ON LITERARY TRANSLATION. Translating Substandard Speech (просторечие), IVAN BUNIN

On Translating the Language of Uneducated Speakers: The No-Win Situation

Text on translation from “On Translating Bunin,” in the book, Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial: Stories and Novellas. Translated, with extensive notes and a critical afterword, by R. Bowie. Northwestern University Press, 2006, p. 710. Quotation from “The Saviour in Desecration” is on p. 158.

Another problem for the literary translator—and the most maddening of all—is what to do about substandard speech. Translators intrepid enough to attempt works with dialogue featuring the underclass usually make their Russian peasants, workers, or merchants speak something relatively close to standard literary English. If you are British, you have those speakers speaking standard British English; if you are American you have them speaking standard American English. But either way, you have made for a big jarring effect: peasants, workers, and merchants don’t talk like that.

You can try for the underclass effects by using nonstandard syntax or other such tricks. That way you can doctor up the text at least a little bit. Why can’t you have them just speak underclass English? Because in so doing you must choose what kind of substandard, illiterate speech—the way the non-educated speak in, say, the American South, or Brooklyn, or Yorkshire, or in rural New Zealand. As soon as you make this choice, you run into the weirdly incongruous situation of having a Russian peasant woman speaking, for example, as if she grew up in the hills of West Virginia.

So, what to do? There really is no solution, but you have to make the effort to get some folksiness into the text. If you don’t, you are left with what Kornei Chukovsky calls gladkopis’ (Lauren Leighton has translated this as “blandscript”), a leveling out of earthy speech that ends up smoothing the earthiness out of it. The peasant woman says what would be in the American South something like, “It ain’t nobody’s bidness but mine,” and the translator writes, “That is no one’s business but mine.” This is something like building a Walmart Supercenter on what was once pristine forestland. To avoid the extremes above you try for a compromise. Maybe, “That’s not nobody’s business, only mine.”

My translation of Ivan Bunin’s “The Saviour in Desecration” starts out like this:

No, I mean to tell you, sir, not all folks gives glory unto the Lord, but the Lord, he will make known his ways. Now, when, and on what account, well, that’s something only He knows. Here in our parts just look how many there is of the famous icons and cathedrals, holy relics galore! And let me tell you what once we had to happen here. 

The daughter of one of our local merchants, she fell sick with a deathly illness, and God Above, Heavenly Mother, the things that man done trying to save his child! He sent away for doctors from Moscow, he ordered up the most costly of prayer services, and he took her off to make supplication at the relics in Moscow, then to the Trinity Monastery. He rooted out every last sacred cross or icon for miles around—but nothing helped. 

Meanwhile, the girl herself, she’s on and on repeating the same thing: “I’ll get well, I’ll be cured, no doubt about it, only not on account of all them things, but by the grace of the Saviour in Desecration.”

“Now, that’s wonderful,” her father says to her, and her mama too. “We believe you and we put our trust in you, only what is this Saviour in Desecration and where is he to be found?”

“Well, it’s something,” she says, “that I seen in a dream; it was the Good Lord granted unto me that vision.”

d

And so on. Does this translation get too much educated speech in here, or too much substandard? You walk the tightrope that most translators walk in this situation, trying for the flavor of the prostorechie (illiterate speech), while trying not to mark the speaker as native of, say, Georgia. The one in America, not the Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains. I would guess that most literary translators would judge my text here as too close to the Georgia in America, near which I grew up. But then, as I said above, the problem is really insoluble. Either way you work it, you can’t really win.

BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE Lee K. Abbott, "All Things All At Once"

U.R. Bowie

Book Review Article

Lee K. Abbott, All Things All At Once: New and Selected Stories, Norton, 2006

Recently I’ve decided to read and review what are generally accepted as the best short story collections by living American writers. With publication of All Things All at Once (Norton, 365 pages), Lee K. Abbott, widely acknowledged as a “writers’ writer,” has seven collections of stories in print. His work has appeared in some of the most highly regarded literary journals. In addition, his stories have been featured in Best American Short Stories and have won O. Henry awards. This most recent collection features new stories, plus several previously published.

Now retired and living in New Mexico, Abbott made his living for years by teaching in the creative writing racket (Ohio State University). Most of his stories are anchored in the dreary genre of “domestic literary realism,” but Abbott is not afraid to challenge the conventions of that genre. His very style, highly literary and unique, his sui generis voice often produce fiction far superior to the usual trite tales of Mr. or Ms. Joe Blow average middle class American. For example, “Men of Rough Persuasion,” is about as far as you can get from the run-of-the-mill DLF that is published, alas, in massive globs of ennui all over the U.S. these days.

Here’s how that story begins: “Almost lost among the gabbies and goombahs, fakeloos and funnel-heads, Catamites and hypes, rajahs and ringers, and can openers and Visigoths in the twenty-plus chapters that are The Gates of Hell, a semi-sci-fi mystery with no little tally-ho at the end of it, is the skel Harbee Hakim Hazar—Triple H himself—an Ur-Dravidian whose opening line of dialogue, addressed to his image in a mirror, is this: ‘Behold, dips and dewheads, the baddest, blackest bindle-bopper to bo your peep.’” Of course, when a writer opens with a paragraph like that, lost and bewildered pin-brained readers are strewn all along the wayside behind the flow of his narrative. Abbott, apparently, doesn’t care; good for him.

In another of his experimental pieces, “As Fate Would Have It,” a musician/drummer, Noley Gilmore, is the main character. The story—a better title might be “Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda”—features a strange conglomerate of modals and tenses. Largely eschewing the indicative mood, this story tells itself to a you in phrases such as “she should be mightily charmed,” or “you should feel your ribs cracking open,” “you must be introduced,” and so on. Occasionally the narrative hops into the future perfect tense: “’She weeps,’ Freddy will have said to you.” Quite an innovation, but God knows exactly what the purpose is of telling a story in language like this. Maybe because it’s fun to be different.

Another line from this skewed tale: “On the outside speakers, your only album, Wet Places at Noon, has to be playing” [why does it have to?]. If we look in the front matter, under OTHER BOOKS BY LEE K. ABBOTT, we discover the collection, Wet Places at Noon. Furthermore, reading two more pages into “As Fate Would Have It,” we learn that the title of the very book we hold in our hands—All Things All at Once—is the most famous song written by drummer Noley Gilmore. So it turns out that Noley, a rather piddling figure in this book as a whole, is doing yeoman service to its author. Abbott’s titles (of collections and of individual stories), by the way, are lovely: The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, Love Is the Crooked Thing, Dreams of Distant Lives. You give a story a title like that, however, and, sad to say, the content of the story often struggles mightily to live up to the sparkle and gleam of the title.

Then again, DLF at its worst is, largely, plotless, and many of Abbott’s best stories have plots. “The Talk Talked Between Worms” tells of how, in the summer of 1947, a man witnessed the crash of a UFO near Roswell, NM, and came upon dead alien bodies. That encounter resulted in his departing forever from the anodyne life he had led: he ends up in mental institutions for the rest of his life. His sad tale is told by a narrator who is his son. Narratives of fathers and sons loom large in this collection.

“Gravity” begins with an apparent kidnapping: “They grab her—Tanya, my fourteen-year-old daughter.” The tale ends up being not about a kidnapping at all, but about the disappearance of a wayward child, and the narrator/father’s realization that his Tanya is not who he thought she was. “One of Star Wars, One of Doom,” my favorite tale in the collection, relates the events of a school shooting, through the point of view of (1) the shooters themselves, two puerile high school boys with problems, and (2) a rather sad-sack teacher, Mr. DeWine, who blunders his way to where he has no business being and gets himself killed. Allowed some final words before being shot in the head, DeWine says, “I’d like to say something about my father.” More fathers and sons. As good as this story is—and it is very good—it suffers somewhat by what is a characteristic feature of the Abbott narrative: the overabundance of verbiage, which retards the action of the tale.

I can single out for praise several other stories in this long collection of twenty-five. The narrator of “Dreams of Distant Lives,” who suffers, as do many of Abbott’s narrators, from the desolation that divorce wreaks, has a highly poetic sensibility—another common feature of Abbott’s first-person narrators. Among the victims of the separation is his dreamlife, which is shattered into flinders and fluff. The narrator is thirty-nine years old (typical of the narrator/characters in this book, late thirties or forties), he belongs to a country club and plays golf (also typical). In fact, golf is so omnipresent in Lee Abbott’s stories that you wonder what the characters would do with themselves if the sport, somehow, fell into desuetude.

Like so many of Abbott’s stories, “Dreams of Distant Lives” contains highly poetic writing. At the end of the tale the bifurcation of the main character—consequent upon the divorce—appears to be resolved. “And so I came to myself—observed the man I am now walk forward to the man I was then and take him, as you take your children, into his arms. The one held the other—the future cradling the present—and the one who had been left, the one whose interior hooks and hasps and snaps had come undone, gave himself up utterly.” Abbott’s characters frequently are held together by interior hasps and snaps, and those things, unfortunately, have a way of coming undone.

A kind of companion piece of “Dreams of Distant Lives,” and another of the best stories in the collection, is “The Who, the What and the Why,” in which the narrator, Bobby Patterson, describes himself as “a voice.” What this means is that he makes his living recording commercials for ad agencies in Dallas, Phoenix, and L.A. But having a voice as the first-person narrator of the story is totally appropriate for Abbott, in that nearly all his narrators are characterized by their unusual voices. Or, better to say, by one unique voice, since they all speak in the literary voice of the author. More on this later.

Following the death of his child, Bobby Patterson splits apart into several strange selves, who begin burgling his house in the night. He is at least half aware that he himself is doing the burgling: “a part of me in the here and now watched a part of me in the then and there go limping slowly into the darkness.” Abbott’s male narrators—and his narrators are always males—resemble one another almost to a fault. They are standard-issue middle class; they have wives with double names (Ellen Kay, Mary Sue); they belong to country clubs and play golf; they have a certain gratuitous poetic sensibility. In “The Who, The What” all of the doppelgängers of the narrator (the burglars) are underclass types, who seldom feature as major characters in Abbott’s prose; nearly all his main heroes are middle class.

“It’s an unsettling feeling to be in- and outside yourself at the same time,” but, as in “Dreams of Distant Lives,” the narrator/hero of “The Who, The What” appears to have resolved the duality in the end. In another wonderful story, “The View of Me from Mars,” the narrator, a Methodist minister, is one more split personality, torn asunder by his adulterous affair. He muses on “the men I am, the public one amazed by his private self.”  In a masterful way the story takes us right up to the point where the lie of long standing will be revealed—and the pretending of both husband and wife that nothing is wrong will end.

In the face of his wife’s ever more persistent questions, about where he was when, the narrator falls back on a lie involving his son Pudge. He has been that afternoon, ostensibly, at the golf course (golf again!) watching Pudge practice. The rest of the story involves the waiting for Pudge to come home, and “you are to imagine now how herky-jerky time moved in our house when Pudge drove up and came in and said howdy.” A subtle theme, really the main theme of this tale, is the way fathers betray their children, and how they must reveal their weakest selves to those children and hope for forgiveness.

d

So much for the strengths of Abbott’s writing. Now for a bit about the weaknesses. All Things All at Once comes complete with a plethora of blurbery, both on the back cover and in the front matter. Now, blurbs are, by their very nature, mostly mendacious. The writer’s agent or his publisher has solicited comments from other writers, the more famous the better. If you are writing a blurb under these circumstances, it is a given that you say positive things. A negative-blurbing blurber is a violator of the rules, and his negative blurb will never see the light of day. So, naturally, the blurbs for this book are all encomiums.

Of course, blurbs are often taken from book reviews, which, for establishment writers, are also almost totally positive. Why? I don’t know exactly why, but after a writer is in with the literary establishment, it is somehow not kosher to review his/her books critically. Despite all this game-playing, however, at times you can read between the lines of the blurbery to discover certain truths. At other times, the blurbers, whether consciously or subconsciously, hint at problems in the text.

When blurbers are searching for something good to say they often come up with “necessary.” As in the last blurb of the front matter: “What a magnificent and necessary collection.” The BS shows through in that sentence, whose author, wracking his brain for superlatives, ends his praising litany with the usual tripartite formula: “salutary, edifying, radiant.” Duh.

The first blurber in the front matter speaks of “the entertainment and vitality of Abbott’s prose,” of the way Abbott “grabs us with a moment that becomes sharply moving.” But in passing the same blurber mentions “narrative idiosyncrasies,” “loquacious banter,” the “eccentric and loose-limbed story.” Many of the blurbers mention “Abbott’s absolutely individual voice,” which “carries you irresistibly along.” It’s true, his voice is unique, while sometimes—at least for me—resistible. 

In fact, the voice can get aggravating. Another blurber: “Lee K. Abbott is a true American original, the owner of an unmistakable voice—at once funny, wise, loopy, and utterly unique.” That “loopy” in the middle of the wise and utterly unique stands out. On the back cover another mentions “loopy language.” Hmm, two readers who found loopiness. 

What aggravates about this book? The eccentricity, the narrative idiosyncrasies, the loquacious banter. Most of the stories are solid DLF, in that the narrator is a screwed up middle-class male, living, most often in Deming, New Mexico, suffering through the most common travails of the DLF character: divorce, the loss of a child, etc. See the beginning of this review for examples of how Abbott, by way of his unique style and writing skills—and his willingness to liven up the action, as in stories of UFOs and school shootings—transcends the limits of DLF at its worst. This part of the review is how he does not.

There is a certain persistent narrative pattern, and it gets old fast. The narration is most frequently first-person, told by the troubled narrator himself. Herein lies another problem. Although the narrator is your standard bourgeois middle-class American player of golf, he speaks in a voice that is highly literary; he makes frequent allusions to writers and to events in world history that he, logically, would know nothing about. The first eight stories in this collection feature, essentially, the same first-person narrator, speaking in the same voice—that highly literate eccentric voice that almost certainly is the voice of the author himself. The problem could possibly be ironed out, if only the stories were written in the third-person, but most frequently Abbott wants his main heroes themselves telling the tale.

Sometimes it might also help if there were more dialogue in the story. “How Love Is Lived in Paradise,” the tale of a football coach, would be much improved if some of the characters—say, the women, Stacy and Mary Louise, or, say, the football players—were given words of their own to speak. As is, the story is mediated through the mind of a totally unbelievable character. No football coach who ever lived or ever will live speaks the literary language of this one, a man who “wondered how love is lived in paradise,” who marvels at “the clatter my hooks and hasps made breaking loose.” A football coach speaks of “got to get out there and show some physicality, some athleticism, got to stay within our ownselves, got to play like a team.” I’ve never yet met a football coach who openly wonders how love is lived in paradise. It would be interesting to see this story rewritten in the voice a real coach would use. It ain’t rocket science, you know. It’s just cracking heads and wracking ass.

Then there’s the thing of the names. The narrator of the final story, Hobey Don Baker, Jr., is typical. Sometimes it seems as if the names were chosen for comic effect. As they pile up, the names, like the so-alike narrators, begin to grate. The golfing buddies are Hub Somebody, or Poot Somebody, or Dub Somebody. The women in the narrator’s life—most often women, rather than one woman, since the narrator is usually divorced or about to be—most frequently have double names: Ellen Kay or Mary Sue, etc. My favorite narrator, the one who made me laugh out loud, is Onan Motley, of “When Our Dream World Finds Us, and Those Hard Times Are Gone,” a Utah hillbilly—apparently named after the man who wastefully spilled his seed on the ground in the bible (Genesis 38:9) and invented the word ‘onanism.’

Loquacious banter. The eccentric and loose-limbed story. Loopiness. The biggest problem in Abbott’s style is the problem of excessive verbiage. In his worst stories, time and again, the telling of the tale gets in the way of the plot. Metaphors, similes, comparisons get in the way. Bracketed passages throughout the rest of this review indicate verbiage best omitted. Take his story titled “Martians.” Here we have two men playing golf. One of them, Newt Grider, believes in UFOs and is about to tell the other, our narrator Lamar Hoyt, how he plans to go off later that day and join the aliens. “’Boy, you don’t believe in nothing,’ I said; this was banter, [like that between Butch and Sundance]. He had just smacked a driver and was watching his ball soar off into one of those sunsets our New Mexico has a reputation for, [extreme and scary to the animal in us.]” 

The bracketed passages here are best omitted. Butch and Sundance play no role in this story, have nothing to do with UFOs and aliens, so why take this brief flash of a detour into their lives? Or why bring them, blinking befuddled in the New Mexico sunlight, into a story that has nothing to do with them? Then again, whether New Mexico sunsets are extreme and scary “to the animal in us” is neither here nor there.

Newt tells Lamar that last night he spoke to the aliens. Now that’s INTERESTING. “’Shit,’ I said, ‘what’re you talking about?’ ‘I’m serious,’ he said.” At this point the reader is whooping, Yeah, tell me more! But we don’t go on right to the next question (‘What do they look like?’). Instead we get the retardation of this entirely superfluous paragraph: [“He [Newt] had the full-speed-ahead forward posture he’d get when we played cards and a full house would suddenly appear in his hands—earnest as a Baptist, humor a thing for lesser souls who believed in luck.”] Do we need cards here, full houses, earnest Baptists, some blather about what humor is and who believes in luck? No, give us the aliens!

Like Butch and Sundance, superfluous characters frequently intrude into the narrative. Take these Puritans in the story “X”: “I do not know now, twenty-five years later, what had ravaged my father’s self-control, what had seized him [as surely as devils are said to have clutched those ancient fugitive Puritans we descend from]. Leave the Puritans up in New England or somewhere, fighting the witch crazes. We don’t need them here.

Some stories, such as “Ninety Nine Nights on Mercury,” told by a narrator named Heath “Pokey” Howell, Jr., a banker, feature the phenomenon of metaphor overload. Some of the metaphors are good, some not so good, and others take us off into Butch and Sundance territory. In three pages of text we get (1) “Just smitten. By her dress, which was blue as heaven’s bottom and at least four times more sparkly than a poet’s idea of nighttime; and by her legs, which were long as hope itself. . .” (2) “I would say that Heath Howell was but a bystander, no smarter about this than is a dog about democracy” (3) “Behind us the door clicked and we, like butchers or other workaday folks with common business to conduct, stripped ourselves, eye to eye like sophomores about to fistfight” (4) “the light behind her as harsh as the word no, and she spoke, hers a sly smile to wonder about, hers a voice with as much rue in it as there is in mine when I tell a debtor the goddamn end is nigh.”

Okay. Heath (Pokey) works in a bank and plays golf at a country club. What does he know about “a poet’s idea of nighttime”? Then again, in the passage that brings butchers and sophomores into the narrative, which is it? Do we want butchers here for our metaphor, or sophomores? You can’t have both, and the story is better off with neither. Think of that image: butchers and sophomores in the same paragraph, stripping themselves naked and about to fistfight. Then again, another Butch and Sundance moment, do we want to leave the present action and veer off, if only briefly, into a scene featuring Pokey in the bank, calling in a debt? This sudden veering off into other worlds for a transient image is a feature of Abbott’s style. We could do with a lot less of this veering.

In the worst of Abbott’s stuff, the metaphors run amuck and the verbiage does massive damage to the narrative. The best example of this in the present collection is “The Final Proof of Fate and Circumstance.” As in so many other stories, this one features some excellent writing. The tale begins with the narrator’s father’s story of how, as a young man, he slammed into a car pulled off the road and killed a man. Here’s the wonderful description of the father’s predicament immediately after the crash, when he gets out of his own overturned car: “His thoughts, an instant before airy and affirming, were full of soreness and ache; and, for a moment before he climbed back to the road, he watched one of his wheels spinning, on his face the twitches and lines real sorrow makes, that wheel, though useless, still going around and around, its hubcab scratched and dented.

“He was aware, he’d say every time he came to this part, of everything—splintered glass and ordinary night sounds and a stiffness deep in his back and a trouser leg torn at the knee and a fruitlike tenderness to his own cheek pulp.”

Really good stuff there, nice, as so often there is in Abbott’s prose. But this story is so overloaded with redundancies, so hyper-loquacious, so badly overwritten that I find myself marking out huge glomps of prose as I read it. “The Final Proof of Fate and Circumstance” needs a good editor. Roughly a quarter of the words in the narrative could/should be cut. Here’s a typical example of the writing on p. 207.

“Then, about four o’clock, while the two of us stood against his cinder-block fence, watching a fivesome of country club ladies drag their carts up the fairway, [the sun hot enough to satisfy even William Wordsworth] Daddy announced he had a new story, one which [he’d fussed over in his brain a million times but one which, on account of this or that or another thing] he’d never told anyone. Not my momma Ellen. Not my uncle Matthew. Not his sisters, Faith and Caroline. [His hand held on my forearm, squeezing hard, and I could see by his eyes, which were watery and inflamed by something I now know as determination, and by his wrinkled, dark forehead and by his knotted neck muscles—by all these things, I knew this story would feature neither the fanciful nor the foreign, neither bird nor military mess-up, nor escapade, nor enterprise in melancholy; it would be, I suspected as he stared at me as though I were no more related to him than that brick or that rabbit-shaped cloud, about mystery, about the strange union of innocence and loss which sometimes passes for wisdom, and about the downward trend of human desires. There was to be a moral, too; and it was to be, like most morals, obvious and tragic.]

“This was to be, I should know, another death story, [this related to Valentine’s the way one flower—a jonquil, for instance—is related to another, like a morning glory, the differences between them apparent, certain, and important;] and the story was to feature a man named X, Daddy said; a man, I realized instantly, who was my father himself, [slipped loose of the story now by time and memory and fortunate circumstance].”

So please, Mr. Narrator, we feel like saying. Let the man tell his story. Forget the jonquils and the morning glories, leave out the abstract blather about “the strange union of innocence and loss which sometimes passes for wisdom,” leave it out. We want to hear your father’s story!

Just imagine: “The Final Proof of Fate and Circumstance” was accepted, apparently without demur, by the editors of The Georgia Review, where it was published. “How Love Is Lived in Paradise,” the one about the football coach, was published in Kenyon Review. Just imagine.

To end this review on a positive note, here is a potpourri of beautifully written passages, taken at random from stories all over the book:

“Yes, I was paying attention—to the gravel and grain of us, the string and the spit, the mud and melt we are. About why it is we have the hearts we do, and how it is they work. The world has already turned red and swirly at the edges, an arctic cold settling at their feet. The world is about to tilt, to wobble out of its groove, about to shrink. The world is cracking, a splintering you can hear in heaven. I took note of what is heard hereabouts at two in the morning: the wind, a wall clock, my mostly paid-for house taking its own pulse, the Fletcher’s three-legged shepherd in their onion field. A holier-than-thou sort with a walleye and hair in his ears, she felt like someone juggling one apple, he was smoking now, flicking his ashes in his cuff, his movements deliberate and precise, as if he had to explain to his shoulder and his elbow and his fingers what to do. About the magazine rack. About the swirl the universe made going down the drain at his feet, something inside tore free, and, like a boulder, went tumbling and crashing downward toward the bottom of me, Onan Motley, Oogie Pringle, that inventive Bowie fellow, a spade Marine named Philly Dog, Zookie Limmer, Dub Spedding, Pammy Jo, Becky Sue, Ellen Kay, Poot Tipton, Hobey Don Baker, Jr.”

Rosamund Bartlett on Best Russian Short Stories

See the link below for one person's take on the best Russian short stories. I put a picture of Gogol on here to remind the reader that if you're talking best short stories, no way you can leave out "The Overcoat" ("Шинель").

Then again, Rosamund Bartlett leaves out Bunin and Nabokov as well, Turgenev, plenty of others. But she, after all, limits herself to five stories, and what she has to say about the stories she chooses is worth reading. I can pretty much do without Leskov altogether, but she has picked two of my all time favorite stories: Chekhov's "Gusev," and Babel's "The Sin of Jesus."


https://fivebooks.com/best-books/rosamund-bartlett-on-russian-short-stories/

On Literary Translation ISAAC BABEL

ON LITERARY TRANSLATION (ISAAC BABEL)

If you want a job that demands excruciating, intense travails, and for which your reward will be mostly nil—both financially and in terms of appreciation—try literary translation. I spent roughly twenty-five years, on and off, translating the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933. My second book of Bunin stories and novellas—718 pages long and complete with extensive notes on the translated stories and a lengthy critical afterword—was published in 2006: Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial: Stories and Novellas, Northwestern University Press. The book was received with thunderous, gut-wrenching silence, not even reviewed anywhere in the professional journals devoted to Slavic languages and literature.

But even when literary translations are reviewed, seldom do the reviewers do anything approaching a thorough job at analyzing the text. The usual thing is to discuss the writer and his works for most of the review, then spend a few paragraphs at the end caviling with the translation. I was reminded of this when reading—in The New York Review of Books, Feb. 8, 2018—Gary Saul Morson’s review of new translations of the great Isaac Babel. The translators are Val Vinocur (Babel, The Essential Fictions, Northwestern Univ. Press) and Boris Dralyuk (Babel, Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, London: Pushkin Press).

Prof. Morson rightly emphasizes the strangeness of Babel’s style and opines that the task of a good translator is to preserve the strangeness. He goes on to say that both Dralyuk and Vinocur “provide a readable text that captures much of what makes Babel’s stories great, but they often explain—that is, explain away—Babel’s oddities.” Morson takes one line from the story “Pan Apolek” and disputes its translation by both D. and V. He, I think rightly, demands that the word “crumpled” be used for the description of a “hastily crumpled city,” whereas the two translators have explained away the odd imagery by using “swiftly crushed town” and “hastily crushed city.”

“Babel’s strange lexicon [writes Morson], and the peculiar image of a town resembling a crumpled letter disappear. And the translators omit the double use of the word ‘in’ (‘In Novograd-Volynsk, in the hastily crumpled city’), so the sentence’s rhythm changes.”

Up to this point I am okay with Morson’s charges, but he goes too far when he insists on those two “ins.” In fact, the greatest genius of a literary translator on earth cannot retain the rhythms of Russian prose in an English translation, nor should he be expected to. English-language prose has its own rhythms, and the good translator finds those rhythms in the target language.

Probably the most famous line Babel ever wrote is the following (in Morson’s rendering), from his story “Guy de Maupassant”: “No iron can enter the heart as icily as a period placed in time.” The original Russian: “Nikakoe zhelezo ne mozhet voiti v chelovecheskoe serdtse tak ledenyashche, kak tochka, postavlennaya vovremya.” Morson laments that “It is especially sad when translators get the timing of this sentence wrong. They drag it out, which is like giving a joke a wordy punch line. In Morison’s version [Walter Morison is an earlier translator of Babel], “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place,” while Vinocur has: “Nothing of iron can breach the human heart with the chill of a period placed just in time.”

Morson continues. “’Stab’ and ‘breach’ are interpretations; ‘with force’ does not mean icily; the right place is not the right time; and the word ‘just’ is only implied. For both translators, Babel’s fourteen words needlessly expand to eighteen. The period arrives, like a bungled witticism, a bit late.”

Hold it, hold on, hold it; here the nitpicking runs amuck. We are, of course, back here as well to the age old argument, which no one will ever resolve: how far is the literary translator, in aid of producing literature in his own language, allowed to get away from the original text? Morson here is close to demanding literal translation, and literal translation means literature is lost. Let’s look in some detail at the points he makes.

The idea of the timing of the sentence, how the translators get the timing all wrong and drag out their sentences. They don’t. In fact, the two criticized sentences are both good in English. They flow well, they read well, their timing is fine, they do not drag. David McDuff, a British translator not mentioned in Morson’s review, has the following: “No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.” That “chillingly,” while accurate, does throw a monkey wrench into the rhythm of the sentence.

Does it matter that Babel has fourteen words, while the translators V and M have eighteen? Not a jot. Counting the exact number of words and holding translators to that standard is absurd. And given that Russian words on average are two to three times longer than English words, the sentences of V and M come out here sounding shorter and more pithy than Babel’s original. Note that in Walter Morison’s sentence sixteen words out of the eighteen have only one syllable. Now, that’s terse, economical Anglo-Saxon writing. By the way, how many one-syllable words does Babel have in his sentence? Four.

Odd that Prof. Morson leaves out Babel’s “human” (“the human heart”). Does it matter? Not really. The context tells us quite clearly that the heart of a monkey or crocodile is not under discussion. I might concede that the ‘stab’ and ‘breach’ have to go. Then again, I might not. Take a look at the four sentences, in the four translations given here. McDuff’s “chillingly” knocks his sentence out of the competition for best rendering. In English Prof. Morson’s sentence, however, is weaker than either of the other two. Okay, so he made sure the iron “enters the heart,” as Babel had it. He kept the iciness in there (I like Vinocur’s use of the word ‘chill’). He insists on “a period placed in time,” but that phrase is somewhat ambiguous: “in time” as in “just in time,” or “in time” as “in the realm of time, the thing that passes”?

In a word, Walter Morison’s sentence gets the furthest away from the original Russian, but  Morison’s sentence still does the best job of expressing, in very good, terse English, the essence of Babel’s thought: No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place. It could be slightly improved, perhaps, if we put Vinocur and Morison together: No iron can stab the human heart with the chill of a period placed just in time. If Isaac Babel were alive to read that English sentence, I think he would smile. Down with the literal in literary translation!  

VAL VINOCUR TRANSLATION OF ISAAC BABEL, "Иисусов грех" ("The Sin of Jesus")

There's a new book of Babel stories in English, Isaac Babel: The Essential Fictions, edited and translated by Val Vinocur (Northwestern Univ. Press, 2018).

Many have tried, but I am yet to find a translator who captures in English the flair and eccentricity of Babel's unique style.

One of my favorite stories is ИИСУСОВ ГРЕХ "The Sin of Jesus," with its humor and overtones of blasphemy. It features a chambermaid in a cheap hotel, who appeals to Jesus for help in negotiating her sordid life. He sends her an angel, Alfred, to help her out, but she rolls over him in her sleep and accidentally smothers him. 

As Vinocur has it: "And so she smothered the angel of God in her drunken slumber and delight, smothered him like a week-old babe, went and crushed him, and he died for good, and his wings, wrapped up in the sheet, wept pale tears." Not bad translating.

When Arina goes back to tell Jesus the news, she is greeted with the wrath of the Lord: "I don't want to deal with you anymore," the Lord Jesus exclaimed. "You've smothered my angel, you brute."

The word 'brute' won't do here, and Jesus speaks in a more colloquial Russian than Vinocur captures in his English version. This presents problems.

Arina's life then goes from bad to worse. At the end of the story she confronts the Lord with her pregnant misery:

Vinocur: "Before she was about to give birth, for three months had rolled by in the meantime, Arina went out into the backyard, behind the janitor's rooms, raised her awful enormous belly to the silken sky, and in a stupor uttered:

'See, Lord, here's a belly for you. They play my drum with their peashooters. And what and why I don't know. But I don't want any more.'

And Jesus answered Arina, and, washed with his tears, the Savior fell to his knees.

'Forgive me, Arinushka, forgive your sinful God for all that I have done to you.'

'I got no forgiveness for you, Jesus Christ,' replied Arina, 'none at all.'"


Taken all in all, Vinocur does a commendable job at translating this story, given the burdens under which he labors. Translating fiction written in the illiterate language of the underclass is the hardest task any literary translator has to face. For more on this problem, see my posting on this blog, about translating a story by Ivan Bunin:

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8905746674606267673#editor/target=post;postID=6244984639158633756;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=9;src=postname

See also, on this blog, my translation of "The Sin of Jesus" into Georgia and Georgian:

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8905746674606267673#editor/target=post;postID=958049745031146618;onPublishedMenu=template;onClosedMenu=template;postNum=0;src=postname

U.R. Bowie Novel Wins Dactyl Foundation Award for 2017

Big news at the turn of the New Year. My novel, "The Tale of the Bastard Feverfew," has won the 2017 Dactyl Foundation Award for Literary Fiction and an honorarium of $1000. My thanks to V.N. Alexander, director of The Dactyl Foundation. I am also beholden to Gen Aris, who did such a great job editing the book, and to Raghu Consbruck, graphic artist, who put those lovely redwing blackbirds on the cover.



https://dactylreview.com/2017/12/28/dactyl-foundation-2017-literary-fiction-award/

https://dactylreview.com/2017/12/28/dactyl-foundation-2017-literary-fiction-award/


https://www.amazon.com/Tale-Bastard-Feverfew-Journey-Collected-ebook/dp/B018POSSDI/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8


https://www.amazon.com/Tale-Bastard-Feverfew-Journey-Collected-

ebook/dp/B018POSSDI/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

РУССКИЕ ВИНОВАТЫ BLAME THE RUSSIANS!

РУССКИЕ ВИНОВАТЫ! BLAME THE RUSSIANS!

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. The Russians finagled with our elections and got Trump elected. Check. The Russians doped up the Olympics and won all the best medals. Check. The Russians conspired with meany old Assad in Syria, beat ISIS, and foiled our plans for “regime change” and “bringing American democracy to the people of the Middle East.” Check.

The Russians arranged for wackos with assault rifles to shoot up our schools and malls, then fiddled with the climate, and that’s why Miami floods every time it rains. Check. The Russians are responsible for the citrus greening disease that is devastating the orange industry in Florida. Naturally.

Canny Putin is the baddest of bad guys on all the earth, the enemy of worldwide nicey-nice. And he’s SMART. What chance do we poor dumb blameless Americans have against nefarious Russian machinations? None. Check.

Book Review of U.R. Bowie novel HARD MOTHER, by V.N. Alexander

https://dactylreview.com/2017/11/16/hard-mother-by-u-r-bowie/#more-3122

MIKHAIL LERMONTOV FREE TRANSLATION OF GOETHE POEM; U.R. BOWIE FREE TRANSLATION OF LERMONTOV

I sometimes think that Mikhail Lermontov's most beautiful poem is not his; it is his translation of a poem by Goethe: "Nightsong of a Wanderer, II." 

Recently, in "The New Yorker" (Nov. 13, 2017) the American poet Rita Dove took a stab at that same poem:

                                                   ABOVE THE MOUNTAINTOPS

Above the mountaintops
all is still.
Among the treetops
you can feel
barely a breath--
birds in the forest, stripped of song.
Just wait: before long
you, too, shall rest.

Here's the original German, side by side with D. Smirnov-Sadovsky's translation into Russian:

Д. Смирнов-Садовский: Smirnov-Sadovsky: Ночная песня странника II На вершине горной  Покой.  Зефир проворный  В лес густой  Бег не стремит. Птиц смолкли игривые споры,  И нас уж скоро  Сон осенит. <22 декабря 2006>

Гёте: Goethe: Wanderers Nachtlied II Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch. 1780

And here is the Lermontov free translation from 1840:

ИЗ ГЁТЕ

Горные вершины Спят во тьме ночной; Тихие долины Полны свежей мглой; Не пылит дорога, Не дрожат листы... Подожди немного, Отдохнешь и ты. 1840

Rita Dove's translation, for me, is barely even poetry. Lermontov's somewhat free translation is wonderful beyond words, probably even better than the original. Goethe's poem is rhymed; so are  Lermontov's and Smirnov-Sadovsky's. Modern poets often assume they need never use rhyme, that rhyme and meter are dated devices. But is that always true? No.

Age-old arguments about literary translation come to mind. Just how close is the translator obliged to stay with the original? When translating rhymed and metered poetry, should you strive for a rhymed and metered poem in the target language? While straining to maintain meter and rhyme, how does the translator avoid awkward passages in the target language? Etc.

Here's a literal translation of the Lermontov free translation from Goethe:

Mountain peaks,

Sleep in the dark of night.

Quiet meadowlands (valleys)

Full of fresh haze (mist).

No dust rises from the road,

The leaves do not shake. 

Wait just a moment,

You, too, will rest.

Here is Smirnov-Sadovsky's near-literal translation into English of the Lermontov:

The mountain heights Sleep in the darkness of night. The quiet valleys Are filled with a dewy haze. The road has no dust, The leaves do not shake… Wait awhile And you will have rest.

1840 (Transl. 14 March 2008, St Albans)

And here is U.R. Bowie's attempt to do, roughly, with Lermontov what Lermontov did with Goethe:

Alpine peaks quiescent

Sleep in the murk of night.

Meadow vapors deliquescent,

Bathed in mute moonlight.

Air on roads devoid of dust,

Leaves to silence acquiesced.

Hang on, ye of rot and lust,

Soon you, too, can rest.

                         February 6, 2018, Gainesville, Florida

Romance sung by Boris Gmyrya

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VBIMpmSWag

                                      Isaak Levitan, Spring in the Alps, 1897

NABOKOV'S TEETH, AND THE TONGUE AS ROLLICKING SEAL

Vladimir Nabokov was 44 years old when he had all his teeth pulled. His brilliant mind marinated the experience for years, then came up with a wonderful expanded metaphor.

LETTER TO EDMUND WILSON, NOV. 23, 1943

"Dear Bunny, some of them had little red cherries--abscesses--and the man in white was pleased when they came out whole, together with the crimson ivory. My tongue feels like somebody coming home and finding his furniture gone. The plate will be ready only next week--and I am orally a cripple."

FROM "PNIN"

In his novel "Pnin" he gave the experience to his central character:

"Two hours later he was trudging back, leaning on his cane and not looking at anything. A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days [note the not-quite native English here, even after years of writing in English; should be something like, "For a few days afterward"] he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate."

Great stuff, huh?




                                                       Nabokov As Knave

BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE Michael Frayn, "The Trick of It"

BOOK REVIEW

Michael Frayn, The Trick of It (Viking, 1989)

Two professors of literature, old friends, one in England (RD, our narrator), one having emigrated to Australia (R), are writing letters to each other. This suggests one of the many metaphors in The Trick of It: “Forgotten questions and meaningless answers passing each other somewhere over the Indian Ocean at thirty thousand feet—an image of human communication. Of love and literature and life” (57-8). So is this an old-fashioned epistolary novel? Far from it. The Trick of It is a marvelous, sparkling-new one-way-epistolary and modern piece of fiction.

This book is about a book written (brilliantly) by a literary critic who never quite figures out how talented he is as writer of fiction. The narrator, RD, Richard Dunnit—as in Who Done It? He done it, but he never knows he done it—has devoted his professional life to researching the works of a woman writer, JL. Then he invites her to speak on campus. She comes up from London, he meets her, sleeps with her. He has opened a huge can of worms, and only much later does he realize that the story of his entire subsequent life has begun. With the invitation he has set in motion the plot.

He writes to his friend R, “The fearful truth is that I am in love. Possibly. Or possibly not. I am in something” (31). What he is in is literature. His life, which, previous to his first encounter with JL in the flesh, was his own, ostensibly real life, becomes immersed now in a fiction—and will continue so immersed for the remainder of the action of this novel.

Much later he looks back on the day his life changed. “This whole strange painful thing, as I now see it, is in a sense my creation. I wrote the first sentence, just as she might write the first sentence in a novel. I invited her to come and be talked to, and from that everything followed” (70). All through the subsequent narrative he is dimly aware of what is going on. “It’s me doing what she does,” he thinks (71). “Not in ink [he adds], but in breath and in skin.” And yes, ultimately, in ink as well. 

Soon after their first meeting he marries JL, goes on studying and teaching her works, while, simultaneously, studying her in the flesh, trying to figure out the secret of her creative talent: the “trick of” writing fiction. She is aged 44 when they marry, he is 32. Fifty pages later in this short novel she has made it almost to 48, and by that time their marriage in on the rocks.

We never learn JL’s real name, although the narrator, who “loves the ludic touch,” refers to her by various nicknames, all infused with light irony. As the story goes on the names seem more sarcastic than ironic: MajWOOT (major writer of our time), Her Maj, Her Majesty, HM. Little by little we learn the titles of her novels; at the beginning they are just letter abbreviations, but halfway through the book (99) there is a listing of them all: The Book of Angels’ Dreams, The Sunday Runners, Falling Down Duke Street, Scatterbrain, Whistling Woman.

Not much is quoted from JL’s works, but RD makes them sound fascinating. They are replete with bizarre incidents and personages: a psychic lemur, a superstitious dog. A family refrigerator suddenly bursts into flames, the sky rains down cornflakes (and later gooseberries). In JL’s most recent novel, written after her marriage to RD, we have “aircraft tumbling out of the sky, a dog eating half an old-age pensioner, a girl raped on a runaway Underground train by a group of marauding Centaurs” (101-102).

Here is a citation from one of her early works, The Sunday Runners: “The train stopped in a small grey town full of chapels and boarded-up warehouses. She could not see the name of the station. The only words visible were on small shops in the street outside. Fags ‘n mags, said one of them. Cash in a flash, said another. An old man in a ragged overcoat walked slowly down the street pushing a pram with a dog sitting in it [the superstitious one?]. No one got out of the train, no one got in. Discouraged, it began to move out of the station. The old man in the ragged overcoat stopped to wipe the drip from the end of his nose on his long woolen scarf. ‘Here,’ she thought suddenly. She dragged her suitcase down from the rack, opened the door and jumped down on to the slowly withdrawing platform. ‘Here is where I will start my life’”(70-71). Like everything else we learn about JL, this citation is filtered through the imagination of her husband RD, who quotes the passage from memory.

Although the reader’s take on RD is mixed, and ever more negative as the book progresses, JL is presented consistently as a highly positive character. Although devoted to her writing, she is not obsessed with literary art to the exclusion of all else and all others. At one point she takes an interest in RD’s poormouth West Yorkshire relatives: “they think she’s wonderful.” Later she nurses RD’s mother in the final days of her life, treats her as a real daughter would, while son RD largely ignores poor old mum. JL never makes an independent appearance on the page until way late in the book, but what becomes the ordeal of her marriage makes her ever more sympathetic.

Before he even meets JL the self-obsessed RD assumes that he knows everything about her, knows her even better than she knows herself. How? Through study and teaching of her fiction. But the entire book is a refutation of this smug assumption. What RD knows about her is only his own invention—his imaginative re-creation of her in his mind through blowing on her fictive sparks until a fire flares up: largely his own private conflagration. After they are married she writes another novel, and this time the critic RD—assuming that he knows best how her novels should be written—begins hounding her to change it according to his own specifications.

His wish to tell her how to write is grounded, of course, in an inferiority complex. Like so many literary critics and teachers of literature RD has a secret wish to write fiction himself. After he sleeps with JL the first time, adding actual physical intercourse to the mental copulation he has engaged in for years, RD exults in what he sees as his equality: “I couldn’t help thinking that this was a revenge for all those long years when she had been up there, oblivious of me, and I had been down here gazing so intently up at her. Because here she was gazing no less intently up at me; and for that short time she knew me. She knew me as I knew her, and we were equal” (29).

Revenge. Not a good way to begin a courtship. But after their marriage they are still far from equal. She who knows “the trick of it,” the secret code of fiction writing, is still up there and RD is still down here. The ignominious life of the literary critic, in RD’s view, has him constantly writing not on the genuine front side of paper, but on the backside of something with writing already on the front; using not one’s own sui generis ideas, but the ideas and imagination of others, “other people’s books, other people’s imaginations, other people’s lives” (54). Meanwhile, JL has read not a word of what he has written about her in his articles.

Here is what RD writes to R on the eve of his wedding to JL, and it certainly bodes ill for the fortunes of his marriage: “I thought I’d end up married all right—married to the wife of one of the major writers of our time” (84). At the very start, therefore, the reader anticipates that the marriage is doomed; RD, with his corrosive envy, will be “the bump in the road that brought the whole rickety load tumbling off the back of the lorry” (83). 

In his persistent efforts to dominate his wife, and to keep her isolated from the world, RD moves her twice, first out of London to his provincial university town, then to the Persian Gulf, where he takes a position as professor. Meanwhile, he goes on mindlessly destroying their life together, while convincing himself that his intentions are benign: “I merely want to help her to locate the true shape and nature of the book [her new novel, The Invisible Banquet], to discover what is still hidden inside herself” (121).

d

All that I’ve written above—about the struggle of a would-be author and literary critic to assert his ego, while deflating the ego of his wife, who is a genuine author—sounds like a grim business. It is nothing of the sort, because The Trick of It sparkles with wit. The book is FUNNY. Take the narrator’s view of his rivals, fellow researchers on JL, fellow university professors in the U.S. One of them is “my esteemed colleague Vlad the Impaler,” who is “always masterfully sweeping his specimens off on joint family holidays in Tuscany before he puts them into the killing bottle and pins them into his collection” (7). Only on p. 146 do we finally find out Vlad’s real name, Vladimir Katc. Another is Dr. Swoff, or Spoff, or Snoff, or Sloff, a woman who RD imagines ingratiating herself with JL by visiting from abroad, “bearing little jars of home-made-arse-salve” (7). Later on (119) RD reveals with a smirk that Dr. Sloff is not a real woman at all, but “a humorous personification of the Society for the Propagation of Feminist Fiction.”

Also hilarious is the description of RD’s “seduction” of JL, at which event he discovers “an appalling solecism”: her underwear “dsntmtch.” At first he is too embarrassed to write the actual words down on paper: “doesn’t match.” Then he experiences “the sense of outraging a divine sanction . . . “a taboo against intercourse with an author on your own reading list” (25-26). Rife with hilarity, The Trick of It has a belly laugh or two on practically every page.

There are several main characters in the novel, but there is really only one: the solipsistic RD. Early on (10) RD asks R, his correspondent from Australia, “You are keeping these letters, aren’t you?” The narrator makes it clear that he wants his letters to be published some day. He’s thinking at first of a critical study, later of some kind of biographical account. We the readers are aware of what he never learns: that we have in our hands a scintillating work of fiction, a one-way epistolary novel.

How and why is it “one-way”? Let’s say a few words now about the other end of the correspondence, Prof. R. He teaches German literature in Australia, specializing in the romantic poet, Eduard Mörike (1804-1875). We are not privileged to read R’s responses to RD’s letters, but from what we learn of him it appears that he lives a normal life, with love affairs and, eventually, a marriage and children. This while, simultaneously, RD marries a writer and begins living a life in literature, becoming, as it so turns out, more a character in a novel than a real person.

RD says the following in reference to letters he wrote and never sent to JL shortly after they first met, but this passage looms large in the context of the book as a whole: “It was all a dream. A fiction. A private video inside my head to keep me going on the long ride from here to nowhere” (58). This, in fact, could serve as an epigraph for The Trick of It.

Since everything in the book is mediated through the consciousness of RD, R himself is less at times a real person than a fictive correspondent of RD, who invents his responses in order to have a conversation in his mind. On the eve of his wedding he holds a solitary “stag night,” drinking malt liquor while pretending that R is drinking along with him and they are getting lachrymose (76). Again and again the principal irony of the whole book is emphasized: that RD, who thinks he doesn’t know how to write fiction, is writing it all the time, making up facts and personages.

All through the book RD invents R’s response to something he has revealed to R, then argues with that response. This is the rhetorical device known as prolepsis. See, e.g., p. 143, where he complains about R’s “ill-concealed scorn” (invented by RD), then goes on to say, “I’m not going to say anything more about it to you, for that matter, since you’ve taken it the way you have.” The real R has not taken what he has been told in any way, since he has not yet received this letter in progress. Again and again RD invents imaginary dialogues between himself and R. See, e.g., p. 21-24, a long back and forth, in which RD concocts his own responses to objections raised by an imaginary R (on the subject of RD’s first night with JL).

The real R makes an actual appearance in the book, when he, his wife and child, visiting England from Australia, drop in on RD and JL. But, once again, we are not shown that scene in a straightforward way. Like everything else in the book it is mediated through RD’s mind in his letters. A telling detail is this: the two old friends do not get on very well when they meet again in the flesh. By this time RD prefers the R he has created in his own imaginary dialogues: “I’ve had better conversations with my fictitious version of you in one of these letters” (118).

This is a book full of metaphors, good metaphors, extended metaphors. Take this early passage (17): “I will write a long letter to my old mucker in Melbourne, I thought, and kill two birds with one tome. I’ll get it all off my chest (does this poor exhausted metaphor refer to some mysterious weight pressing on the outside or to bronchitic lungs full of phlegm within?), and at the same time relieve the dreariness of his Australian exile by providing an opportunity for jealousy, irritation, disapproval and condescension. So here we are off my chest and on to yours—a great gob of narrative phlegm, spat ten thousand miles down the airways by your fellow-toiler in the vineyard of knowledge.”

This is a good sample of the way that RD writes. Note the sheer literariness of his style and the tongue in cheek. Note, e.g., the way he “kills two birds with one stone” by rejuvenating two tired clichés in one passage. Note, especially, the irony, what he calls the “light ludic touch.” Several times he mentions that the perpetually serious JL, who “never laughs,” has not one iota of the ludic. In fact, the big fight between husband and wife over her most recent novel, The Invisible Banquet, involves largely RD’s insistence on her making the novel into something with touches of light irony. JL, he writes, has “lost her taste for the ludic possibilities of fiction, when some of us have committed our lives to them” (159). But she cannot have lost what she never had.

More metaphors. Extended metaphors. Sometimes whole chapters are built around highly developed metaphors, as the one beginning, “I’ve suddenly discovered the joys of free-fall parachuting” (127). RD has rashly rebelled against prospective changes in his department and resigned from his university position. The metaphor continues. “You may, it occurs to me, think I left the plane rather precipitately. A routine announcement from the captain about diverting to a slightly different destination, and I was out the door, taking the quick way home” (129). And continues. “So there I am, falling down the empty sky. That’s why I’m writing. To say PLEASE SEND PARACHUTE. Because it occurred to me only when I reached to open it that I had omitted before leaving the plane to provide myself with this obvious and elementary requisite for the sport” (130-31).

Why mention all the metaphors? Primarily because this is good, good writing. Repeatedly, over the course of this short novel, the reader is reminded that RD is a brilliant writer of comic fiction. Does he realize that he is? No. Time and again he bemoans his lowly status as writer of litcrit, envies his wife the author, puzzles over “whatever it is these people [fiction writers] do, what it is the buggers do” (9). He despairs of ever finding “the trick.”

After a desperate move to the Persian Gulf, taking in tow his long-suffering wife, JL, he makes the logical decision: RD decides to become a fiction writer himself. After all, “it’s a trade, writing, that anyone can learn, not a Masonic mystery. Part of my aim is to demonstrate that any bloody fool can do it.” This novel is an account of a man who relinquishes all his scruples [see p. 29: “little white scruples scrupling in the wind”], destroys his wife’s peace of mind and ruins his own life in order to find the trick. But then, in the midst of wrecking for all time his marriage he still cannot find it. First, “I believe I can see how it’s done . . . I believe I can see the trick . . . Anyone can do it, even me” (144, 147). Then, finally, “After all these years I still had not the slightest idea how the conjuring trick was done” (163). RD gives up on the “something-or-other” that he has been toiling over, a work of fiction, and throws it in the dustbin.

At this point the novel is making its way into the place that any great comic novel eventually comes to. The “light ludic touch” fades, and we are into serious pathos. Adrift in the desolation of the Persian Gulf, the ever-more-desperate RD describes how JL, whom he has tried to bully into changing her new novel, has nursed his mother in the end. “She was the one who coaxed her into the local hospital, and washed her nightdresses, and sat with her every afternoon while she was still conscious. . . Did I tell you my mother had died? Last November. Secondaries in the bowel. Perhaps I didn’t even tell you she had cancer. . . Or how much I loved her. . . I’m not sure I’ve even told you how much I love JL, for that matter. In spite of what you might think. . . But then men don’t talk about these things” (126).

Soon after this we come upon practically the only time in the book that we hear JL speak in her own voice, not mediated through the narrative of the importunate RD: “You have led me into a desolate and stony place,” she said, “and things are very bad between us. You hedge me about, you cage me and patrol me, and take all the ground and the air from around me. But you don’t own the words I say or the thoughts I think, and you never will, and you never can” (155-56). So speaks the most decent character in the book, but one whom we never get to see entirely in the clear light of day, as RD consistently throws his own oppressive narrative shadow over her.

The supreme irony of the whole novel, or course, Michael Frayn’s practical joke, the ultimate “trick of it” is that RD is a great writer. He doesn’t think he knows the trick, but some neurons deep inside him are totally confident; they know how to write a comic novel. They know not only the ludic, but also even the time to temper the ludic with pathos. This is especially salient, given the hints that JL’s star is fading in academia. Her poor bedraggled husband, her tormentor may end up being a better writer of fiction than she is.

Driving back from work one day in the desert, RD brakes for a man on a motorcycle. The man is carrying a can of water, which spills all over the road. “By the time the crowd had dispersed, and the motorcyclist had dusted himself down, the wet patch on the road had ceased to exist. In those few minutes under the noonday sun it had lost first its gloss and then its dark wetness. It had become nothing but a faintly coastlined whiteness in the whiteness all around. And suddenly I thought, that’s not just a story about water. That’s a story about me. I could disappear off the face of the earth here just as easily, and leave little trace behind” (152). A metaphor for the transience of a human life.

“You suddenly see yourself as one of those tedious, bumbling characters in an old-fashioned detective story who turn out at the end to have solved the problem” (34). Except that RD turns out NOT to have solved the problem (“the trick of it”), except again that, paradoxically, the book he ends up writing HAS solved that problem.

In the end, dimly aware that his letters to R constitute a brilliant comic novel, RD pleads with him to preserve the letters at all cost. R sends him a cable: “Letters Lost.” It might be a good title for this book, were the book not about “the trick of it,” which, unbeknownst to the narrator, is not lost at all. The very novel itself is a demonstration that RD knows the trick. Of course, if the letters were lost how did they make their way onto the pages of this luminous and dazzling comic novel? Only Michael Frayn knows that trick.