Category Archives: Literature in Translation

June 4, 2017 · 7:19 pm

Beware of reading too much Latin poetry: Stendhal’s Italian Chronicles

The nine stories in this collection are Stendhal’s translations and retellings of historical records from Italy in the 16th century which depict the upper classes behaving very badly: forbidden love, murder, adultery, torture, poisoning are all found within the pages of Stendhal’s translations.  Written between 1829 and 1840, most of the stories in this volume were not published until Stendhal’s death.  He tells us himself, in the beginning of “The Duchess of Palliano”, why the stories from this time period and in this part of Europe so fascinated him. Stendhal believes that “Italian passion” is something that no longer exists in the literature and culture of his own era.  Love, in particular, he observes, has given rise to so many tragic events among the Italians and Stendhal is fascinated with visiting Italy and searching through the archives of Rome, Florence and Siena to find stories of these “Italian passions”:

In order to get some idea of this “Italian passion,” that our novelists speak about with such assurance, I found it necessary to study history; and I found that the great histories written by men of talent, though often quite majestic, say almost nothing of such details. They tend to take note only of the follies committed by kings or princes.

Stendhal, in his extensive research, has a penchant for finding stories in which upper class Italian women from prominent 16th century families fall in love with men of lower rank for which unforgiveable indiscretions they are put on trial and condemned to death.  In “The Duchess of Palliano,” A Duke, in service to his uncle Pope Paul IV, takes advantage of his authority by pillaging local villages and engaging in all sorts of erotic debauchery.  One of his favorite pastimes is bringing home mistresses, one after the other, while at the same time expecting that his wife, the Duchess of Palliano, remain faithful and look the other way as far as his own sexual trysts are concerned.  Inevitably, the neglected Duchess falls in love with a handsome young man of the court and through a series of betrayals the Duchess and her lover are found out.  Her lover’s throat is slit and the Duchess herself is put to death by strangulation.  Stendhal doesn’t hold back from translating the gruesome details of these Italian chronicles—descriptions of torture, murder, suicide are all included in these passionate stories.

The longest story in the collection, “The Abbess of Castro” is one that has the most passion because of the primary source letters that Stendhal translates.  Elena de Campireali, the daughter of a noble family who possessed great wealth and many estates in the kingdom of Naples, is the central figure of this tragic story.  Elena’s father and brother are horrified when they learn she has fallen in love with a lower class brigand named Giulio Branciforte.  I found Stendhal’s introduction to Elena’s story particularly amusing:

It would appear that Elena knew Latin.  The verse she was made to learn spoke always of love, a love that would seem completely ridiculous to us if we were to come across it in 1839; that is, it treated of passionate love, love that was nourished by great sacrifices, love that can subsist only in an atmosphere of mystery, and love that is always found accompanying the most horrible misfortunes.

A fair warning from the author for those who might engage in too much translation of Catullus, Ovid, or Propertius!

Guilio visits Elena every night by standing under her balcony window and giving her a bouquet of flowers with a letter attached.  Stendhal includes translations from large excerpts of their passionate letters.  Guilio writes to Elena in one of the notes embedded in her flowers:

To tell the truth, I do not know why I love you; I certainly cannot propose that you come and share my poverty.  But what I do know is that if you do not love me, my life is worthless to me; it is useless to say that I would give it up a thousand times over for you.  But before your return from the convent, this life was not an unfortunate one; on the contrary, it was full of the most wonderful dreams.  So I can say that the sight of my happiness has made me miserable.

Stendhal has a valid point: we don’t see letters like this in the 19th or, for that matter, in the 21st century, do we?  Like the other stories in the collection, there is no happy ending for these two lovers.  Even though they profess their undying, eternal love for one another, in the end they cannot prevent her family from keeping them apart.

Despite the fact that these stories end in with the lovers’ deaths, they are full of passion, intrigue and interesting historical descriptions and details that Stendhal uncovers through his research.  Italian Chronicles is a fascinating look into the lives of 16th century Italian nobility through the eyes of the astute, erudite 19th century French novelist.

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May 18, 2017 · 10:48 am

Review: The Death of the Perfect Sentence by Rein Raud

“If we always knew in advance what was going to happen, we would behave like machines.  So in a sense it is the unexpected things in life that make us who we are.” —Rein Raud

My Review:

In Rein Raud’s latest novel he cleverly inserts his own voice into his narrative by including text boxes with personal stories, observations, anecdotes and proverbs.  For example, one such text box in the novel states:

When the big boss walks past
the wise peasant bows low
and quietly farts.

(Ethiopian proverb)

This is, admittedly, an odd way of starting a review about a book that deals with spying and subterfuge during the waning years of Soviet Occupation in Estonia. But Raud’s inclusion of these observations into his text is the perfect demonstration of the author’s ability to mix serious topics with his subtle and wry humor.

The novel begins with descriptions, in alternating chapters, of a group of Estonian youths who have formed an alliance to collect and smuggle secret KGB files out of Estonia.  Each person is given a background story so that we better understand their motivations for undertaking such a potentially dangerous operation.  These Estonians , like the Ethiopian proverb says, bow low to their masters, the Soviet occupiers, but they find subtle and subversive ways to fight back against their oppressors.  Among the group is Indrek who, when he reaches eighteen, moves out of his parents’ home and has no desire to do what is expected of him and work at a construction brigade.  Erwin seems to be the most restless of the bunch and no matter what happens with the rest of the group he is determined to find his way to freedom.  And the most interesting is Anton who is caught between two worlds because of his Estonian father and Russian mother.

As the story progresses the role of each of these Estonians in their alliance becomes clearer.  By alternating between different points of view, the story maintains its suspense until very end when all of the characters’ roles in the operation are revealed.  The varying points of view also provide a rich and multifaceted peek into the lives of everyday Estonians during this time period.  I found it especially fascinating that the book allows us to see how different people and different generations dealt with life under Soviet rule.  A young man named Raim, for instance, lives with his conservative parents who spend quite a bit of time watching Finnish television.  The USSR was not able to block the Finnish TV signals, so Estonians got a wider view of what was going on beyond the Iron Curtain than their counterparts in Russia.  Although Raim has joined his friends to combat the Soviet regime, his parents seem more resigned to their fate.  Raim’s father isn’t necessarily interested in seeing the blue, white and black Estonian flag fly over the capital once again, but he would like to be able to travel to Finland without having to go through a labyrinth of officials and paperwork.

Another interesting way in which Raud demonstrates the tension and conflict between oppressor and oppressed is through the insertion of a romance into the narrative.  An Estonian young woman named Maarja who becomes involved in the mission to smuggle KGB files to the west develops feelings for Alex, a Russian economist from Leningrad whom she meets at a café.  Neither of them knows that the other is involved in the smuggling of files so their romance, at first, progresses as a separate plot within the novel.  The author makes an intriguing choice in their relationship to use a woman as the Estonian character to represent the smaller, weaker and oppressed and to use a male as the Russian to represent the larger, stronger oppressor.  But their romantic involvement and their characters are much more complicated than a simple case of conqueror and conquered.  Alex is a kind young man who treats Maarja with respect and their romance is simple, romantic, tender and naïve; when Maarja’s friends begin to question her choice of a Russian boyfriend she, too, buys into their paranoia and mistrust of Alex.  In the end it doesn’t matter if Alex is kind, genuine, romantic and able to whisper the perfect sentence into Maarja’s ear because the deep seated mistrust in anything Russian will destroy their hopes.

The best writing and most enlightening parts of the book are the ones in which the author inserts his own voice and commentary into the fictional story.  Raud describes his life as an Estonian living during and after the occupation, his first trip to Finland, and his motivations for writing this book.  There is one particularly poignant text box in which he discusses an old Chinese curse and how it relates to his experiences living through a communist regime:

“May you live in interesting times”

In 1936, shortly before Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen departed on a diplomatic mission to China, one of his friends told him about a Chines curse he had once heard: ‘May youlive in interesting times!’ Or at least that is what Knatchbull-Hugessen claims in his memories.  There are some other British authors who appear to have know of such an expression too.  The Chinese, however, do not.  The closest thing in meaning which they have is the following: ‘It is better to live as a dog in peaceful times than as a human in a world of confusion.’

And what about it?

Just like anyone else, I have done things in my life which I am not proud of, and even one or two things which I regret.  But I have no reason to be anything other than happy that I have lived in a  period when I have, and that I have been able to experience one world changing into another.  So what if this has stirred hungers in me which have damaged me?  I am willing to pay that price, if only for the perspective it gave me, which is something I do not encounter in people who have lived under only one political order.

As someone who has only lived under one political order, I wholeheartedly agree with Raud’s assessment.  When I read books like his or Sergei Lebedev’s novels about life under Soviet rule they feel more like movies or dreams to me than reality.  The Death of the Perfect Sentence and politically charged literature that is similar to it are important so that we can have some iota of perspective, especially in these turbulent political times.  A lack of perspective, I think,  is one of the reasons for many Americans apathy at the mess our current president has made of the American system of government.  It is alarming to me how many people I encounter that don’t understand or care about the news; those who are not adequately alarmed by the machinations of our current president seem to have the attitude that our system has always worked for us and allowed us to be free so why wouldn’t it continue to do so?  Raud’s book is timely and important for those of us who, whether we like to acknowledge it or not, are living in “interesting times.”

One final aside that the author includes in the narrative is a very personal account of his attitude towards this book.  He writes, “Even after I put the final full stop in the draft of this story, it took me a long time to shake the moods which it evoked in me.  It was hard to think of anything else…And I still feel that I am somehow trapped inside it.”  I found The Death of the Perfect Sentence thought-provoking, relevant and chilling and it will linger with me for a long time to come.  We had better learn from countries like Estonia or we might find ourselves bowing low to a big boss…

Coming soon on the blog, I have an interview with Rein Raud in which we discuss the themes of family and relationships in his books, his interesting use of narrative voice and his thoughts on the current state of literature in Estonia.

About the Author:

Rein Raud was born in Estonia in 1961. Since 1974, he has published numerous poetry collections, short stories, novels, and plays. For his works he has received both the Estonian Cultural Endowment Annual Prize and the Vilde Prize. Having earned his PhD in Literary Theory from the University of Helsinki in 1994, Raud is also a widely published scholar of cultural theory as well as the literature and philosophy of both modern and pre-modern Japan. For more information on purchasing The Death of the Perfect Sentence visit https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/bookshop-changelings/the-death-of-the-perfect-sentence or the author’s website: http://reinraud.com/

 

 

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May 9, 2017 · 2:17 pm

Fato Profugus: Teffi’s Memories—From Moscow to The Black Sea

As I was reading Teffi’s memoir about her katabasis from Russia to Constantinople during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, two words from Vergil’s Aeneid kept coming to mind: fato and profugus .   After barely escaping from the burning and destruction of Troy, Aeneas is profugus–“exiled”, “driven forward”, he is essentially a fugitive or a refugee.  The fate of his sea voyage and his various landings are the result of fatum, “fate” driving him along from one place to the next; he rarely, if ever, chooses his next destination.  Like Aeneas, Teffi is a refugee and much of her flight from her motherland is a result of fate and circumstance.  At one particularly dramatic part of her journey in Odessa she reflects, “And then there I was, rolling down the map.  Fate had pushed me on, forcing me wherever it chose, right to the very edge of the sea.  Now, if it so wished, it could force me right into the sea—or it could push me along the coast.  In the end, wasn’t it all the same?”

Teffi’s journey begins in Moscow when an impresario named Gooskin approaches her and convinces her to do a series of readings in Odessa: “My Petersburg life has been liquidated.  The Russian Word has been closed down.  There is, it seems, no possibility of anything.  Or rather, there is one possibility; it appears, day after day, in the shape of a squint-eyed Odessa impresario by the name of Goodskin, who is trying to persuade me to go with him to Kiev and Odessa and give public readings there.”   There are many scenes throughout the narrative, similar to this opening paragraph, in which Teffi allows herself to be swept up and carried along the waves of fate and hordes of people and luggage from one city to the next.

The tone of Teffi’s narrative reminded me of Lenora Carrington’s memoir Down Below;  in both memoirs there is strange calm, almost an indifference that pervades the texts.  But I would argue that each woman, writing her memoir in hindsight, is attempting to relate the most harrowing and traumatic experiences they have ever experienced and the only way to revisit such horror is to do it with as little emotion as possible. Both of these narratives also seem to be cathartic farewells for these women: Carrington bids goodbye to her mental illness and her relationship with Max Ernst while Teffi is paying a final adieu to her beloved Russia.

Teffi’s Memories were originally written and published as serials in the Russian language newspaper Vozrozhdenie  between 1928 and 1930.  At that point Teffi had been in exile for ten years and was able to tell her story of chaos, violence and destruction caused by the Bolsheviks as they take over one city after another with a certain amount of detached calm.  The human spirit can only take so much suffering and Teffi gives us a glimpse into her mindset as she escapes one dangerous situation after another.  When she is left almost alone in a desolate hotel in Odessa, unsure of how she will escape that city she writes:

My future was a matter of complete indifference to me.  I felt neither anxiety nor fear.  In any case there was nothing I could do.  In my mind I retraced my strange journey from Moscow, always south, always further south, and always without any deliberate choice.  In the form of Gooskin, the hand of fate had appeared.  It had pushed me on my way.

As  Teffi  narrowly escapes invading forces while making her way south from Kiev to Odessa to Novorossiisk,  she describes her experiences with cramped train journeys, cold and uncomfortable living quarters, food shortages and outbreaks of  Spanish influenza and typhus.  Teffi’s humor and strong spirit, however, prevent the tone of this memoir from becoming horrendously bleak.  As she leaves Odessa she runs into a beauty salon full of women who don’t want to go into exile without getting their hair done; in Novorossiisk she meets a woman who is so proud of her newly made dress that is fashioned completely out of medical gauze.

In addition to her humor and her resilent spirit, there are certain objects that Teffi carries along with her that give her comfort as a refugee.  Her guitar, her religious artifacts and her sealskin coat are dragged along with her from city to city.  One of the most poignant stories in the book was about her sealskin coat that she wraps around her for warmth while traveling by train and she makes us understand that those coats represented the entire, prolonged journey of Russian refugees:

Were there any of us who did not have a sealskin coat?  We put these coats on as we first set out, even if this was in summer, because we couldn’t bear to leave them behind—such a coat was both warm and valuable and none of us knew how long our wanderings would last.  I saw sealskin coats in Kiev and in Odessa, still looking new, their fur all smooth and glossy.  Then in Novorossiisk, worn thin around the edges and with bald patches down the sides and on the elbows.  In Constantinople—with grubby collars and cuffs folded back in shame.  And, last of all, in Paris, from 1920 until 1922.  By 1920 the fur had worn away completely, right down to the shiny black leather.  The coat had been shortened to the knee and the collar and cuffs were now made from some new kind of fur, something blacker and oilier—a foreign substitute.  In 1924 these coats disappeared.  All that remained was odds and ends, torn scraps of memories, bits of trimming sewn onto the cuffs, collars, and hems of ordinary woolen coats.  Nothing more.  And now, in 1925, the timid, gentle seal was obliterated by invading hordes of dyed cats.  But even now when I see a sealskin coat, I remember this epoch in our lives as refugees.

Teffi’s memoir is timely because it reminds us that the many refugees we see on a daily basis in the media are suffering hardships that we couldn’t begin to otherwise imagine.  What objects do these refugees, who are also exiled by fate, carry along with them?  As these refugees are forced to live in camps and not welcomed by other nations we should ask ourselves what would have happened if Teffi didn’t have a place like Paris to welcome her and give her a new home?

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April 13, 2017 · 9:59 pm

Nil de Nilo Fit: A Different Sea by Claudio Magris

ἀρετή τιμὴν φέρει, (excellence brings honor), are the first words spoken by Magris’s protagonist in A Different Sea.  Enrico has graduated from the Royal Imperial Staatsgymnasium of Gorizia and has decided to set sail for Patagonia in an attempt to live an authentic life, free from material items, worry,  and The Great War which is about to break out in Europe.  His mind has been shaped by the Ancient Greek texts that he and his friends Nino and Carlo are so fond of reading in Nino’s attic room:

Up in Nino’s attic in Gorizia they would read Homer, the tragedians, the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and the New Testament in the original Greek, and Schopenhauer—also, of course, in the original; the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Sermon of Benares and the other teachings of Buddha; Ibsen, Leopardi, and Tolstoy.  They used to exchange their thoughts and describe the day’s events, like that story of Carlo and the dog, in ancient Greek, and then translate them into Latin for fun.

Enrico has an existential crisis in his youth as he is trying to decide what, for him, constitutes excellence in his life.  To the Homeric heroes he is so fond of studying, excellence comes in the form of success on the battlefield which, in turn, brings them honor.  Enrico’s search for purpose in life seems to have more elements of Epicurean philosophy than Homeric values.  He feels the most content when he is with his friends, in the attic, discussing life and Greek philosophy.  Epicurus himself achieved ἀταραξία (a lack of disturbance) sitting in his garden and contemplating human existence with his friends.

The Epicurean elements of Magris’s text continue as Enrico traverses the ocean in order to reach South America.  Enrico craves simplicity, has no interest in politics, avoids pain and has no fear of death.  On board the ship, when he is told the story of a famous captain who dies at sea Enrico remarks: “Nil de nilo fit et nil in nilum abit” (nothing happens from nothing and nothing will go into nothing).  Once he reaches Argentina he spends weeks and months alone herding his flocks and living in a modest hut with only a bed and a few Greek books.

When Enrico finally returns home he settles in Salvore and also lives a modest life in a small house and rents his land out to tenants.  But he still remains unhappy and unfulfilled since his friends have all died and he fails to make connections with anyone else in his life.  Every time he has the chance to get close to someone, especially a woman, he ends up driving them away.  His poor relationship with women begins early in his life with his mother whom he feels favors his younger brother.  He finds comfort in having a woman with him who can also fulfill his sexual needs but he treats each woman he lives with very badly.  Even his niece, for whom he at first develops a fondness, is treated poorly and verbally abused by Enrico.  In the end Enrico’s loneliness and his failure to achieve ἀταραξία are due to his inability to make emotional connections with other people in his life.  He never finds his excellence, his reason for living, something that can bring him honor and self-satisfaction.

I found Magris’s writing in A Different Sea as enjoyable as his longer novel Blameless which I recently reviewed.  He is fond of weaving images of the sea into his stories, imbedding stories within stories in his texts, and portraying flawed characters who are searching for meaning in this random, crazy life.

Here is a link to a recent interview with Claudio Magris whose English translation of Blameless has just been published by Yale University Press: http://blog.yupnet.org/2017/04/13/writing-as-witness-a-conversation-with-claudio-magris/

For a more detailed discussion of excellence and honor in Homer see my thoughts on Logue’s War Music: https://thebookbindersdaughter.com/2017/03/23/excellence-and-honor-in-logues-war-music/

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April 9, 2017 · 8:40 pm

Review: Blameless by Claudio Magris

I received a review copy of this title from Yale University Press.  This book was published in the original Italian in 2015 and this English edition has been translated by Anne Milano Appel

My Review:
The unnamed protagonist in Blameless has been obsessively collecting items associated with fighting and warfare for decades in order to establish a war museum in his native home of Triste.  His collecting began shortly after World War II, during which time he helped negotiate the liberation of Triste.  He gathered so many items throughout the course of these post-World War II years that they could only be stored in a hangar.  His entire life was consumed with establishing his museum to the point that he even slept among his objects and papers.  When he dies in a fire that consumes him and some of his precious objects in the hangar, it is a woman named Luisa that is tasked with curating the museum and organizing his notes, objects and stories.

The novel is not easy to read and both its images and its disjointed structure make it disconcerting, but also appropriate for a story that deals with the violence and atrocities of war.  While he was collecting items for his war museum, the narrator also kept copious and detailed notes in a series of journals, some of which were presumed lost in the fire that killed him.  The narrative alternates between pages from the narrator’s journal, descriptions of items that are to be displayed in the museum, and Luisa, the curator’s, own story as a child of a Jewish woman and a black man.  The most difficult parts of the narrative to read and grasp are the narrator’s thoughts in his journal.  There are layers of stories within stories, personal reflections, and names of spies, informants, victims and those involved with perpetrating war crimes.

Magris does not shy away from describing atrocities of war.  Scenes of torture, for example, and descriptions of the last moments of victims who are sent to the gas chambers at the Risiera are described.  The unnamed narrator’s collection culminated with his copying into his journals the words written on the walls of the Risiera by victims who were about to be murdered by the Nazis.  But the notebooks in which he transcribed these horrors go missing and Luisa is left to speculate what mysteries they contain about the horrific evens that occurred  in Triste during the war.

There is a constant tension in the book between images of love and death.  Items of war—guns, tanks, axes and bullets are meticulously described as Luisa plans how they will be displayed in the war museum.  The final, violent days of the liberation of Triste are related by the narrator in great detail.  And the violent death of Lusia’s aunt, a nurse serving in the war, who  is kicked to death by a band of racist thugs is found within the pages of this war novel.  But there are also glimmers of love and even hope.  Luisa’s mother Sara, orphaned when her own Jewish mother is killed during the war, comes out of her deep depression when she meets her husband, a black American who comes to Europe for the liberation.   Together they bond over the persecution that their ancestors have suffered through the course of many generations.   They find a deep level of comfort in one another’s company that sometimes not even their daughter cannot penetrate.  Magris eloquently relates their first night together in his lyrical prose:

Every sunset is different, in all the thousands of millennia no two evening’s glowing embers have been identical; the switch instead wastes no time with lighting effects, its’ not a huckster trying to lure mothers with glittering trinkets for their children, but always turns on the same light and turns it off to the same darkness, like someone who takes his job seriously.  But one night, that night, when the dark hand—dark on the back, the palm was lighter—which had gently touched her arm helping her up the poorly lit stairs had reached to turn the handle and open the door, Sara, looking at the strong, powerful brown hand, had felt that even a small mundane gesture can reveal a man and that something can change, suddenly, in your heart.

One image that struck me which is ubiquitous in Magris’s narrative is that of the sea.  The sea is presented as both a source of comfort but also something that can consume, overwhelm and suffocate.  The book opens with a description of the narrator’s acquisition of a submarine and his of his fear of the sea.  By contrast, Luisa’s mother has fond memories of Salvore, a town by the sea on the other side of the Gulf of Triste where her mother safely hides her during the war.  In these scenes Magris writes about a sea that is calming and beautiful:  “The sea is blue, a dazzling light;  when it reverberates in the fierce noonday heat its brilliance is blinding, a darkness in which you cannot see anything, like at night.”   Luisa’s mother uses the blinding, white light of the sea as a shelter from the war that is being waged around her.

In the very last scene in the book. however, Magris returns to the image of the all-consuming sea and the submarine.  As the narrator is suffocating in the conflagration of his hangar and hallucinating, he conflates his own death scene with the deaths of those who were suffocated and burned at the Risiera.  As he is dying he has the chilling and horrific sensation that he is sinking in one of those submarines along with the other victims in the war.  As the sea is swallowing him he sees the remnants of his war museum:

I must have entered the submarine that I had the Navy give me.  Yes, I’m going under; through the porthole I can see the white pages with those numbers and names sinking to the bottom.  They dumped the waste into the sea, into the gorge, they dumped us here, between the Patoc and the sea, the water can’t be very deep, but we’re going down, down, throwing garbage into the sea is a crime and so is throwing men in, but the judge declares there is no cause to indict.

I was impressed with the high level of Magris’s erudition mixed with his poetic language and intriguing plot.  Much like Compass which I recently finished,  is not an easy read, but for those who enjoy a literary challenge then I highly recommend Blameless.  Has anyone else read any other Magris books?  I also have Danube sitting on my “to read” pile.

About the Author and Translator:
Claudio Magris has been a professor of Germanic studies at the University of Trieste since 1978. He is the author of Danube, a best-selling novel now translated into more than twenty languages, and in 2001 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize. He has translated into Italian the works of such authors as Ibsen, Kleist, Schnitzler, Buchner, and Grillparzer.

Anne Milano Appel is a professional translator. Her translation of Stefano Bortolussi’s novel Head Above Water was the winner of the 2004 Northern California Book Award for Translation.

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