offering, from the street peddler in Athens. We learn through their short conversation that Ninon, Jean’s daughter, a woman in her twenties, is very ill. Deathly ill. The scene then shifts, jumping back in time to Ninon’s childhood and moving forward to her young adulthood. Throughout these flashbacks, the reader is given other scenes as Jean and Zdena, Ninon’s mother, who has been separated from Jean since Ninon was a young girl, begin preparations for their daughter’s wedding. The event will take place in Italy and so both parties are traveling across Europe to meet up for the celebration.

Slowly, as the characters travel, as the past comes forward, Ninon’s tragedy is revealed. I won’t give it away here, because it does come as a surprise when it is finally explained. But it is within her tragedy that the Greek peddler’s voice becomes relevant to the story. At least this is how I finally settled it. Despite the fact that his voice is compelling and highly effective, no one else could tell her story with as much empathy as a man who was not always blind but is now condemned to a life of darkness and helplessness.

The novel doesn’t belong exclusively to Ninon and her fiancé Gino. It is also about Jean and Zdena, who are meeting again after ten years to confront their daughter’s tragedy. It is about Gino’s courageous optimism, his father Federico’s painful but practical resignation. And it is about unexpected calamities and how humans navigate such treacherous waters.

Besides the intricate narrative stance and Berger’s simply stunning imagery, I loved how the novel combined hints of the fantastic and ethereal descriptions with down-to-earth characters and dialogue. The mixture of these two moods created something very special. It transformed the novel modern fable, able to discuss a certain horror while maintaining moments of pure elegance.

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more Suvanto and a book giveaway

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A few months ago I had the pleasure of reading Maile Chapman’s début novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto. My reactions to the book are here, here and here.

I also reviewed the book recently for the literary journal Cerise Press.

Now, I happen to have two copies of Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto and I would love to give one away to a deserving reader. If you are interested, please leave a note in the comments and I’ll do a random drawing on the 12th of November when I get back home. I will send anywhere in the world, but I prefer the interested party to be a regular reader of this blog.

One more week of holiday…as most good holidays, this one is passing too quickly. But it’s a relaxing holiday, with plenty of reading, so I have some books to write about when I get back.

more on The Voyage Out

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Although I mentioned in my earlier post that The Voyage Out was similar to a typical coming-of-age novel, let me give that idea a bit more nuance by tracing the storyline for a moment. In pure story, my statement is true – young Rachel accompanies her aunt and uncle on a journey to South America and in the course of that journey she falls in love and comes to understand one of the great mysteries of life, namely, what will society and what will one man in particular expect from her as she makes the transition from childhood to adulthood.

On the surface of things, this is timeless literary fare. But this is also Virginia Woolf and I think it is the details, the specific Woolfian twist, that makes all the difference.

First, the characters are all very close to being eccentric, without being exactly so.  They are almost types: Mr. Ambrose the doddering erudite scholar, the young, unfinished Rachel, Mrs. Ambrose the wise older woman, and Hirst, the pompous academic. There are many, many more. But then each is endowed with such particular, distinct, and sometimes bizarre thinking.

And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all…She forgot that she had any fingers to raise…The things that existed were so immense and so desolate.

Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed?

She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true proportions.

Woolf allows her characters to meander and wonder, to question their reality. So much so that their reflections on the state of their world begin to undermine the novel’s seemingly traditional structure. As the story unravels, it starts to become quite clear that this isn’t just Rachel’s story at all. It is everyone’s story, and although each of their stories may not get equal weight, each of their given moments are equally weighty.

And then Woolf upends everything with a final, jarring twist. I think this was the aspect of The Voyage Out that I most enjoyed. Just as I was getting comfortable with Woolf’s wonderfully different version of a young woman’s coming-of-age, she takes that away and offers a radical and almost completely unexpected* alternative. Suddenly, the book is about everything but Rachel. Very clever. All those searching questions become more relevant.

I am coming to realize that this Woolf project will not really ever be complete until I’ve read these novels several times. I’m only just ready to begin Night and Day, and already I want to go back and reread The Voyage Out to catch all that I missed. But all things in their order…I’ll get there, it may just take a few years.

*The foreshadowing about what will eventually happen to Rachel is excellent. It happens about a hundred pages before the end, and it comes from the perspective of Mrs. Ambrose. Although it is pretty high-handed, Mrs. Ambrose is given to extreme thinking so it doesn’t necessarily overwhelm the reader. And it is one of the novel’s most poetic moments.

Jean Giono and other thoughts

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My mother-in-law passed me a Jean Giono novel a few weeks ago, and I realized it’s probably the fourth she’s brought to my attention. For various reasons, and much to my embarrassment, I’ve never actually read any of them. But yesterday, I finished some work and was waiting for Mlle. Petitvore to wake up, so I started the first few pages. Giono has a lovely style, full of sounds to parallel his images, and careful, rolling sentences. This particular novel, Le Grand Troupeau (To the Slaughterhouse) from 1931, is a war novel, and it describes how war involves everyone, not only the men at the front. Giono was a fervent pacifist, and his disgust of war is a palpable element of the book.

I’m curious if any of you have read Jean Giono…I’d love some recommendations. He has a large oeuvre, over thirty novels and novellas. And I learned (thank you Wikipedia) that he was inspired by Balzac to write a series of ten novels similar to La Comédie Humaine. Unfortunately, he never finished the project, but there are four, maybe five novels that fall into the category. Could be interesting companion reads as I start digging deeper in Balzac.

And of all things, I have glimmerings of a war-novel project in mind. Not to start this year, of course, but it would be fascinating (perhaps a bit grim, however) to put together a number of “war” writers and begin a tour through that aspect of literature…Pat Barker, Jean Giono, Hemingway. Something to think about.

Woolf's 1915 Diary

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I’ve started reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary. I am struck by and thankful for her ordinary-ness. She records all the necessary boring bits about life. That is rather refreshing. Of course, she does wind her way to lovely reflections like this:

I know that with the first chink of light in the hall and chatter of voices I should become intoxicated and determine that life held nothing comparable to a party. I should see beautiful people and get a sensation of being on the highest crest of the biggest wave – right in the centre and swim of things.

Or this:

There is a foreign look about a town which stands up against the sunset, and is approached by a much trodden footpath across a field.

The first quote reminds me of her writing, the energy of it. And I suspect as she wrote the sentence, she was no longer writing in her diary. It just has a different feel than her other jottings. And the second is simple, but it strikes me as a fine example of her skill for unique observation.

I tried to read Sylvia Plath’s diary once, (at least I think it was Sylvia Plath…I may be wrong, but this was over ten years ago) and was instantly put off because it read like a novel. It was so perfectly shaped and “written”, with long passages of dialogue and actual scenes. It didn’t feel like a diary at all.

But Woolf’s diary is exactly that. A record for each day of what she did, who she saw, her thoughts and little snippets of conversations. It isn’t at all intimidating. It’s wonderful such a record of her life exists.

I’ve just come across the only mention (in her 1915 diary) of her first novel The Voyage Out. She writes:

We talked about my novel (which everyone, so I predict, will assure me is the most brilliant thing they’ve ever read, and privately condemn, as indeed it deserves to be condemned.

I am very curious if she ever mentions this novel again in any of her later diaries. Why so severe on herself? A considerable amount of time had passed since the novel was accepted for publication and then actually saw publication…is that what made her think it was bad? Or was she always this severe with all of her writing? And did she really mean it?

Initial thoughts on The Voyage Out

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I like reading authors from start to finish, beginning with their early works and moving forward in sequence. There are other ways to get to know a writer, I suppose, and it’s tempting even to work backwards or just go at random, and then let the different works speak to another. I suspect there would be some fascinating bridges and parallels to be found. But I am obstinately compelled to begin at the beginning and turn those pages until I get to the end.

And so my Virginia Woolf project begins with her first novel The Voyage Out, published in 1915. I won’t be able to get through this book in one post, and I think it would be a mistake, an injustice even, to attempt to do that. So I’ll begin here with some scribbling and impressions.

First, it was both lighter and heavier than I expected. By lighter, I mean that it reminded me of many novels written in the late 1800’s, society novels, in which people travel and interact with lots of other people, in which couples are formed and broken, in which small events string together with sometimes haphazard connection but still manage to race toward an ending. And by heavier, I mean that mixed up within all these conversations and events and people was a fascinating, profound, eccentric and insightful contemplation of a wide variety of people. What they think, how they feel, what they want.

The Voyage Out is preoccupied with existential questions – does all of this meeting and chatting and loving really matter? The story attempts to answer some of those questions, others it leaves hanging, and to nice effect.

Second, what a narrator! What incredible narrative control and authority. Perhaps it impressed me so much because contemporary fiction seems to have abandoned this kind of omniscient third person, but the skill with which Woolf explodes a moment into multiple levels of thinking, layering each character’s thoughts on top of another, is a true pleasure to read. Not to mention how well she differentiates between each character by their thinking. Each person is allowed truly exceptional thoughts, but they are tailored to the individual.

And finally, although I think the last statement I wrote is true, I also think that many of Woolf’s characters, perhaps the more important ones to the story, share one quality that I believe comes from Woolf’s own unique approach to the world…a recognition that perception, insight and awareness are double-edged strengths. On the one hand, this kind of sensitivity makes a person more alive to his or her surroundings, more receptive, but on the other, that state of being receptive involves a certain rawness, it makes a perceived sensation/intuition both revolutionary and painful.

I did so much underlining in The Voyage Out, and I’m not quite sure where I want to begin further discussion. I loved the book, for several different reasons, and I want to sort those out before writing again.