Tag Writing

Reading the World: Books in Translation

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

Whenever we are spending time at our home in France I enjoy browsing the bookshops, and in Nice there are at least three good independents that I know of. Not that I buy many books when I’m there because my French isn’t really good enough. I can just about manage a crime novel if I’m prepared to take my time with it and have a dictionary to hand. Books with a lot of dialogue are easier for me than anything with long, convoluted sentences. Proust is a no-no.

But what always strikes me is the range of general fiction that is available in translation. Particularly books translated from English to French. And it’s not just the classics – Austen, Dickens and so on – but many recently published books, from contemporary literary fiction to more mainstream writers, and plenty of genre fiction: crime, SF/Fantasy, romance and YA. All this is laid out on tables for easy browsing, not hidden away in a special section on the third floor. I even have a friend in England whose first novel was published in its French translation before it came out in the UK.

This is a remarkable openness to foreign literature, all the more impressive (perhaps even surprising?) coming from a country that is justly proud – and indeed protective – of its own culture, and I wonder whether in the UK we have the same interest in writing from other languages? To a degree perhaps, certainly Murakami and Knausgaard are easy to find in Waterstones, but less celebrated writers? Genre writers? No doubt there are others that I’ve missed, but apart from the piles of increasingly derivative Scandi noir, I’m not so sure. Where is the French science fiction or the Portuguese crime?

If in the UK mainstream publishers and retailers hesitate to offer books in translation, what we do have instead are some excellent small indies that specialise in bringing the best writing from wherever to Anglophone readers. Pushkin Press and nordisk books (the lower case is not a typo) are two examples, but one that I would like to celebrate here is Peirene Press. Over the last few years, they’ve introduced me to novels by writers from Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Chile, Egypt, France, Sweden and Norway. You can buy their books individually, but what I appreciate is their subscription model where for a single annual payment I get three books a year. I don’t think I save much (if anything) this way, but what it means is that I read books I probably would never have considered buying normally.

I’ve just finished Imagine Breaking Everything (Imagina que rompes todo) by the Colombian writer Lina Munar Guevara, beautifully translated by Ellen Jones. Link here Peirene Press – award-winning independent publisher. This tells the story of the 18-year-old Melissa and a weekend she spends with her slightly estranged mother.  Melissa is hoping to graduate from high school and go to college (there are complications) and is such a well-written character. She is deeply flawed and prone to acts of violence – and we learn why, it’s not really her fault – but her honesty and self-awareness mean that we root for her nevertheless. She is also very funny. There is terrific writing from Lina Munar Guevara; one sentence in particular impressed me in the way that in a mere six words the reader is very cleverly told a key (and quite unexpected) plot point. I was left gasping in admiration for the skill with which that was done – but of course I can’t tell you more. Too much of a spoiler!

There’s nothing like literature to show you other people’s lives, we all know that, but it is even more the case with books in translation. Perhaps I don’t need to know what it is like to be a young woman in Bogotá and what daily life is like in a less than salubrious suburb, but my life is richer for having spent time in Melissa’s company.

I hope she did make it to college in the end.

On Silence

Graeme Hall Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about silence lately.

Of course, as John Cage taught us, absolute silence does not exist so perhaps I need to define my terms, but silence as we commonly understand it, extreme quietness perhaps, seems to be something that most people appear anxious to avoid, almost as if they were afraid of it and feel the need to keep it at bay with empty talk, banalities that blanket the sound of time’s wing’d chariot. Restaurants – even the finest Michelin-starred establishments – play background music, train journeys are accompanied by the modern scourge of music from phones (I’ve even seen people doing that on country walks). On a recent trip to London one woman talked at (not to) her companion for three hours straight (and how did her friend feel about that?).

What is it that people are so afraid of? Their own thoughts? Do they equate, if only subconsciously, silence with emptiness? The void? The silence of the grave?

Fernand Knopff, Silence, 1890

I love silence, quietness at least, though I appreciate that this does nothing for my social life, and I am certainly no fun at parties. But silence gives space to reflect and consider, and it’s no surprise that most religious traditions recognise the value of time spent in silence. I love the way it comes in different guises, quite different from each other: the silence of late at night is the sound of the day’s energy dissipating, while the quiet of dawn – depending on the amount of birdsong! – is pregnant with possibilities. The silence of the new, the day as yet untarnished, not yet spoilt by the inanities of modern life.

It was Debussy who said that the music lies in the space between the notes. An elusive comment for sure, much like his music, but consider the tension that rests in the air between the final chords of Sibelius 5 – and the fact that they are irregularly spaced only adds to the effect – or countless examples where composers leave brief pauses. Think of a piece as well-known as the slow movement from Dvorak 9. Don’t simply listen for the famous tune, listen for the silences that are coloured by the notes that come before and after. The silence is never empty, but is shaped by what surrounds it. It is a positive absence of notes that makes it musical material in its own right.

Silence in literature is an even more complex – and paradoxical – issue than it is in music. Silence on the stage is a standard effect – Pinter being only the most famous – but how do we talk about silence in novels? Characters may be silent, and silence (hesitations, ellipses) can be a key part of writing good dialogue – and what a character doesn’t say is often more important than what they do – but can fiction itself be silent, and not merely quiet as in understated? The French writer Pascal Quignard says that “The book is a piece of silence in the hands of the reader.” I like that. I also like Graham Swift’s echo of Debussy when he wrote that “the spaces between and around words can have their unspoken resonances”. I feel sure I’m going to come back to this.

So, a plea for more silence – or at least quiet – in the world. Enjoy the aesthetic qualities of silence itself and how it is shaped by and shapes in return the world around it.

And remember Wittgenstein: whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.