It’s old news now, but I’ve had a start to this post saved in my Google docs for weeks and felt like I had to finish it. So here, a hastily written rant!
In the July 15 issue of the New York Review of Books, Tim Park talked about translation in a piece titled “America First?” He uses Dalkey Archive’s anthology Best European Fiction 2010 and Edith Grossman’s collection of lectures Why Translation Matters to discuss, well, why translation matters. [The Novel: An Alternative History, Beginnings to 1600 by Stephen Moore and David Shields’s Reality Hunger are also discussed, but I’m more concerned with his discussion of the first.] He’s a translator himself so you’d expect positivity, but instead he takes issue with many of Fiction editor Aleksandar Hemon’s and Grossman’s points about its importance and makes an oddly nationalistic argument.
He repeats the stat that only 3 to 5 percent of books published in the U.S. each year are translations in the first paragraph and tries to say both Hemon and Grossman have the same reasoning for thinking this is a bad thing:
Hemon sees this as another manifestation of “culturally catastrophic American isolationism”; Grossman feels that the resulting incomprehension of foreign cultures has dangerous implications for world peace. Thus both these publications that invite us to experience other cultures do so within a frame of a polemic at home.
I haven’t read the Grossman, but that does sound rather hyperbolic and outlandish. I’m very familiar with Best European Fiction 2010 and Hemon’s understanding of its importance, though, and would not equate finding cultural isolation “catastrophic” with Grossman’s exaggeration–we all know literature isn’t so influential that it will affect “world peace.” Park goes on in his misconstrued interpretation of Hemon’s and preface-writer Zadie Smith’s perspectives to inappropriately frame the stories.
All the contributions are interesting and some impressive. That is enough for me. But it does make one wonder whether we are learning much about other cultures from this venture, whether it is true, as Hemon claims, that ‘ceaseless’ and ‘immediate’ translation from abroad is a ‘profound, non-negotiable need.’
We don’t read writers who don’t write in English in order to learn about other cultures, but simply to gain a more thorough picture of literature. It takes an exceptional amount of work to read writers from Latin America, for example, beyond the Marquez and Bolaño that gets pushed upon us. If, as Hemon suggests, translation were “ceaseless” and “immediate,” readers could make their own assessments and the canon would naturally be broadened.
Basically, there is no way you can argue that translation is not a good idea, a necessary thing–but that’s how Park’s argument reads. Because the stories in Fiction (1) don’t represent every European country and language, (2) don’t take place in the nations in which the writers live, and (3) aren’t markedly different stylistically from much contemporary American writing, this anthology doesn’t serve an important, exciting purpose. All of this strikes me as a bit insane: American writing is good and experimental enough, so who cares what the silly little Portuguese are doing.
He goes on to cite that in Germany, France, and Italy, translations account for around 50 percent of what’s published. This is irrelevant to him because apparently they’re translating American genre writers, the type of stuff that sells, not literary fiction, whereas in the U.S., pretty much all of the roughly 350 translated books are literary or poetry. So perhaps Hemon and Grossman shouldn’t have used these countries as upstanding examples, but it doesn’t change the fact that putting out anthologies like Best European Fiction serves a distinct need for the translation of new writers, not so that we might become familiar with their cultures, but because without “ceaseless” and “immediate” translation we lack a true understanding of literature as a universal art, a universal pursuit.
His perspective just struck me as short-sighted, anti-intellectual, and bizarrely supportive of American cultural hegemony. He’s more interested in refuting the points about translation made by Hemon, Grossman, and Smith than engaging stories on their own merits. I’m not ready to write the book on why translation matters, but this piece certainly struck me as dangerous considering the cultural climate that already questions its importance.
Weeks before the overexposure began, I was excited about Gary Shteyngart coming to my town to support his new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. I live in Huntington, Long Island, a pleasant, walkable town that’s more concentrated than most spots in the city. But it’s not the city, it’s an hour outside of it, so the only writers who come to read at Book Revue, a great indie, are celebrities with undesirable memoirs–Pat Benatar, Howard Stern’s wife, Tori Spelling, the Guns ‘N Roses drummer. There are also all the genre writers who appeal to middle-aged men. Once I was shopping while there was a flash fiction workshop being given to the elderly.
So a literary writer, a praised writer, one who would be named to that fucking “20 Under 40″ list–this was something. But I’d never read him. I went to said bookstore and picked up his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, used for $4.50. Good deal. Then it started. The onslaught. At work, in my leisure blog-reading, my feels-like-the-right-thing-to-do WNYC listening, my Saturday mornings on the beach with my embarrassing NYT book review and magazine. Everywhere.
I enjoyed it at first–this guy is getting attention everywhere and he’s coming to the store I walk to! On Long Island! I was reading and enjoying Handbook, but finally started to grow a little bored with his schtick in the media appearances. Like, “iKindle”? You know the names of things, Gary. Stop manufacturing humor for old people.
But the day, Thursday the 29th, came before I didn’t feel like going anymore. I was a little stressed it would just be me and, like, five people from a nursing home. It was a sizable crowd, though, composed of a lot of middle-agers: a lady in an art teacher’s necklace sitting in front of me, saying to her friend, “Want to hear my favorite line from Margaret Atwood?”; ladies behind me talking about a daughter’s cowboy-themed destination wedding; a 60ish man who sat next to me and kept shaking his head saying, “David Sedaris!” But there was also the kid next to me with a galley. Where did he come from, this scruffy college student who quite clearly reads HTMLGiant? It will remain a mystery, but I was happy he was there.
Shteyngart was introduced by a way too extroverted bookstore employee, who would go on to be the person who laughed the loudest during the reading, and then did a little bit about how he should visit his parents while on the island. “In Long Island? On Long Island, I should say.” Phew: He knows, which means my brethren are out there fighting the good fight about the proper preposition to use.
And then he began the most entertaining reading I’ve ever seen, doing the character’s parents Russian accents, perfectly imitating what would be the voice of an illiterate American girl, seamlessly translating the Russian phrases, even singing. The part he read actually took place in Westbury, a few miles west of where we were in Huntington. It was good, too—characteristically hilarious, playful, smart, and “super sad.”
The Q&A was shockingly painless, though because I was apparently his publisher’s prime target audience for this book, I knew the answers to many of the questions. He gave thoughtful yet predictable answers about how reading literature is necessary to developing empathy, how integral narrative is to our lives, and said he felt compelled as an immigrant to tell his story. After mentioning Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri, he said that being an immigrant kind of creates its own stories through the odd experience. He teaches a class at Columbia called “The Hysterical Male,” using writers like Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, which sounds amazing. When asked what he’s inspired by other than literature, he noted Mad Men, The Sopranos, and The Wire (duh) as TV shows giving people the narrative they crave in a more easily digested form. To paraphrase: When people get home from work, they don’t want to sit down with a book, and so these shows are to reading a novel what drinking a blended steak is to eating the real thing. I think it’s a pretty brilliant analogy.
And so it was a success, with him rekindling my initial excitement for his work and my suburb-dwelling comrades not embarrassing me. In conclusion, yeah, I was really successfully marketed to.
July was crazy. No one reads or knows about this blog, really, but I must apologize to myself: Sorry, self.
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This review of Gordon Lish’s Collected Fictions by Joshua Cohen at Bookforum is so good, in its way. Its very specific way. I’ve read the fiction of neither but was utterly compelled, utterly uncomfortable–and considering that it’s a book review, that’s something. There’s a distinctly masculine confidence here, that thing I lack and lament when I’m most frustrated and think that if I were born my brother maybe I would’ve dropped out of high school (or at least college) to go write poetry in Mexico.
So here I am at midnight, sitting in a Barcalounger, reading the Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish while idly masturbating. Idly, that is, not idol-ly, because Lish is no god of mine so much as he is a lazy indulgence.
The review itself is indulgent, but it does its job of being a piece of criticism in addition to indulging Cohen’s apparent disgust with the work at hand, with an added dose of playfulness. It makes me think I will love Witz, even as I’m simultaneously wary and desirous of that fearlessness I lack, and I guess that’s why he’s been maintaining his original voice even while just making the promotional rounds: I’ve been interested in reading it; now I need to read it.
This morning I was able to get myself up at 6 a.m. after going to bed at midnight, so the day felt successful already. A new feeling. I’d come home from work last night completely exhausted even though I’d spent the entire train ride, from the moment I sat down until they called Cold Spring Harbor, with my eyes closed. Not sleeping the whole way, but definitely some, as I’d missed Van Morrison’s version of “It’s All Over Now (Baby Blue)” on my playlist and my saliva was thick and stinky when I got off. All I wanted to do when I got home was watch Before Night Falls; I was convinced it’d stop the exhaustion. I did, and cried, like always, and it helped, so I decided to leave my alarm set for 6, though I usually get up at 7 when I work at home.
I got up, successful already, and went to the gym. After I’d come home and showered, I set about the task of hard-boiling an egg because Arenas eats them in the movie–specifically in a scene when he is at his typewriter on a balcony overlooking the sea. I’m pretty impressionable, pretty childish, and pretty obsessed with eating eggs anyway. The first attempt at making one failed, but even without the egg I was able to transfer the contents of my notebook onto my computer and start on an entirely new piece that I thought could bring together everything I’d been considering somewhat separately when writing by hand. I’m newly rededicated to my shit, you see, and I’m definitely going to get somewhere by the end of the summer. Definitely.
Scott actually woke up to his alarm at 8 and I stopped writing, then I tried again with a new egg and got it right. Now I have this new blog to go with my new rededication and my newfound ability to hard-boil an egg. Hello.
