Posts filed under 'adventure novel'

Between Languages: The Politics of Class, Race, and Translation in the Novels of B. Traven

February 26, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Todarello

Such is how the frontier in Traven functions: an arena of capital that both equalizes and reproduces extant racial hierarchies.

The identity of novelist B. Traven has spawned a delightfully layered and debated array of theories, stipulations, and investigations. Best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, later adopted into a well-loved film by John Huston, Traven was the pseudonym of a German- and English-language writer who, in various hypotheses, has been the collaborative result of several individuals, an imprisoned actor, an enthusiastic explorer of Mexico, and a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. The most fascinating aspect of this mysterious identity, however, lies not solely in the individual’s life, but also in the entangled multiculturalism and various iterations of his works, which render American landscapes in German language, examine the intersection of class and race politics, and create narratives in which complexities of social agency are examined in both local and international contexts.

If you’re reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its English translation, it would be be hard to guess that it was written by a German author, let alone intended for German-speaking leftists, living in German-speaking countries in the interwar period. Even in the original German, the book bears no obvious trace of Europe or European culture—aside from the language, of course. It feels, on the contrary, quintessentially American, falling easily into the category of the western and full of the genre’s tropes and generic dictates. At least for this reader, it felt odd to be reading one’s way through many of the familiar elements of the western, in a language not commonly associated with it.

The novel takes place in a post-revolutionary Mexico during the interwar years, and its protagonists are white American vagabonds, property-less and looking for work. There are oilmen, Mexican “Indians” and Mexican ladinos, or mestizos. There are bandits, train heists, and Federales. There is gunplay. And there is gold. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was originally written and published in German as Der Schatz der Sierran Madre by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1927, and was part of Büchergilde Gutenberg’s mission to provide impoverished workers with access to cheap entertainment and Bildung. The current Büchergilde Gutenberg website tells us, for example, that the publisher was founded in 1924 to facilitate easier access to Bildung for members of the working class, doing so by means of affordable but well-crafted, premium books. Bruno Dreßler, Büchergilde’s first chairman, had in mind the idea of a proletarian cultural community, a “proletarische Kulturgemeinschaft”; the publisher saw itself as part of proletarian literature and culture at a time when such a thing perhaps still existed, though its contours and possibility—or impossibility—were, even then, debated by Marxist critics and thinkers of every stripe. Even Diego Rivera, a card-carrying communist, argued that, properly speaking, there could be no such thing as proletarian art within capitalism. Only after the dictatorship of the proletariat has “fulfilled its mission,” Rivera writes, after it has “liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society,” can there be a proletarian art. READ MORE…

Texts in Context: Glynne Walley on Kyokutei Bakin

August 29, 2022  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Hakkenden represents a whole other side of premodern Japan: big, messy, intellectually sophisticated, verbose, and populist.

Welcome to our new monthly column, in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked!

The following interview, conducted with Glynne Walley of the University of Oregon, spans Walley’s unprecedented efforts in bringing a titanic work of classical Japanese fiction to light. In his monograph Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden” (Cornell University Press, 2018), Walley explores the oft-ignored popular literature of nineteenth-century Japan, and how Bakin’s master epic foregrounds fundamental questions of morality, virtue, and the functions of fiction in society.

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (KB): Tell me about your book, Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden.” Can you briefly describe the central idea or argument?

Glynne Walley (GW): Essentially, I’m looking at how a mid-nineteenth-century popular writer with aspirations toward capital-L Literature used a rhetoric of didacticism to satisfy both the demands of entertaining readers and his own desire to turn the novel into something Serious. The writer in question, Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848) was one of Japan’s first professional authors of fiction, and he accomplished that by being acutely aware of what audiences wanted. At the same time, under the influence of masterworks in Chinese vernacular fiction, he had an idea that fiction, which his society considered beneath intellectual notice, could be a vehicle for serious ideas. It was a negotiation that other novelists in other places were also engaged in, but since Japan was operating largely outside their influence at that moment, Bakin makes an interesting case study of how the tensions between commerce and Art played out in a different and very specific context.

KB: What led you to this topic?

GW: The novel I focus on—Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Hakkenden for short, and Eight Dogs in English)—was hugely popular in its day, acutely influential on the next couple of generations, and remains crucially important to literary history, both for its intrinsic worth and for the role it played in debates over the modernization of fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, it has been almost entirely neglected in Anglophone scholarship—mentioned, but seldom analyzed. It was time for a monograph on Hakkenden, I felt, and if nobody else was going to do it, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

KB: I’m burying the lede here a little bit because you are also, of course, the translator of Bakin’s Hakkenden! This is a monumental task—Hakkenden is massively long, immensely complex, and challenging to translate. What were the particular difficulties that this translation posed?

GW: Hakkenden is a massively long work! The modern edition I work from is nearly six thousand pages. The biggest challenges relate to that—and no doubt that length is one thing that kept the work largely untouched by Anglophone scholars and translators. Perhaps the smartest thing would have been to come up with a volume of highlights (a few short excerpts had already appeared in anthologies), but since the scale was part of the point of the work, I really wanted to see the whole thing in English.

The other big challenge is the language. It’s written in classical Japanese, which is grammatically and syntactically quite different from modern Japanese. The author writes in a wide array of styles within classical Japanese, drawing from literary masterpieces from Japan and China as well as the popular theater and fiction of his day, making for a really diverse stylistic palette. And he’s also incorporating a lot of elements of vernacular (as opposed to classical) Chinese writing, which adds a distinctive flavor, but which is, in a way, much harder for the modern reader than classical Chinese. Understanding all these registers, which are freely mixed in virtuoso ways, is hard enough, but the translator, of course, wants to try to capture them in English . . .  READ MORE…