Almost Lost in Translation Part 2

Beyond Sleep by W F Hermans (1966, translated by Ina Rilke in 2006)

Willem Frederik Hermans was a Dutch writer who is generally regarded as one of the three most important post-war writers in the Netherlands, alongside Harry Mulisch and Gerard Reve (one of whom may feature later). Despite this, his only previous translation into English was in the 1966 anthology The World of Modern Fiction. Luckily Ina Rilke rescued Hermans from this indignity by translating Beyond Sleep in 2006. The novel tells the story of Dutch geologist on an expedition to the north of Norway which does not go according to plan. This was followed the next year by the more serious The Darkroom of Damocles set during the German occupation of Holland. Sadly, neither made a huge impression, but in 2018 his novella, The Untouched House, also set during war-time, was translated by David Colmer and published by Pushkin Press, who now plan to reprint the previous two novels, so perhaps a Herman revival is on the cards. You can read a review of Beyond Sleep by Michel Faber here.

 

Seven Stories by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (written during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, translated by Joanne Turnbull in 2006)

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was a Russian writer of short stories and novellas, most of which were unpublished in his lifetime (1887-1950) due to a combination of bad luck and Soviet censorship. It was not until 1989 that his work began to be published in Russia with a collected edition finally appearing between 2001 and 2005 According to Adam Thirlwell “Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction is based on the fact that language makes things possible that are not possible in reality.” Although the New York Review of Books Classics imprint has become his de facto publisher in English (beginning with Memories of the Future in 2009), his stories first appeared in 7 Stories from Glass New Russian Writing translated by Joanne Turnbull in 2006. Krzhizhanovsky continues to appear in translation with a fifth volume from NYRB, Unwitting Street, is due in August. You can read a review of 7 Stories on Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings here.

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (1947, translated by Michael Hofmann in 2009)

Alone in Berlin (or Every Man Dies Alone – the direct translation of its title in German used on its original publication in the US by Melville House) was published in 1947, the same year as Hans Fallada’s death. Though Fallada’s work had been translated into English throughout the thirties (indeed, he thought of immigrating to England after Hitler came to power), he was long forgotten until the publication of Michael Hofmann’s translation in 2009. Fallada’s story of an ordinary couple’s resistance to the Nazis was a huge success (you can tell from this list that UK readers still have a keen appetite for anything related to the Second World War) and, like Suite Francaise, was made into a film. Further translations followed, including two more from Hofmann (A Small Circus and Tales from the Underworld) and another late novel, Nightmare in Berlin, translated by Allan Blunden. You can read my review of Alone in Berlin here.

Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson (1947, translated by Damion Searls in 2010)

Hans Keilson was also a German writer, but he left Germany for the Netherlands in 1936 (he was Jewish) and later, under the German occupation, had to go into hiding. His experiences informed Comedy in a Minor Key, translated by Damion Searl and published by Hesperus Press in 2010. This short novel is about a Dutch couple hiding a Jewish man, but (proving it’s not entirely autobiographical) the man dies and the couple must find a way to dispose of the body: it’s a fairly dark comedy. Round about the same time the novel he wrote while in hiding, The Death of the Adversary, (in a 1962 translation by Ivo Jarosy) was republished and his first novel, Life Goes On, was translated by Searl in 2012. Though he lived until the age of 101, there were no further novels, though you can also read his 1944 War Diary in English. You can read a review of Comedy in a Minor Key by David Ulin here.

 

The Topless Tower by Silvina Ocampo (1986, translated by James Womack, 2010)

The Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo has, for many years, lived in the shadow of her husband Adolfo Bioy Casares, and his (and her) even more famous friend, Jorge Luis Borges. Yet throughout her life she published regularly, although her work mainly consists of stories (many for children) and poetry, leaving her lacking the major novel which is often use to launch a writer in English. The Topless Tower is more a story than a novel – it would be generous to call it a novella. In it the narrator finds himself locked in a windowless room in a tower, which he first saw in a mysterious stranger’s painting. It was a slim introduction to Ocampo’s work, but was followed in 2015 by a selection of her stories, Thus Were Their Faces, and, more recently, the posthumous novel The Promise and her first collection of stories from 1937, Forgotten Journey. It seems her work is finally making it into English. You can read my review of The Topless Tower here.

Subtly Worded by Teffi (a selection of short stories written between 1920 and 1952, translated by Ann Marie Jackson in 2014)

Teffi was a Russian writer who began publishing short stories in 1905. She left Russia after the Revolution and settled in Paris. Up until 2014 her stories had only ever been published in English in anthologies. This changed when Pushkin Press brought out a collection of her work translated by Anne Marie Jackson, Subtly Worded, revealing Teffi to be an adept and often amusing proponent of the form. This was followed by two other collections, Rasputin and Other Ironies, and the autobiographical Memories – From Moscow to the Black Sea. You can read a review of Subtly Worded at JacquiWine’s Journal here.

The Promise

“Can one write a novel without a plot?” asks a character in Silvina Ocampo’s only novel, The Promise, now translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell.

“Naturally. One could write forever about their feelings.”

The Promise is not, of course, entirely without a plot, but neither is it a novel for those who long for the fast pace of narrative events. Its central conceit is that its narrator, en route to Capetown, falls into the ocean and can only watch the ship “calmly moving away.” If she survives, she promises to write what she calls “this dictionary of memories” while at the same time admitting:

“I don’t have a life of my own: I have only feelings. My experiences were never important – not during the course of my life or even on the threshold of death. Instead the lives of others have become mine.”

Just as she is left floating on the ocean, an observer of the ship’s continuing voyage beyond the horizon, so too she characterises herself as an observer of others, floating through events she bears little influence on. What she remembers instead are the people she has known:

“I began my itinerary of memories with names and even biographical descriptions, down to the last detail, of people I had known in my life. Naturally, they didn’t emerge from my memory in chronological order or in the pecking order of my feelings for them, but instead appeared in a capricious way…”

What follows is a series of character vignettes, generally headed by the name of the character. Some are only mentioned once, while others reappear. Of most importance are Irene, her daughter Gabriela, and Irene (and the narrator’s) lover, Leandro. Irene and Gabriela’s characters are very different: Irene is a romantic, at the mercy of her emotions; Gabriela is analytical, forensic. Whereas Irene “upon discovery of love…believed in its fleeting salvation,” “what [Gabriela] desired most in the universe of her curiosity was to see a man and a woman doing it.” We first meet Gabriela left waiting in the street while Irene and Leandro make love. This distance between them is also echoed in Gabriela’s feelings for her mother:

“Gabriela loved Irene more than anyone else in the world. Nevertheless, she had spent the happiest days of her life far away from her…”

The narrator’s relationship to these characters remains undefined. At points, as she remembers them, she becomes them:

“I felt Irene’s heartbeat through Gabriela’s breast; I felt the sweat from Gabriela’s hair on Irene’s breast.”

As she later says:

“I’m inhabited now by infinite people who disturb my memory.”

We find a similar situation with Leandro, the character who most often recurs:

“Everything he told me now feels like it happened to me.”

Leandro is a trainee doctor – and a womaniser: “Everyone fell in love with him.” He may even be a composite character: “Leandro has infinite faces,” and “It was as if he were several men” suggest as much. In his relationship with Irene it is clear he does not return her love quite as enthusiastically as she might hope. Later he falls for another woman, Victoria, when he finds pages from her novel on the street. Interestingly, the word ‘promise’ is also used with reference to this writing too:

“These pages were the promise of something new.”

Stories of Leandro ensure that much of the novel is focused on the theme of love, but it is primarily about memory. Ocampo continued to write the novel (begun in the sixties) until the years before her death in 1993, and it is difficult not to see elements of it as a response to approaching mortality. The disappearing ship is the sense that life is leaving her behind, the stories an attempt to ward off death, as she admits:

“I told stories to death so that it would spare my life…”

which later becomes:

“I don’t know what to do so as not to die, so as not to fall apart, lose my identity completely and forget everything else.”

This gives the novel a poignancy which goes beyond the memories collected:

“Now I just float on top of the water, my name, my face, my identity forgotten.”

There is perhaps a certain irony that only now is Ocampo being recognised as the important writer she is.

The Topless Tower

During Spanish Lit Month I reviewed Where There’s Love, There’s Hate by husband and wife Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo This collaboration was my first acquaintance with Silvina Ocampo (who was a prolific writer but notoriously unavailable in English) and may well have been my last if I hadn’t fortuitously discovered that only a few years ago Hesperus Press had published a translation by James Womack of The Topless Tower. It is referred to in the introduction (co-authored by Marion Womack, hopefully another marital co-production) as “one of only two novels published during Ocampo’s lifetime” (the other being the, at that time, untranslated Where There’s Love, There’s Hate) but this is a rather generous description as, at 56 pages, I would be reluctant to call it a novella.

Ocampo edited The Book of Fantasy with Borges and Casares (it includes one of her stories) and most of her fiction was of that genre, including her children’s fiction. The Topless Tower uses many of the tropes of children’s literature from the fairy tale tower of the title to an appearance from Alice in Wonderland. James and Marion Womack suggest this is one reason why she is not better known:

“But one more answer to the question of why Silvina Ocampo is not better known is that large parts of her activity, her imaginative stories and plays and poetry, has to be filtered, or so it seems, through the unfairly marginalising label of ‘children’s writing’.”

It is certainly true that, although The Topless Tower contains many elements of a children’s fable, one senses a darker intelligence behind it. Consider, for example:

“Will the images we’ve seen through our lives remain in our eyes? Will we be like a modern camera, filled with little rolls of film; of course, rolls that don’t require to be developed? If I die before reaching my home, before seeing my mother who I love so much, will she get to see the photographic film stored inside me?”

The idea and voice here are childlike but there is a gothic imagination behind the image.

In the story a young boy, Leandro, laughs at the paintings of a man who appears at the garden gate offering them for sale, particularly one of a yellow, windowless tower. He immediately finds himself trapped in just such a tower where he finds a room with an easel and paints. He soon discovers that whatever he paints becomes reality. Initially he struggles to control this ability: branches become spiders; creepers become snakes. Above all he wants to paint his mother, which he feels will unlock his imprisonment and allow his return home, but this proves most difficult of all.

The story becomes a fable about growing up. He paints a bird and monkey as companions but loses them carelessly. Next he attempts a self-portrait (showing increasing self-awareness) which gives him another perspective, dismissing his lost pets: “You were talking about those two as if they were humans.” In his pursuit of his mother’s face he creates a young girl:

“It wasn’t his mother, but he didn’t feel much disappointment about this. He had fallen in love with the little girl he had painted by accident.”

His maturing is also seen in the way that underlined words, those he doesn’t understand (“I’ll underline the words I don’t understand” he says at the beginning), increasingly disappear from the narrative.

The Topless Tower is a strange story, flickering between light and shade, but one that does haunt the memory. It does seem very slight for stand-alone publication, and would be better as part of a selected stories – one can only hope that might one day appear.

Where There’s Love, There’s Hate

Adolfo Bioy Casares is probably best known for his friendship and collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges. They wrote a number of books together, adopting the pen-name of Bustos Domecq, and co-edited the anthology The Book of Fantasy. Casares was an author in his own right, however, most famously of the novel The Invention of Morel. Now, thanks to Melville House and translators Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Ernst Powell, we have another of his collaborations, Where There’s Love, There’s Hate, which he wrote with his wife Silvina Ocampo. Where There’s Love, There’s Hate is not an unjustly neglected classic, but it is an absolute delight, the fun the couple clearly had concocting their tale communicating itself charmingly to the reader.

Where There’s Love, There’s Hate takes the form of a murder mystery. The setting is a suitably isolated hotel:

“The building, white and modern, appeared picturesquely set in the sand like a ship on the sea, or an oasis in the desert.”

The guests are a suitably varied and interconnected collection: Mary, who (in the first of many in-jokes which also prove relevant to the plot) translates detective novels, her sister, Emilia, Emilia’s fiancé, Atuel, a Doctor Cornejo, and an Englishman, Manning. Also present are the hotel owners, and their mysterious young son, Miguel. The final guest is the narrator, also a doctor, Humberto Huberman, who from the beginning, has the fortunate habit of overhearing:

“…by now it was impossible not to hear the voices. Reluctantly, I strained to place them. They were the voices form the beach. Emilia and Mary were insulting each other with a shocking ferocity! I could scarcely bare to listen to them.”

It is Mary who is found poisoned the next morning. Huberman, as we would expect from our narrator, is convinced that he can unravel the mystery of her death. Unfortunately he is far from the ideal protagonist, and it is here that much of the novel’s humour lies. As well as being arrogant and ego-centric, he finds it difficult to treat the fatality with any seriousness. Even while examining the body he reflects on a comment he has made, “I found this amusing”, and later watches with tears of laughter in his eyes as the coffin is brought to the hotel. He is similarly distracted by his appetite. While discussing Mary’s death shortly afterwards, his mind is elsewhere:

“It wasn’t only the soup that deserved high praise. The toast was outstanding.”

Above all, his investigation, based largely on his knowledge of detective fiction, is frequently well off the mark. Meanwhile the real investigation (of which he thinks he is an integral part) goes on around him. When he finds Manning and Atuel making notes on detective novels which Mary has translated he refers to this as “childish activities” little knowing that they are closer to discovering the truth than he is.

What is impressive about Where There’s Love, There’s Hate is that it works successfully as a whodunit while at the same time satirising the genre. Casares and Ocampo also create an insufferable narrator with whom the reader happily spends time. Any lover of detective fiction looking for something a little different should get hold of this book.