To Be Read...

Translators, damned by faint praise

I am very grateful to the translators who make accessible so many of the books I enjoy, and try to acknowledge this in my TBR reviews.  The problem is that I don't know any language well enough to begin to know how good the translation is.

As David Bellos points out in Is That A Fish In Your Ear?,  the range of terms available for complimenting a translator on her work is remarkably small.

When book reviews pay any attention to at all to the translation of a translated work.... they (tend to) recycle one of a small set of standard words of praise: fluent, witty, racy, accurate, brilliant, competent and stylish.  You would have to comb through a great quantity of book reviews to find any nods towards translators that step outside of this set and its quasi-synonyms. Translation quality evaluation criteria are hard to establish ... critical language to express such evaluations seems even harder to find.

... A translation can't be right or wrong in the manner of a school quiz or a bank statement. A translation is more like a portrait in oils. The artist may add a pearl earing, give an extra flush to the cheek or miss out the grey hairs in the sideburns - and still give us a good likeness.... but the users of a translation, unlike the friends of a portrait's sitter, don't have full access to the model (they would barely need the translation if they did).

.... There's no choice but to trust the translator. 

The Girl with the Kerouac Tattoo

 

 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/10/body-of-work.html

 

The Reunion, by Simone van der Vlugt

 

"Years ago I went to school in this area. Every day I rode ten kilometres there and back sometimes with the sea wind behind me, but mostly straight into it."

 

Sabine is now 23, working in a bank in Amsterdam, but she grew up just south of Den Helder.

I love cities with a soul, with a historic centre. But the only thing old about Den Helderare the people. All the young people go to Alkmaar and Amsterdam when they leave school. The only people left are sailors and tourists, taking the boat to Texel.

School was a misery for Sabine, who found herself bullied and excluded by a girl who was once a friend. One day, as she is cycling home along the Lange Vliet, she sees her tormentor just ahead. At the junction between Jan Verfaillerweg and Seringen Avenue (Seringenlaan, marked A), Isabel turns right towards a the Dark Dunes.

 

She is going to meet a boy, and Sabine decides to follow her. What happens next has been blocked from Sabine's memory, and might be the reason for the severe depression that means she is absent from work for many months.

 

 

 

One of the many reasons I enjoyed The Reunion is that I have cycled many times through and around Den Helder, staying at Julianadorp, and passing the Dark Dunes (De Donkere Duinen), even catching the ferry to Texel.

 

 

• I read The Reunion (trans Michele Hutchison) as part of my Read the Walk Zoo City Challenge. 

And the Land Lay Still, by James Robertson

Broadly framed by a retrospective exhibition of the work of acclaimed photographer Angus Pendreich, And The Land Lay Still is a vivid and ambitious portrait of post-War Scotland.

The photographs chronicle Scottish life over 50 years, from post-war austerity and slow reconstruction, to small moments of history, including, apparently the return to Scotland of the Stone of Scone, brought alive by the magical Angus Angle. The angle is a way of capturing a scene obliquely, revealing truths through observations just a little removed from the centre of action, something at which James Robertson is a master. 

This is a novel of remarkable sweep, and considerable self-confidence. On page 200, Robertson begins with a short sentence: "This was Scotland in 1950." What follows is a two-page paragraph listing details of a half-forgotten world...

...this was the land of few cars and no seat belts, no motorways but a railway station in every toen of any size, and marshalling yards full of wagons laden with coal and iron and timber and grain... the land of no swings on the Sabbath, no Polaris submarines in Holy Loch... no duvets, no drip-dry shirts, no tracksuits and trainers; the land of semmits and girdles and long, aching cold Januaries... of Pansy Potter, Wuzzy Wiz, Plum McDuff and Biffo the Bear... and the Edinburgh festival was a three year old bairn just learning to talk in a foreign language."

It is the world of  miners and gangsters, activist and spies, housewives and matriarachs. Some live mundane lives, others shape the nation. Some veer close to being archetypes - you just know the Tory MP will end up the self-immolating victim of John Major's hapless Back to Basics war on sleaze - but all have a richness that reflects Robertson's compelling sympathy for 'ordinary' people.

For many reasons Mike Pendreich finds the challenge of writing an introductory essay on his father intimidating, not the least being that his own work lacks his father's magic. As Jean, one of Angus's women, and a focal point for Bohemian, radical Edinburgh explains: "Stories aren't static, Mike. That's what we were talking about earlier. They grow, they shrink, they change with the retelling."

One thread, of course, is the very future of Scotland. Back in the Fifties, honest but battered Don is talking with damaged Japanese POW Jack.

"Full blown independence, that's the thing."

"Canna see there's much appetite for that," Don said. "Why would ye go doon that road, after all we've been through together?"

Later, earnest fighters will argue over the detail, whether is it is to be dev-olution or dee-volution; others will take lives in the struggle.

And the Land Lay Still is a magnificent achievement. Robertson has put enormous effort into his research, but his empathy and insight carries through many gripping, entwined stories, interlacing real tragedy with a dry humour.

Billy gulped at his pint. He glanced at the bar and caught sight of their awkward grouping in the mirror. The grey, anxious-looking one was himself. Joy of Sex man without the beard, the joy, or the sex. All he wanted to do was drink up and go.

It is a complicated work, one that could easily have been delivered as three, even four separate novels, and it requires concentration to stay familiar with a sweep of characters that rivals, say Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time.

And The Land Lay Still makes you think. And when you think, remember this advice:

In retrospect is better than with hindsight. In retrospect suggests sustained reflection, coherent analysis. With hindsight says you'd have done things differently if only you'd fucking known.

Reading the World: 2011

During 2011 I read books written by novelists from 33 countries

create your own visited country map

The Moon and Sixpence, by W. Somerset Maugham

Loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin, The Moon and Sixpence tells the story an undistinguished stockbroker, Charles Strickland, who apparently out of the blue, abandons his wife and career to become a painter in Paris

'Tell Amy it's no good coming after me. Anyhow I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn't be able to find me.'

'My own impression is that she's well rid of you', I said.

'My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.'

The narrator is a friend of Strickland's wife who is determined to present a more accurate account of a misunderstood genius than had appeared to date.

"The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the tribute of your interest. He disturbs and arrests."

Strickland is stunningly boorish and unpleasant (in my mind's eye I saw him being played by Oliver Reed): "It is obvious that there was much in the commonly received account of Strickland's life to embarrass a respectable family."

With decided understatement, we are told: "His faults are accepted as the necessary complement to his merits....(but) To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist."

Th artist's personality is at its ugliest when matched against the unbeliebvably generous spirit of an uninspired fellow painter, Dirk Stroeve, who is undeterred from giving money, and ultimately his unfortuante wife, to the monstrously ungrateful Strickland.

Wilfully unable to sell his work, Strickland voyages to the South Pacific, and finds some sort of sanctuary with a Tahitian girl.

Maugham paints his characaters every bit as vigorously as Gaugin. Like Gaugin, many of his values are at best out-dated, but this is a powerful novel.

 

So how did January go...?

January has been strange. Very, very strange.

To my utter amazement I have managed to keep to my no-more-new-books (Double Dare) pledge! I wonder quite how many years it is since I last went a month without adding to Mount To Be Read?

I have also made some progress on various other reading challenges - and this rather the point of it all - I have read some very good books.

Resolution 1 was to Read More Big Books, and James Robertson's hugely impressive And the Land Lay Still is definitely big - smallish type pages, and covering a huge canvas, with enough storylines and sharply drawn characters to fill three novels.

I began my Read the Walk literary stroll to Zoo City, with W Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, a very English novel about an artist who turns his back on England with some ferocity, travelling to France and then Tahiti in the manner of Paul Gaugin.

And I began my other own-creation challenge, 19/72, to read 19 novels by UK- based writers that were first published in 1972, with The Players and the Game.
 
I read The Newspaper of Claremont Street as part of Kimbofo's Australian Challenge, and could easily dally Down Under, perhaps as part of the 2012 Global Reading Challenge.

Finally, I tried a bit harder to read more non-work non-fiction and The Hare with Amber Eyes, drawn from Mount TBR, was a quite brilliant, five star start to 2012.

1972: What a momentous year...

How many of these UK authors published a new novel in 1972?

Here are some of the names I thought of when first contemplating my 19/72 Challenge (reading 19 novels from 1972): Kingsley Amis, JG Ballard, Malcolm Bradbury, Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Durrell, Grahame Greene, David Lodge, John Le Carre, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell, Colin Wilson and Evelyn Waugh.

Some rereads, and some famous names that had somehow passed me by... Splendid!

Then I started checking around.

As you will have guessed, but to my great suprise, the answer was, of course, that none of them presented the world with a new novel that year.

Perhaps I should have chosen 1973 - JG Ballard's Crash was 73, as was Grahame Greene's Honorary Consul. Muriel Spark published in 71 and 73, as did Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch; John Le Carre  selected 71 and 74. Lawrence Durrell published a collection of poetry in 1973, The Suchness of the Old Boy (but younger brother and my boyhood hero, Gerald's Catch Me a Colobus was 1972!).

Evelyn Waugh had been dead seven years...

 

The best selling books were Watership Down and Joy of Sex. PG Wodehouse published Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin

19/72: The Players and the Game, by Julian Symons

The Players and The Game opens with an extract from the journal of a deranged man, obsessed with Dracula and Frederick Nietzsche, who recalls watching a television programe in which people leaving a horror film were interviewed.

One chap said "I like it when the monster gets the girl. That's me I thought. That's me. But I've never met anybody else who would admit that.

He does however meet a woman who identifies with Bonnie Parker (as in Bonnie and Clyde). Nothing good will come of this.

Extracts from the the journal appear througout the novel, but most ofthe narrative centes around Paul Vane, marketing manager of Timbals Plastics. Against his wife's wishes, Vane moves to the leafy suburd of Rawley, to be closer to the management team at Timbals. It is a world of tennis clubs and dinner parties, and endlessly finessed social niches, dominated by the pig-like managing director Bob Lowson (who just happens to like £20 discipline sessions with a Soho 'doctor').

Despite him being a prolific crime writer, I an not sure I had ever heard of Julian Symons (Wikipedia) before reading a Martin Edwards Forgotten Books post. Edwards notes that "Symons shifts viewpoint rapidly, introducing a good many characters, but he sketches them with great clarity."

This is true, but forty years on some seem like stereotypes, and the names could be from Benny Hill - 'trick cyclist' Dick Service and Peter Ponsonby ('a bachelor in his forties, thought by some members to be queer').

Both Vane and his wife are socially rather inept, and don't quite fit into Rawley life. This seems more to do with Alice having some funny ideas, "I shouldn't be surprised if she is a vegetarian" - than that he has had a couple of incidents with very young girls that were frowned upon but were not sufficient to cost him his job.

Several girls go missing, and there seem to be links to Vane; certainly enough to interest the local constabulary, from the ridiculous Sir Felton Dicksee downwards. Vane has, for instance, some connection to Louise Allbright, who also knows newspaper reporter Ray Gordon, who mentions to a polce contact, Plender, that she seems to have disaapperaed.

"We did have a bit of a squabble last Saturday at the tennis club. She was playing with a conceited bastard called Vane, just come to live here, and we had a few words. Nothing really."

"How old?"

"Nearly 19."

"Doing a bit of cradle snatching, weren't you?"

Ray's embarrassment deepened. "Sounds like that I daresay, but she could look after herself. Well, in a way. She didn't exactly want sex, she wanted adventure."

Plender goes to the house and is met by an indignant father. "You've got to consider my position. I can't afford to be made a laughing stock."

"What is your position? Plender asked politely.

"I am at Timbals. Assistant works supervisor, Moldings division." He puffed out his chest as though a medal were on it.

"And why would you be a laughing stock?"

He looked incredulous. "What... if it got to be known that George Allbright can't control his own daughter."

• An author's preface states that Players has some similarities to the Moors Murders and the American Lonely Hearts murders, which suggests even more unpleasantry than that which unfolds. Apparently Ian Brady was obsessed with Nietzsche, but quite why this is flagged up I am not sure.

 

The Newspaper of Claremont Street, by Elizabeth Jolley

 

Even though my attention had been caught by a review, it is rather unlikely that I would have read The Newspaper of Claremont Street without the prompting of the Reading Matters' Australian Literature Month. Even then I was initially interested because it seemed to be a novel about journalism but in fact the Newspaper is an elderly cleaning lady, known to one and all as Weekly.

 

Weekly is a prickly character, who passes on information about the householders of Claremont Street, a gossip, yes, but somehow sparing with her words, even rather brusque. She is ferociously hard working, and cleans with ferocity.

Everyone tried to get as much work from her as possible and she was expected to go into every room in the houses where she worked. But after all these years there was nothing, not even The Seducers Cook Book, that could upset her.

If she surprised people in their nakedness that was their affair. Clearly, in her opinion, showers should be taken before eight in the morning...

She was used to people being in bath towels or in bed at all our hours of the day. The intimate things which she could not help perceiving did not interest her much. If at the time of cleaning, various sexual or alcoholic activities of the householders were in the way, she simply cleaned around them.

Her services and and her access to the private information give her a strange sort of power, but this is little help in fighting her many demons, including the long shadow of an unpleasant and selfish brother, and a mother who went to prison to hep help him.

The characterisation is vivid, and it is the power of Elizabeth Jolley's writing that carries the novel. Her style is deceptive, delivered lightly, with strong accents and rough vernacular (the words of Weekly's friend Nastasya - Narsty - are delivered almost phonetically) but there is a steely edge to the narrative.

The telling is sympathetic but rarely sentimental, though I did like it when the Newspaper recalls her father's longing for the countryside.

Railing against modern farming, he says: "There's nothing so beautiful as the sun shining through a happy pig's ears."

Quite right, too.