The Reading Experience

"What He Does Not Say"

In a very good essay about the Russian writer Isaac Babel, Gary Saul Morson also provides a useful mini-lesson on the perils of translation:

Babel’s prose depends on his silences, on what he does not say. Like his contemporaries the Russian Formalists, he wanted to shock readers out of cliché and routine perceptions, and so he cultivated a style demanding interpretations he did not provide. When convention or common sense suggests one word, he provides another, slightly but significantly different. The test of a good translator is whether she preserves the strangeness. When Babel writes “invisible voices,” does the translator supply (as Walter Morison does) “mysterious voices”? Without realizing it, most translators betray Babel’s style by interpreting his words.

The new translations. . .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. In the story “Pan Apolek,” Babel begins a sentence: “V Novograd-Volynske, v naspekh smyatom gorode, sredi skruchennykh razvalin,” which, as literally as possible, means: “In Novograd-Volynsk, in the hastily crumpled city, amid the crooked ruins….” Vinokur gives us “In Novograd-Volynsk, among the twisted ruins of that swiftly crushed town,” while Dralyuk offers “In Novograd-Volynsk, among the gnarled ruins of that hastily crushed city.” And Morison: “In Novograd-Volynsk, among the ruins of a town swiftly brought to confusion….”

These are all interpretations, almost paraphrases. Babel describes the city as “crumpled” (smyatyi), the way one crumples a piece of paper before throwing it away. The ruins are not twisted or gnarled or brought to confusion, but crooked: the word skruchennyi, as my colleague Nina Gourianova reminds me, is the one used in Samuil Marshak’s famous translation of the English nursery rhyme about a crooked man in a crooked house. Babel’s strange lexicon, 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.

[Boris] Dralyuk makes a principle of explaining. His introduction offers as an example of his method a passage where Babel describes old letters as istlevshikh (rotten, decaying). Dralyuk alters this to “letters worn thin”: “If one takes a moment to imagine what Babel’s narrator imagines…one can conjure the fragile letters before one’s eyes, feel their texture; they have been ‘worn thin’ by friction and sweat.” But Babel does not describe them as worn thin, and the Red Cavalry stories constantly offer images of rot, decay, and moldering.

All translations are always, unavoidably, interpretations. This is a fact we have to accept, since otherwise we would have no access at all to some of the world's greatest writing. In this case, Babel's style hasn't truly been "betrayed," or it has only if you are fluent in Russian and know what Babel really wrote. Most of us, alas, are not in a position to know this, and must settle for the interpretation (although certainly some interpretations might be better than others). We should acknowledge--and this is true for reviewers of translated books especially--that we are reading a necessary (and essential) substitute for the work the author in fact created, not the "thing itself," which abides as itself only in the language its author actually used. 

In Between

Laurie Stone's My Life as an Animal is a particularly interesting "in-between" book in at least two ways: it straddles the line between novel and short story collection more adroitly than most such books, and it provocatively blurs distinctions between the fictional and the autobiographical, not allowing us simply to appeal to the latter as the final source of meaning, the book's interpretive authority.

The book's cover labels its contents as "stories," but while we reflexively identify such a marker with fiction, there of course is nothing that would necessarily prevent the term from applying to nonfiction, where stories, especially in "creative nonfiction," certainly serve as the coin of the literary realm. The stories as a whole provide a depiction of character, event, and milieu of sufficiently expanded scope that we could certainly regard  it as a novel-in-stories, although again nothing would preclude a memoir from being structured as a series of self-contained episodes that contribute to an overarching narrative. If the book has a formal pattern or continuity, however, it is in its prevailing fragmentation--the individual stories are themselves highly fragmented, freely shifting in time and place, and the book overall provides a discontinuous portrayal of the narrator and her circumstances, although there are motifs and repeated images that serve to unite the stories both thematically and formally. In a book that at first glance might seem formless, this concern with the configuration of experience, its subordination to form, is the most telling affirmation of the book's status as a work of fiction, to be judged and interpreted accordingly.

The stories in My Life as an Animal are narrated by "Laurie," who, as far as can be determined, shares all the characteristics of her depicted life with the life--personal and professional-- of the author. Although the book mostly concentrates on the narrator's current status as a 60-something woman, she also frequently recalls episodes from her past--often prompted by events in the present--but they are presented not so much to give a fuller account of the narrator's life-story (although they do indeed have that secondary effect) but to illustrate and extend the narrator's contemporaneous preoccupations. This formal quality is no doubt an effect rising from Stone's method of composition: "In building stories, I work at the level of the sentence. The first sentence is a provocation setting in motion the next sentence, and so on. I layer the narrator’s reaction to an earlier moment with what the narrator makes of it now—at the time of the telling—whether the lookback is five minutes ago or twenty years in the past" (Necessary Fiction). Stone's stylistic approach, which implies that the finished story is indeed a product of artifice, that the writing itself largely determines the "content" rather than acting merely as the means of registering that content (documenting the writer's experiences), thus seems to further confirm we are to take her book as a work of the imagination, the realization of an aesthetically ordered language.

While My Life as an Animal ostensibly belongs to an increasingly familiar literary form that attempts to unite fruitful qualities of already existing forms of fiction, then, this book doesn't exactly unite the more compressed effects of the short story and the more expansive story "arc" of the novel but subtly questions prevailing notions of what is to expected of these forms--why can't a story seem to be a "jumble of impressions," as Laurie's partner puts it in the very first story, rather than a dramatically integrated narrative; must a novel have discernible "development," or might it instead be deceptively static, proceeding through a kind of amplification, gradually enlarged as if through concentric circles? Similarly, it is a book that doesn't so much leave us wondering whether the characters and actions portrayed are autobiographically "true" or they are invented, but should convince us that, in a work of fiction, this distinction doesn't matter. Considering as well that it presents us with a perspective--an unmarried woman in her 60s, sometimes torn between independence and attachment--that is generally underrepresented in American fiction, My Life as an Animal in its unostentatious way provides a consistently engaging and enlivening reading experience.

In Praise of the Unruly

Collections of book reviews are inherently difficult to present as sufficiently unified to warrant republication as a book. Whatever unity of theme, style, or approach the reviews possess first of all reflect such unifying qualities as they manifest themselves in the reviews to begin with, which of course requires a critic who pursues particular themes or maintains a particular approach. Books like John Domini's The Sea-God's Herb and David Winters's Infinite Fictions illustrate how a well-chosen and well-arranged compilation of reviews can reinforce the insights provided by skilled and perceptive critics.

Often the critical perspective a reviewer offers is given its most characteristic expression when considering certain kinds of writers or a particular literary mode or genre (as is the case with both Domini and Winters). Jeff Bursey's Centring the Margins: Essays and Review exemplifies this tendency, which is signaled clearly in the book's title. Bursey generally examines works of fiction outside the mainstream (outside the U.S. mainstream, at least), including works of formally transgressive fiction, translated fiction, and lesser-known Canadian books, and certainly to the extent the book succeeds in calling attention to this work it is a worthwhile effort for that reason alone.

Bursey makes his purpose quite clear in the book's prefatory essay: "Where Margaret Atwood and other brand names are granted much leeway in sentiment and space in the press no matter if what comes out is average or bad, novels that don't adhere to some perceived notion of normal writing are received in a less friendly way. They are sometimes considered not art but an affront." Further:

I don't deny the mainstream authors their audience. However, others will seek to create new work in new forms, and if they're viewed as rude threats, that's not a bad thing. These reviews were often written with the explorers and the unruly in mind.

In collecting the reviews, Bursey expresses the hope that they might help in "bringing less popular works into the centre of the conversation" about books. However, I'm not sure that this is an altogether realistic, or desirable, goal if it means achieving an easy, automatic acceptance of such works in the "mainstream." Better that adventurous and iconoclastic works remain an "affront," as threats to established practice lest they become reflexively amalgamated into a bland and uncritical literary culture. Such works should remain unruly, even if that means some very good writers might not get the immediate recognition they deserve. Such a book as Centring the Margins is valuable because it provides access to readers who might be interested in exploring the margin, discovering it can be quite an interesting place.

If there is a drawback to emphasizing reviews that in effect seek to champion the writers and works surveyed it would be that eventually the tone of consistent approbation can become somewhat wearing, and I would have to say that Centring the Margins doesn't always avoid this problem. Bursey is certainly willing to point out flaws and missteps in the books he considers, but in most cases it is in the context of coming to an ultimately appreciative conclusion. As well, I found myself occasionally looking for more detailed analysis of the writing strategies and their effects in the works considered, somewhat less reliance on longer quotation. (In the review of Gaddis's Agape Agape, for example, we are told at the end that the book is filled with "jagged rhythms and darting wit," and that Gaddis is a "superb stylist," but there isn't much critical commentary in the review that explicates these qualities.) On the other hand, the pieces on Blaise Cendrars and the Estonian writer Mati Unt introduce me to writers about whom I know little and definitely make me want to get better acquainted with their work.

I can't say I always agree with Bursey's estimations of the writers under review (I can't bring myself to admire either William Vollmann or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as much as he does), but of course this is an inevitable reaction to the views of any critic (especially when they are expressed in such a relatively large number of reviews). The breadth of his reading is impressive, however, lending credibility and authority to his reviews, both individual reviews of books he has clearly carefully considered (both text and context) and the assembled reviews as a whole, which collectively leave the impression that their author reads comprehensively across formal and linguistic boundaries, and against the grain of entrenched assumptions about what books are worthy of our attention. Certainly readers will conclude from these reviews that Jeff Bursey has given the books his engaged attention, and those who would like to expand their own reading horizons beyond the books reflexively covered in the high-profile book review sections would be making a good start by consulting Centring the Margins.

New Reviews

Two new reviews of mine appeared this past week:

At Open Letters Review, on The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online:

As they should, the essays collected in The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online offer a mixed assessment of the literary culture the Internet has both transformed and distorted. By now it is clear that online literary culture is no longer seen as an appendage to the “real,” more serious and authoritative culture originating in print but is now a fully functioning source of both literary writing and commentary about that writing—it might be argued, in fact, that it now provides the largest and most significant part of the latter. While The Digital Critic is not focused on making such an argument, nevertheless the range of issues discussed makes it clear that, for better and worse, the futures of writing, reading, and publishing are inextricably tied to the ways in which everyone involved adapts to the possibilities and the limitations of cyberspace as a communications medium.

On Irish writer Mike McCormack's Solar Bones at Full Stop:

The most immediately visible characteristics that frequently seem to prompt both readers and critics to label a work of fiction “experimental” or “unconventional” (or perhaps just “quirky”) are the appearance of irregular sentence patterns, an apparent disregard for the expectations of realism (in literary fiction, at least) and a formal arrangement that can’t be described as simply identical with the narrative movement the work offers. By this measure, Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones can be called experimental, although any reader who gives the novel a chance to validate its strategies is likely to affirm relatively quickly that these more adventurous qualities of the novel — adventurous, but not conspicuously “difficult” — do not ultimately make it inaccessible except to the most passive kind of reading.

Please consider subscribing (sidebar, top left) to "Reading Experiences," a newsletter supplement to this blog. It will include links to interesting critical writing across the web, additional observations on literature and the literary scene not posted to the blog, and enhanced access to future publishing projects of my own.

(Update: Here's newsletter 1, for anyone who would like to sample first. )