How do you love someone hell-bent on harming himself?

 I picked this up because Phil Klay, the author of Redeployment, said in an interview, “One of my friends, Scott Cheshire, wrote a beautiful book about faith called High as the Horses’ Bridles. Scott is not a believer himself, though he was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses and used to give sermons as a child, and the novel approaches questions of faith with the same degree of respect and serious consideration that any great believing writer would. It’s a challenging and provocative read.” It is that. 

A bio of Cheshire on the Gotham Writers site says that “in the back of every New World Bible (the official Witness translation), there are appendices that include maps and ‘scholarly references’ supporting a literalist reading of the Bible. Ironically, it was the inclusion of these references, designed to keep believers in place, that led Scott ‘astray.’ Scott realized how terribly flawed the so-called scholarly references were in that they merely propped up the Jehovah’s Witness agenda. He researched secular criticism along with histories of American Christianity, Mormonism, and Seventh Day Adventists.”

In college Cheshire found that even sacred texts steal. “Good writers steal or are at least influenced,” he says. “The writers of Genesis stole or borrowed from other religious texts.” He attended church less and less and even skipping the much-revered “Last Supper” celebration. Ultimately, he began exploring fiction, began writing fiction, published short stories, and earned an MFA in fiction from Hunter College.

High as the Horses’ Bridles is the story of a believer who stops believing, his father, mother, and ex-wife. The title refers to how deeply the blood will rise when God brings about the Apocalypse. In the first chapter, 12-year-old Josiah Laudermilk is a boy preacher speaking to an audience of 4,000 in what had been a Queens, NY, movie palace, now the sect’s church. Josiah, his spirit fired by the crowd, announces to the believers that in fact the world will end in twenty years, on December 31, 1999. 

Twenty-five years later, the world has not ended. Josiah returns from California to the Queens family home. He is divorced. He owns a shaky computer retail business. After growing to four stores, Otter Computing has shriveled to one with one employee, Josiah best friend Amad Singh, who keep the business afloat. His mother has died after suffering for several years with with the onset, remission, and return of cancer. And his father, Gill, has retreated into his faith, allowing the house and his health to deteriorate.

While Josiah has given up on the church although not (apparently) on his belief in God, his father has become obsessed with living by the rules of the Bible that mean the most to him. For example, that one should lie down beside the still waters means that Gill has moved a cot in the bathroom so he can sleep beside the filled bathtub. Everything that happens, happens for a reason. In a scene between Gill, Josiah, his mother and church elders, Gill says:

“I want to be a true believer, it’s all I’ve ever wanted out of life . . . And my wife. She wears a hat so you don’t have to see her shining head. For you! You think this is sickness? This is God’s work! All of it God’s work! All of them signs we are living in the End Days, and you won’t even see it. Look to the book of Matthew. In the Last Days. The Apostle Matthew says in the End Days one shall be taken, but the other left behind—”

High as the Horses’ Bridles puts us in the consciousness of white, middle-class American man who in his mid-thirties is trying to make sense of the world and his own history. Josiah does not debate his father or the tenets of his church. The novel does not question the inerrancy of the Bible’s stories, nor does it suggest that there may be questions about or inconsistencies in the stories.

The book does convey the difficulty of loving someone who seems hell-bent on harming himself in a mad quest for . . . what? Transcendence? Ultimate truth? Death? At times I found Josiah irritatingly indecisive. I wanted to tell him: Clean the damned house of the cat crap! Don’t let your father continue to live in such filth! Do something even if it’s wrong! 

Eventually, with the unexpected help of his ex-wife, he does. His friend, Amad back at the store in California, never gives up on him (or the store). And in an extraordinary coda, Cheshire ends the novel with a story of religious transfiguration in Woodford, Kentucky, in 1801. It alone is worth the price of admission. 

What life can be like while serving a life sentence

This Life is a fascinating novel for several reasons, starting with its publishing history. In the book’s Foreword, Zachary Lazar writes that he first met Quntos KunQuest in 2013 at Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison.

Lazar, a professor of English at Tulane University, had come to the prison as a journalist to cover the production of a play the inmates were performing. Quntos was part of the sound crew and wrote some of the play’s music. “He was a rapper, he said, but Angola disapproved of hip-hop, unlike country, gospel, and rock, so he had to find ways to work that didn’t draw much notice.”

Lazar mentioned to Quntos that he was trying to write a novel “about a man serving life at Angola.” Quntos, 20 years into his life sentence, said he’d written a novel like that himself. He said “he would send it to me and I could ‘steal’ from it anything I wanted.” Lazar wasn’t interested in stealing but was interested in read the manuscript—which was 348 pages hand printed in ballpoint pen with cursive for italics. It took at least one false start before the novel found a publisher in Agate.

This Life is a highbred: memoir, poetry, fiction, all written in an English that may take some getting used to. Here on page 1 is Lil Chris considering the correctional officers who are taking him to Angola: “If anything unusual happened, they wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot. That triptriggered sump’n he wa’n’t tryna think about, but he knew: this was his slow descent to the bottom of the barrel.”

The other major character is Rise who’s been inside for a while. Looking at the new arrivals, “within 30 minutes he’ll have assessed every one of them’s makeup. He’ll know who’s dangerous and who’s soft, who’s got sense and who can’t think, who’s playin’ games and who wants to be left alone. And, most importantly, which of these fools he’s willing to allow inside his zone.”

Lil Chris and Rise are both natural born rappers and This Life is studded with, and enriched by, rap poetry. At the climax of the story, they compete in a rap contest.

This could have been a simple memoir of what it’s like to be serving an extended sentence in Angola, which has provoked a number of books, notably Wilbert Rideau’s In the Place of Justice and Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. Covering 18,000 square acres, Angola is larger than Manhattan. It currently houses about 6,000 prisoners. 

In a facility so large with working farms, manufacturing facilities, education center, an inmate-run radio station, TV station, and magazine, one individual prisoner’s daily life inside can be very different from another. Violence exists, but prison tends to be more peaceful than movies and television would have you believe. We watch Lil Chris being institutionalized before he is fit to live relatively peacefully in a dormitory with a job in the library rather than in a two-man cell or in the SHU—the segregated housing unit, what modern prisons call solitary.

In the course of This Life, we watch Lil Chris change from an angry young man into a rap artist who (we can hope) has a future within and perhaps beyond prison. He is guided in this change by Rise who has his own demons and history to live with, but who also has learned exactly how the system works. As one of the old ’victs tells Lil Chris:

“The prison system is a racket. When we go out and commit criminal acts and get caught, we fall into a well-planned net. A trap. From that point forward, it’s we, the offenders, who are usually victimized. They already know that a large percentage of us don’t know the law—let alone our rights. This problem is compounded by the fact that most of us can’t afford competent legal assistance. We’re given a court-appointed lawyer who not only doesn’t have adequate resources, but also can’t properly defend us even if they did have the resources. They’re being called to defend too many clients at one time.”

So not only is This Life an interesting story, a persuasive picture of prison life, a chapbook of rap poetry, it also offers a thought-provoking perspective on the criminal-justice complex. It reads so well, so persuasively one wonders what, if anything, a copy-editor did with the manuscript. Would you touch an exchange like this between Lil Chris and a female CO:

—“How you doin’ Sarge?”

—“Fine. What’s up with you?” she returns.

—I’m straight.” A little too emphatic. Damn! “I mean, I’m cool. Just another day in the joint.” He recovers. “So you chllin’ wit’ us tonight”

—"Yeah,” she smiles. “I’ll be here with you, tonight.”

—Did she just give him a little under-eyed glance? Boy, that’s cold. I know she just didn’t do me that, Lil Chris thinks.

This Life deserves to be read, to be read widely, to be read aloud, to be savored, and to be thought about.

What Jane Austin would have written if she'd written a mystery

Death Comes to Pemberly is an outlier among P.D. James’s murder mysteries. It was published in 2012 after James had published 17 mysteries set in the contemporary era in which she created Adam Dalgliesh, a police commander and poet. James died in 2014 at age 94, so Pemberly is a very late blossom indeed.

It is also as far as I know unique in that recreates Jane Austin’s characters an involves them in a mystery, rather than, say, taking a detective like Sherlock Holmes and involving him in another mystery as Laurie King does in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. James said, “I wanted to combine my two enthusiasms: writing detective fiction and reading Jane Austen. I thought it would be enjoyable to revisit the characters in Pride and Prejudice and to create a really original, exciting, credible detective story at the same time.”

Death Comes to Pemberly opens in 1803, six years after Pride and Prejudice, with Darcy and Elizabeth happily settled in Pemberly House, the great house on the Darcy estate. They are the parents of two young boys and preparing for the annual Lady Ann’s ball. The evening before the ball, a carriage hurtles out of the stormy dark carrying Elizabeth’s flighty sister Lydia who is screaming bloody murder. Lydia’s husband, the despicable if charming, George Wickham, has followed his friend, a Captain Denny, into the woods after Denny stopped the carriage. Lydia screams that Denny has killed Wickham. When a search party finds the two men in the wood, however, Denny is dead and Wickham, cradling the body exclaims, “He was my friend, my only friend, and I’ve killed him! I’ve killed him! It’s my fault.”

Because the death occurred on Darcy’s land and because Wickham, much to Darcy’s disgust, is Darcy’s brother-in-law, Darcy cannot be the investigating magistrate. That has to be Sir Selwyn Hardcastle from a neighboring estate. Complicating matters is some unfortunate history between the Darcy and Hardcastle families. Indeed, that is only one complication and among the pleasures of Permberly are the number of events and characters in which Darcy and Elizabeth are embroiled. 

Another pleasure is James’s ability to reproduce Austin’s style and syntax. Here, taken entirely at random, a sample: “The statement was met by a silence which Elizabeth felt she was expected to break. As she rose she was aware of the sixteen pairs of eyes fixed on her, of worried and troubled people waiting to be told that all in the end would be well, that they personally had nothing to fear and that Pemberly would remain as it had always been, their security and their home.” The passive voice, the long sentences, the record small moments and social relations all reflect Austin’s sensibilities. 

At the same time, James managed to avoid the melodrama and preposterous coincidences of much 19^th century fiction. In my reading, James handles masterfully the ripples caused by Captain Denny’s death, the potential harm to the estate, the family in crisis, and the story of what led up to and actually happened the night before Lady Ann’s Ball. We understand Elizabeth and Darcy, Lydia and Wickham, Elizabeth’s parents and her sister Jane. We understand them better perhaps that we did in Pride and Prejudice.

Readers who enjoy the book may also enjoy the three-part BBC television adaption of the story. It is no longer Jane Austin, and the scriptwriter had to simplify as they always do. I did not see Ann Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth, but that is a quibble. It did help to see Chatsworth House as a stand in for Pemberly House’s exteriors and Castle Howard for its interiors. When the show was broadcast in December 2013, Antonia Frasier called it “a Christmas feast.” I recommend it, but for maximum pleasure, read the book first.

". . . creating a space for thoughtful moral response"

This is an appreciation rather than a review or critique of Phil Klay’s collection of short stories because (a) I think Redeployment is tour de force and (b) it’s already won 2014 National Book Award. It’s right up there with Dispatches, The Things They Carried, and The Last Parallel.

Klay, born in 1983, grew up in Westchester, New York. He studied creative writing and literature at Dartmouth College and during the summer of 2004, he attended Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. He graduated from Dartmouth in 2005 and joined the U.S. Marines, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. In 2007 was deployed to Iraq during the troop surge. He served as a public affairs officer out of Camp Taqaddum in Anbar Province until February 2008. After leaving the Corps in 2009, he completed an MFA in fiction at Hunter College. Redeployment contains a dozen stories of varying lengths. Most are set in Iraq, a few in the U.S. as Marines return home to adjust (or not) to civilian life. They are all told in the first person, but remarkably and interestingly the narrators are all different: enlisted men and officers, infantry grunt and artilleryman, a chaplain and PsyOp specialist. Even a Marine combat engineer who spent his deployment filling potholes in Iraq’s roads and a State Department Special Assistant who is charged with bringing democracy and American values to the country in “Money as a Weapons System.” That’s actually a funny story if you find cultural incomprehension and head-throbbing waste funny.

Klay personally never saw combat, and he’s written, “Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen.”

These stories are not entertainment. They are serious attempts to covey what it was like to be in that place at that time—Iraq in 2007-08. As sharp and brilliant and powerful as they are (and they are), they must fail in some sense because if you were not there, you cannot know what it was like. That of course is true of fiction generally; the difference here is that the experiences being described are so alien to most people. The most these stories can do, I think, is to describe to safe, comfortable readers the fear, the human waste, the folly, the physical and mental wounds of war.

The Navy medics are there to treat the physical wounds, the chaplain to treat(?), relieve(?), ease(?) the wounds to the soul(?), the spirit(?), or the psyche(?). “Prayer in the Furnace,” a long story in the center of the collection, is told by a Catholic chaplain who reads from Second Timothy at the memorial service of a dead Marine, the battalion’s twelfth KIA in four months: “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.”

The chaplain talks to Rodriguez, a Marine who was with the dead man when he was shot by a sniper. You sense that Rodriguez is trying to make sense of the senseless, and possibly report a war crime, and that the narrator can offer only what the Church has ever offered, trust in God’s mercy. 

But is that enough? During training for deployment in the California desert, a trainer told the unit, “I’m very concerned that this battalion is overly focused on killing people.” The chaplain hears a company commander stage-whisper to his first sergeant, “I guess that pogue think he joined the fucking Peace Corps.”

And in Iraq, after two more Marine deaths, the narrator prays: “I asked God to protect the battalion from further harm. I knew He would not. I asked Him to bring abuses to light. I knew He would not. I asked Him, finally, for grace.” 

An interviewer in Image magazine asked Klay about this story which seems “to burrow down toward a single, absolute, dramatic point, but then end on complex, natural, often ambiguous notes. How do you know that a story is finished—in terms of character, story, even morality?”

Klay said that he sends the works out to trusted friends for suggestion. But, “When I end a story I don’t want to close it off or tie it up. What I want is, ideally, to achieve a slight twist, to shift the ground a little in a way that offers the reader an altered perspective on what they’ve just read . . . As far as how I know a story is done in terms of morality, I think that’s a question of whether I’ve been true to the characters, and to the moral stakes for the characters. You’re not just trying to tell the reader what war was like; you’re trying to guide the reader toward the kind of collision of values that happens for people in war and after. The morality, I suppose, lies in creating the space for thoughtful moral response from the reader.”

How can Bo Bo in Burma, only 12, help his parents?

The Heart Remembers is the third novel in a series set in Burma (now Myanmar), written in German by Jan-Philipp Sendker. The first two novels in the series are The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (2012) and A Well-Tempered Heart (2014) While it is not necessary to have read these two to enjoy The Heart Remembers, I suspect the new book will send readers to them to live a while longer with these interesting characters.

Sendker, who was born in Hamburg in 1960, traveled first to Burma in 1995 as a journalist and several times later as a novelist. He was Stern’s American correspondent from 1990 to 1995 and its Asian correspondent from 1995 to 1999. His books have been translated into Burmese even though they criticized the military. For example, the military is said to have kidnapped young men and sent them into minefields as human mine detectors. “My translator at the time said that as a foreigner I had a kind of fool’s license,” says Sendker. “A local writer probably would not have been able to express himself in that way.”

While there is nothing so horrific in The Heart Remembers, the Army does confiscate a piece of land a character owns and will not sell. And it is clear that the military is a force to avoid if possible.

We follow four main characters, 12-year-old Ko Bo Bo; his uncle U Ba, who is Bo Bo’s caretaker; Bo Bo’s mother Julia Win, who is U Ba’s sister, a Burmese-American lawyer; and Bo Bo’s father Thar Thar, who is a Buddhist monk and former soldier. Bo Bo tells his part of the story in the first person; Julia’s and Thar Thar’s stories are told in the third. Bo Bo has not seen his mother in seven years; he sees his father for only a week or so once a year because Thar Thar cannot leave Julia alone for long in Yangon.

The action takes place in  Kalaw, a village in central Burma interesting enough to attract foreign tourists; in New York City, where Julia has been a high-powered lawyer; and in Yangon, a large city to the south at the confluence of the Yangon and Bago Rivers (formerly Rangoon). One of the many pleasures of The Heart Remembers is the tension Thar Thar feels moving about New York City and the stress Julia feels in unsettled Burma, where she had never lived. 

The book is set in the current day and twelve years earlier when the military junta was officially dissolved following a 2010 general election, and a nominally civilian government was installed. This, along with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and political prisoners, improved the country's human rights record and foreign relations.

The narrative is set in action when Bo Bo discovers letters his uncle U Ba has written about his parents’ love story. He presses U Ba to tell him about Julia’s courtship with Thar Thar, a romance that unfolds against the uncertain backdrop of the Saffron Revolution, a series of mass protests in 2007, spurred by increases in fuel prices and a long history of military government rule. At the time, Thar Thar is in New York with Julia but feels he must return to Burma to participate in the revolution.

Back in the present day, Bo Bo hatches a plan to help his family by employing his acute emotional perception. He tells us, “I can tell that a person is sad even when they’re laughing. I can tell that someone is getting angry, even if they pretend that everything is fine. I can tell when rage is a mask for fear. I can sense the uneasiness behind a friendly voice. Your eyes will give you away. They can’t pretend. They can’t lie, even when they want to.” Believing he can cure his mother, Bo Bo sets off to find his parents and bring his family back together.

The Heart Remembers is smoothly translated by Kevin Wiliarty. It is an absorbing and persuasive evocation of a place and situation about which few readers will know much more than what television news has reported. In other words, almost nothing.

Can a good translator be a bad writer?

A few days ago, I asked a private Facebook literary translation group whether it is possible to be a good translator and a poor writer. How do translations fail (other than misunderstanding the original language)?

My post provoked a couple dozen comments, many of which agreed with Daleth who said, "No. A translator IS a writer. A translator who is a bad writer is also, by definition, a bad translator. Just because you can accurately convey the meaning of a text, that doesn't mean you're a good translator." Rachel said, "If I say (as I do) that a good translator has to be a good writer, I mean that they have to be good at putting words together in their own language."

Kevan expanded on that: "A bad writer cannot be a good translator. They may be able to fully understand the source text and produce a faithful translation, but will that final product be good writing unto itself? No. There are numerous, sometimes countless, ways to render a thought into a language, and the talent and skill of the translator in writing his/her mother tongue will guide those choices. A talented translator will give us natural, elegant prose worthy of being called literature. A poor writer who translates will give us clunky, inelegant, tone-deaf prose, that while grammatical and conveying the meaning of the source text, will be unpleasant to read."

Silvia wrote: "You have to be a good writer, otherwise it is a literal translation that fails to capture cultural elements and metaphorical meanings."

My own suspicion is that the ability to translate is one skill and the ability to write clear, fluent English is another. Some of those who commented define "good translator" as someone who writes clear (appropriate? accurate) English. But I think that begs the question. Certainly the opposite is true: Someone can be a fine writer in English and be a terrible translator.

What is going on in "The Factory"?

The factory in Hiroko Oyamada's novel The Factory is immense. It has apartment complexes and housing that looks “like a real suburban development full of tidy two-story homes,” supermarkets, a bowling alley, karaoke, a fishing center, hotel, “more restaurants than you can count” not including employee cafeterias, a post office, bank, travel agency, a couple of book stores, an optometrist, a barber, an electronics store, a gas station, a museum (with works by factory artists and employees, but still worth a look), its own bus and taxi companies. 

The factory is much bigger than the average town. It has its own mountains, forests, and river. It has its own Shinto shrine and priest. “All we’re missing now,” says the employee who is acting as a guide for a new employee, “is a graveyard. I guess we don’t have a temple, either.”

For all this we never learn what the factory manufactures, what it produces.

The book follows three employees. Yoshiko Ushiyama, after going through five jobs in four years, is hired by the factory and feels fortunate to be taken on as a part-timer. In college, she focused on the Japanese language and how people communicate, particularly the use of language in print media. She’s hired by the Print Services department as part of the Staff Support team. Her job is to shred documents. That’s it. Shred bins full of documents three or four days a week

Yoshio Furufue, a graduate research assistant in bryology, the study of mosses and liverworts, is hired to determine how to grow moss on the factory’s roofs. “We have a few different organizations taking care of our trees, flowers, roads, and streetlights,” says the PR guy explaining the job. “Green-roofing has been a real blind spot, thought, and that’s why HQ finally decided to step in and deal with it on their own.”

The third employee, a former systems engineer for a small company, is hired as a proof reader. Packets arrived daily and “our job was to take whatever we found in the packet—documents of various types and formats—and proof them. In some files, there were additional materials, like manuscripts or newspaper articles. If that was the case, we were supposed to check the document against them for accuracy.”

Aside from evoking the mind-numbing routine of these jobs—although Furufue lives in factory housing, studies the local mosses, and determines they will not grow on the factory’s roofs—Oyamada captures the office bureaucracy, the plant tour, the after-hours drinking, a hunt for the Forest Pantser—a middle-aged man “who ran around the forest trying to pull the pants of men and women of all ages.”

And the story begins to slide from the realistic—or recognizable, if exaggerated—world into something stranger. Grayback Coypu, a rodent, “similar to the spiny rat”; Washer Lizards, “the order of scaly reptiles”; and Factory Slags, “a member of the order Pelecaniformes, related to the cormorant” begin to appear. Mutations provoked by the factory? And what does the factory do to the humans who work within it?

Hiroko Oyamada, who was born in Hiroshima in 1983, based the novel on her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. The Factory won the Shincho Prize for New Writers, and The Hole, her next novel, won the Akutagawa Prize. 

David Boyd’s translation from the original Japanese is clear and fluent. The publisher or book designer did the book no favors by limiting the number of paragraphs. Because Amazon Japan does not have a “Look Inside the Book” feature, I cannot tell if this is how the original appears. In the New Directions edition, paragraphs go on for pages, one quote following another like a line of ants. It saves space, and it may have been an art director’s idea to have the reader drag herself through the story the way the characters have to drag themselves through their days at work, but it make hard reading.

Nevertheless, for anyone interested in contemporary Japanese literature, it’s worth the effort.

There's more disfunction than love on South Green Road

Janice Spector’s debut novel, 2207 South Green Road, is an account of the lives of an extended Jewish family in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. It’s set in the early 1960s; a time marker is two characters going to a first-run showing of “El Cid” with Charlton Heston, which was released in 1961.

We meet the family patriarch Morris Katofsky; his hypochondriac wife Becky; his daughter Esther; Esther’s pharmacist husband Harold; Esther and Howard’s overweight and lonely ten-year-old daughter Edna; Morris’s brother Abe (who has a gambling addiction); Morris’s two goyim employees in his floor-scraping business Willie and George (while the family is barely religious, many have strong feelings about non-Jews; a point the author underlines); Becky’s younger sisters Ceal and Libby; Ceal’s husband Al; Libby’s husband Joe; Becky’s successfully brothers Arthur and Izzie; Arthur’s wife Millie; Izzie’s wife Ethel; Lurlene, Morris and Becky’s black cleaning lady(?), housekeeper(?); and Ida.

Ida is interesting. Ceal and Al have a brain-damaged child Rosalie. When Ceal realized she needed help to care for Rosalie, she decided she needed a full-time resident aide. The agency sent “a slight, bespectacled Negro girl, holding all her belongings in a large brown paper bag.” The agency says Ida is 18; Ceal thinks she is no more than13, but welcomes her anyway. Indeed, Ceal and Al unofficially adopt her as a member of the family.

According to the author’s website, Spector “received her first awards for story and playwriting in the sixth grade in University Heights, Ohio. She attended college in Brooklyn, New York, and began her career at The New York Times, where she worked on the foreign and metro news desks. After relocating to Northern Virginia, she focused on political and media consulting. Her last employment was as a speech writer for a U.S. Congressional Committee. Most recently, she was a member of the National Finance Committee for Biden for President.”

While the novel is filled with incident—and stuffed with characters—there is not a lot of drama. The family celebrates Morris’s 63^rd birthday. Abe, who owns a candy store, has to borrow $1,000. Becky, with the connivance of a malleable Dr. Gold, becomes addicted to pain killers. Edna is put in the hospital to have her tonsils and adenoids taken out. Becky disappears for a while, frightening the family. Abe disappears, sending Morris to Florida to retrieve him. Becky begins to haunt Emergency Rooms in regional hospitals in her search for drugs. Harold, Esther, and Edna go on a vacation trip to Washington, D.C.

Howard is not a very sympathetic character. When Edna accidentally puts her hand through the storm door glass badly slashing her wrist and arm, Harold “refused to come even when they hollered that Edna was hurt. After all, he reasoned, it’s not like there isn’t anyone to take her to the hospital. He was entitled to his relaxation and it was Saturday night. Bonanza was on TV—he wasn’t going to miss that.” 

Although 2207 South Green Road is subtitled “a novel of love and dysfunction,” the incidents of disfunction tend to swamp the examples of love. For example, when the family would go to White Castle, Joe ordered a cheeseburger with grilled onions, ketchup bread-and-butter pickles, French fries, and birch beer. “After all the orders had been placed, Joe’s wife Libby would inform the server, ‘We need to make a change. My husband will have a plain hamburger. Nothing on it. No fries. No birch beer. He can have water.’” Perhaps it was her way of showing love.

In any case, 2207 South Green Road is an interesting evocation of one family’s life.

Interestingly, 2207 South Green Road is an actual address in the Cleveland suburb. You can look it up on Google Maps, which I did, and here it is. 

Intriguing meditations on translation, writing, and literature

The little art Kate Briggs writes about is translation. She attributes the description to Helen Lowe-Porter, the first translator of Hermann Mann’s Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. Briggs’s book is an extraordinarily rich series of meditations—I hesitate to call them essays, some are no more than a sentence—on writing, literature, translation.

Briggs herself is a translator and, based on the evidence within This Little Art, was simultaneously translating Ronald Barthes’s The Preparation of the Novel as she wrote the book. Because I’ve never read Barthes, Briggs’s writing about him and her engagement with his lecture notes has piqued my interest; I now have two books of his waiting on my to-read shelf.

Until I began doing it I never gave translation much thought. With my interest in things Japanese, I was aware I could not have read Kawabata, Mishima, or Tanizaki without their translators. I heard the rumor that Kawabata would not have won the Nobel Prize in 1968 (the first Japanese to do so) had the judges not been able to read his works in translation. But what is there to say about it this little art? One so little that publishers occasionally leave the translator’s name off a book’s cover.

As it turns out there’s lots to say. And Briggs says a lot to say and says it well: “When I teach translation (I am a translator and a writer and a tutor), I am often surprised by how often students are surprised to discover that translating involves writing, that its most vital prerequisite is an interest in writing, for the reason that written translations have to be written.”

That made me wonder whether it is possible be a good translator and a poor writer? How do translations fail (other than misunderstanding the original)? My questions provoked a lively discussion among a private translators group on Facebook (and I will post about it). But what does a translator do these days in contrast, apparently, to the time when the goal was replace every word in the original language (then usually Greek or Latin) with an equivalent English word. 

(Do that and you get something like: “The friends him they abandon, the father not approve the his decision, only the mother him is close” from “Gli amici lo abbandonano, il padre non approva la sua decisione, solo la madre gli è vicina.”)

Briggs quotes Douglas Robinson: “Translators are never, and should never be forced to be (or to think of themselves as), neutral, impersonal transferring devices. Translators’ personal experiences—emotions, motivations, attitudes, associations—are not only allowable in the formation of a working [translation], they are indispensable.”

She says that the translator knows that the work “she is translating is not hers: she knows that it didn’t originate with her; it not something that she has already written or said.” Indeed, she may believe she’s not capable of writing something like the original, “and perhaps this is part of its appeal.”

Barthes cites Julio Cortázar, who translated Defoe into Spanish, as writing, “I would advise a young writer who is having difficulty writing—if it’s friendly to offer advice—that he should stop writing for himself for a while and do translation; that he should translate good literature and one day he will discover that he is writing with an ease he didn’t have before.”

This Little Art is not light reading (or not for me). It raises all kinds of interesting questions. What do you do if you are translating from the German (or whatever) and a character speaks briefly in French (or whatever)? Leave the French and trust your English-speaking readers will get the gist? Translate it into English and tag it “she said in French”? 

(To indicate characters were speaking Japanese in one of my novels, I italicized that dialogue rather than tag it. I’m not sure that works either.)

What do you do if you’re translating Barthes (or whoever) into English and he himself translates into French Japanese haiku that have already been translated into English—and he does not cite a source? Briggs managed to identify the source and then struggled to identify the poems Barthes translated. She then apparently went back to the English. Forget the original Japanese.

But while This Little Art may not be light reading, it is certainly worth reading if you have any interest in translation, writing, or literature. Indeed it’s worth reading more than once.  And although it does not have an index or a bibliography, it does have extensive notes with enough citations to keep a diligent student occupied for a good long while.

Go for the great virtues, not the little ones

One of my social media acquaintances noted recently that he was rereading Natalia Ginzburg's slim essay collection The Little Virtues. He reads it once a year, and has done so for twenty years. Wow. I almost never reread something. With an endorsement like that, I thought I ought to look into it.

I've known the Italian author "Natalia Ginzburg" for years, but The Little Virtues is her first work I've read. Her work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. An activist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983 she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an Independent. Born in Palermo, Sicily in 1916, Ginzburg spent most of her youth in Turin with her family, as her father in 1919 took a position with the University of Turin. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, a renowned Italian histologist, was born into a Jewish Italian family, and her mother, Lidia Tanzi, was Catholic. Her parents were secular and raised Natalia, her sister Paola (who would marry Adriano Olivetti) and her three brothers as atheists. Their home was a center of cultural life, as her parents invited intellectuals, activists and industrialists. At age 17 in 1933, Ginzburg published her first story, "I bambini," in the magazine Solaria.

In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, and they had three children together, Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra. Their son Carlo Ginzburg became a historian. Although Natalia Ginzburg was able to live relatively free of harassment during World War II, her husband Leone was sent into internal exile because of his anti-Fascist activities, assigned from 1941–1943 to a village in Abruzzo. She and their children lived most of the time with him. Opponents of the Fascist regime, she and her husband secretly went to Rome and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, until Leone Ginzburg was arrested. He died in 1944 after suffering severe torture, including crucifixion, in jail. In 1950, Ginzburg married again, to Gabriele Baldini, a scholar of English literature. They lived in Rome. He died in 1969; she died in 1991. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

The Little Virtues was published in 1985 and the eleven essays, fluently translated by Dick Davis, were published in newspapers and magazines between 1944 and 1962. They range from a memoir of the time in Abruzzo to comparing and contrasting herself with her husband ("He always feels hot. I always feel cold . . . He speaks several languages well. I do not speak any well . . . ") to a critique of England and English life ("English shop assistants are the stupidest shop assistants in the world . . . The restaurants are either too crowded or too empty. And they are either stiff and priggish or squalid . . . ") She wrote that last in 1960; England's restaurants have changed.

What makes The Little Virtues worth reading once a year are Ginzburg's essays on her vocation, on human relationships, and on the little virtues. Her vocation, of course, is to write. "When I sit down to write I feel extraordinarily at ease, and I move in an element which, it seems to me,  I know extraordinarily well; I use tools that are familiar to me and they fit snugly in my hands." That, it seems to me, is a good way to tell if what you do is your vocation (I call it my calling) or just a job. It works whether you are a carpenter, plumber, welder, baker, programmer, or poet.

And while it is tempting to quote much more, I will quote only the first paragraph of her title essay:

"As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know."

I wish I'd read this when my children were young.