In translation

Some of this will retread what I covered in my post about Tristana, but that's my own fault for not getting around to finishing this sooner.

I read a lot of books in translation. My world books project necessitates it, and I suspect the proportion of books written in English that I read versus those not has gotten smaller since I started the project, but even before I started the project it's fair to say I read a lot in translation. Of the books I've read so far this year, half were written in English, and exactly half of the 34 books I read in 2018 were written in English.

Though I read a lot in translation, what that meant or how it affected my experience of the books I read wasn't something I gave much thought to probably until I read The Count of Monte Cristo in an edition whose translator is not even listed on the publisher's website. (If this Amazon reviewer is to be trusted, I should have read the version translated by Robin Buss.) Reading this edition of The Count of Monte Cristo was the first time I recall where the writing really got in the way of my enjoyment of the book. The story was still exciting, I still wanted to know what would happen, but the language was so stilted. It read like it was a literal, word-for-word translation from the French (perhaps it was) and it kept dragging me back to the act of reading (which is something an author might do intentionally with language, but was certainly not the case here).

Around the same time that I read The Count of Monte Cristo, the new translations of Proust started coming out, beginning with Lydia Davis' rendition of Swann's Way and followed up by the more-correctly-translated second volume title, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (which was previously translated as Within a Budding Grove), translated by James Grieve. I had recently finished the Moncrieff-revised-by-Kilmartin translations of In Search of Lost Time and I had the idea that I had to start reading the books all over again in the "right" translations. (Big thanks to Margaret Jull Costa for letting me off the hook on that one!) A couple years after that, Pevear and Volokhonsky's new translation of War and Peace was getting all sorts of media attention and it seemed like maybe translation was having a moment. (I eventually read their War and Peace and also their translation of The Idiot. Now when I search for them it sounds as though there has been a Pevear and Volokhonsky backlash, and perhaps a backlash to the backlash, but in 2007 they were all the rage.)

Of course, the big news translations are always the new translations of old classics; the translations that render old books in modern vernacular; those that reinstate the sex and other taboo subjects excised in older translations. I was working in a bookstore when the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey was released to much acclaim. (Here Penguin Random House doesn't fail to mention the translator on the book's webpage.) Maybe if that had been the version I'd been given in school when I was assigned The Odyssey a few years earlier, I would have actually read it. Then again, maybe not. But the translation of contemporary authors rarely gets so much attention. It's simply viewed as part of the publishing process. I was in Buenos Aires a couple years ago and saw a Javier Marías book on the new release table at a bookstore. I hadn't heard he had a new book, but I knew I could look forward to an English edition in the not-too-distant future. (Meanwhile, on the same trip, but in Santiago, I came across some José Donoso books that I'm not sure have been translated into English; or if they have, are not widely available.)

Recently, I was reading something about José Saramago that mentioned his English translator, Margaret Jull Costa. I knew I knew that name, but I didn't think it was from Saramago's books, so I googled her and realized she's also Javier Marías' translator. I've read thousands of pages of her work. She has a part - and not a small one! - in making some of my favorite books accessible to me. I loved this interview with her from 2011 that I found when I tried to learn more about her. Now I want to read more of her translations. So in February, I picked up Tristana, a book I knew nothing about, simply because it was translated by Margaret Jull Costa. She didn't translate either of the Saramago books I've already read, but I have some that she did and I'll get around to them soon.

Learning about the translator's process and relation to the work they translate has become a new fascination of mine. Just a couple weeks prior to reading the Margaret Jull Costa interview I mentionend above, I heard an interview, this one with Roberto Bolaño's English translator, Natasha Wimmer. And also this interview with Megan McDowell is full of interesting insights.

Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano

After  a very busy April, I took a much-needed day off work yesterday. It was a perfect kind of day to read a book cover to cover. I did't actually read Missing Person in one sitting. I read it in bits, in bed in the morning, after my coffee, on the subway when I went downtown to run errands, on the subway back home, on the couch for an hour, on the subway on my way to the gym (which was seriously delayed and gave me more than an hour of reading time!), and I finished it while walking down Nostrand Avenue from the subway to my home.

I was reading while standing on the platform at Union Square waiting for the 4 train at around 7:15 last night when I had a profound sense of deja vu. The book mentioned a woman in the Place Malesherbes who might buy jewels from the narrator and I was sure I knew this street from something else. Earlier, the book mentioned the Parc Monceau, which I knew I had visited in Paris, and it came up in this passage again. I pulled up my map of Paris and suddenly I could picture it all. The park I remember clearly -- it was an unseasonably warm March day and the park was full of people. Apparently I only took one photo in the park.

After visiting the Parc Monceau, I also remember walking around the block of what had been Place Malesherbes (it is no longer called by that name), looking for a particular building only to find it was completely covered in scaffolding and tarp. The building I was looking for was built for the banker and art collector Émile Gaillard by the architect Jules Février. My whole excursion to this section of Paris was apparently inspired by an article on Émile Zola’s Paris.

Missing Person gives off the most intense sense of nostalgia. Not only because it is set a decade or so after WWII, but certainly that is a factor, it reminded me frequently of French new wave films. The French have again and again borrowed American noir story tropes and complicated them, and this book is an excellent example of that. The book takes place some 10 years after the end of the war and the narrator, who has been employed by a private detective, suffers from amnesia and doesn't know who he is. After the retirement of his employer, he decides to use the tools he has learned through his trade to try and discover his own past. The mystery unfolds in a beautiful and wholly unexpected way.

Beauty Is A Wound, by Eka Kurniawan

I finished Beauty Is A Wound this afternoon, and I have to say I'm relieved. I've spent the last three weeks with this book, and it has occasionally felt like a burden. It's a beautifully-written and engaging book... but it's so incredibly violent. There is every type of violence. Really gratuitous violence. Quite a lot of sexual violence. And violence towards animals, which is one of my personal triggers. And other types of violence. When I was about 2 weeks, and 250 pages into the book, I told a friend I wasn't sure I could read another 200 pages of it. The violence was hard, but the writing style makes it almost bearable. The story told in a matter-of-fact and occasionally funny voice, and it has a fairy tale aspect that I suppose lends a touch of unreality to the violence. I'm almost surprised at myself that I mostly liked this book, but there were a few days in the last three weeks when I had to mete it out in little doses, or when I couldn't bear to read it on my commute at all.

Beauty Is A Wound was my book for Indonesia, and as the representative book, it felt relevant. The story spans the period from the end of Dutch colonization to almost present day and the history and events in the country (of which I have very limited knowledge) inserted themselves frequently in the story.

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi

I had been meaning to read Homegoing for so long. I should have just bought a copy ages ago. Then a couple weeks ago I was in DC and had finished the book I brought with me on the plane. (Clearly, this was poor planning on my part, as the flight to DC is only ~45 minutes long. In my defense, this was a short work trip and I didn't expect to have much -- if any -- reading time.) The day I arrived in DC, I had a few hours before my meeting and I had planned ahead and finally booked a timed entry to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which I've been a member of since before it opened, but had never yet managed to visit. Unfortunately, I was rushed and tired and anxious about my events, so I wasn't able to commit the mental energy I should have to it. (I will make it back one day.) Anyway, on my way out I stopped at the gift shop, which has a small selection of fiction and I saw Homegoing and so finally I got around to it. I started it on the plane home. The next day, I turned around and flew to San Francisco and I finished it there a couple days later. It's as good as everyone says.

A couple weeks before my trip to DC, I was in Detroit for another meeting but I found time one morning to visit the Wright Museum of African American History. Unlike my visit to the NMAAHC, I was well-rested and I think I was the first visitor of the day (it was a weekday and I went right when they opened), so I had entire rooms to myself. I saw two exhibits on my visit the Wright: one about slavery at Monticello and the permanent exhibit called "And Still We Rise," that charts African and African American history from the earliest time until roughly the present. I found myself thinking back to elements both these exhibits while reading Homegoing.

First, the And Still We Rise exhibit. In 1993, I visited Senegal. While there, we went to the House of Slaves, a prison and port on an island off the coast of Dakar from which slave ships left Africa. It's a truly haunting place; one I still remember clearly these 26 years later. In the exhibit at the Wright, they've recreated the holding cells of an African slave port and the "Door of No Return," which, in the museum, leads you onto the upper deck of a slave ship. You can then descend to the lower level where they've tried to capture the conditions below deck. It's quite affecting. In any case, when, a few weeks later, I started Homegoing and the book's events turned up at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, this all felt very fresh in my memory -- both my recent visit to the Wright, but also my long ago visit to Senegal.

The exhibit on slavery at Monticello, Paradox of Liberty, does a pretty incredible job of centering the experience of the enslaved people in the history of Monticello. It focuses pretty heavily on the Hemings family, mainly because theirs is the most well-documented, but it actually features the family trees and histories of four enslaved families from Monticello. I took a picture of the Hemings family tree. What struck me was that family trees from the era of slavery are largely matrilineal. Between a culture of rape, the routine break-up of families, and an intentional or benign lack of record-keeping, often only mothers are known. This stands out particularly in the context of the ruling class's patriarchal structure. Homegoing also starts with a family tree that centers the mother. The book follows two branches of a family; one that remains in Africa and one that is enslaved and brought to the U.S. While there is hardship on both sides of the ocean, the family that remained in Ghana can trace their history back through the generations to the mother at the top of the family tree. Meanwhile, from the very beginning, the branch of the family that is enslaved is in a continuous state of disconnection and loss. Through the subsequent generations in the book, unknown or absent parents are a recurring theme. It was sometimes heartbreaking as a reader to know the history of each character, when often they didn't know it themselves.


This disconnect is one of the legacies of slavery, and it's one reason the work of the NMAAHC, the Wright, and similar institutions is so important. The family trees in the exhibit on slavery at Monticello were constructed through oral histories. The artifacts in the exhibit are mostly the result of archaeological excavation, because while the Jefferson family's heirlooms have been meticulously preserved over the generations, the possessions of the enslaved people at Monticello were not thought to be historically significant until recently. One of the wonderful things about the NMAAHC is the several recording booths that are scattered throughout the museum where people can record their own family's history. These institutions are trying to recreate the connections that were forcibly severed. The most powerful thing I saw at the Wright was this statue of Thomas Jefferson in front of a wall that lists all ~600 people he owned. For most, only a first name is known. For a handful, no name is known, but they are still listed. The museum can't tell all their stories, but to say their names is a start.

Probability Moon, by Nancy Kress, and The White, by Deborah Larsen

I've been traveling a bunch and reading a bunch, so I'm three books behind now, but I want to save the book I just finished, Homegoing, for a separate post.

For the past few years, I've read at least a couple sci-fi books each year, but I still feel I'm a newcomer to the genre. I read some sci-fi or sci-fi adjacent books as a kid (Douglas Adams and Madeleine L'Engle, mainly), but for most of my adulthood I didn't think it was for me, so I didn't read any. I'm not sure when exactly that changed. The first sci-fi book I read as an adult might have been Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which I had to read for a class I took at Harvard in 2002. I had seen Bladerunner dozens of times, and yet I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the book. Around the same time, I also read his A Scanner Darkly. But I always thought Philip K. Dick was a special case and not like other sci-fi. Aside from Dick, the first sci-fi book I read was The Last Castle by Jack Vance, and my decision to read that can be attributed entirely to this article, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2009. I'll admit that I thought of reading the Vance as sort of an experiment, a wading into genre, which I felt I read at a remove. I still have this feeling reading some sci-fi. A few months after reading the Vance, I read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and I subsequently went on to read nearly all his other books, starting with the Baroque Cycle. Which is to say, the first of Stephenson's books I read were not so much sci-fi either, but I do think reading Stephenson was probably a significant factor in me changing my mind about whether sci-fi was for me. So, in the intervening decade, I've read a dozen or maybe a bit more sci-fi books, and it's part of my regular rotation, but still sort of new to me and I guess I'm still trying to figure out what I like, so when I come across recommendations, I note them and that is how I ended up reading Probability Moon. I don't actually have anything profound to say about it, but I enjoyed it.

I finished reading Probability Moon on my commute to work one morning last week, and so on my lunch break that day, I did what I do in that situation: I visited the thrift store by my office that sells paperbacks for $1 to find something to start on my way home. (This despite the fact that I also keep about 8 books at the office for precisely this scenario. I said to myself, if I don't find something to read a the thrift store, then I'll read one of my office books.) I picked up The White by Deborah Larsen, which I'd never heard of, as well as All That Is, by James Salter (and two Lidia Bastianich cookbooks!) and almost started the Salter, but then wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for, so started The White instead. I wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for, but I got through more than 40 pages on the subway home and finished the whole book 2 days later (it's very spare). The White is based on the true historical figure Mary Jemison, the daughter of Irish immigrants to the colonies, who was captured by the Shawnee in 1758 and ended up making a life among the Seneca. Toward the end of her life, Mary Jemison narrated her life story to a doctor who recorded it for posterity, but she reportedly said she hadn't told him the half of it, so this book imagines the other half. The book was violent and quite troubling in parts, but of course the times that Mary Jemison lived in were violent and troubling. One of the things that I found troubling about this book, though, is that it focused (very effectively) on the personal struggles of Mary and her families, but the larger historical context feels vague in the book. This may, in fact, be true to Mary's experience, but to tell in the 21st century, a story about a white woman living among Native Americans that spans the period of American independence, knowing what we know is to come seems like leaving a lot out.

Fludd, by Hilary Mantel

My plan to read only women during Women's History Month really brought home to me how many more books I have by men than women. It might be 2:1, and the ratio of men to women authors is probably even worse, because there are a handful of women writers whose books make up large chunks of my collection. I own every or nearly every book written A.S. Byatt, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Kate Atkinson. I suspect Hilary Mantel belongs on this list of women. At present, I have -- and have read -- 3 of her books. I adored Wolf Hall. I went right out and bought Bring Up the Bodies upon finishing it, and then got so mad that the third volume was not yet out. (And this was 2015! Where is The Mirror and the Light Hilary Mantel?!) I never really looked beyond the Cromwell books but a few months back when I found a copy of Fludd at a thrift store, so I bought it for $1 and shelved it next to Bring Up the Bodies and forgot all about it until I was scanning my shelves for books by women. It's a slim book and doesn't get into the depth of its characters thoughts quite the way Wolf Hall does, but there is a familiar tenderness toward them. The book starts out rather bleakly, but the story was wholly unexpected and delightful.

The Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman and The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing

Two months into this year, I was well ahead of my usual reading schedule, but had hardly read any books by women.* I had read 11 books in 2019, but only one by a woman when I started The Time of the Doves on February 27. So, with Women's History Month around the corner, I decided to observe it by reading only books by women in March. I have now finished two, in addition to The Time of the Doves.

I can't remember who recommended The Rules of Magic, but I think it came some time ago from someone on Twitter (as a general recommendation, not for me personally). For some reason that's hard to pinpoint, I feel like this book isn't my usual fare, but I found it thoroughly enjoyable and totally absorbing on my subway commute - always a good thing. I even found myself looking to see if "Practical Magic" was streaming on any of my services (it was not). Maybe I should read the book?

Next I read The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, which is really almost a novella rather than a novel in length. I had not read Doris Lessing before and I picked up this book at some point because it was slim and seemed more approachable than The Golden Notebook. The Fifth Child is a strange book. In some ways it feels dated - the central characters are already anachronistic in the book's own present, which spans from the mid 1960s to the 1980s (coincidentally, roughly the same time-frame spanned in The Rules of Magic). In other ways, some of the issues it confronts seem very relevant still today. Something about the pressure we put on mothers and the way they are held responsible for their children felt present and urgent to me, particularly the interactions between the book's mother and the medical establishment. The Fifth Child made me uncomfortable, and I suppose that's what it intended to do.


*With the caveat, which I started a post on some time ago but have not yet finished writing, that I've read several books that were translated by women this year.

The Time of the Doves, by Mercè Rodoreda

Based solely on the merits of Mercè Rodoreda's A Broken Mirror, I went out and got 4 additional books by her. It's my understanding that The Time of the Doves is her most well-known work, which I suppose is why I went to it first when I was deciding what next to read by Rodoreda. I read this book in bursts, which was an unfortunate way to read it. I started it just before leaving on one trip and finished it while I was away on a second trip, and I was home for basically two days in between. So, I was in the process of reading The Time of the Doves for 11 days, but I probably only actually read it on 4 or 5 of those days, with stretches in between. I read the last 70 pages in one sitting, and if I had started reading it at a less disrupted time of my life, I probably would have read the whole thing in 3 days. As I said, my reading conditions were not ideal.

War stories are usually men's stories, but The Time of the Doves is a woman's war story. It follows its narrator from the day she meets her husband before the Spanish Civil War, through the trials of her life and their relationship, which intensify as he becomes involved in the war, and later into the post-war period. While the war is central to the story of The Time of the Doves, it also remains partly at remove while the book follows the domestic life of a woman in Barcelona during the war. Yesterday, completely by chance, I happened across this Robert Capa photo, "Running for shelter when the air raid siren sounds, Barcelona, Spain, January 1936." It could be a scene straight from The Time of the Doves. The war is there, sometimes in the background, sometimes forcefully in the foreground, but these women must still go about their daily lives. They must care for their children and take their dogs out for walks. These struggles feel more tangible and relatable than many battlefield stories.

The Time of the Doves is written in a stream of consciousness style, but is quite accessible. It reads almost as if the narrator is recounting her experiences on a therapist's couch, reflecting on her life, and it's really quite beautiful.

Tristana, by Benito Pérez Galdós

I have the beginnings of a post on reading in translation in my drafts, which I hope I will get around to finishing soon, but I have to get ahead of myself a little because I picked up Tristana entirely on the merits of its translator, Margaret Jull Costa. I'd read thousands of pages of Margaret Jull Costa's writing before I ever registered who she was. The moment of clarity occurred when I noticed her name on the José Saramago Wikipedia page. I knew it was a name I recognized, but I didn't think it was from reading Saramago: I'd only read two of his books -- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and The Stone Raft -- neither of which, it turns out, was translated by her. So I clicked through to her page and remembered -- of course! -- that she was Javier Marías' translator. I'd read five of her translations; three of them veritable tomes. I'd seen her name day after day while reading those books, but I'd never investigated who she was. So, I did some investigating... but that's a topic for my as yet unfinished post. In any case, I thought it would be interesting to read other of her translations and when I found Tristana at Books Are Magic, I decided to start with it. I'd never heard of Benito Pérez Galdós, though evidently he's well known in Spain. Tristana was originally published in 1892 (and was adapted by Luis Buñuel for the screen in 1970). I've read a ton of 19th Century books from France and England and Russia, but I wasn't at all familiar with non-contemporary Spanish literature (aside, of course, from Don Quixote, which I've resolved I'll finally get around to reading soon). I had no idea what I was in for. Every time I thought I knew where the story would take me, it went somewhere different. While the overall framework felt familiar: a young woman is orphaned and left in the protection of her father's friend, who seduces her and takes away her "honor," and then becomes jealous when she falls in love with a man more her own age; the execution and turn of events were totally unexpected. Tristana is a brilliant young woman who is trying find freedom of a kind that was unavailable to women in her time. I did something I almost never do while reading Tristana: I got out a pencil and marked the passages I wanted to remember. (What I usually do when I want to return to a passage later is memorize the page number, but in Tristana there were too many to keep in my head!) Tristana is such a compelling character; you sense in her this great potential, and desire that you know is out of her reach. But you also think, if anyone can rise above her circumstance, certainly Tristana would be the one do to so. Of course, things don't end well for her, but they also don't end quite where you think they might.

As a side not, Tristana is the 11th book I've finished in 2019, and the 10th by a male author. However, I've read 5 books translated by women (3 of them by Margaret Jull Costa), so that's something, right? It's something, but it's not enough.

A Heart So White, by Javier Marías

When deciding what to read next last week, I finally asked myself, "What am I waiting for?" and picked up A Heart So White. (I still have Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me set aside to read eventually.) I felt like I had been reading around A Heart So White, putting it off, for no particular reason. I do sort of wish I had read it sooner, but not sooner as in a few months ago; sooner as in before I read Your Face Tomorrow. Reading A Heart So White has given me the urge to go back and read all Marías' novels, in order.

Some Marías fan or scholar must have put together a dramatis personae from across his novels. Some recur: Peter Wheeler, who I first encountered in Your Face Tomorrow also showed up in Thus Bad Begins. Custardoy, from A Heart So White, was also a figure in Your Face Tomorrow, and I believe Villalobos from A Heart So White also made an appearance elsewhere. Others recur but with a difference: wives named Luisa, for instance. A Heart So White takes place approximately a year into the marriage between the narrator and his Luisa. Your Face Tomorrow takes place approximately a year after the dissolution of the marriage between the narrator and his Luisa (some 10-15 years after its start, if I recall). Which makes me want to go back and reread The Infatuations, which also features a wife named Luisa. Though, in that case, it's not the narrator's wife -- the narrator is a woman who has a certain fascination with the Luisa from that book.

Well into A Heart So White, I was still puzzling over whether the narrator and his Luisa were the same narrator and Luisa from Your Face Tomorrow. In fact, I would have had to wait until page 239 to know for certain that it was not -- that's when the book first reveals the narrator's first name, Juan (the narrator of Your Face Tomorrow is named Jacques or Jacobo or Jaime) -- if I hadn't accidentally glanced at the back blurb on the subway, which starts, "Juan knows almost nothing of his father Ranz's interior life...." (This is why I never read back-cover blurbs.) But there were other clues, the main one bing his father. I didn't remember the father's name from Your Face Tomorrow (if indeed you ever learn it), but I couldn't square the Nationalist father from Your Face Tomorrow, who never fully recovered professionally, or psychologically for that matter, from being on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War and the horrors he witnessed during it, with the dapper, affable, opportunist father in A Heart So White. I'm sure a side-by-side reading, or at least one closer in time would bring up more obvious differences, but the evidently different fathers was the reveal for me.

It's not just characters that recur in Marías. It's also words and themes, whole sentences sometimes. The use of the word contract in the sense of contracting an illness, for instance, but also in the sense of a marriage contract, shows up again and again in his books. Marías' books do stand on their own, of course, but they become even greater as a body of work. In Fever, the first book of Your Face Tomorrow, the narrator stays up a whole night getting progressively more drunk and furiously cross-referencing books in his friend's library, looking for clues to confirm a suspicion he has developed. I feel like I could have this sort of a feverish night with just the works of Marías.