As both writers and readers anticipate the results of the National Book Awards this upcoming Wednesday, we at Asymptote, to no surprise, are keeping a particular eye out for the outcome of the Translated Literature category. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Erik Noonan gives us a probing and interrogative look at the five books on the shortlist, looking beyond content to pursue answers regarding the linguistic journeys that these works have taken, in order to be chosen.
With the reinstatement of the Translated Literature category, the National Book Foundation is clearly attempting to correct the gender and culture biases of years past. From the beginning of the category in 1967 until 1983, when it was discontinued, every winning author was European with only four exceptions: Yasunari Kawabata in 1971, the anonymous author of The Confessions of Lady Nijo in 1974, the anonymous Chinese author(s) of Master Tung’s Wester Chamber Romance in 1977, and Ichiyō Higuchi with the Japanese authors of the Ten Thousand Leaves anthology in 1982. Lady Nijō and Higuchi were the only two women, albeit long deceased, to be awarded during the prize’s first iteration. Among the translators, Karen Brazell and Helen R. Lane won in 1974, Clara Winston won with Richard Winston in 1978, and Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link won in 1980. The rest were male. In 2018, the category was reinstated and the entry criteria revised, so that both the author and the translator had to be alive at the beginning of the awards cycle to qualify. Last year, the first of its new phase, author Yōko Tawada and translator Margaret Mitsutani took the award for The Emissary. This year, you can expect this corrective trend to continue (for example, every book on the longlist was written in a different language).
The 2019 shortlist is striking for the emotional intensity of its entries, and for the way they position the individual vis-à-vis their social environment, mostly by way of the family. Brought into the standard literary English of commercial publishing, with its mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate roots, an almost neoclassical balance can be detected in the texture of the sentences of almost all these books (I’ll return to this idea in my conclusion). This even-toned, measured and balanced sentence—the sort of English in which these books have been (re)written—is in itself a matter of impeccable good taste. I think the unstated significance of the way the books are written in English is the meaning of the Translated Literature Award; the prize asserts the stable position of the American literary establishment at home and abroad, and by extension, that of the USA in domestic affairs and in geopolitics. The award does this in a deeply encoded fashion that enlists a set of aesthetic values in the execution of a project that’s concerned with other values entirely.
Here are this year’s five National Book Award finalists in the Translated Literature category:
- Death is Hard Work, by Khaled Khalifa, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price (Farrar Straus & Giroux/Macmillan)
- Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (New Directions)
- The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Archipelago Books)
- The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder (Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House)
- Crossing by Pajtim Statovici, translated from the Finnish by David Hackston (Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House)
Musing on the inflexibility of English and the challenges of translating from the Hungarian, Ottilie Mulzet, the translator Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, conjectures: “Maybe the kind of English that’s spoken in the Indian subcontinent—where it’s partially subjugated to the tendencies of Hindi—would be a more suitable English for translation from Hungarian, but I have to work with the language I know the best.” In Baron, the fourth in a quartet of novels, a character known only as The Professor has given up on his research and moved into a hut in a town that he no longer recognizes, where his disowned daughter and a neo-Nazi group pursue him. Plot points are introduced only to be dropped, heading nowhere, irresolute. The reclusive former screenwriter for Béla Tarr and the author of many prizewinning novels, Krasznahorkai has described the postwar 20th century as “. . . distinctive because there was this huge influx of hope that we’re building an entire new era. And then it just completely fell to pieces. Then along comes the melancholy—or the rebellion!” The author’s statement might be right out of the mouth of one of his characters, as for example when the Professor says, “. . . what kind of collapse would it be—my heavens—he shook his head, smiling, next to the stove, when we understand, when we really grasp that the basis of all human culture is false, but how bleak everything will be then, he bowed his head. . .” I’ll have a bit more to say about this title in my conclusion.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Baron is the novel The Memory Police, by Japanese author Yōko Ogawa, whose sentences come closest of any of the finalists to being minimalist, in the sense that they use the least means to say the most. On a small island, objects and people have begun to disappear, and the protagonist, an author, records not only the way that everything vanishes, but also the disappearance of the disappearance, the erasure of every trace of the absent thing’s very existence—a task carried out by the titular Memory Police, the official agents of nothingness, who do their work with a flat affect that outdoes the banality of evil and suits the matter of factness of the style. Translator Stephen Snyder states: “Ogawa’s prose is austere and lovely in Japanese, with cadences and effects that don’t exist in English, or at least not in my versions.” The author of many novels, and the winner of every major Japanese literary honor, she has said of her fiction: “Contemporary Japanese society appears to be safe and comfortable, but I wanted to write about the shapeless violence and danger that lurk beneath the surface.” Indeed, the flatness of the statements in her prose often belies what they’re saying: “The town was quiet. I could sense the roughness in the air that I’d felt after other disappearances, but somehow people seemed calmer. There were almost no cars on the streets, with the exception of the Memory Police trucks, and though the crowds were thick, no one seemed to be stopping to talk. The only sound was that of burning books.”
The only work of nonfiction among the finalists, Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir The Barefoot Woman struck her translator Jordan Stump like this: “I loved the sharpness of Mukasonga’s eye, the graceful construction of her chapters, the way a story wrapped up in unimaginable loss is told with a little smile, and the way in which that smile sometimes abruptly disappears.” The book memorializes the author’s mother, with an ethical authority that’s unique among the entrants, as she brings the murdered woman to life for her readers from beyond her horrible fate in the Rwandan Genocide. A Tutsi who emigrated to France and escaped the genocide that claimed the lives of many of her family members, Mukasonga declares that: “Fiction makes it possible to take on subjects that would be too difficult or painful to address in the first person. It allows me also to maintain a certain distance from what I write.” The Barefoot Woman cancels that distance and regains the presence of the author’s beloved mother, when she rejoices after finding a potential bride for her son Antoine: “It was a gift from heaven, it was a miracle! She offered thanks to the Virgin Mary, along with Ryangombe, the Master of the Spirits . . . Mary or Ryangombe, she didn’t know which, had answered her prayers, so it was best to keep them both on her side.” It’s the warmth of Mukasong’s remembrance that brings her mother back to life in the imagination.
As for Syrian author Khaled Khalifa’s novel Death Is Hard Work, translator Leri Price describes an uncanny moment during her efforts: “I was translating a section on the university in Aleppo . . . and how there had been purges and murders of its professors, and when I turned on the news that night the BBC [was] running a story about purges and murders of the staff in the University of Aleppo. You couldn’t make it up.” Khalifa’s novel narrates the road trip undertaken by protagonist Bolbol in a minibus, to deliver his father’s corpse to its final resting place in accordance with the old man’s wishes, amidst a civil war. The screenwriter and novelist, whose No Knives in the Kitchens of this City received the Naguib Mahfouz Medal and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, famously declined an invitation to teach at Harvard University and remained in Aleppo. Of his book, he has said, “I wrote Death is Hard Work because I felt that I did not have a lot of time, or a surplus of life, therefore I was tied to the table thinking that I must do what I can to write something different from my other works as well as other stories about war.” In a passage of piercing beauty, Bolbol and his father Abdel Latif have a difference of opinion about the conflict: “He didn’t want to be cruel to his son, but made it clear that he was here to talk and Bolbol here to listen, nothing more; in a few days he would be far away, and then Bolbol could go back to his opinions and his capitulation, could go on living in a neighborhood supporting the regime.”
Translator David Hackston describes the work of Finnish author Pajtim Statovici as dealing with “displacement and the realities of life as an immigrant in a foreign culture,” and the flight of Bujar, the young protagonist of Statovici’s novel Crossing, takes him among cities and identities, to Rome, New York, Helsinki, and finally back to his hometown of Tirana. In each new incarnation of his personality, he collides with someone he considers to be the authentic version of the self that he is trying on, wearing identities as a sort of garment in an effort to, not so much become anyone or anything, but as to pass from one entity to the next; at last he returns to take care of his senile mother in a further crossing, this time a crossing back. The novelist, whose Albanian family fled persecution in Kosovo to Finland when he was a toddler, says of his conception of fiction that: “Fictitious works that were never supposed to be anything other than imaginary creations, that can’t even be more than that, are regularly read in ways that make them something other than fiction, representations of people or beliefs.” When the protagonist and another character are preparing to leave Albania for Italy by boat, some market vendors by the wayside court them, possibly believing they’re the sons of local officials or Italian tourists, and Bujar sees his companion in a different light. He observes: “Agim seemed to enjoy the attention far more than me, because he loved moments like this, loved being on display—it seemed that he had built his entire life around these types of moments, moments in which he could appear as the person he wanted to be, the person he truly was beneath those broken shoes and dirty clothes.” The main character measures himself against others before he learns to measure himself against himself.
There’s certainly diversity among the entries. Although the 2018 reboot expanded the award criteria to include both fiction and nonfiction, only one of the finalists, The Barefoot Woman, is a memoir rather than a novel. Death Is Hard Work and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming are distinguished from the other three entries by narrating events with an ironic third person narrative voice that often creates a distancing effect, as opposed to the intimate if untrustworthy first person narrators of The Barefoot Woman, The Memory Police, and Crossing. Only Baron and Death are funny. Crossing is the only entry that deals with queer and trans themes. And yet, for my purposes, no matter how much the shortlisted titles stand out from each other, they’re more alike than distinct.
There’s one significant exception. I mentioned earlier that for me almost all of the shortlisted titles share a certain kind of sentence, a way of writing that you might call “the middle style,” neither plain nor ornate, neither abrupt nor long-winded, neither mono- nor polysyllabic, neither clear nor obscure, but able to become any of these, and then to return to a kind of equilibrium. The single outlier is Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. Baron is distinguished from the other entries by the experience of reading enforced by its style, the kind of attention that the reader has to maintain, as Krasznahorkai’s paratactic phrases, offset by commas, proceed in a long string—single sentences going on for page after page, without a full stop, digressive and oblique, building to a cumulative effect of anxiety and paranoia that’s excessive, disturbing, and entirely unlike the effect produced by the steady paragraphs of the other four entries. It’s the sentence in the realm of Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass, Mathias Enard’s Zone, and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. Krasznohorkai’s engagement with Modernist and Postmodernist aesthetics, at the level of the sentence, sets his book apart. It’s a measure of the judges’ catholicity that this book made it to the shortlist, and their decision to award the prize to Baron or not will be a test of the system’s tolerance for complexity and difficulty. The outcome of this competition can also be interpreted as a measure of the stability of the system, because if a book like Baron can win a National Book Award, as the USA heads into a truly extraordinary second-term presidential election year, then perhaps there isn’t such an urgent need for the ruling institutions to claim that everything is normal, after all.
Editor’s note: Full-length reviews of four out of the five works on the shortlist have been previously published on Asymptote. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming was reviewed by Assistant Managing Editor Jacob Silkstone as part of our May 2019 What’s New in Translation column. The Barefoot Woman was our December 2018 Book Club selection, and was reviewed by Assistant Editor Alyea Canada. The Memory Police was reviewed by Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong Jacqueline Leung, and Crossing was reviewed by Jenni Råback for our April 2019 issue. Click through for further takes on these titles!
Erik Noonan is from Los Angeles, California, USA. He is the author of the poetry collections Stances and Haiku d’Etat. His writing is featured in a variety of publications, including the anthology Cross Strokes: Poetry Between Los Angeles and San Francisco. For more, please visit eriknoonan.net.
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