Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘contemporary literature’

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.

 

 

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.

Norma Kassirer – Katzenjammered

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I recently reviewed (at Necessary Fiction) a really wonderful little novel from BlazeVox Books called Katzenjammered:

And so Katzenjammered pretends, successfully and engagingly, to be about many other subjects: her mother’s difficult personality, her best friend across the street and a long parade of eccentric and marvelously described family members. It pretends to be about growing up at the tail end of Prohibition America, about walking those first few steps on the road to adolescence and what parts of that path will remain to haunt one’s adult understanding.

I can say without a doubt this was one of my favorite books read this year. Click here for the full review.

Christopher Boucher – How to Keep Your Volkswagon Alive

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed How to Keep Your Volkswagon Alive by Christopher Boucher:

Boucher’s narrative is self-consciously metatextual and, well, storyful; the narrator wants you, the reader, to remain aware that you are reading something that is being written both for the narrator and the narrator’s son, but also for you, and that what’s being written is a collection of experiences now crafted into “stories.” By transforming what has occurred into stories, he gives each of these moments a different kind of life. The transformative process is as important as the narrator’s ability to perform the conversion, and this works both within the storyworld of Volkswagen, because it comes to be a matter of life and death for both the narrator’s father and son, but it also reflects outward in the way the reader then experiences Boucher’s playfulness with language, imagery and metaphor.

Click here for the full review.

Vyacheslav Pyetsukh – The New Moscow Philosophy

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed The New Moscow Philosophy by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh and translated by Krystyna Anna Steiger:

There is a wonderful layering of thematic project in this novel, deftly smoothed together by the chatty omniscient narrator. Beyond the meaning of the actual events which transpire in the apartment and Chinarikov and Belotsvetov’s philosophical examinations, the novel spends many a word on an intertextual reckoning of the complicated bond between life and literature…

This (preoccupation) proclaims with unabashed joy that literature and life have become equal sources of human memory, of human thought. To a convinced reader, this is nothing extraordinary except for the thrill of the thought being written down and thus sanctioned. That a fictional conversation between Raskolnikov and Sonia might carry as much truth, or better yet, a greater, more perfect truth, than one between a real-live Russian student and his impoverished prostitute sweetheart is something all committed bibliophiles believe with something as powerful as religious faith. In literature, life is refined, perfected, distilled.

Click here for the full review.

 

A.S. Penne – Reckoning

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Today at Cerise Press I reviewed Reckoning, a collection of short stories by A.S. Penne from Canadian publisher Turnstone Press:

The emotional ground in A.S. Penne’s collection Reckoning is unstable:
shifting sands, rugged terrain. Her characters search, again and again, for a
firm foothold, a space to feel safe, a secure shelter in which to debate and
assemble their difficult decisions. Penne does not grant them this refuge, is
not interested in what it feels like to make it successfully to the other side
of heartache. Instead, the seventeen stories in this well-balanced collection
are about walking the rickety bridge forward from a difficult moment, about the
dread and confusion, the indecision, the regret, the panic and anger in those
careful steps. They are about the swirl and tumult of modern heartbreak.

Click here to read the full review.

 

Filippo Bologna – How I Lost the War

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed How I Lost the War by Filippo Bologna:

One of the more interesting aspects of How I Lost the War is the way the narrative meanders through and around its primary preoccupations. Despite his claim to the contrary, Federico isn’t really telling the reader about one event that happened to him—the war against Aquatrade and Ottone Gattai—but about a series of experiences that began before he was born and that have culminated in him. In that sense, the end of the book is not the end that really matters. Federico—his self, his simple existence—is the end and his understanding of that truth is the lament that connects all the other stories, both historical and contemporary.

Click here for the full review.

 

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thoughts on reviewing translations

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A few weeks ago over at Necessary Fiction, I reviewed Seven Years, a novel by a Swiss novelist writing in German. In that review I tackle the content of the book, and only make a few passing comments about the style. I actually wanted to say more about the writing but couldn’t find my way into that discussion within the review, so I settled for leaving it out. This kind of compromise always leaves me a little unsettled, especially because Seven Years is a translation and I feel strongly about not overlooking that fact when considering a book.

Recently, Words Without Borders has published a series of essays on how to review translations. The latest is by Scott Esposito, the editor of The Quarterly Conversation, and it’s a good one. Esposito provides some thoughtful framework-style guidelines for looking at a translation and finding a way to evaluate it. There are about nine essays now for the whole series, and they are well worth a read for anyone interested in reading or reviewing literature in translation.

Now, where I come to this in relation to my Seven Years review is that I sorely wanted to be able to say something about the translation. And in my idealist little heart I figured that I would find a way…I am a translator, right? I am also a huge fan of literature in translation, right? I live in Switzerland, right?  (Okay, Seven Years is set in Germany, actually, so never mind). But in the end, because I don’t read German, I simply did not feel comfortable approaching that aspect of the text.

The writing in the English version of Seven Years is unadorned and straightforward. The most interesting thing about it is that much of the dialogue comes indirectly, and even when it is direct, it isn’t set off from the rest of the text. So there are moments when you have to read a line twice to make sure who is speaking. Other than that, though, there isn’t much that stood out from Seven Years to raise my translator antennae…but maybe this is only because I don’t read German. Perhaps if I read German, I would have been able to see patterns in the translated English that could only come about because they were being created on top of German scaffolding. I see this with translations from the French and from Japanese, because certain phrasings and structures necessarily occur as the English grapples with the original.

You see my dilemma here. In my heart of hearts, I’d like to believe that someone unfamiliar with the original language can engage with aspects of the translation as suggested by these WWB articles, but I’m skeptical. And I get the sense that this great discussion on reviewing translation isn’t addressing this question head-on. (Except this piece by Jonathan Blitzer.) Is it possible to review fairly and thoroughly, emphasis on thoroughly, without knowledge of the original language? I want to think so, but I don’t think so. Examples? Anyone?

In the end, all I can say about Seven Years is that it is a translation, that an original text exists in German and that what I read was Michael Hofmann’s version of Peter Stamm. How that differs from someone else’s version of Peter Stamm I cannot say. And that frustrates me. I’d like to find a way through this problem.

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Peter Stamm – Seven Years

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Yesterday at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Peter Stamm’s Seven Years:

Alex’s narrative is, in essence, a comparison of the two women. Ivona, a simple individual whose devotion to Alex borders on mental illness, and Sonia, a kind but distant partner whose passion for her work outstrips her passion for anyone and anything else. Where Ivona is self-less, Sonia is self-full. That essential difference informs Alex’s connection to each woman.

Click here for the full review.

 

Gregory Sherl – I Have Touched You

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Gregory Sherl’s I Have Touched You:

Despite the collection’s overall mood of “being stuck,” Sherl’s prose is not stagnant. His pieces have movement; they often feel like a stacking of interconnected bridges, one sentence crossed with a parallel thought, intersected by a tangent, re-lifted onto a previous platform, winding back to an earlier reflection. This is untidy scaffolding but it helps fight against a mood with a dangerous potential for monotony.

Click here for the full review.