Tag: Italian

In search of a shadow: Indian Nocturne by Antonio Tabucchi

When the murky waters that obscure any tangible connection between an author and his or her “unnamed protagonist” are intentionally stirred in the opening lines of a text, it is a not-so-subtle cue that that things may not be what they seem. Add an ostensibly exotic foreign location into the mix and there is plenty of space for the edges to become blurrier. Indian Nocturne, by Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, is a case in point. He describes this book as an insomnia, but also a journey—the insomnia his own, the journey that of his protagonist. Yet, should one wonder, he has himself passed through the places that will be described so, in lieu of titles, he provides a brief index of the settings of each of the novella’s nine chapters for the sake, perhaps, of some wayward traveller who might wish to follow a similar trail of shadows.

The story opens in 1980s Bombay as the narrator is making his way into the city from the airport with a map spread across his knees and a copy of India, a Travel Survival Kit in hand. The taxi driver seems determined to disregard his requested destination, certain that this European gentleman has made a common tourist’s error and is mistakenly bound for a most undesirable area. Angered, our hero insists on getting out and making his own way. The neighbourhood is he reaches is certainly rough, worse than he’d imagined, but he is hoping to find a woman, a prostitute, who might have some information that will help him on his mission. He’s looking for a friend, someone who seems to have disappeared. What little he gleans at this first stop takes him, on the following day, to the office of a tired doctor at a busy public hospital:

‘What was his name?’

‘His name was Xavier,’ I answered.

‘Like the missionary?’ he asked. And then he said: ‘It’s not an English name, that’s for sure, is it?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s Portuguese. But he didn’t come as a missionary; he’s a Portuguese who lost his way in India.’

The doctor nodded his head in agreement. He had a gleaming hairpiece that shifted like a rubber skullcap every time he moved his head. ‘A lot of people lose their way in India,” he said, “it’s a country specially made for that.’

Spare and elusive, the tale unfolds as a series of encounters with places and people, as the narrator travels from Bombay to Madras by train (published in 1984, the British names for Mumbai and Chennai are still in use), then back across the country by bus to Goa. He shares a railway retiring room with a Jain bound for Varanasi, meets with the strange leader of a spiritualist movement, shares a bus shelter with a crippled fortune teller, and finds an American lost by choice, shall we say, on a Goan beach. Add to that a couple of women who happen to cross his path and you have the makings of a dreamy, subtle mystery with more empty spaces than solid clues, enigmatic conversations that drift off unresolved, and a healthy metafictional twist.

Always economical, Tabucchi excels at creating atmospheric settings, enigmatic characters, and cryptic dialogue. He captures the strangeness of being in an unfamiliar country surrounded by unintelligible languages, and the passing, often odd, communion with other foreigners who each have their own reasons for being far from home. And no one, not even the first-person narrator, is  ever really showing themselves fully. Indian Nocturne is my first experience with Tabucchi, a writer I have long been meaning to read. This novella, which almost seems slight at first blush, lingers vividly in the imagination so I will be definitely be reading more of his work soon.

Indian Nocturne by Antonio Tabucchi is translated from the Italian by Tim Parks and published by Canongate in the UK and New Directions in North America.

“I remain / in the baptism of this window.” All the Eyes that I Have Opened by Franca Mancinelli

from here ways parted
breathing was growing

in the collapse, something sweet
a hollow of time

all the eyes that I have opened
are the branches I have lost.

Ever since I started reading Italian poet Franca Mancinelli’s latest collection, recently released in a beautiful dual language edition, I have been haunted by the couplet from which the title was born—all the eyes that I have opened / are the branches I have lost. I have been more aware than ever of the eyes of the aspen meeting me on my daily walk, watching over me as in some sense I have always known them to, but now I was seeing my own journey reflected in their stare… the branches I have lost, and the growth that I have gained over the years.

I’ve always loved aspen, widespread as they are throughout North America. I found an adolescent refuge in the hidden depths of an expanse of aspen that spread across a wide, open field near my childhood home and, now, every day I look out at the clusters of aspen that mark the edges of the forest of Douglas firs I live above. Ever since I learned that they are typically colonial, that a growth of aspen are a single organism, I love them even more. An extended family in nature to balance my fragmented human one.

All the Eyes that I have Opened is a mature collection from a poet whose work I have read since her first English translation, The Little Book of Passage, arrived at my door courtesy of our mutual friend, her long-time translator John Taylor. A few months later, our paths would fortuitously crossed in Calcutta, so I can’t help but hear her voice when I read her words, even as her poetic voice continues to expand beyond the strictly personal to encompass an ever wider range of experiences and circumstances. The enigmatic title of this latest collection came to Mancinelli, as she explains in “An Act of Inner Self-Surgery,” a piece in her essay collection The Butterfly Cemetery, during a time of “inner devastation” when, walking through the woods she came upon a tree with a heavily scarred trunk. Despite many cuts and amputations the tree had healed and transformed itself, reaching ever upwards to the light:

I continued to walk with this voice that had been articulated in me, and one clear image: there are losses that you can weep over with all your tears, fight with every effort, yet they are necessary. We would give our life so that they won’t happen, yet they are guiding our sap toward the shape and the place that belongs to it.

This understanding is expressed most explicitly in an early sequence, “Master Trees,” which like many of the others in this book blends verse and prose poetry. The poet speaks of branches and pruning and seeing “the eyes of the trees,” of opening herself up “according to the light.” But growth is uneven:

the air was inert, traversed by trembling and quivering. It needed to withdraw, to set life aside, to push it towards areas where pockets of quietness opened. I thus grew in this maimed form. You can see in me how the nearby street burns.

Her ensuing engagement in the woods with the very bark of the trees is existential in nature. She emerges with her gaze freed. The following sequence, “All the Eyes that I Have Opened,” turns to experiences that have caused pain, abstracted in natural imagery that is often brutal yet from which new strength and determination seems to arise in the speaker. As ever, Mancinelli distills emotion, memory and experience into crystalline elements, moving from the intimate to the universal in rarely more than a handful of finely wrought lines. Drawing her metaphors from nature and the land, with eyes, sight, branches, darkness and light as recurring images throughout this book, she focuses her attention on a world—internal, external, and interpersonal—in which the dynamic tensions are always shifting, always in flux, and aims to capture its essence.

This collection, as Taylor points out in his introduction, sees an expansion of Mancinelli’s poetic universe, as she brings ancient and traditional sources into her work for the first time, including Saint Lucy (Lucia), the patron saint of the blind, often depicted with her eyes on a plate, whose own sight was restored by God. All the Eyes that I Have Opened also begins and ends with sequences in which the poet endeavours to give voice to the plight of migrants seeking a better life in Europe, meeting danger, cold, and closed borders along the way.

My body has an open texture from which hangs a thread. Someone at the other end, without even noticing, pulls it, and slowly I grow thin. The absence beckons me. I approach the spirits of the cold, that white wordless nucleus which governs this earth. I close my eyes as if pervaded by a flat colorless sea.  (from “Diary of Passage”)

These works stem from an interdisciplinary project she took part in which she and other artists traced a route through Croatia often used by refugees.

This is but a brief and rather personal response to this rich new collection. Every time I open it I find something else that catches my attention. I will be turning to it again and again, and thinking of these poems as I encounter the eyes of the aspen each day.

All the Eyes that I Have Opened by Franca Mancinelli is translated from the Italian by John Taylor and published by Black Square Editions.

Holding the fort: The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati

Fortezza Bastiani was neither imposing with its low walls nor beautiful in any way. Its towers and ramparts weren’t picturesque. Absolutely nothing alleviated its starkness or recalled the sweet things of life. Yet Drogo gazed at it, hypnotized as on the previous night from the base of the gorge. And an inexplicable ardor penetrated his heart.

As newly commissioned officer Giovani Drogo makes his way to the mysterious fortress on the mountainous northern border of his homeland, he is unable to imagine what lies ahead. When he chances upon Captain Ortiz who is heading in the same direction, he is surprised to hear that the older man has already spent eighteen years at the Fortezza, and speaks of it in less than glowing terms. And yet, as the structure finally comes into view, the young lieutenant is struck by a strange attraction. He also notices, in the captain’s face, a curious mix of joy and sadness. The complicated motion he observes on this day, is one he too will succumb to.

The Stronghold, the best known work by Italian journalist and writer Dino Buzzati (1906–1972), is a tragic tale of how easily youthful ambition and dreams of glory can be lost to the slow erosion of time. Travelling a fine line between the realistic and the fantastic, this novel is a slow, steady march toward an ending as inevitable as it is unexpectedly unkind. When Drogo first arrives, he quickly learns that Fortezza Bastiani’s glory days are long gone. Young soldiers tend to volunteer simply because two years at this bleak outpost count for four, effectively jumpstarting their military careers. But something’s wrong. Drogo did not volunteer, he was assigned. He argues that a mistake has been made, he requests a release from his commitment. His superior responds with apparent empathy, encouraging him to stay for a mere four months for appearances’ sake. Then something can be arranged, a visit to the fort’s doctor to receive a diagnosis that will assure his reassignment. Four months in, however, he will decide to stay. He will have fallen under the spell of the fortress, the towering mountain range that cradles it and its proximity to that vast unknown desert where an enemy may well lurk, preparing to strike. The possibility of glory is a powerful drug.

Through Drogo’s mind passed the memory of his city, an indistinct image—streets thunderous under the rain, plaster statues, dampness in barracks, dreary bells, faces weary and haggard, endless afternoons, attics dirty with dust.

Here, however, the vast mountain night was advancing, clouds in flight over the Fortezza, miraculous omens. From the north, from the invisible north behind the walls, Drogo felt that his own destiny was pressing.

Buzzati skillfully balances finely drawn scenes—Drogo’s first return to the city, the excitement and speculation when figures are perceived moving out of the distant mists of the frontier, or an ill-fated expedition to mark the boundary—against the passage of months and years and decades. An aching, sorrowful mood rests over the stark beauty of the harsh landscape that so captivates the men who dedicate their careers to this mostly forgotten frontier. And, as much as we know his fate is sealed, it is difficult not to feel for the young man with the confidence of a whole life ahead of him as he ultimately finds himself following the pattern of the other officers who spend their entire careers walking the halls and ramparts of the isolated fort, caught up in the swell of self-importance, routine, and vague purpose.

Originally published in 1940 as Il deserto dei Tartari, the novel was widely praised, relieving the doubts and insecurities that had dogged its author throughout the creative process. Although Buzzati was drawing on some of his own experiences covering conflict and inspired in part by his appreciation for Kafka’s The Castle, this work is not an explicitly political. The country is never named, nor is the neighboring land of desert. The enemy exists primarily in the minds of the soldiers. The questions it raises, the author suggests, about “hope and the life that passes fruitlessly” are existential in nature. Yet, when the first English translation by Stuart Hood appeared in 1952, the chosen title, The Tartar Steppe, encouraged readers to understand it in relation the Cold War and fear of the USSR. Meanwhile, in Italy, it would come to be seen as a critique of fascism. The novel’s openness to interpretation is indicative of its strength as a timeless and recognizable fable, one that can apply to both the personal and political.

This new translation by Lawrence Venuti—now with a title reflecting the original title the author wanted—attempts to allow for the historical interpretations without losing the humanist qualities earlier readers connected with. It also leaves intact some Italian greetings and terms, to situate the narrative in a particular culture and add a “political edge” in certain scenes. Otherwise, Venuti aims to adopt an English that would be accessible to a broad anglophone audience. His Afterword is quite illuminating, deepening an appreciation of Buzzati’s aims, this fine novel’s reception over the years and his approach to translation. It is one of two works by Buzzati recently added the New York Review of Books Classics catalogue.

The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati is translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti and published by NYRB Classics.

So much space to fill: Thirsty Sea by Erica Mou

Today it’s twenty-five years since I killed my sister.

Nobody has ever said it out loud, but I can hear other people’s thoughts loud and clear. And the unmanageable ones have a special sound: they make a low constant rumble like waves crashing against docks, like high heels as you carry on walking, resisting and smiling.

My mother says it wasn’t my fault.

My mother wears them often, high heels that is.

The voice of Maria, the narrator of Erica Mou’s debut novel Thirsty Sea, sings with a heady mix of guilt, defiance and insecurity. Not always likeable, sometimes driven to over dramatic metaphor, she manages to maintain an irresistible, infectious flow that carries you right along with her, even if you may sometimes wonder how or why other the characters in her life put up with her at all. She’s a little injured perhaps, but you can’t help hoping she will find a way to start to heal. It makes for a strangely captivating read.

Thirsty Sea is the first offering of Héloïse Press, a new venture dedicated to publishing contemporary female narrative that launched in the UK earlier this year. Mou is an award winning Italian indie singer-songwriter who brings a free-spirited musical energy to her writing, a vitality that is captured with creativity by translator Clarissa Botsford. In her introductory note, Botsford describes the challenges inherent in translating the work of an author who delights in playing with double meanings. It was necessary at times to make changes and alterations, especially to the short poems that occur within and at the close of each chapter. These brief verses have a title that reflects back on the theme just covered and, as such, it was not always possible or desirable to translate directly from Italian to English. Fortunately she had an opportunity to meet and work with Mou herself and the author was more than open to the idea of “trans-creating.” As she said: “It’s my text. We can do with it what we like.”

Watermark

All you needed to do was pick me up and shine a light
to see whether I’d ever been there

Maria, named after her two Maria grandmothers, is a thirty-two year-old woman living in Bari, Italy, with her extraordinarily patient partner Nicola. He is a pilot and she is the proprietor of a rather unlikely business, a gift-finding service—unlikely because she herself has never liked receiving gifts. This resistance, like most of the self-imposed roadblocks in her life and relationships, has its origins in the tragic death of her younger sister, Summer, when Maria was seven and her sister three. Despite frequent reassurances from her mother and several therapists, Maria cannot let go of a sense that she was somehow at fault, that everyone who knows of the situation sees her as a murderer. Her unyielding monologue continually turns comments, questions and recollections into varieties of self-accusation. Her sharp tongue is turned on herself and everyone else, though, for the most part, she manages to keep from expressing her harsher observations out loud.

Unfolding over the course of one twenty-four hour period, from one evening to the next, Maria gradually fills in details from her life, colouring in a self-portrait of a woman burdened by guilt, feeling crushed by her mother, alienated from her father and stifled by Nicola who wants to have a baby. She is weighed down by a block of marble she imagines carrying in her chest. Everything with Maria is intensified, technicolour, against the grey backdrop of her mother, her father’s crumbling edifice and Nicola’s pristine white palette. Almost the only person she trusts with the occasional honest expression of her feelings is Ruth, an American she met while visiting London in her youth. But what comes through loudest is the sense that Maria is truly isolated by her own inability trust herself. She cannot shake the trauma of her sister’s death no matter how unaffected she attempts to sound.

As the narrative unfolds and the pieces start to fall into place, tension builds. By this point we are attached to this wounded but entirely relatable soul as she nears a critical turning point. All we can do at that moment is trust that she will know what is right. For her. With Maria, Erica Mou has created a truly engaging, oddly eccentric character and a well-paced narrative that leaves one wondering where the future will take her. Definitely a writer to watch.

Thirsty Sea by Erica Mou is translated by Clarissa Botsford and published by Héloïse Press.

Reading Women in Translation: Looking back over the past twelve months

For myself at least, as Women in Translation Month rolls around each August, there is, along with the intention to focus all or part of my reading to this project, a curiosity to look back and see just how many female authors in translation I’ve read since the previous year’s edition. I’ve just gone through my archives and am pleasantly surprised to find twenty titles, the majority read in 2022. Within this number are several authors I’ve read and loved before and a number of new favourites that have inspired me to seek out more of their work.

First among these is Lebanese-French writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata, whose The Last Days of Mandelstam (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan) so thrilled me with its precision and economy that I bought another of her novellas and a collection of poetry, Alphabet of Sand (translated by Marilyn Hacker). I’ve just learned that another of her Russian poet inspired novels, Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga, will be released by Seagull Books this fall. I can’t wait!

 

The advent of the war in Ukraine instantly drew my attention to a tiny book I had received from isolarii books. The name Yevgenia Belorusets became suddenly and tragically familiar as her daily diary entries from Kiev were published online. I read that small volume, Modern Animals (translated by Bela Shayevich), drawn from interviews with people she met in the Donbas region and as soon as it became available I bought and read her story collection Lucky Breaks (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Although both of these books reflect the impact of war in the east of the country, they could not be read without the context of the full scale invasion underway and still ongoing in her homeland.

Another author I encountered for the first time that inspired me to read more of her work was Czech writer Daniela Hodrová whose monumental City of Torment (translated by Elena Sokol and others) is likely the most profoundly challenging work I’ve read in along time. Upon finishing this trilogy I turned to her Prague, I See A City… (translated by David Short and reviewed with the above) which I happened to have buried on my kindle. A perfect, possibly even necessary, companion.

My personal Norwegian project introduced me to Hanne Örstavik, whom I had always meant to read. I loved her slow moving introspective novel, The Pastor (translated by Martin Aitken) and have since bought, but not read, her acclaimed novella, Love. However, lined up to read this month, I have her forthcoming release in translation, Ti Amo, a much more recent work based on her experience caring for her husband as he was dying of cancer. The only other female author I brought into this project was Ingvild H. Rishøi whose collection Winter Stories (translated by Diane Oatley) was a pure delight. I have been making note of other female Norwegian writers to fill in this imbalance in the future.

The past year also brought new work by two of my favourite poets: a book of prose pieces by Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, The Butterfly Cemetery (translated by John Taylor), and the conclusion to Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s epic experimental trilogy, My Jewel Box (translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen). In May I had the honour of speaking with Olsen and Jensen over Zoom for a special event—it was a fantastic opportunity I won’t soon forget. I also became acquainted with a new-to-me Austrian poet, Maja Haderlap, through her excellent collection distant transit (translated by Tess Lewis) and have since added her novel Angel of Oblivion to my shelves.

Among the many other wonderful women in translation I read over the past year, Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker winning Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) needs no introduction—it is an exuberant, intelligent and wildly entertaining read. On an entirely different note, Rachel Careau’s brilliant new translation of Colette’s classic Cheri and the End of Cheri completely surprised me. I had no idea what a sharp and observant writer she was, in fact I didn’t know much about her at all and I discovered that she was quite the exceptional woman. Changing direction again, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s account of her terrifying encounter with a bear in a remote region of Siberia (translated by Sophie R. Lewis) approaches the experience in an unexpected manner that I really appreciated.

Keeping with nonfiction for a moment, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Sarah Booker), a collection of essays about contemporary Mexico, was a difficult, necessary read. Annmarie Schwarzenbach’s account of her overland journey to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart in 1939, All the Roads Are Open (translated by Isabel Fargo Cole) was another book I had long wanted to read that did not disappoint but which carries much more weight given the more recent history of that region. Finally, My Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi (translated from Tamil dictation by Nandini Murali) offers vital insight into the lives of hijra and trans women and trans men in India from a widely respected activist. Tilted Axis in the UK will be releasing this book to an international audience later this year.

Rounding out the year, were three fine novels. First, I after owning it for years, I finally read Seeing Red by Chilean writer Lina Meruane (translated by Megan McDowell) and was very impressed. Last, but by no means least, I read two new releases from Istros Books who have an excellent selection of women writers in their catalogue. Special Needs by Lada Vukić (translated from the Croatian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić) captures the slightly magical voice of child narrator with an undisclosed disability in a remarkably effective way, while Canzone di Guerra by the inimitable Daša Drndić (translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth) offers a fictionalized account of her years in Canada as a young single mother that was most enlightening for this Canadian reader.

I have, at this point, seven books selected for this year’s Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth) and we’ll see how I manage—and now I also have a goal to exceed for the eleven months before August 2023! I would, by the way, recommend any of the titles listed above if you are looking for something to read this month.

A map of your absence: If You Kept a Record of Sins by Andrea Bajani

Some novels greet you at the door—or in this case, just beyond the baggage claim—engage your attention, and hold you, sentence by sentence, through the past and the present, until you reach your final destination. If You Kept a Record of Sins, by Italian writer Andrea Bajani, is such a book. Yet the magic of this story lies entirely in the telling—in the delicate balancing of select, sharply depicted images within a spare, measured narrative that simmers with barely restrained emotional tension. On the surface, it’s the tale of a young man grieving his mother’s legacy of repeated departures and arrivals, the mainstay of his childhood, while he attends to her final dispatch in Romania, the ultimate faraway destination from which she would never return. His prospect of achieving closure, however, is tenuous for beneath the surface, complex and conflicted feelings remain unresolved.

The novel opens with Lorenzo’s arrival in Bucharest and his initial contact with Christian, the driver who will serve as his guide to the city and his means to understanding some elements of his mother’s life. Although she is dead, she is never far away—Lorenzo’s account is essentially directed toward her—but his tone speaks to an unbreachable distance. After enough time, absence no longer to makes the heart grow stronger. Addressing her is perhaps the only way to make sense of his loss:

You started leaving when I was young. The first trip was for pleasure, to go meet some friends who were off trying to strike it rich. You drew the world on a sheet of paper the night before, to show me where you were going. We’re here, you said, and tomorrow I’ll be right down here, in this spot. You drew a line with a red marker from home to there. It’s a bridge, you said, it’s like crossing the river to the other side. And under the bridge we colored everything blue; we filled in the water of Europe. Then we taped the picture to the refrigerator, and that’s where it stayed for years to come.

His mother’s trips became more frequent. Promotion of her egg-shaped, sweat-inducing weight loss machine takes her around the world. The souvenirs she brings home multiply in her son’s room, mapping her absence. When she is home, the increasing presence of her business partner in her life begins to put a strain on her marriage. Before long, the partner and the promise Romania holds as the ideal base for their enterprise is too strong and finally she is gone for good. Left behind in Italy, Lorenzo and his dad will never see her again; even the phone calls will dwindle as the years pass.

Now grown and finally in Romania himself, Lorenzo is reunited with Anselmi, his mother’s business partner, a loud, brash Italian who has clearly found a level of success and self-importance that would have eluded him at home. He is of a breed, not uncommon in the country—latter-day middle-aged foreign opportunists—and Lorenzo will encounter more than a few men of this type, including another long-time friend of his mother who reveals to him the shocking and sorry state of her final years. No one is exactly forthcoming with details, but Anselmi has taken up with a young Romanian woman named Monica who seems less than thrilled with her circumstances and rather attracted to the young Italian she has been ordered to attend to. Lorenzo, however, is seemingly most comfortable in the company of Christian, his mother’s long time driver. With him he is able to be present without pressure. Together they visit Ceausescu Palace, spend time in the city, share both laughter and silence. Lorenzo is gently attentive to the hidden strengths Christian seems to carry, leaving a faint erotic tension in the air.

If You Kept a Record of Sins offers an account that rides as much on what is unspoken as on what is shared. The narrative is economical and precise, moving from one finely honed image to another. Lorenzo’s mood is lonely, detached. He is cautious in his engagement with others. The abandonment he felt at a young age comes through even as he recalls tender moments of play or adventure with his mother. As an adult he appears to be grasping at something to feel for someone he hardly ever knew. Her own family, he is aware, were oddly unforgiving and remote themselves, while her final years in Romania were marked by romantic betrayal and self-destruction, but how to make sense of the damage she was responsible for between those two ends? A mixture of love and ambivalence fuels this bereaved son’s ongoing one-sided conversation with this mother as, for example, in this account of his first night in her apartment:

The mirror was too low—it cut off my head—and to think there was a time you used to lift me up, to look into my eyes. I was still wet when I left the bathroom, a trail of droplets behind me. I turned off all the lights, except the nightstand lamp. I took my pajamas from my bag, put them on, and went over to your bed. I dropped onto it, tried to bounce, then slipped under the covers. And it was almost as if I felt your bones, under there, that I was lying between bone and muscle and had to stay very still, or else I’d hurt you.

This is a novel at once sombre and hopeful. Beautifully translated by Elizabeth Harris, it never falls in to oversentimentality. Grief is idiosyncratic, sometimes elusive, and Bajani captures this complexity well. The cast of complicated secondary characters add depth to Lorenzo’s experiences without ever distracting or weighing them down. Reading fiction this well-crafted is a joy.

If You Kept a Record of Sins, by Andrea Bajani is translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris and published by Archipelago Books.

Women in Translation Month 2019: Some off-the-radar reading suggestions and my own modest proposal

Each August is Women in Translation Month, a time set aside to promote women writers from around the world who write in languages other than English and, of course, encourage increased translation of these authors into other languages so that they may be more widely read.  This initiative, started by blogger Meytal Radzinski, is now in its sixth year.

My best ever effort to participate was during 2015, my first year as a blogger. Not only was this before writing critical reviews and editing commitments started to creep into my reading time, but I was also recovering from a cardiac arrest and could stretch out on the sofa and read without guilt. Doing much else was painful! Since then, each year I have made public or private commitments to toss a few extra appropriate titles on the TBR pile and, if lucky, read one or two.  I console myself by remembering that reading women in translation is something that naturally seems to occur throughout the year in the course of my normal reading. As so it should.

This year I have a few books earmarked for the month (fingers crossed), but I thought I would take a little time to suggest some titles that might not be so well known. They’re all taken from my own bookcases and most are (as of yet) unread.

I’ll start with those that I have in fact read and reviewed. First up, poetry:

From the bottom up:
Korean poet Kim Hyesoon won the 2019 International Griffin  Poetry Prize for this book Autobiography of Death, a cycle of 49 poems and one longer piece inspired by national tragedies and personal experience. Her daughter’s distinctive illustrations accompany this powerful collection translated by Don Mee Choi.

Thick of It by German poet Ulrike Almut Sandig, translated by Karen Leeder, is a wonderful blend of the magical and the everyday. Fresh and alive.

Finally, Italian poet Franca Mancinelli’s The Little Book of Passage, translated by John Taylor, is a spare and delicate collection that invites rereading. Earlier this year she and I were able to meet and spend a few days together in Calcutta when my visit happened to overlap with a residency she was doing in the city—evidence that reading the world makes the world smaller in unimaginable ways!

*

Second, I wanted to highlight a book I recently reviewed that I am afraid has not had the attention it deserves:

Croatian writer Olja Savičevič’s Singer in the Night features a wildly eccentric narrator and a highly inventive style to tell a story that paints a serious portrait of the world that her generation inherited after the break up of the former Yugoslavia. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth, this book is already available in the UK and well worth watching for when it comes out on October 1 in North America.

*

Third, I have an impressive stack of Seagull Books by female authors that I am ashamed to say I have not read yet (save for the poetry title tucked in here). The interesting thing for me about this selection is that although I did purchase many of these books, other titles arrived as unexpected—but very welcome—review copies by writers previously unknown to me.

Most of the above are German language writers; two, Michele Lesbre and Suzanne Dracius are French, the latter from Martinique. The review copy at the bottom of the stack is East German writer Brigitte Reimann’s diary I Have No Regrets.

*

Finally, I wanted to include a couple of translated titles by Indian women writers. Two vastly different offerings.

Translated by Kalpana Bardhan and published by feminist press Zubaan, Mahuldiha Days is a novel by Anita Agnihotri, one of West Bengal’s best known writers. She draws on the decades she spent in the Indian Administrative Service in this story of a young civil servant caught between her obligations to the tribal community she is working with and the state.  By sharp contrast, I Lalla, gives a fresh voice the poems of fourteenth century Kashmiri mystic poet, Lal Děd. A detailed introduction by translator Ranjit Hoskote provides a fascinating background to her life and the tradition to which she belonged, opening a world little known to most Western readers.

*

So, what are my best laid plans for this month? I would like to read one or two titles from my Seagull stack—not sure which—and I have a new Istros title Wild Woman by Marina Sur Puhlovski on my iPad in PDF format, but the following three books have been patiently waiting for August:

The Snow Sleeper by Marlene van Niekerk, translated from the Afrikaans by Marius Swart, is a recently released collection of short pieces, including “The Swan Whisperer” which was published as part of the Cahier Series.  I ordered it as soon as I heard of it—new van Niekerk is a rare and special treat.  Aviaries by Czech writer Zuzana Brabcova caught my attention when fellow readers and reviewers started talking about it so it’s another title I sought out when it was released here this spring. And last but not least, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover is a book I’ve been meaning to read for years now. Will I fit it in this August? Time will tell. And, of course, I reserve the right to change my plans altogether…

The nice thing about books is that, at least with the old fashioned solid form variety, they don’t vanish at month’s end if you don’t get to them. They will still be there on the shelf waiting no matter how much time I do or do not have to read amid all my other projects on my plate this August!

Rivers and railways and portals to other ways of being: The Little Book of Passage by Franca Mancinelli

Here’s the river which widens my gaze, which flows through my forehead. Each time I await it. I know when it’s coming because the rails make a different noise on the bridge. Next to my seat is a small suitcase. I packed it, knowing I was leaving.

—from Ecco il fiume the mi allarga lo sguardo/Here’s the river which widens my gaze

The flow of time, seasons, energy. Movement through space, life and form. Franca Mancinelli’s The Little Book of Passage—Libretto di transito—begins with what appears to be an evocation of the minute rituals of travel: the suitcase packing, the waiting , riding a train, walking along a river. But the journey soon becomes one that spirals through intimate encounters with the domestic and the natural, reaching toward an internal, essential experienced reality. This small, dual language Italian/English collection of brief, fragmentary prose poems contains, within thirty-three brief one or two paragraph pieces, subtly toned, ever shifting passages that extend beyond the horizon of the printed page.

In his introduction, translator John Taylor offers a perfect illustration of the ineffable quality of this work:

As in her verse poetry, which similarly points to silence as it sketches moods, daydreams, and fantasies set amid carefully observed daily scenes, Mancinelli’s short prose revolves around unvoiced centers and disturbing causes which cannot be wholly defined yet which have come to the surface, as it were. As the reader meditates on them, they reveal their intricacy and mystery. That is, wordless centers full of emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and even unimaginable acts—those pertaining, for instance, to the loss or lack of something or someone essential.

This is easy to acknowledge a priori; in the reading, rereading, and returning once again we are increasingly aware of the unsettling and exhilarating otherness at the heart of all that we know or think we know in the act of being and engaging with the world.

Mancinelli’s language is characterized by an exactness, pointing to the simplest of acts and the most fundamental relationships, and yet the angle of perspective shifts. The poetic voice slides from “I” to “you”, sometimes reaching toward another, sometimes reflecting back to the speaker. Other pieces take the first person plural, the speaker and another perhaps, lover or child, or a more open and general “we”? Both or neither? No matter, the effect is one of blurring distinctions and encompassing the reader in the flow of images.

Nature is vital. It absorbs and infiltrates all that we are and what we do in her vision. The most basic everyday task becomes a transformative experience:

I force myself to put on clothes, shoes. I still grow in the darkness, like a plant drinking from dark soil. Getting dressed demands losing the branches extending into sleep, their most tender leaves open. You can suddenly feel them falling like an unexpected winter. At the same time you also lose the tail and the wings you had. You feel it happening somewhere in your body.

—from “Indosso e calzo ogni mattina/As if I always had another number, another size”

There is a restlessness, a yearning in these poems. Movement, travel, transience. But to where or to what, even the poet seems uncertain. Or content to leave connections unresolved. The precision of her prose casts sideways glances at implied, inferred, unspeakable sensations. And in the grasping for a language, a  grammar, to touch this point where tangible meets intangible, the threshold of the physical and the mental or spiritual, her imagery grows more dreamlike, more abstracted:

The fault line is inside you, it is widening. A chilly gust of wind blows through your ribs and is decomposing you. You no longer have an ear. Your neck has vanished. Between one shoulder and the other one opens a darkness peopled with shivers, with voices calling out from branch to branch, on a sheer slope uncrossed by human steps. (87)

—from “Nel tuo petto c’è una piccolo faglia/There is a small fault line in your chest”

Life is a series of passages. Arrivals, leavings and transitions. We often make allusions to one kind, even a profound passage like birth or death, to speak to another. This series of delicate poetic prose pieces invites you hold each one, like a shard of glass, and allow it to refract and distort reflected light and meaning.

Italian poet Franca Mancinelli is the author of two previous collections of verse poetry. The Little Book of Passages, translated by John Taylor and published  by The Bitter Oleander Press, represents the first appearance of her work in English.

A chronicle of madness? One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello

To be born is a fact. To be born in one period rather than another, as I’ve already said; and of this or that father, and in this or that condition; to be male or female; in Lapland or in central Africa; and handsome or ugly; with a hump or without: facts. And if you lose an eye, it’s a fact; and you can even lose both, and if you’re a painter it’s the worst thing that can happen to you.

Time, space: necessity. Fate, fortune, chance: all snares of life. You want to be, eh? There’s this catch: in abstract, you cannot just be. The being must be trapped in a form, and for some time it has to stay in it, here or there, this way or that. And everything, as long as it lasts, bears the penalty of its form, the penalty of being this way and no longer being able to be otherwise.

In a world obsessed with identity politics, there seems to be a considerable currency placed on defining and understanding oneself in relation to others. To be authentic. But implicit in claiming, or rejecting any identity, is the assumption that we can know our own selves, and have that knowledge accepted and validated by others. Yet what if that is impossible? What if the image we have of ourselves is at once entirely singular, unverifiable, and at odds to some degree, great or small, with the multitude of images everyone else has of us?

Then you have the crux of the crisis that befalls the protagonist of Italian writer Luigi Pirandello’s classic 1926 novel One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, newly released by Spurl Editions, the inimitable little US publisher of nearly forgotten literary and photographic treasures.

The premise is simple, if, at first blush, a little contrived. The narrator, Vitangelo Moscarda, is a proud but unambitious twenty-eight year-old, heir to a considerable fortune, who is content to allow others to manage the bank his father founded while he enjoys a life of self-satisfied leisure in the town of Richieri. One day, while he is examining his face in the mirror, his wife offers an unexpected observation about his nose—it tilts to the right—and, wounded by this previously unnoticed imperfection, he quickly finds more to fault: his eyebrows look like two circumflex marks ^^, and his ears are poorly placed, and examination of his hands and legs revel further defects. An innocent remark thus sets off a crisis of identity that quickly escalates, ultimately ending with the complete psychological dissolution of character. As his grasp of reality spins out of control or, perhaps, becomes so precise that he can no longer surrender to the illusions that had previously buffered his existence, Moscardo carefully details the progress of what he calls “his sickness” and the remedy he believes will cure him of it.

Since he first becomes aware that his own view of himself is lacking, it troubles him that his wife is apparently in love with someone else—a construct of him, “her Gengé”—whom he now can only pretend to be. He blames his passivity and indecisiveness on a fault in his character and upbringing:

Unfortunately, I had never been able to give any sort of form to my life; I have never firmly wanted myself to have an individual nature, on my own, both because I had never encountered obstacles that aroused in me the will resist and to assert myself somehow in front of others and myself, and because my spirit tended to think and feel also the opposite of what it thought and felt the moment before. It tended, in other words, to dismantle and separate in me, with assiduous and often opposing reflections, every mental and sentimental formation. And then, finally my nature was inclined to yield, to give way to the discretion of others, not so much out of weakness as out of indifference and resignation in advance to the troubles that could then come to me…

The more he thinks about it, the more he comes to resent the way she manipulates this other version of himself, and grows jealous of this shadow of a being who has now come between them. The one she really loves. He has begun to disassociate.

The narrative is presented as a dialogue of sorts with an audience, the protagonist anticipating objections, inviting attention to certain observations and considerations. Pirandello (1867-1936) was a prolific playwright, and this interactive form of monologue reflects that. But this is an intense and deeply internal journey, one that, once in motion, the narrator is unable or unwilling to halt—even as he is aware of the self-destructive nature of his actions. After all, “self” destruction is his ultimate desire. If he is simultaneously one, nonexistent, and a multitude, he reasons that he should be able to break his various selves apart, shatter the impressions others hold of him—prove that he is not what they think he is.

The scheme Moscardo concocts leads him to engage in irrational, cruel and reckless behaviour and, of course, his goal is not appreciated. Because he has become especially concerned with the widespread reputation, inherited from his father, that he is a usurer, he turns his attention to the financial affairs of the bank in an especially reckless manner. And when money is involved, everyone pays attention. But not in the way our poor hero imagines. His friends and family respond by seeking to have him declared incompetent, a fate he is keen to escape.

Following Moscardo’s misadventures is akin to witnessing an existential train wreck. However, his insights into the limitations of self-awareness, and the nature of being in the world are profound. And, his observations of others are, for a narrator whose world falls apart with the  revelation of his own physical flaws, filled with vivid, typically unflattering, detail:

To judge by his appearance, Canon Sclepis didn’t seem to contain all that power of authority, that stern energy. He was a tall and thin priest, almost diaphanous, as if all the air and light of the hilltop where he lived had not only faded him but had also rarified him, and had made his hands almost transparent in their tremulous frailty and his eyelids finer than onion skin over his pale oval eyes. Tremulous and faded was his voice, too, and his smiles were empty on his long white lips, from which often a little blob of saliva would hang.

In navigating a very fine line between wisdom and madness, Pirandello has, in Moscardo, crafted a protagonist who is complicated, tragic, and strangely sympathetic.

Most famous perhaps, for his plays  “Six Characters in Search of an Author” and “Henry IV”, Pirandello was known for his ability to parlay his acute psychological insight into entertaining drama. That talent was recognized with the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. But he was also an important novelist and writer of short stories. This, his last novel, took him more than a decade to complete. Although it harvests territory familiar to Pirandello’s greater body of work, the tone is pessimistic, the style spare and the setting abstract. In that way it foreshadows the Theatre of the Absurd, in particular the work of Samuel Beckett. As translator William Weaver notes in his introduction, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand was not well received when it was first released. It was, he suggests, ahead of its time. In 1990, when this translation was initially published, Weaver recognizes that “(t)he terrible honesty of the novel and its protagonist has, with time, become all the more desirable and impelling.”

How then, will today’s identity obsessed climate respond?

An excerpt from the opening chapters of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand can be found at 3:AM Magazine.

 

The truth has no ornaments: SS Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy

You don’t tell the story of your own life, there’s no time. Life began the moment in which we got on board. The beginning is the Proleterka.

SS Proleterka was the last of Fleur Jaeggy’s currently available translated works that I had left to read and I did not want it to end. I used to think Sweet Days of Discipline was my favourite but this novel is far more subtle, real, and painful. And with none of the gothic overtones that creep into so much of her other work. A most dispassionate and restrained coming of age story, it is cold, calculated, yet charged with a deep, sorrowful beauty.

Central to this novella is the account of a cruise to Greece that the unnamed narrator and her father take when she is fifteen years old. It will turn out to be the last opportunity they have to get to know each other. Her parents separated when she was young, and she was deposited with her maternal grandmother, leaving her father effectively exiled from her life, forced to request time with his daughter—applications that were frequently denied or strictly curtailed. To have two weeks together over the Easter holidays is unprecedented, and precious, but unlikely to resolve the existing distance between parent and child. They are too much alike, too accustomed to emotional self-preservation. But, with almost surgical precision, Jaeggy’s crystalline prose exposes the currents of repressed affection that run deep beneath the surface of their relationship.

Our protagonist is looking back from mid-life, at her childhood and youth. She offers an unsentimental, clinical assessment of her own experiences, emotions, and interactions. It is a learned response to the world. Occasionally she speaks of “my father”, but most commonly she refers to him by his first name, Johannes. With respect to herself, she alternates between first person and third, talking of “Johannes’ daughter,” “she” or “the girl”—at times employing all three in the same paragraph. She is thus able to step back and place herself within the regard (or lack thereof) of others. Detachment is her means of coping.

As a young girl, she tells us, she lived with Orsola, her mistress or “the mother of my mother, of her who had been Johannes’ wife.” After her own parents’ divorce, her father’s parents who had moved south for the health of their other son, an invalid, lost the textile factory that had been in the family for generations. Johannes lost his inheritance and his wealth. For the narrator, her father’s family hold a tragic fascination. She does not know them beyond their photographic images. But then she hardly knows her father any better. It is her mother’s family who control her destiny, which will ultimately be boarding school. She is disposable and knows it early on. Still, she describes her “quasi-glacial” relationship with her maternal grandmother as the most intense she ever had, even if she is at a loss to know if she felt affection for the woman:

Orsola treats me like an adult. Like a peer. Obedience does not mean subordination. I close all the shutters. I do not open them in the mornings. A continuous closing. I close the day. Closing is order. It is a form of detachment. An ephemeral preparation for death. An exercise. It was entirely natural that that woman and the garden corresponded to the vision of a happy land. How much time did I still have at my disposal? The curtains at the window are fragile, almost dust. And she, the mistress, looks like a white plaster bust.

If her relationship with Orsola is formal and defined by expectation, her mother exists almost entirely in absentia. She is “Johannes’ wife.” By the time the protagonist is recounting her tale, she too is dead. Her daughter has only her jewels and her piano to remember her by. It is the Steinway, purchased in New York and carried across the ocean to Europe, that is the narrator’s closest connection to her mother. As an object resting in a specially prepared room, she endows it with personality, demonstrating an intimacy she could never find with the pianist who once played it:

You do not want me to touch your keys yet. My fingers are unfamiliar to you. That slight hint of carnality. But I am sitting beside you. I watch over you. In the first years I always kept the door closed. I wanted to be sure that no one came in. You alone, locked in. Now no longer. Now I allow you more freedom. And at the same time I allow myself more freedom too. I have become wiser. Before, if I felt resentment, it seeped into my veins, my eyes, my thoughts. An insomniac resentment.

Aboard the SS Proleterka, the connection between father and daughter is marked by a formality that neither can seem to breach. They have, she has told us, always been able to “perceive the exceedingly fine line between equilibrium and desperation.” By the time they are on this shared voyage, the daughter on the cusp of womanhood and the father aging quickly, they can no longer negotiate that line. The ship has been chartered by the Guild to which Johannes has belonged since he was a student. Having fallen into poverty, he is treated by his peers with a measure of pity. He is awkward, out of step. His daughter, meanwhile, is looking to test other waters while they are out to sea. As the voyage progresses, she engages in a number of rather abrupt sexual encounters with several of the officers. She is being used and she knows it, but she wants the experience. She likes and dislikes it at once. Having been raised by a family who could not show love, she seems unable to accept more than brute affection. Yet there is also the sense that she wants to evoke a reaction in Johannes, protective, angry, disappointed—anything—but if he registers her absences from their cabin he refuses to show it.

Day by day, their extended visit slips away. Trips ashore to visit ruins and others sites, exhaust Johannes and confuse his daughter. At Knossos, for example, his sadness weighs on her and distracts her:

I should pay attention to the woman’s explanations, says Johannes; I continue to look at her white gloves, the seams of her stockings. Her calves. “Höre, höre zu,” says Johannes, listen. I cannot catch her words. Only in my mind’s eye can I grasp what I see. The words are too much. And the light is extremely bright. The journey is important for Johannes. The journey to Greece, father and daughter. The last and first chance to be together. But we do not know this. Or perhaps he does.

There will be no magic breakthrough on this voyage, nor in any of the remaining visits the narrator makes to have dinner with her father in the hotel where he lives. There is an emotional stasis that defines their relationship and in a strange way it suits them. The narrator’s father will be long dead before she really confronts the importance of their bond. And even then it is stretched taut and unarticulated.

Perfectly paced and tightly controlled, the devastating power of SS Proleterka lies in the way Jaeggy manages to capture the complicated and unexpressed affection that underlie even the most strained parent-child relationships, while demonstrating the lengths to which a child who knows they have been disposed of will go to maintain a sense of identity. Self-preservation requires distance. If the narrator seems dispassionate at times, she is also resilient and real.

SS Proleterka is translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen who maintains a remarkably clean, even tone throughout, seamlessly incorporating the German dialogue, and allowing the stark beauty of Jeaggy’s prose to shine. Highly recommended. Available from New Directions.