Norman Manea - Captives

— Make yourself comfortable. Perhaps you’d like to wait. Have a seat.

Proceeded to pick a pile of the chair. Miscellaneous trash. Couldn’t find a place for it. Threw it on the bed.

There is no way to write the English second person without using the word you , however, and I have simply used it when the narrator’s prose apostrophizes Captain Zubcu’s daughter.

Readers not preoccupied with the blood and guts of translation and the differences between languages may see these final notes as technical details, and that’s as it should be. For any translator, what really matters is bringing the spirit of the writing into the new language. In this case, the language is swirling and mysterious, for Captives does not aspire to be a traditional novel. It expresses the dementia induced by the captive state. Part novel (verging on roman-fleuve), part musically inspired composition, Captives leads the translator to grapple with the text as fluid, polyphonic writing, for it includes many kinds of speech, nearly all of them unstable.

JEAN HARRIS

AUGUST 2014