Aleksandar Hemon: Best European Fiction 2013

“ Best European Fiction 2010 … offers an appealingly diverse look at the Continent’s fiction scene.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

“The work is vibrant, varied, sometimes downright odd. As [Zadie] Smith says [in her preface]: ‘I was educated in a largely Anglo-American library, and it is sometimes dull to stare at the same four walls all day.’ Here’s the antidote.” FINANCIAL TIMES

“With the new anthology Best European Fiction… our literary world just got wider.” TIME MAGAZINE

“The collection’s diverse range of styles includes more experimental works than a typical American anthology might… [Mr. Hemon’s] only criteria were to include the best works from as many countries as possible.” WALL STREET JOURNAL

“This is a precious opportunity to understand more deeply the obsessions, hopes and fears of each nation’s literary psyche—a sort of international show-and-tell of the soul.” THE GUARDIAN

“Readers for whom the expression ‘foreign literature’ means the work of Canada’s Alice Munro stand to have their eyes opened wide and their reading exposure exploded as they encounter works from places such as Croatia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia (and, yes, from more familiar terrain, such as Spain, the UK, and Russia).” BOOKLIST STARRED REVIEW

“[W]e can be thankful to have so many talented new voices to discover.” LIBRARY JOURNAL

“[W]hat the reader takes from them are not only the usual pleasures of fiction—the twists and turns of plot, chance to inhabit other lives, other ways of being—but new ways of thinking about how to tell a story.” CHRISTOPHER MERRILL, PRI’S “THE WORLD” HOLIDAY PICK

“The book tilts toward unconventional storytelling techniques. And while we’ve heard complaints about this before—why only translate the most difficult work coming out of Europe?—it makes sense here. The book isn’t testing the boundaries, it’s opening them up.” TIME OUT CHICAGO

“Editor Aleksandar Hemon declares in his preface that at the heart of this compilation is the ‘nonnegotiable need for communication with the world, wherever it may be,’ and asserts that ongoing translation is crucial to this process. The English-language reading world, ‘wherever it may be,’ is grateful.” THE BELIEVER

“Does European literature exist? Of course it does, and this collection of forty-one stories proves it.” THE INDEPENDENT

It is not only in French that the words translate and traduce bear a close affinity. Legend has it that John Braine’s novel of ambition and opportunism in 1950s Britain, Room at the Top , in its Swedish version was very nearly entitled Vinden —‘The Attic’—until a vigilant editor thought to double-check. It is also said that in a passage in one of Sean O’Casey’s plays of Dublin working-class life where a character speaks of the ‘little chislers’, that is, children, an earnest Japanese translator rendered the colloquialism as ‘small stone-masons’. One laughs, of course, but at the same time one does sympathise with the hapless traducer. Language is a sly and treacherous medium.

We are all familiar with Robert Frost’s mournful contention that poetry is what gets lost in translation, but meaning itself can go subtly or grossly astray in the crossing from one tongue to another—not so much tripping lightly, one might say, as merely tripping. The problem, as any translator will ruefully remind us, is that in the original text meaning is not fixed, but is always more or less ambiguous. This is so not only in verse, but can be true of the most seemingly limpid passages of prose. You sit down to write a letter to your lover, or your bank manager, thinking you know exactly what you have to say, yet when you finish and read over what you have written you notice that the sense is not quite as you intended. Who speaks here, you wonder? The answer is, language itself, wilful, subtle, coercive. We think we speak, but really it is we who are spoken.

Even when language seems at its most docile, the sense, or non-sense, of a phrase can turn on the most innocent-seeming effect. Take that comma in the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus . In the original the first proposition is written thus: ‘ Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist .’ Wittgenstein in his early work was fond of symmetry, and certainly this is a handsomely symmetrical sentence. However, the rules of punctuation in German are strict, and by those rules a comma is called for here, at the halfway point in the sentence, making for a nice caesura.

Yet the translators of the 1961 London edition of the Tractatus , Pears and McGuinness, flexing the looser muscles of English, render the line as: ‘The world is all that the case is, as the German indicates.’ Thus at the very outset of this tangled text the reader meets with uncertainty. Does Wittgenstein mean to say that the world is all, that the case is, as the German indicates, or, as the English seems to have it, that the case is that the world is all? These are, surely, two separate propositions, and though the difference between them may seem slight, it is not negligible, especially in a work that sets out to explore and even prescribe the limits of language. In the German version of proposition 1 the emphasis is on the allness of the world, while the English seems primarily concerned with what is the case or state of affairs in the world. Wittgenstein himself might have devoted a whole section of his later Philosophical Investigations to the effect of that apparently innocuous comma.

So who would be a translator?

Occasionally, of course, a translation chimes happily with the original. The poetry of Paul Celan is notoriously difficult to render into another language—indeed, it is a question whether the attempt should be made at all, given the poet’s agonised relation to German, the language of the monsters who administered the Holocaust. Yet great and inventive translations have been made of his work, notably by Paul Hamburger and John Felstiner. In his search for a way of dealing with, if not expressing, the horrors suffered by the Jews in the Second World War, Celan formulated a negative aesthetic—a 1963 volume of his poems is titled Die Niemandsrose , ‘The No-one’s Rose’—and again and again he inverts usages, twists and bends them, turns them inside-out. For instance in the poem ‘ Weggebeizt ’, ‘Etched Away’, he speaks of

which Hamburger renders as

and Felstiner, wonderfully, as

In both these instances, ‘noem’, for ‘ Genicht ’, is a stroke of genius. Compared to what Seamus Heaney has called Celan’s ‘tortuosities’, or the knotty intricacy of the Tractatus , the novel, you might think, would surely present few problems for the translator. In fact, fiction is just as difficult to translate, if not more so, than verse. Here, too, the Frostian lament asserts its sad truth. The late John McGahern liked to make a simple distinction: there is verse, he would say, there is prose, and then there is poetry, which may be conjured in either medium. Thus the poetry of prose, no less than of verse, stands to lose badly when it is filleted from one language and fed into another.