Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books
Page 15
Yet she never disappears completely. Something of her own character must remain embedded in the lines, however tenuously, for the translation to be persuasive, for it to feel like the work of an individual rather than a conglomerate or a machine. This is why a Margaret Jull Costa translation of Javier Marías will sound slightly but noticeably different from an Esther Allen translation of Javier Marías. He is clearly the same author in both cases—witty, self-aware, elaborately eloquent, fascinated by sex and violence, immersed in movies and television, drawn to Anglo-American culture, but with a saving distance that makes him seem totally unlike anything we could have produced. (That, after all, is why we go to foreign writers, why we need them.) Still, Allen’s Marías is not quite Jull Costa’s Marías. The difference is so subtle it’s hard to define: something to do with Allen’s expansive American ear, something to do with Jull Costa’s uncanny ability to locate Anglo-Saxon equivalents for Latinate terms. If I were pressed, I would say that Esther Allen’s Marías sounds more like a Spaniard, Margaret Jull Costa’s more like a native English speaker. Which is preferable? I suppose it depends on what kind of reader you are, or perhaps on which translation you encountered first.
Priority may be what accounts for my allegiance to Michael Hulse as the translator of W. G. Sebald. The first books I read by this postwar German writer (Sebald was born in 1944, and his works all seem to be rooted in the aftermath of the Third Reich) were The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. Both were translated by Hulse, in such a marvelously poetic and yet down-to-earth way that they felt almost like works of English literature. This was especially true of The Rings of Saturn, a book built around a walking tour of England and containing numerous references to the English author Sir Thomas Browne, a favorite of Sebald’s. The Germanness of the book’s narrator was impossible to miss, but it had been transmuted, in Hulse’s sinuous sentences, into an Anglo-German melancholic sensibility. In fact, Sebald—who lived more than half his life in England, though he continued to write in his native tongue—may be one of those writers who actually appeals to English readers more than German ones, because he offers us something we Anglophones feel we collectively lack. Whether that is moral seriousness, or endless patience, or an inbred awareness of history, or an almost planetary distance from our daily habits and assumptions, or a deeply secular sense of what you might call original sin, is impossible for me to say; it’s probably a combination of all these and other things besides. Whatever it is, it lends Sebald’s works in English the kind of estranged pertinence one finds in a book like Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower or Louise Glück’s A Village Life: pertinent because we feel ourselves to be somehow implicated, yet with a safety net of foreignness that protects us from the author’s too-direct glance. It is as if Fitzgerald and Glück, reaching over from English toward something else, have arrived at the same contemplative midpoint that Sebald occupies when his strangely hybrid works—neither fully fictional or nonfictional, but always infused with an uncanny combination of imaginative reconstruction and displayed evidence—are brought into English from German.
At least, this was the feeling I got from those first two Hulse translations. So when I came to Austerlitz, translated instead by Anthea Bell, I was startled. I suspect that on some level the Bell translation is as good as the Hulse, but it was nonetheless a barrier I felt I had to overcome, a new voice added to Sebald’s old one; my “Sebald,” that is, had apparently consisted of Sebald plus Hulse. And there was again the shock of a change when I moved to Michael Hamburger’s elegant, attentive translation of Sebald’s posthumously published After Nature. (Sebald died suddenly at the age of fifty-seven in a car crash near his Norfolk home, and for those of us who had only recently discovered him, it was like losing a new friend.) This time, though, I realized what was happening and was able to brace myself against the unexpected. Also, in the case of After Nature—a book-length unrhymed poem, set out on the page in broken lines—I was alert to the way in which the transformation of genre would inevitably mean a transformation of voice. This, I subsequently reasoned, had also been true for Austerlitz, which is Sebald’s closest thing to a real novel, a sequential story featuring a fictional character other than the narrator. So what I took as a shift attributable to the translators might well have been just as much, or instead, a shift in Sebald’s own writing style. In any case, despite the differences I was sensing, Sebald remained essentially Sebald in all his manifestations, for great writers can never escape themselves, whether through translation or through their own development or even through death.
My most intense experience with translation, thus far, has involved a Japanese author. Like Javier Marías and W. G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami is a writer who is intimately acquainted with Anglo-American culture even as he remains outside it. (I think writers of this kind may well make the most interesting test cases for translation; at any rate, I find myself repeatedly drawn to them.) Murakami, who has translated Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Theroux into Japanese, is partial to the Beatles, jazz, Scotch whiskey, Marx Brothers movies, and many other products of Western culture. He often injects something akin to an American sensibility—a rebellious, non-salaryman’s sensibility—into his hapless fictional protagonists. Yet the novels are written in Japanese and set, for the most part, in Japan, so when we read them in English, we get, as with Marías and Sebald, a strange sensation of foreignness mixed with familiarity, of worlds collapsing in on each other.
The first three novels I read by Murakami—A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance Dance Dance—were all translated by Alfred Birnbaum. When I finished the books, I was mildly curious to know more about Murakami; I was desperate to know more about Birnbaum. Who was this guy who could come up with two completely different kinds of English, an old-fashioned fairy-tale diction and a sharp-edged modern idiom, to render the two intertwined plot strands of Hard-Boiled Wonderland? How did he manage to do that weird, youthful, but never annoyingly with-it voice in which Murakami’s narrator-protagonists spoke to themselves? How, in short, could he make a Japanese writer sound so remarkably American without losing any of his alien allure? All I could find out from the jacket notes was that Birnbaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1957, grew up in Japan, and lived at various times in Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, and Barcelona.
Then The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle came out. This may still be Murakami’s best-known novel in America; it was his first crossover book, the one that signaled his emergence from the ghetto of Kodansha to the more exclusive precincts of Knopf. I started the first chapter as soon as the book was available, but right away I sensed that something was wrong. Turning to the front of the book, I noticed the name of a new translator: Jay Rubin. What had happened to my dear Birnbaum? I called Kodansha, Knopf, the Society of Translators—no answer. Nobody knew anything about the missing Birnbaum. He had apparently completed the transformation required of The Ideal Translator and become a figment, a ghost, an invisible man.
But then I remembered some additional evidence of his corporeality, or at least of his presence as a translator. Before publishing his novel with Knopf, Murakami had given that same publisher a collection of short stories called The Elephant Vanishes, and the first story in the book consisted of the opening section of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I checked my copy of the book, and yes, my memory had not deceived me—that story, that beginning, had been translated by Alfred Birnbaum. So the two translators of Murakami, the two alternate realities, existed side by side.
Here, submitted as Exhibit A, are the opening sentences of the Rubin translation:
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
I wanted to ignore the phone, not only because the spaghetti was nearly done, but because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London Symphony to its musical climax.
I’m in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.
I hear the telephone ring but tell myself, Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking. It’s almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra are coming to a crescendo.
And there he is, my Birnbaum—or rather, my voice-in-the-ear version of Murakami, my Birnbaum-inflected Japanese narrator, my unemployed cosmopolitan wastrel who loves jazzy rhythms and thinks of his life in the present tense. Even the small details (the Italian rendering of the Rossini title, the use of the term “crescendo” rather than “musical climax”) seem to me crucial to the smart but strangely innocent voice. In this translation, the logic of cause-and-effect English sentence structure has been jettisoned in favor of some other mode, and it is that mode—the intrusion of the surprising and the foreign and the unknowable into the mundane regime—which marks the world of a Haruki Murakami novel.
I adapted, eventually, to Jay Rubin’s perfectly good translations, and even to the slightly more whimsical voice of Philip Gabriel, who did the English for some of Murakami’s more recent novels. (Both Rubin and Gabriel worked on the gigantic 1Q84, and I have to admit I couldn’t tell the difference between their sections.) But all along, the Birnbaum passion simmered. So you can imagine how the flame leapt up when I finished the Rubin translation of Norwegian Wood—Murakami’s first huge bestseller in Japan, published there in 1987, but not brought out in America until 2000—and read a reference in the Translator’s Note to “Alfred Birnbaum’s earlier translation of Norwegian Wood, which was produced for distribution in Japan … to enable students to enjoy their favorite author as they struggled with the mysteries of English.” We should not, the note enjoined us, try to obtain this bootleg version, for “the present edition is the first English translation that Murakami has authorized for publication outside Japan.”
Naturally I sought out the bootleg version immediately. Thanks to the internet, such things are readily available, if at a shocking price: the two little paperbacks of the Kodansha English Library edition cost me more than a hundred dollars. Not surprisingly, I found that the Birnbaum version was better, in exactly the way his opening sentences of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle were better. But I have yet to read the whole of the Alfred Birnbaum Norwegian Wood. I am saving them for a rainy day, those two cunningly miniaturized volumes, a red one and a green one, each encircled with a band of metallic paper covered in Japanese writing. They’re like a souvenir brought back from a country I’ve never visited—a strange hard-boiled wonderland of wild sheep and vanished elephants, a place that never existed except in the imaginary terrain inhabited jointly if briefly by Haruki Murakami and Alfred Birnbaum.
If you can lose an author through a change in translator, you can also gain one in the same way. I found this out with Dostoyevsky, who by now has benefited from more than a century of good translators, beginning with the remarkable Constance Garnett and going on to include David Magarshack, Sidney Monas, David McDuff, Andrew MacAndrew, and many others. Dostoyevsky’s latest English incarnation is the work of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. To date these two have translated The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons (their name for The Possessed), The Adolescent (elsewhere called A Raw Youth), and a number of the shorter novels, such as Notes from Underground, The Double, and The Gambler. What I found when I read their Demons, my earliest encounter with one of their translations, was that I consciously perceived, for the very first time, that strange narrator who is both there and not there, who comes in when the author needs him and quietly disappears when he doesn’t. Pevear and Volokhonsky have done something with Dostoyevsky’s language—I don’t know exactly what or how—so that you can actually hear that ingratiating, whiny, gossipy, unreliable, all-seeing fellow who conveys the story to you.
Once you have had your ears opened to this, you can go back to the Magarshack or the Garnett and hear it in them as well. The narrator, it turns out, was there all along, but it took these new translators to make me aware of him. So in giving us their own insightful version of this great Russian novelist, Pevear and Volokhonsky have magically enriched all the previous versions. Perhaps it takes a writer as large and multivoiced as Dostoyevsky to make room for all these translators at once. Or perhaps it takes someone who has been dead for over a hundred years, so that several generations of interpreters are required to convey him to us. But either way, it gives me hope. As long as a literary work is there in its original language, however inaccessible to me, there remains the possibility that it will eventually be given a new voice with which to speak its old lines. The new version will not quite duplicate the original—nothing can ever do that—but it will at least get me a step closer to my golden prison’s exit.
* * *
All translation work is underpaid and underpraised, but there is one kind of translation which, in my experience, operates almost completely beneath the radar, and that is the translation of mystery novels. Thanks to all this skillful drudgery, I have spent many of my most pleasurable and certainly my most addictive reading hours in an imaginary Scandinavia. Though I’ve never been to Stockholm, Oslo, or Copenhagen, I know the street names in these cities almost as well as European teenagers of the mid-twentieth century knew the landmarks of New York and Los Angeles. Their tour guides were American movies. Mine were the thrillers and mysteries of Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, Henning Mankell, Arne Dahl, Jo Nesbø, and a long list of other Scandinavian authors, all of whose craftsmanlike works were brought to me by equally craftsmanlike—that is to say, nearly invisible—translators. Without looking them up, I cannot tell you the translators’ names; from a readerly point of view, their identities have merged completely with those of their respective authors.
What is it about Scandinavian mysteries that makes them, on average, so much better than anyone else’s? I’m not saying Americans can’t write good thrillers: Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series would come near the top of any aficionado’s list, as would Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books. But these psychological, individualistic portraits of twisted motivation represent only a sliver of what the genre can do. In the right hands, the mystery novel becomes not only a thrilling cat-and-mouse game between a clever murderer and a persistent detective, but also a commentary on the wider society that spawns, polices, and punishes murder. It is this aspect, the wider, social view, at which the Scandinavians excel.
Perhaps one can attribute this in part to the small size of these far northern countries, their relatively homogenous populations, their stable cultural traditions—a setting, in short, in which murders, and especially serial murders, stand out starkly and beg for analysis. Or maybe this wider focus is connected to the firmly if mildly socialist perspective of even the most conservative Scandinavian governments, a view in which individual behavior contributes to or detracts from the public welfare. Possibly the dark, cold, long winters also have a role: with those extreme alternations between everlasting night and midnight sun, the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians may be more likely than the rest of us to reflect on the role of environment in shaping character. The citizens of these countries also seem unusually alert to their own national pasts (unlike Americans, say, for whom the mid-twentieth century is already History), and this in turn makes them more likely to seek cause and effect in these collective historical influences. In any event, what all these factors add up to is a worldview that places the criminal at the center of a social web. This is not necessarily what makes Scandinavian mysteries addictive—that can probably be attributed to the more usual thriller qualities of suspense and surprise—but it accounts for at least part of what makes them satisfying, in that you reach the end of each novel with a sense of f
ulfillment rather than letdown.
The greatest of all Scandinavian mysteries are undoubtedly the Martin Beck series, ten sequential volumes written in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Swedish husband-and-wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who sought to convey a changing Swedish society through the crimes investigated by Detective Beck and his band of policemen. Closer to our own time, the worthiest inheritors of the Sjöwall-Wahlöö mantle that I’ve been able to find are Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander novels. I should pause here, though, to admit (for once) that my “undoubtedly” is not universally agreed to. Louise Glück—who in her own way is as much of a mystery addict as I am—believes that the Kurt Wallander books are even greater than the Martin Beck series. She has read and reread each volume many times, and at least one of her own poetry collections, Averno, is infused throughout with images that she privately but very consciously borrowed from the Wallander novels. Where I find Mankell’s sentences serviceable, she finds them compelling and evocative. She is so adamant in her devotion, and so effective in her expression of it, that she has almost begun to shake my own conviction about the superiority of the Martin Becks.
I began reading the Kurt Wallander novels in the final years of the twentieth century, when they first started appearing in English, and I have reread most of them at least once since then. The first one, Faceless Killers, was published in Swedish in 1991, and after that they came out on a nearly annual basis, with each book set about a year earlier than its date of publication. What this topicality meant was that Mankell was often riding the wave of history before it had even had time to break on our shores. The 1992 Dogs of Riga, for instance, anticipated the disarray into which the Soviet Union and its satellite states would soon fall; the 1993 White Lioness was even more prescient about the dying gasps of apartheid in South Africa. Part of the reason for reading Mankell obviously lies in his penetrating social and political vision. He occupies a larger world than ours (than mine, anyway: he spends part of each year in Sweden and the rest directing a theater company in Mozambique), and he is able to make a great deal of what he observes in that world. But to rest the praise for the Kurt Wallander series entirely on this largeness would be to ignore what is perhaps best about the books: their rueful, tender attention to detail.