2020s

Michael Cunningham’s autobiography

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I’ve over at Shiny New Books, talking about Michael Cunningham’s new autobiography(?), Unsayable. Here’s the beginning of my review, and you can read the rest at SNB…

When Michael Cunningham set out to write Unsayable, I wonder if it started as a book about writing that couldn’t keep out memoir. Or perhaps it started as a memoir which kept getting sidetracked into advice about writing. Or perhaps – the most likely, given Cunningham’s evident and enviable control over his writing – Unsayable is exactly the combination of the two that he intended.

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle

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I’ve changed as a person. I’m becoming one of those people who reads sequels/series in relatively quick succession! I started Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series in January, and I’ve made it to the fourth volume – published in Danish in 2022, and in translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell in 2026, making it perfect for Women in Translation Month. (Incidentally, I wonder why the translators have changed since the first volume?) Here are my thoughts on the books in the series so far.

Even though I’ve read the third book as recently as May, I did have to dig around to remember what happened (and found this excellent essay). This review will have spoilers for the other books so far, of course: as a reminder, Tara is an antiquarian book dealer stuck in a timeloop. She is 35, though I’d remembered her being much older. For thousands of days, it has been 18 November. The twist is that she always starts the day wherever she ended the previous one – so, in the course of three books, she has travelled far and wide. Sometimes she returns to her husband, Thomas. Sometimes she visits her parents. The early volumes are beautiful explorations of what it looks like to find contentment alone in a world you can’t change. Then it becomes more claustrophobic. And then more people appeared. Henry, Rolf, and Olga were also trapped in 18 November.

Well, ready yourself. The stream of ‘loopers’ just keeps coming in volume IV – and that terminology is one of the main things that the book explores. What should they call themselves? What should they call the ‘normal’ people? What about names for lengths of time? If the third volume took tangents on history and feminism, the main undercurrent of this one is language and how it forms and changes meaning – which I imagine was particularly tricky for the translators. (I also imagine that ‘noopers’ being the negative of ‘loopers’ works better in the Danish equivalent.)

I started making notes about who the people were – Sonia the doctor; Marlice who also ‘works in the hospital industry’ in the hospital laundry; Rosi the au pair – but I quickly last track. Each is sketched out, and some are more dominant in the story, but their real function seems to be a united swell of people. As Tara reflects towards the end of the book:

Our house has become a reception centre, a gathering place, a meeting point. People arrive alone or in small groups. Some arrive very quietly, as if they have slipped unseen through the back door. Others arrive like peacocks, strutting through the gate and up the driveway as if a red carpet had been rolled out all the way to the front door. Some leap into focus the moment we meet them, and within an ahour, you feel like you know them. Others take longer to emerge from the bakcground, a gradual reveal, and some you barely notice until suddenly they unfold – offering a story, an idea, a gesture, an experience – and all at once, you seen them in colour, brightly lit.

For they are living together in an abandoned building – and people start living in a flat across the road, too. The loopers (if we use that term) are drawn from seeing posters that Tara and her friends put up in the third book, or perhaps by word-of-mouth – because each person takes breaks from the shared community, travelling around, encountering other loopers. The timeloop is no longer something that Tara faces alone. Instead, she is now a small part of a much larger group – and that brings a completely different dynamic to her life and to the novel. Balle captures the amorphousness really well in passages like this:

It is in the way things move. Cutlery and bowls making their way to the table. A hand reaching into a drawer for a handful of spoons, the sound of metal. The drawer sliding shut again. A cupboard opening, a stack of plates balancing in a pair of hands, then other hands bringing cups to the table. A pot of coffee is brought in, then another. Tea, brewed by Sonia, carried to the table by Peter, poured by Rosi, and Henry gets up to fetch milk while I take the empty coffee pot back to the kitchen and return with a full one.

It is this intertwining that makes it feel as though we are a group. The voices in the room, the eyes sweeping the table and the objects migrating from the kitchen to the conservatory. Then someone asks whether Olga is up yet, or whether anyone has seen Peter. Someone answers, or throws out a guess across the table. More questions follow, another scan of the table. Would anyone like more tea, are there any more oranges, and is there anything else I should bring up from the basement? Sentences floating, a voice replying, sometimes several at once. Yes, on the table in the kitchen; or no, she’s still sleeping; or he was here just a moment ago; and then the coffee’s ready, are there enough cups? And new questions come up, followed by comments on the questions and an answer from the other end of the table. We speak into the air over the table and answer on behalf of one another. We check to see whether we’re out of bread, and someone mentions that the lamp in the upstairs bathroom needs a blub, and then someone else remembers seeing a box of old light bulbs in the basement.

The individuals become almost interchangeable. A series that started about the strangeness of becoming unique has now changed into one about finding your place in community – and, in some ways, it is like being from any minority and then finding other like-minded people. At first, you are overjoyed that other people ‘get it’. And then the disparites and disjoints start to show. Just because you have the same experience that differentiates you from the majority doesn’t mean that your perspectives will completely align.

One argument that arises in the novel is the ‘why’ of it all. It’s something Tara didn’t dwell on in the first books, but there are some loopers for whom it is all-encompassing – particularly those who blame themselves. Marlice stole a hospital gown and was caught – is that the reason she was condemned to the loop? Have others made it out of the loop, and they are the weak ones who are stuck? Olga, the teenager from the previous book, gives her take:

The world is not a calm sea where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat, she said. The world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.

She believed our concerns about being at fault were an overestimation of our own abilities. As if we could set the universe in motion, out of commission, put the day on repeat. If we were serious, she couldn’t see why we hadn’t started putting our superpowers to better use by now. If it’s actually possible to defy the laws of nature and the entire universe by stealing a hospital gown, then we’d better get to work.

Of course, this novel is still in Tara’s diary entries – but in volume four she becomes more a documenter than a thinker. She is sharing the backs and forths of the arguments around her, and recedes behind the blur of noise. I missed the more pensive Tara from the first book, where the whole experience was focalised through her eyes and her mind. I can see why Balle has evolved the series, and the neverending flood of loopers definitely makes this book succinct, but it’s my least favourite so far. Which isn’t to say it’s bad – I still really enjoyed it – but it didn’t have quite the beauty and magic that made me fall for the first one.

Having said that… there is another twist towards the end that has made me very excited to read the fifth one, translated in November! Watch this space.

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Translating Myself and Others: Amazon.co.uk: Lahiri, Jhumpa: 9780691238616: Books

Earlier this year, I read Daniel Hahn’s excellent translation memoir Catching Fire, and I loved the experience so much that I jumped at the chance to read essays about translation by Jhumpa Lahiri – an author I’ve come to late, but whom I am loving. Princeton University Press kindly sent a review copy of Translating Myself and Others (2022), and here we are. It doesn’t quite count for Women in Translation month but it is certainly Women About Translation. Actually, it does include two essays translated into Italian, but I’m afraid I can’t read those.

Lahiri moved to Italy in 2012 and a few years later started publishing in Italian. She’s now written a novel, a collection of short stories, poetry and several works of non-fiction in Italian – but that wasn’t sufficient for this polymath polyglot! She has also turned her hand to translating her own work, which is the genesis of this collection of essays. 

I don’t speak any language other than English, so reading Lahiri’s experience as an adult language learner, and writer, was a portal to another world – and she writes about it with her usual elegance:

Confronting a foreign language as an adult is a considerable challenge. And yet, the many doors I’ve had to open in Italian have flung wide, giving onto a sweeping, splendid view. The Italian language did not simply change my life; it gave me a second life, an extra life.

Reading, writing, and living in Italian, I feel like a reader, a writer, a person who is more attentive, active, and curious. Each new word encountered, learned, and listed in my notebook constitutes a small door. My Italian dictionary, meanwhile, serves as a doorway. I think of the books I read, the sentences I write, and the texts I finish all as doors, along with every conversation with an Italian friend, each occasion to express myself.

In terms of the title of the collection, the most relevant essay is ‘Where I Find Myself’ – originally published on Words Without Borders – which examines the process of turning Dove mi trovo into Whereabouts. It is certainly the essay I found more interesting, and Lahiri talks us through the contronting experience of returning to a ‘completed’ work with a new task at hand.

The profoundly destabilizing thing about self-translation is that the book threatens to unravel, to hurtle toward potential annihilation. It seems to annihilate itself. Or am I annihilating it? No text should sustain that level of scrutiny; at a certain point, it cedes. It’s the reading and the scrutinizing, the insistent inquiry implicit in the act of writing and translating, that inevitably jostles the text.

In this essay, and throughout the collection, Lahiri tends more towards the abstract and philosophical rather than the word-by-word experience of translating. I find an approach like Daniel Hahn’s – in which he details tiny decisions, as well as larger ones – is very satisfying to read. Lahiri’s writing is entertaining and thought-provoking, but harder to take grasp of. I suppose it’s easier to get a handle on how a translator might line up three potential options and land on one particular word than it is to construct a broader philosophy of translation. 

I would like to pause for a moment on the ramifications of being first as opposed to second. Now that I have become a translator in addition to remaining a writer, I am struck by how many people regard what I am doing as “secondary” and thus creatively inferior in nature. Translation, it seems, is considered imitative as opposed to imaginative. Some people, when I tell them I am translating someone else’s work as opposed to writing something of my own, appear almost sorry for me, as if translation projects represent a dearth of my own ideas, the solution for a fallow period, a drying up of my original voice. Readers who react with suspicion to a work in translation reinforce a perceived hierarchy in literature between an original work and its imitation. This hierarchy, sadly prevalent, between what is authentic and what is derivative—one might take another step and say, between what is pure and what is tainted—influences not only how we regard literature but how we regard one another. Who is original, who belongs authentically to a place? Who does not?

Sections like this – jumping off from Lahiri’s personal experience being a translator, or what being a translator means for her reputation – really interested me. It’s a good conversation to have about authenticity. But I did question why she has conflated translator and translation? Isn’t it possible for somebody to think of a translator being imitative (at least to an extent, and without diminishing the creativity needed) without disparaging the idea of reading something in translation?

Elsewhere, I found some of her bold statements rather confusing. She writes this with certainty: “While the shock of change is often a catalyst for art, art is not—should not—be an instrument for change of any kind.” Surely that isn’t true? Surely it rules out enormous amounts of fiction, non-fiction, visual art, cinema..? But then sometimes she says something so pithily that you forgive her occasional surprising views. For example, I loved the simplicity of this: ‘Translation is about choosing, at times wisely, at times reluctantly, always with lingering misgivings’. 

The essay collection is structured chronologically by publication date,  and includes three introductions/afterwords she wrote to her translations of three Domenico Starnone books – which, because of that structure, don’t appear together. The longest essay is about Antonia Gramsci, and I do think you have to have some interest in him to really get the most of it. 

It’s definitely a mixed bag, and some are less likely to have the widest appeal – but there is also a lot of really thoughtful and thought-provoking consideration of the act of translation, and what it tells us about writing, language, writers and readers. It certainly tends to the abstract rather than the specific, so bear that in mind – and adds to my admiration for the many strings to Lahiri’s bow.

Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr

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We’re continuing the Canadian literature here, and there will be others to come, as I get around to writing about the books I read on my holiday to Calgary and Vancouver. Up today is the first book that the booksellers in Pages, Books in Calgary recommended when I said “I’d like to read books by Canadians, about Canada, that I wouldn’t be able to get easily in the UK.” I don’t know how much of a struggle it would be to find this in the UK, but I’m really glad they put Prairie Edge (2024) by Conor Kerr into my hands – I thought it was excellent. Even better, it was set in Alberta (the province I was staying in), and even mentioned in passing one or two of the places I visited in Calgary.

And it’s all about releasing bison into downtown Edmonton.

After a brief prologue from inhabitants of the district in the 1870s, we are straight into the action from Ezzy’s point of view. Here’s the first paragraph of his first chapter:

Around two in the morning, Grey dropped me off at an outskirt suburb of Edmonton. The kind where there were no numbers to tell you where you were on the grid, just the name of a landscape feature like Rolling Meadows, followed by a Blvd., Way, Point, Lane. I assumed that rich people loved not having numbers in their addresses. Why else would you live out here? Grey took off down the block in her beat-up Honda Cr-v. I watched the taillights until they disappeared around a suburb bend. Rich people also loved curves in the road.

Ezzy and his cousin Grey are Métis, a First Nations group that has lived in the area for many years, but has faced considerable historical discrimination and persecution. Nor is it solely in the past – their Métis identity still exposes them to these things, be it suspicion from the police, inescapable forms of poverty, or limits to their educational and career prospects.

Grey is passionate about these things. She lives to protest injustice – against Métis, against the environment, against animals. Along the way, she often joins with other protestors, but she also has well-worn disdain for the sort of wealthy white person who can protest as a hobby before they move on to their secure futures. Ezzy also sees this injustice, but he has less hope for change in the world – his world, or the whole world. His disaffection is sometimes a wedge between the two of them. But it is understandable.

I felt like most of my life so far had been waiting. When I was a kid, I waited for someone to adopt me. When I turned twelve and realized that was never going to happen, I waited until I aged out of foster families. After that, group homes. Then I went out on my own, and I waited for something, anything, to happen to give me direction or purpose. Floating through life was fine, but I felt like there must be something missing. What motivated people to try to do something different than the generations before them? I couldn’t grasp it. All I knew was survival mode. If there was food, eat it as quick as possible before someone took it from you. If there were drugs or booze, do them all before someone else could. If there was money, spend it now, or else it’d just be whittled away. Survive. Survive. Survive. No purpose, no direction, nothing – just waiting for that moment to happen.

He spends time in jail, during which Grey and he didn’t communicate at all – but they reunite when he comes out, having been close as children. She has had a different path, going to university, but they are still able to bond over their feelings of rejection from so many parts of society. Grey’s stubborn idealism and Ezzy’s shrugging nihilism clash but somehow they are a unit. One person who doesn’t reject them is Auntie May, who takes Ezzy in, and is very much the more centre of this book. A beacon of possible hope in the midst of the petty crime, joyriding and empty future that define Ezzy’s current life.

So, releasing the bison! This is an act of defiance by the two: Grey is trying to make a point about environmentalism and the reclaiming of urban land, while you feel like Ezzy just finds some peace in destruction. Between them, they manage to steal bison from someone’s land and transport them to the city, leaving them roaming and quickly scarpering themselves. It becomes a local mystery on the news – and a wider mystery, when copycat bison-releasings happen.

It’s such a brilliant image for a novel, and also makes a great way of marketing the book to make it sound fascinating: “This is the novel about bison released in downtown Edmonton.” I loved the idea, but the novel is far more than a cleverly constructed set piece. It’s such an interesting interplay of characters, entirely convincing – and more layers are added when, after a while, we switch to Grey’s perspective. She thinks more poetically, perhaps, and certainly with more decision.

There is plenty of darkness in the novel, including attempted sexual assault, murder, and drug taking. But it didn’t feel gratuitous, because it is anchored by the novel being chiefly about two fascinating characters. There was the odd page or two of viscera that I skimmed past, but mostly I really loved spending time with Kerr’s writing, his intriguing slant on modern Canadian life, and the vivid creations of Grey and Ezzy – deeply flawed, and hurt, people I couldn’t help rooting for.

Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart

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As mentioned in my Canada haul post, I chose Ordinary Wonder Tales (2022) by Emily Urquhart after looking through all the books in a bookshop that had ‘Canadian author’ or ‘Canadian press’ slips in the top of them. This one turned out to be both, published by Biblioasis which, like Emily Urquhart, is based in Ontatio.

Well, I’m so glad I picked out Ordinary Wonder Tales – I thought it was a fantastic book, and exactly the sort of thing I love: an essay collection that skilfully combines personal memoir with the author’s particular expertise. In this case, that is folklore – Urquhart has a doctorate in folklore, and a wide-ranging knowledge of examples from around the world. Better still, she is excellent at explaining them in an accessible way, filled with curiosity.

In each essay, Urquhart takes incidents from her own life, and the contemporary world more broadly, and intertwines it with folklore from the centuries. It is such a brilliant idea for giving depth and intrigue to stories which would be interesting on their own. For example, in ‘Lessons for Female Success’, she recounts different experiences she has had of violent men – most surreally, being tasked with removing the graffittied name of a serial killer from bunkbeds as a camp counsellor, alongside equally shocking but more common interactions with male violence:

He took my hand in a strong and painful grip. I pulled away, hard, and freed myself. The white mitten that I’d been wearing fell to the ground. I felt a rush of air, as if a sudden gust of wind had blown from the shadows behind me. I turned slightly to see a blur of movement. It was a second man running towards me from an opposite shadowy corner than the first. I wondered if I had been screaming and if the man was coming to my rescue. He was not. He threw me to the ground with a full-body slam. My tailbone bore the initial impact of my fall. Then, the back of my skull hit the pavement. I heard a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I struggled, kicked, and bit, but the men overpowered me. I had two thoughts in quick succession: first, I thought I might die. Second, I thought, No, my voice will save me. By then I could hear myself screaming. I didn’t know if I was using words in English or Ukrainian or Russian or if I was shrieking into the abyss. I thought I was saying, “No, no, no.” I might have been asking, “Why?”

In another instance in this essay, Urquhart and her friend are flashed by man waiting in an alleyway – and the shock of that moment is compounded by the unsympathetic dismissal by police officers. Even when another police officer later apologises for this dismissiveness, it puts the weight of it back onto her: “I guess what I’m asking is, do you want him to apologize to you in person, or in writing, or what? Do you want this man to lose his job? He’s got a family, but, you know, if that’s what you want.” Alongside her own experiences, this essay explores Child ballads – a collection of 305 British sung poems, collected by 19th-century folklorist Francis James Child and drawn from four centuries before that.

I first encountered them in graduate school and was immediately taken by their imagery and gory drama. The action in these tales is present-tense and immediate, the past a vague and unmentioned country. The stories focus on a central event and begin at the height of the tension – an incident that is, almost always, sexually violent. These are sorrowful songs where women are raped, punished to death for loving the wrong man, abducted by vicious relatives and strangers, and burned at the stake for affairs of the heart. The narrator never editorializes; she offers the story but no analysis or comment.

It’s interesting that Urquhart mentions that lack of editorialising, because the same thing strikes me about her own writing too. Urquhart’s approach to memoir is always restrained. She tells us what happens, she explains how she felt, but she knows that the stories do not need grandstanding conclusions. We can conclude for ourselves. Nor does she draw unduly heavy-handed comparisons between the folklore and the aspects of memoir. Obviously there are some comparisons, but mostly she reveals these simply by telling the stories of her life and of centuries of tradition alongside each other. They interweave, with Urquhart’s pacing expertly flowing from one to the other. It shows how her experiences are simultaneously deeply personal and eternal.

Another chapter explores Urquhart’s experience of pregnancy – including the devastation of miscarriage, as well as giving birth to her two children. Alongside her experiences of antenatal care (or perhaps ‘care’), she tells the story of a miller’s daughter who is inadvertently promised to the devil, and her continuing attempts to escape him – and the violence she experiences because of it. It is so compelling, even when the comparisons are less direct. The stories, alongside each other, give such richness and pain and significance to each other.

It’s hard to single out the most moving or thought-provoking sections – I don’t have space to tell you about chapters concerning her father’s dementia (brilliantly told alongside folklores of ‘years become days’ where someone goes to the underworld or another world for a short period and returns to find many years have past), or plague legends told alongside her Covid experiences, or the long shadow of radiation, or (the weakest in the collection in my opinion, and the first, which doesn’t give the best sense of the book) hauntings in her childhood home. But I’ll end with an essay that hit me hardest, since it concerns her brother.

After he died, I began to see my brother with surprising frequency. These appearances were not ghostlike apparitions, nor were they dreams. Instead, I saw him in the bodies of strangers. He was waiting for the traffic light to turn so he could cross at a busy intersection. A man tipped his hat skyward to read a street sign and my brother’s face hovered beneath the brim. He was the token collector at the subway entrance, the lone soup-eater in the basement food court of a downtown shopping mart.

Her accounts of her relationship with Marsh and his sad, premature death are somehow all the more moving because they were not closely bonded siblings. There is nuance and generosity to her examination of their relationship and his abbreviated life, related alongside bereavement hallucinations – not seeing spectres, but seeing your loved ones’ faces in other people’s. They are common and largely unspoken, and I found Urquhart’s exploration of them very poignant – partly because they seemed to bridge a distance that had existed in their actual knowledge of each other. It’s another example of Urquhart using honesty as a tool that gives depth and detail, rather than simply exposure.

Urquhart has such a fascinating slant on the world. I think Ordinary Wonder Tales would have been an excellent, immersive, resiliently honest collection if it simply included her autobiographical experiences. Incorporating the folklore elements makes it something really special. It shows the long, long history of humanity, and of making narrative from human (often women’s) lives, as a background to one individual’s most poignant, intriguing or traumatic moments. Each essay is so cleverly structured, and with such artistic restraint that amplifies the power of each account. I long to read more by Urquhart in the same vein, and urge you to seek it out – if you’re in Canada, that’ll be pretty easy. If, like me, you suffer the misfortune not to live in Canada, then I hope you’ll manage to track it down nonetheless.

Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan – #ABookADayInMay – Day 23

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At the end of Kick the Latch (2022) by Kathryn Scanlan, there is quite a curious note from the author. She writes:

Kick the Latch is based on interviews recorded in person and by phone in 2018, 2020, and 2021. With Sonia’s permission, I transcribed those recordings and used them to write this book, which is a work of fiction. My gratitude to Sonia – and to my mother, who introduced us – is profound.

I don’t remember reading any of the many reviews that circulated about this book a couple of years ago, but I’m sure they’d all have highlighted this curious mixture of fiction and non-fiction. If the main character is called Sonia, sharing her experiences in the first person, where does the real Sonia end and the fictional one begin?

The novel – if such it is – is told in many vignettes, or extremely short chapters. They are broadly in chronological order, from her early childhood through her career as a horse trainer, with a slightly unexpected addendum of life working in a prison at the end. But Kick the Latch is really a window on a world that most of us know nothing about: the visceral, often violent, all-encompassing world of horse trainers and jockeys. While the horse owners are at the peripheraries of the book, this not their stage. This is a clear-eyed, direct account of a world that Sonia loves, even while it treats her with apathetic brutality.

You get hit. I got kicked in the head. The horse was kicking at a fly and my head got in the way. Riders would go down. They’d get steel rods put up their spine. You were on top of the world or the bottom. You’d get hurt and be laid up with no money coming in, but there’d be other weeks where you made real good.

It’s a sport, you’re competitive – you want to be tops, you want to win, you want your name on the program, in the standings. A trainer’ll try to swipe an owner from another trainer. A jockey’ll say to another jockey – What the fuck are you doing, sniffing around my stable? Bad feelings, hard feelings, friction – nobody loves everybody. But if someone gets hurt, laid up, down on their luck, loses a loved one – even if their truck breaks down on the way to the next track – we’d work together to help. We’d have a big benefit.

Sonia’s voice is clear and unapologetic, and she skates along the surface of this dizzying world. Whether describing the dubious ways that jockeys keep their weight down, the muckier side of horse rearing, or her own rape and, later, domestic violence, she gives us the information in staccato summary. She seldom dwells on anything. It gives the book a break-neck pace.

Scanlan isn’t afraid to immerse us in the idiolect of horse training. We get some glossing, but I still felt rather at sea with paragraphs like this:

Dark Side had been ruled off for flipping in the gates. You can get a flipper reinstated, but it’s a lot of work. You have to get reapproved by the starter and you have to have eight clean breaks.

I’m none the wiser, to be honest, but I think it’s better to be thrown into this world than to have everything explained – or, goodness, footnotes.

And we are very much thrown into the world of the book. It is short, spiky, and totally consistent. Perhaps it is too visceral for my liking, and it certainly doesn’t have the elegance or intertextuality of other vignette-based books I’ve read like Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill or Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton. But it is confidently, unflinchingly its own thing – and, on those terms, very much a success.

Catching Fire by Daniel Hahn – #ABookADayInMay – Day 18

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I knew I had to buy Catching Fire (2022) by Daniel Hahn as soon as I heard about it – and, boom, it’s not even three years since I bought it and I’ve read it! Such speed and agility. I don’t know why it took me so long, since I was pretty certain I would love it – and I definitely did.

Catching Fire is a subtitled ‘A Translation Diary’ and that’s exactly what it is. Hahn is a literary translator, and the book documents his process of translating Diamela Eltit’s Jamás el fuego nunca from Spanish into English. It would eventually appear as Never Did The Fire, though in the earlier sections of the translation diary it is called Never The Fire Ever. Catching Fire began life as a blog, and it retains the structure of a series of dated entries, responding to people’s comments and occasionally referring to real-world events. Because it was a blog, Hahn cautions (in his introduction) against reading it all in one go. Well, Hahn, I have not taken your guidance, and it didn’t stop me absolutely loving this book.

Even the very best translators will acknowledge this: essentially, theoretically, translation is impossible. It’s one of the paradoxes inherent in literary translation, I think. it’s easier to do it, or at least to do it well, once you’ve understood that in theory it cannot be done.

So Hahn writes in his introduction, before going on to explain exactly how he does it. I like his own description of translation: ‘Translation is like copying a work of art in a different medium. We’re art forgers attempting to reproduce an oil painting using only pencils, but so skilfully you won’t be able to tell the difference.’

Like most readers, perhaps, when I read a work in translation, I’m not trying too hard to see the original text behind the text I’m reading. Indeed, I tend to sort of pretend it doesn’t exist. Trying to balance the book I can’t access without the translator’s help into my reception of the book I am reading feels too fraught with challenge. It’s that suspension of disbelief (or something like that) that makes reading a translation possible. And perhaps the translator’s job is to make that possible.

I don’t read any languages other than English, with the possible exception of a very easy children’s book in French, so I already marvel at anybody who could speak more than one language – let alone have the skill to do what Hahn does. My appreciation of translators was already pretty sky-high, but after reading Catching Fire, it has stratospheric.

His process starts by doing a quick translation of everything. It is speedy and unapologetically shoddy. Hahn courageously shares examples of this initial parse through, and it is littered with ‘this/that’ options, words still in Spanish because he can’t think for that moment how best to translate in context, and sentences that, if complete, are ugly. It is, I suppose, the sort of translation that AI is trying to convince us is sufficient – and it shows exactly why it isn’t, especially for literary fiction.

After this, he goes through and looks at many words to check their precise meaning – and, since Eltit is Chilean, this also includes checking for different uses that are specific to Chile. Future drafts are about getting the nuance exactly right, trying to capture what is in the original even when English doesn’t accommodate an easy transfer.

The bulk of Catching Fire are about these nuances. I loved it, and it didn’t matter at all that I don’t speak Spanish. Hahn explains very well for the monoglot. How to capture the way that Eltit lists adjectives after a noun? How to translate words which tell you the gender of the speaker in Spanish, but don’t in English? What to do about allusions that refract across the novel when the same reaching-out moments don’t make sense in English?

One of my favourites of these was a character complaining of pain in his wrist – muñeca – which Hahn at first translates unquestioningly as ‘wrist’. It is only in the ensuing dialogue does it become clear that muñeca’s other meaning (‘doll’) is also significant. How on earth do you retain this in translation? (I may have missed the answer, or he didn’t tell us.)

I mentioned very early in this diary that ambuity can be the hardest thing to translate. I think some people imagine ambiguity as a kind of vagueness, but to my mind you might better consider it exactly the opposite, as an extreme sort of precision, and that’s what makes it hard.

If that sort of thing appeals to you, then Catching Fire is rammed full of them. It reminded me a lot of Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, though they are tonally and structurally very different – both equally fascinating about translation.

It also helps that Hahn is great company for the ride. Perhaps because we are similar ages, I appreciated his humour and his character shines through as someone intellectually curious while also being a good hang. I also appreciated his evident patience with the number of non-translators who were clearly giving their thoughts in the comments – perhaps he liked getting these, though I suspect I would have found it hard to deal with quite so many non-experts sharing their thoughts on my job. Maybe Hahn is just a better person than me.

Well, it’s ridiculous that I waited so long to read this when I knew I’d fall for it completely. Now I wish every book in translation came with exactly this sort of companion book. I have to confess that nothing in it made me want to read Eltit’s novel, which doesn’t sound like my cup of tea at all, but that is beside the point. Catching Fire is a total triumph, and it feels like a privilege to have had this window into the translator’s world.

On the Calculation of Volume (vol.3) by Solvej Balle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 16

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is personal growth. I’m actually reading a series without gaps of years between the books! I wrote about the second volume in Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series only a few weeks ago, and now I’ve finished the third (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell). As you might expect, this review will contain pretty significant spoilers for the first two books, though I’ll try not to give too many twists and turns away from the third.

As a quick reminder, if you’re new to this series – Tara is stuck in a timeloop. It is endlessly 18 November. She has lived through several years of this now, and no longer truly believes that 19 November is possibly on the horizon. The first book was about finding peace and space in this timeloop; the second was about claustrophobia and exploration. And the third… well, the second book ended with a big reveal. And this is a major spoiler for the first two books. The big twist is… it turns out Tara is not alone in her timeloop! Another person has been living the same circular existence as her, for the same length of time. His name is Henry Dale.

There are several long entries in this volume, explaining how they first encountered each other in a lecture theatre – where, even before they knew for certain that the other was an anomaly in the loop, they recognised something distinct about each other. Even though they are strangers, this shared strangeness is, of course, soemthing that brings them together intimately.

The thought of our meeting makes me smile now, and it occurs to me how long I’ve lived without this mutual recognition, the little mental jolt, a faint quiver in the brain as you recognize someone who recognizes you back. A sensation that had been absent for so long it came as a surprise: a peculiar new feeling which launched us into an odd little dance.

I am back in the apartment on Wiesenweg, alone now that we’ve parted ways, but still astonished that it’s possible for two people to share a common history in the midst of the eighteenth of November, a very brief history, but a history all the same, of meetings and goodbyes and reunions and plans to meet again.

It is surprisingly plain sailing for a long time. They live through dozens and dozens of days together – moving around, eating and talking and sharing their experiences. Henry has a young son in America, and has spent many of his days there – each day, doing an impromptu visit to his ex-wife and asking to spend the afternoon with his son. (As a reminder, they always start a day wherever they ended the previous one, so travel is possible.) Tara has spent years honing her own philosophy and approach to the extraordinary world she has found herself in, and it is understandably confronting to have to accommodate someone else’s. A blessing, but also a jolt to the rhythm she has established.

A world had opened up, and it was not all to the good; we were in some strange way bound together. There was a promise of more conversations, but not only that. There is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibilities for their baggage.

Because there are so many volumes, Balle can be spacious in how she describes this world. There is time for tangents – about Romans and their obsession with grain, about historians and ‘female history’ and a dispute about whether such a thing exists separately from man’s. For a long while, the two separate – Tara goes back to her husband, and has less success with him than she did in the first book. And she continues to age. She is years older than when the story started, while the world remains the same, over and over. I imagine that will become increasingly a plot point. How can she continue to visit Thomas when, in his eyes, his wife will have aged significantly overnight?

I shan’t say more about what happens in this volume, but the world has certainly opened up more than I anticipated at the outset. I never really worried that Balle would run out of steam, because she writes so beautifully and engagingly about the utterly mundane and thus could never exhaust her material. But I love the direction the series is heading in, and the distinctive nature she manages to give each book – even while the same day repeats itself time and again. I think the first book remains my favourite of the three, but they are all triumphs, and I’m excited to get onto the third.

With or Without Angels by Douglas Bruton – #ABookADayInMay – Day 5

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Cover of With or Without Angels showing details from Giandomenico Tiepolo's Il Mondo Nuovo

You probably know about Douglas Bruton by now. Even if you’ve missed that I love Blue Postcards and Hope Never Knew Horizon, there are many other book bloggers who also love him – and, indeed, Madame Bibi has already reviewed one of his books in her own Novella A Day In May project.

I’m continuing my Bruton journey with With Or Without Angels (2023). Like the other works I’ve read by him, it responds to and is inspired by specific artworks. In this case, The New World by Alan Smith – which, in turn, is a response to Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo (‘The New World’). I have to confess that I had never heard of either artist or their work, but (miraculous for a paperback!) they are printed in the book itself – so I didn’t need to have a Google tab open.

Smith’s The New World is a series of 11 photograph collages, starting with a selfie of Smith and his wife in the Tate Modern. They appear in the subsequent images, but so do elements of Tiepolo’s work, other landscapes, and a floating cloth that may or may not be intended to represent an angel. Tiepolo’s piece, on the other hand, is subversive in its own way: a portrait of a series of people, almost all of whom have their back to us.

Bruton’s novella is told through the perspective of Smith, and his creation of the artwork – along with a young woman called Olivia, or Livvy, who has the expertise to do the digital manipulation and photoshopping required to create his collages.

Livvy is taking notes.

“It’s like something mathematical. Like showing my working out, my thinking.”

He has pritned out a picture of an empty space, a pillared courtyard. There is a well in the centre of the picture and maybe it was the reason he took the picture in the first place. He wonders if that can be removed.

Livvy looks up and nods.

“And sky – I want there to be sky, so the upper floor should be removed and something like a wind-lifted carrier bag falling down on the square. Maybe a sheet.”

“Like an angel,” she said.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“No?”

“Yes. That is to say, like an angel but also not. I am not sure that today I believe in angels.”

Smith also learns, during the narrative, that the symptoms he has been experiencing are more serious than he hoped. Along the way, With Or Without Angels becomes a subtle treatise on the broadest imaginable topics – living, loving, creating – as well as an examination of the tiniest moments.

As it’s Bruton, it’s all done with humanity and beauty. Having said that, I have to admit that the artworks are not ones I particularly respond to myself – and something about reading the fictionalised account of such a recent artist feels curiously more uncanny than reading the same thing of artists many, many decades earlier. So this won’t race to the top of my Bruton list, but any Bruton is a good Bruton and it was a fun way to spend Day 5.

Only About Love by Debbi Voisey – #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

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A quick one from me, because I’m back home late after driving home from Hay-on-Wye (haul to be revealed at some point, possibly after May), via an afternoon at Hidcote National Trust and Chipping Camden, and then straight to Devil Wears Prada 2 (good for nostalgia’s sake, if very patchy). Somewhere along the way, I managed to finish Only About Love (2021) by Debbi Voisey.

After loving Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards, I decided to buy up a whole bunch of other Fairlight Moderns. They’re such lovely little editions, and a really interesting range of titles. Admittedly, I read another one that I didn’t like (and decided not to write about) but Only About Love was more of a success.

It tells the story of Frank – in many ways, an ordinary sort of man. He lives in a normal house, has a job that is neither exciting nor particularly the opposite, and marries a nice woman and has nice children. Along the way, he has at least one affair – which is sadly also not that out of the ordinary. But the style in which it is told is where the unusual element comes in. Voisey has taken this everyman’s life and told it in fragments and vignettes – out of chronological order – from Frank’s perspective and from the perspective of his wife and children, and occasionally objective lists and bullet points. Since these are not framed with an explanation, the reader has to quickly catch up with who is telling their story, and where we are in Frank’s life history. It means Only About Love is an endless chain of mild disorientations, always having to establish and re-establish our surroundings – but it comes together in a very coherent whole.

The disorientation also puts us a little in Frank’s place – because the crux of the novella is his diagnosis, decline and eventual death with dementia. An acknowledgement from Voisey suggests she has first-hand experience of this from her father, and that is perhaps why this plot is told with such observation, kindness and charity. Illness does not exonerate Frank of his misdeeds, but nor should it overshadow the everyday nobleness that was also part of his character. (Incidentally, once you know that dementia is central to the story, I think it makes Sam Kalda’s illustration on the cover feel very poignant.)

The title comes from a section late in the novella, from the perspective of Frank’s daughter as she tends to him in the late stages of dementia. I’ll finish by quoting this vignette in full:

When you shave him, he moves his mouth and face around like he’s chewing an invisible sweet. He offers up his neck with absolute trust; you glide the blade down beneath his chin and over his Asam’s apple. It’s massive, like he’s swallowed a rock.

You hear the rasp of his stubble and it’s almost like the noise is coming from you, because there’s sandpaper inside you. Your stomach is made of it. Your heart is made of it. Your throat. Your insides have been transformed into a million tiny pieces of rock.

He can no longer speak, but words are unnecessary. Life is now simply in its cruelty; he once cared for you and now you’re caring for him.

Each touch of your fingers on his skin reminds him that love still exists. You want all his waking thoughts from now on to be only about love.