Best European Fiction 2013 (2 page)

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

   
das hundert-
züngige Mein-
gedict, das Genicht

which Hamburger renders as

    the hundred-
tongued pseudo-
poem, the noem

and Felstiner, wonderfully, as

    the hundred-
tongued My-
poem, the Lie-noem

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.

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.

JOHN BANVILLE

Introduction

1

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.

2

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.

3

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.

Reading and inquiring about what is outside our experience means willfully adopting another worldview, putting ourselves in a position to look at things in a way that is, shall we say, displacing or even disorienting. But, as Graham Greene said, “When we are not sure, we are alive.” Of course, there are plenty of books, writers, and readers who seek a confirmation for what they already know, who hope to cement the position from which it all looks solid, unalterable, and, therefore, bearable. If that is what you’re after, stay away from this book. The
Best European Fiction 2013
anthology is proudly difficult and imperfectly translated.

ALEKSANDAR HEMON

space

[SLOVAKIA]

BALLA

Before the Breakup

Miša discovered there was something in the apartment.

It was behind the TV set in the corner of the living room. But later in the evening when she phoned Jano, who had left on a business trip a few days earlier, she made no mention of her discovery. Why make him worry? He had other things to worry about out there in the Asian metropolis. Or maybe he didn’t? Doubt started gnawing at her: only the other night she’d dreamed of her husband in karaoke bars and the things he was getting up to with sluts; though they might go by a different, fancier name in those parts—Miša couldn’t remember the exact word—she was quite sure they were just sluts, engaging in slutty practices.

After the routine call was over she sat in the kitchen until late at night, and as the light of a small lamp above the freezer illuminated her hands and fingers, and long shadows crept along the floor and the opposite wall, Miša wondered why this had to happen to her, of all people. Actually, not just to her, to Jano as well—but Jano didn’t have an inkling of it. Or did he? Was he lying in a hotel bed somewhere with an inkling? Was he on the twentieth or thirtieth floor of a skyscraper, in the middle of negotiations, with an inkling?

Miša had grown up in a family where nothing ever appeared behind the TV set. Her parents had never even mentioned such a possibility to her, though they were happy to discuss in her presence the petty scandals involving their neighbors or people at work. But perhaps they’d had it in their bedroom too. Their daughter had never been allowed to go in there. Could it have been in their bedroom? Did they take it along when they went on vacation? On one of those outings they used to go on, leaving their daughter with her grandma in the countryside?

She went to the hallway and called a friend from the landline, for she felt the need to discuss this unexpected problem with somebody. A few sentences into the conversation she replied, baffled:

– You mean I should go and see a psychiatrist?

– Of course. You’ve got to. What if you’re just imagining it all?