Aleksandar Hemon: Best European Fiction 2013

For a novel or a short story even in its original state is already a translation. The version it presents of reality is as far from actual reality as our dreams are from the events of our lives out of which they propagate their lovely or malignant blossoms. In our lazy way we tend to imagine that a piece of fiction is a direct statement of a set of facts or factual images when in fact—in fact!—fiction is a kind of dream-metaphor, a moulded and mannered traducing of ‘what really happened’. This is the wonderful fact about fiction, that we know it is all made up, a farrago of marvellous lies, yet we regard it as if it were somehow all true—which it is, of course, although the truth of fiction is not the same as the truth of life.

When we consider it at all carefully, we realise that there can be no such thing as a translation. What a translator produces is a new thing, and when he finishes, there are two works where before there was one. That is inevitable, given the nature of language, and given that there are languages. The Book of Babel is legion.

Who would be a translator?

Coda: Worrying that I might make a blunder, a thing easily done in this context, I consulted a Swedish friend on the matter of the word, or title, Vinden . Is not vinden the Swedish word for ‘wind’? It is. But also it means, indeed, ‘the attic’. But should the title, the mis-title, not have been Den Vinden ? No, because den vinden would mean ‘that [particular] attic’. Ah, the infinite undependability of words.

For some time now, I’ve felt compelled to convince the hypothetical reader—presumably ever-ready to grab the remote or download more shades of grey on the Kindle—that it is necessary to read difficult and/ or translated works of literature. With considerable effort, here and there and everywhere, I’ve tried to build an argument based on the presumed benefits of such reading. For some time, being in that situation annoyed me terribly—to the point of my being tempted to say to the reader: take it or leave it.

What was bothering me, I realized, was that I sought confirmation in numbers. I strived to convert readers to my point of view so that they could buy the Best European Fiction anthology en masse, which would then confirm the utility and social value of the whole project. I was, as it were, marketing it, suggesting to small audiences around the world that they were an avant-garde of the great army of readers gathering just beyond the horizon, about to realize what they have been missing by not reading the anthology and translated literature.

And it turns out I don’t care about the numbers anymore, even if they’re pretty good, as the anthology has, over the past four years, introduced more than a hundred European writers to English-language readers, and generated a vast number of translations from more than forty European languages. The presence of those writers and their work is now indelible. The connection has been established and the flow of communication is ongoing.

For the past few years, every single review of the anthology brought up the question: What is European fiction? I am happy to report I have no clue. This is the fourth Best European Fiction anthology I’ve edited and I’m not any closer to a clear picture, let alone a definition, of what particular qualities of writing, other than loosely geographic, could be defined as European. True, there are intellectual domains or formal approaches European writers are conspicuously comfortable with, particularly when compared to their American colleagues: fragmentariness; dialogue with other writers across cultures and history; experimental cheekiness and love of absurdity; disinclination to entertain by deploying TV-friendly banalities masked as social commentary; presumption of the reader’s intelligence; willingness to reach for the far ranges of both humor and seriousness; a firm conviction in the transformative powers of literature. But of course, for every piece that exemplifies one of the above, I could find—in the anthologies I’ve edited—a counterexample. Perhaps one constant and unchanging aspect of European literature is precisely its slipperiness—it cannot be collared, reduced to a marketable formula, or posited as the absolute opposite to American literature. The reason for that ought to be obvious: Europe is nothing if not an intricate entanglement of languages, histories, borders, and varieties of human experience. It is not only complicated—culturally, intellectually, geographically—but is ever in the process of becoming increasingly more so.

For the past few years, Europe seems to have been on the verge of collapse, due to the financial shenanigans rooted in the belief (so dear to Americans) that the free market and capitalism would bring us endless joy and money. The European Union, which, like many an empire, appeared solidly eternal not so long ago, might not be able to outlive the ongoing debt crisis. Europe, as it were, might not survive itself. What heretofore seemed unquestionably real might turn out to be a foolish fantasy. The rule of apparent reasonability has approached its end and there is, shall we say, a widespread surge in absurdity. The reality of Europe is being renegotiated. If there is a need to reconsider—or indeed abandon—the intellectual and formal limits of realism, Europe provides plenty of justification. Perhaps significantly, the crisis of the European domain coincides with the crisis of the print form—the book and the related human project known as literature are undergoing a transformation with uncertain outcome. One should read European fiction not so much for the purposes of understanding it, but rather just to keep up with its accelerating history and to see how literature reinvents itself in trying to keep up with it. The understanding might have to wait.

When you come right down to it, no human experience appears translatable or understandable outside itself. The world looks different from each individual position—everyone is inescapably locked in a worldview. But it is precisely in overcoming that existential circumstance that humanity lives up to its potential; indeed, in transcending the biological and ontological individuation, humanity becomes imaginatively and conceptually possible. What allows for the ascension from the individual to the human kind is language—we are impossible as a species that recognizes itself as such without the belief that words can convey experience. Out of that belief writing comes; without that belief literature—as the depository of the entirety of human experience—is impossible.

But language is far more than a code necessary for transmission of existential information. Language being merely a code would imply that the world is figured out before the words are spoken or written, that we can only speak and write what we know. As a matter of fact, language— and literature as the field of its actualization—serves us to negotiate the mysteries, to enter not only the unknown but the unknowable as well, and find ways to say what is unsayable or, even, unspeakable. Which is why imprecision is as essential to language and literature as precision. It is in the continuous search for the right word that we find meaning; it is in the failing to find the exact word that new interhuman spaces open. What great book or poem was easy to read or translate? It is in trying to grasp Proust that we fall in love with his work. Pursuing meaning in literature is the meaning of literature.

Translation is, therefore, essential to language and literature, as is the impossibility to translate exactly. “Poetry is what is gained in translation,” Brodsky said, countering Frost’s claim that poetry is what is lost in translation. Languages and literatures overlap, seep into, and contaminate one another, blocking—thankfully—the very possibility of purity. Literature is about nothing if not about continuously trying to say what is hard to say, to convey what is difficult to convey, translate what is impossible to translate. Those who harp on the impossibility of translation betray a belief in the superiority of their own language; as far as they are concerned, nobody can say it better than those who have already said it; our language is perfect for us as it is; the world is complete, in all its hierarchies.