Reviews and Comments

I so admired the moral compass of Socrates Fortlow! He'd be the first to admit that he's not perfect; he spends most days regretting the actions that put him in prison. His code of "right" and "wrong" may not always be the same as mine, but in his world he's a beacon of hope.

I so admired the moral compass of Socrates Fortlow! He'd be the first to admit that he's not perfect; he spends most days regretting the actions that put him in prison. His code of "right" and "wrong" may not always be the same as mine, but in his world he's a beacon of hope.

This issue of McSweeney’s is an outstanding tribute to the power of storytelling (although I found it to be more a catalog of experiments than masterpieces of short fiction).

The premise of the experiment was to take a story and have it translated it into another language, then translate the result into yet another language, again, and again.

The introduction describes the parameters: each translator received only the piece immediately preceding; the entire series was not available to the translators until the end. The instruction was to preserve the story’s style, “to provide an accurate copy that was also a live story.” What exactly that meant, however, ended up varying widely. Did specific words get translated? Usually. But what about the story, the tone, the ambiance, the sound, the feel? Yes, no, sometimes. The various translators added and subtracted photographs, footnotes, chapter numbers, locations, and characters’ names. Editor Adam Thirlwell wrote: “The ethics of the novelist-translator may well be different from the ethics of the translator-translator.” As translator Dave Eggers said in his followup note: “I took some liberties.”

Just reading the titles, I saw things morph. The most striking examples: The Four Seasons, Without a Summer turned into Four Seasons with Two Summers; the story titled Umberto Buti was reborn as Tian Huaiyi (and these from the original Italian Incontrarsi, which appears not to be the character’s name at all).

Several of the stories seemed to be selected because of their strong cultural underpinnings, as a challenge the translators to test the limits of the transformation. The story sets I enjoyed the most were the ones that ended up in parallel universes. I could see the previously mentioned Tian Huaiyi was the psychic twin of Umberto Buti, transported to a different time and place. My favorite was translated by David Mitchell, who (because of his familiarity with Japanese culture) was able to transform a story written by Kenji Miyazawa into English while retaining its basic plot elements and melancholy tone.

The translators’ notes added greatly to the reading experience.

--Péter Esterházy: “I wanted to make it obvious that this was a translation.”

--Laurent Binet: “I believe translating is rewriting. My own voice has to be there.”

--John Wray: “Translation is a creative act.”

The physical book is itself a creative act. The layered flaps on the covers are an integrated part of the design, the interior text appears in two colors of ink, and two versions of each story appear side by side. The non-Latin typefaces included Urdu, Hebrew, and Chinese.

Highly recommended, particularly if you are fluent in another language!

Every once in a while I need to read something mindless like this very lightweight crime thriller, the second in a series of books about Private Investigator Sloane Monroe.

I've said this before, and I'll probably say it again: authors of Kindle freebies need get their work professionally edited.

--"Grizzly" instead of "grisly"
--"Shuttered" and not "shuddered"
--Confusion between "pour" and "pore" (not just once, but several times)
--Blatant misuse of apostrophes and commas
--Implausible plot points (the protagonist enters a murder suspect's home, where the police have not searched and the front door just happens to be unlocked; the abrupt brush-off Sloane gives her live-in boyfriend, Nick)

These very severe weaknesses are redeemed by occasionally snappy dialogue between Sloane and her BFF, Maddie.