Last February we published Geoffrey Strachan’s translation The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah, a young French-Mauritian writer of considerable talent who won the FNAC Fiction Prize for the French edition, also shortlisted for the Prix Femina and Prix Medicis. The Last Brother gathered a string of excellent reviews, and was relased in paperback just a few days ago. The paperback’s publication coincided with its realease over the Atlantic, where it is already causing quite a stir.
Graywolf Press
Graywolf Press is an independent not-for-profit publishing company based in Minnesota. It is now in its thirty-seventh year of publishing and remains committed to fostering creative and imaginative writing that reflects America’s diverse cultural makeup. Recently, were delighted to welcome them as co-pubilshers for two of our translations: The Last Brother and Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen (translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, released here in May).
Judging by how often it was mentioned on Twitter, I gained the impression that the good folk at Graywolf were quite excited about Appanah’s wonderful, lyrical little novel. So I asked Marketing and Publicity Manager Erin Kottke to fill me in:
I’ve been telling everyone who will listen to me how this is one of my favorite books we’ve ever published—and, for that matter, one of my favorite books of all-time, not just Graywolf’s—which is a bold thing to say. I love all of our books, but I can’t tell reviewers and booksellers that “no, this one is my favorite now” about every book, because they won’t trust my opinion if it’s always the same. But I feel quite confident about the universal appeal of The Last Brother; my love for the book comes from the reader side of me, not the publicist side. The love between Raj and David is just so sweet, so innocent, and so pure—I’ve been calling it “human,” though perhaps “humane” is the better word—that it’s impossible not to be deeply moved by their story. The Last Brother may be a slender novel, but it packs an emotional wallop that lingers long after you’ve finished the book. It’s one that has stuck with me like few others have.
Perhaps because the novel struck such a deep chord with me as a reader, I’ve found it particularly gratifying that independent booksellers read the advance copies of the book I sent to them and have responded with great enthusiasm. Several influential book buyers—including Paul Yamazaki from City Lights in San Francisco, which was named Publishers Weekly’s 2010 Bookseller of the Year—have given us blurbs for the book, which have in turn generated interest from other renowned indies across the country. Bookstores are upping their orders, and word-of-mouth is spreading. It’s been an honor to be a part of it.
What the Critics Are Saying
“Appanah’s is a beautiful new voice, one that, like David’s, makes “a kind of music.” If the song it sings is sad, well, it’s all the more lifelike for that.” Dalia Sofer, New York Times
“The Last Brother is that rare book that’s able to explore grand and sweeping themes of history with a masterfully light touch” Anderson Tepper, Words Without Borders
“With the lightest of touches, the author movingly conveys a child discovering his own mysteries, then navigating those of a baffling, larger world.” Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company
Anuradha Roy’s debut novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, was one of the first MacLehose Press titles to be published in 2008. It went on to receive lavish praise from reviewers and has been translated into thirteen languages to date.
Roy lives between Rankihet, a town in the Himalaya mountains, and New Delhi, where she works for the independent academic publisher Permanent Black. Her second novel, The Folded Earth, will be published by MacLehose Press in January.
Paul Engles: Where did the idea for the story of The Folded Earth first spring from?
Anuradha Roy: It was when I saw a photograph of Roopkund, a lake in the Himalaya at an altitude of over 16,000 feet. About 500 skeletons were discovered in that lake in 1942 and parts of those skeletons are still there – it is informally called the Skeleton Lake. The skeletons have been carbon dated to about the sixth century but the reason for the death of so many people in that uninhabited area – as well as the reason for their journey – are still matters of conjecture.
My friends had gone there for a trek, some of them had made it, some didn’t manage to climb the final distance, but I knew from the moment I saw their photos that this lake would not stop knocking about inside me until I found room for it in a novel.
Paul Engles: The references in the novel to the relationship between Edwina Mountbatten, who was the last Vicerene of India, and Jawaharlal Nehru, her first Prime Minister, are intriguing. Can you tell me a little about it?
Anuradha Roy: Many of Edwina’s letters to Nehru and snippets from his letters to her are in Janet Morgan’s biography of Edwina Mountbatten. It is clear from those letters as well as from the events in their lives that the relationship was a deep and emotional one. Morgan’s biography tells us how both the families – Edwina’s husband and children as well as Nehru’s family (he was a widower when he met her) — discreetly arranged things so that they had time alone with each other while maintaining the sorts of proprieties their public roles demanded.
Nehru’s letters to her have never been published because his descendants, still India’s most powerful political family, have not allowed it; their relationship however is common knowledge.
As for the letters in the novel: those are all made up, but drawing from the style and content of their own letters.
Paul Engles: Another real-life figure you bring into the novel is Jim Corbett, the legendary hunter of man-eating big cats. Living in Ranikhet, have you ever had an encounter with a tiger or leopard?
Anuradha Roy: Ranikhet no longer has tigers. It’s astonishingly lucky for us to have even leopards around because this is a town, not a national park. Ranikhet is surrounded by forest, and those forests have wild boar, deer, martens, many kinds of animals and birds.
Leopards are hard to spot because they are so secretive. We hear them calling often enough but over eleven years of living here I’ve seen them only six times; years can pass between one glimpse and the next. Once it was a full moon night and a leopard crossed the road just ahead of us when it saw our car and strolled off into the forest.
Then it came back, perhaps attracted by the scent of our dog, and stood in the headlight beam staring straight at us with a still, pale-eyed gaze, incisors on display. When it dropped into the forest again, I could see it in the moonlight for quite long, moving around among the trees. It combines beauty with unhurried menace so powerfully that our hearts were exploding though we were safe in the car.
A few yards ahead, we came upon three men warming themselves on the roadside around a small fire made up from dry leaves. They were quite unaware that there was a full grown leopard within sniffing distance of them.
This unawareness is a scenario very common in Corbett’s stories. The leopards he killed were man-eaters. He was enormously brave and charged off alone into deep forests pursuing tigers and leopards that had killed dozens, and were lethal. His books are read everywhere in India, even in translation. When we are in certain places such as Rudraprayag, Ramnagar, or Mohan, which are nearby hamlets, we get that “Corbett was here!” feeling, because he has written about the place and its wildlife so wonderfully. Our Ranikhet leopards have fortunately never been man-eaters but their version of a hot dog is the real thing, so we are very careful to bring our dog indoors after dusk.
Paul Engles: The Folded Earth is partially concerned with the divisive effects of Hindu nationalism in India. Do you think that this is a growing problem?
Anuradha Roy: I think the divisiveness of Hindu nationalism is one of the strands of the book – the vanishing of the wilderness is an equally important theme, as are other less large things. In India religion, caste, etc. are used for political gain with absolute cynicism, and Hindu nationalism is feared for its potential for brutality. We’ve experienced it often in this country and it’s a landmine; you don’t know when someone will step on something and set off full-scale horror again. The lumpen sections among Hindu nationalists also have no qualms burning libraries/books/ pictures and threatening artists and writers with violence, thereby setting up a bullying, hooliganish censorship state of their own.
Paul Engles: There are so many fantastic characters in The Folded Earth – Ama, the infinitely wise village woman; Mr Chauhan, the officious administrator and frustrated writer; Diwan Sihab, the curmudgeonly academic; Puran the bumbling cowherd – which was the most fun to write and create?
I loved writing Mr Chauhan and his signs. I still have fun thinking up other little literary gems by him that could have gone into the book. But I think I enjoyed Ama the most. From the moment she parked herself on the page, she sort of took over. She is as resourceful, wise, strong and energetic as she is snide, gossipy, infuriating. Despite the poverty and drudgery in her daily life, she has a lip-smacking enjoyment of it. Writing her dialogue was difficult though; it is when you want the flavour of slang or proverbs that you really wish—when you come from a country like India—that you could write one novel in three or four languages.
Paul Engles: Your first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longinghas been translated (or is in the process of being translated) into thirteen languages. How closely do you work with your translators?
Anuradha Roy: Strangely enough, I know only three of my translators. The happiest translation story for me is how Myriam Bellehigue became my French translator. We have been close friends ever since we found ourselves living on the same staircase at university in Britain. She now teaches English literature at the Sorbonne. When she read the first draft of Atlas she made detailed suggestions for improving it and also said she wanted to translate it if that opportunity ever came up. The book was taken by Actes Sud, they gave her a trial, and then the book to translate! I hear her work is exquisite, wish I could read it. It’s being published in April 2011.
Paul Engles: As well as writing novels, you are publisher of Permanent Black, an independent academic publisher. How do you find the roles of novelist and publisher dovetail?
Anurahda Roy: They don’t really, not for me. My main work was to acquire and edit books, but now I find it very hard to carry my own book plus someone else’s in my head while writing, because editing is hard, intensive, involving work, just as writing is. So I now do the other stuff: I do all our cover designs, look after our blogs, make coffee for authors when they visit, design ads and stationary and so on. I am a sort of publishing dogsbody. The actual publishing is done by my husband, who acquires mss, edits them, sells and buys rights, does our finances: everything but the distribution, proof-reading and selling.
Paul Engles: What do you think about e-books and digital publishing? Are they big in India?
Anuradha Roy: They are just about being introduced. Most people here are not affluent enough to invest thousands of rupees in a device that will enable just one person to read. Books are lent and borrowed a lot here - even a single copy of a newspaper might be shared by five people - while the whole concept of an e-reader is that it is a personal device that contains all your reading and travels with you. If it ever becomes as cheap as a mobile phone and combines books with music, DVDs, and games it might just gain popularity.
I made an honest attempt to read on an E-reader and just hated it. Fiddling with wires and chargers and tiny buttons and magnification percentages when I could just have opened a book and read!
Paul Engles: Are there any writers – of fiction or non-fiction – in India that English readers may not know about, but certainly should?
Anuradha Roy: There are too many to mention because of the richness of the literature in languages such as Bengali, Urdu, Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil. If I make a few suggestions they’re only from what’s in translation and all governed by my own taste: in poetry, the translations of classical Tamil poetry by A. K. Ramanujan; in fiction, the work of the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, such as Song of the Road on which Satyajit Ray based his Apu trilogy. In theatre, the disturbing, brilliant plays of Vijay Tendulkar and Girish Karnad; epics: the Mahabharata (John D. Smith’s translation) is really worth dipping into even if you can’t last the distance.
I’m not well-read enough to make a sensible list actually. I’ve just been reading Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (first published by the Hogarth Press in 1940) which I found remarkable for its depiction of the tragedy of losing your history in the process of being colonised, the rich randomness with which characters come and go, and its gritty, detail-soaked picture of urban life in Delhi in the early twentieth century.
Paul Engles: Would you say you have a favourite writer?
Anuradha Roy: No favourite writers, only favourite books, and those keep changing too. There are phases too when I hate almost everything I pick up to read. When that happens I comfort myself with the more reliable pleasures of crime fiction.
Paul Engles: MacLehose Press publishes mainly works in translation. Do you have a favourite translated novel?
Anuradha Roy: I have two absolute favourites: Chekhov’s novella, The Duel, and The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata. They were revelations and I read pages from them at random on and off when I feel dehydrated. Among MacLehose Press’s recent books, I loved Brodeck’s Report.
Paul Engles: When writing, do you have an idea in your mind of your “ideal” reader?
Anuradha Roy: I keep a reader in mind only for matters of narrative clarity, pace, etc. Just a generalized sort of reader who is probably much like me…
Paul Engles: On the photo on your Facebook page you are pictured with your dog. What is his/her name; what breed; how old? Do you have any other pets?
Anuradha Roy: Biscoot is her name and she was tiny, only about 4 few weeks old, with no mother dog to be seen when she was found in a Delhi park. It was a very cold December and I held her inside my coat to keep her warm while my husband drove us home. Heart-rending yowls the whole way and people in neighbouring cars staring as though we were kidnapping someone.
Once home, she looked around, approved, and then took over our lives. And has ruled us ever since – she’s nine now. Once I rescued another puppy and tried making Biscoot see reason, but she insisted we give it away. So there are no other pets.
Paul Engles: Are you already working on a third novel? If so, would you like to share anything with us about it now, or is it top secret?
Anuradha Roy: I said Never Again when finishing this one. But my instinct for self-destruction has always been powerful.
Jakob Ejersbo is a writer who died young. He succumbed to cancer at 40, having published a volume of short stories and a novel, Nordkraft, which won the 2003 Golden Laurel Prize. But more importantly, it was hailed by critics and readers alike as a great new Danish novel, ushering in a new type of fiction that would draw a line under the minimalism and symbolism that had prevailed in Danish literature during the late 1990s.
A gritty, realistic tale about disaffected youth in Aalborg, Denmark’s fourth largest city, it captured the Danes’ imaginations, holding a mirror to their society and rendering them as they saw themselves.
It was the last book Ejersbo would live to publish. He died in July 2008, just 10 months after being diagnosed with cancer. Throughout his illness, Ejersbo strove to complete his latest project, an ambitious trilogy about the relationship between the West and the Third World. Shortly after his death, his publisher, Johannes Riis, literary director at Gyldendal, revealed that he had left behind a manuscript and that it was virtually finished.
At a cumulative 1,600 pages, Ejersbo’s trilogy is a formidable work, and when the first part, Eksil, was released in Denmark in summer 2009 it caused just as much of stir as did Nordkraft. The literary critic Klaus Rothstein wrote in the Danish Literary Magazine that ‘seldom has anyone written anything so insistent and impassioned, so glowing hot and ice-cold, so heartfelt and so cynical’.
The trilogy is primarily set in Eastern Africa and explores the relationships between European ex-pats and the Tanzanians they live amongst. Ejersbo was not a writer for whom easy solutions and happy endings held any interested, and there are none to be found in these bleak but impeccably observed books. The trilogy is also formally inventive: two novels, Exile and Liberty sandwich a collection of stories that returns to the characters introduced in the first part.
In October 2011, MacLehose Press will be publishing Exile in English, translated by Mette Petersen. It is primarily the story of Samantha, the daughter of neglectful, abusive English parents, who takes solace in sex, drugs and lies but cannot control her destiny once the wheel of catastrophe has begun to turn. Revolution will follow in 2012 and Liberty in 2013. I’ll let Klaus Rothstein have the last word, except to say that we haven’t been as excited about a Scandinavian trilogy since . . . the last one we published:
Jakob Ejersbo was a deliberate and original writer, who was not only able to maintain an artistic overview of the antipoetry of existence but was also capable of describing it in finely narrated and captivating language. Exile is an electrifying novel, and its final chapter – which gives the novel its name – shocks the reader as a shattering highpoint of modern Danish literature.
Its packed-out seminar programme included a ‘Live Translation Slam’ in which renowned translators Margaret Jull Costa and Nick Caistor went head-to-head, translating an extract from Nada by Carmen Laforet from the Spanish and dissecting their respective renderings before a rapt audience.
The ‘Slam’ provided a fascinating insight into the processes of literary translation, with the two translations differing subtly, but palpably on a sentence-by-sentence if not a word-by-word level. It was rather less raucous your average poetry slam, but no less partisan by the end, as every audience member I spoke with took home a firm preference for one or other translators’ version.
As both Margaret and Nick have published translations with us in 2010 (The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka and No-one Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi), we wondered whether they would like to share with us some of their impressions of the ‘Slam’, and of International Translation Day in general.
At the evening panel discussion that took place on Translation Day at the Free Word Centre, A.S. Byatt remarked that she considers all translations to be provisional texts. I did not respond at the time, but perhaps I can now, because the Translation Slam made me confront that issue all over again.
As a translator, I hope to produce a text that is as perfect and seamless and ‘unprovisional’ as possible; if I don’t, I have failed. For me, the mark of a poor translation is precisely A.S. Byatt’s sense of provisionality, the feeling that there are many other ways in which a sentence or sentences could have been written, and that another translator would produce something entirely different.
The text Nick and I had to translate for the ‘Slam’ was taken from Nada, a book I have loved ever since I first read it when I was 23, the same age as Carmen Laforet when she wrote the novel. It is written in a deceptively simple style, but there are all kinds of pitfalls, not least the voice. I hear it as a young woman’s voice, still full of the romantic poeticism that later becomes corroded by experience.
Having been through and through my translation of the extract and convinced myself that I had captured that voice, it was a real shock to read Nick’s version, which is totally different in tone and vocabulary. One or two people commented afterwards that Nick’s version was male and mine was female. I found this rather alarming.
Does this mean that I have feminised all those male authors I’ve translated over the years? Do all my translations sound like me and not like the original author at all? Or is it simply that every translation – if it’s a good translation – has a dual personality, that of writer and translator?
I think (and hope) that the latter is true, for it seems to me that, along with all the obvious linguistic skills, a good translator needs to have an actor’s intuition for tone and cadence and character and emotion, and, like an actor, will inevitably bring to the text something of her own personality, experience and perhaps even certain linguistic foibles. Hamlet has been played a thousand times by a thousand different actors, and each actor brings to the role his (or even her) own qualities. Hamlet, however, is still Hamlet.
And so, to come back to A.S. Byatt’s point, every new Hamlet is a provisional Hamlet, but an actor has to convince the audience that his is the definitive interpretation and the truest to Shakespeare’s original. As it is with actors, so it is with translators: a good translation should ideally read as if it were the only possible interpretation and the words used the only possible words.
The first question at the start of our Live Translation session was about how much we brought to the words of the text we had to translate from our knowledge of the author, the historical context in which it was written, and so on. I was surprised when Margaret said she simply ‘translated the words on the page’, whereas I said the opposite, that I tried to imagine the writer and their world, and the circumstances in which they came to write the text.
As it turned out during the conversation, our positions were in fact reversed. Margaret had read the book years earlier, and formed a clear idea about Carmen Laforet, the way she imagined the world and the ways she found to express that. I realised as I responded to the questions that I was much more concerned with not just the ‘meaning’ of the words, but how the translation would work in English.
Paradoxically perhaps, this led me to what Margaret called a much ‘freer’ translation, in that I took over words and phrases to give them what seemed to me more resonance in English – as in the final paragraph, where I had ‘gave the house a heartbeat’ compared to Margaret’s ‘gave the house its vital pulse’.
I was surprised at the time that no-one asked how I felt about translating a female author, but am not yet convinced that there is such a thing as ‘female’ writing – once again, I feel the need to stay much closer to the words on the page and not what surrounds them.
What did become clear during the conversation is just how much the translator adds in the transfer: it’s not so much a question of what is lost in the process, but of how convincing and interesting the additions are. And Margaret and I did agree on one sentence.
With Mario Vargas Llosa now ennobled with the laurel leaf, it seems like a good moment to remind you all about a new South American import, hailing this time from Venezuela.
The Sickness, the first novel in English by Alberto Barrera Tyszka (pictured right), has quietly gone about its business gathering starred reviews since we published in July, giving its author, according to Booktrust’s Translated Fiction website, ‘a claim to be[ing] the Venezuelan Ian McEwan’.
The plot hinges on a sharp comparison between the rational fear of death and the hypochondriac’s refusal to believe that death has not singled him out. Dr Andrés Miranda struggles to face telling his father that tests have confirmed terminal cancer, while all the while being bombarded with emails from a patient who insists he has a debilitating but undiagnosed disease. Tyszka skillfully softens his potentially daunting subject matter by drawing from it a subtle and philosophical appraisal of life’s little absurdities and unlikely alliances.
The Sicknesswon the Premio Herralde in its original form, a prize open to the entire Spanish-speaking world, and to make sure we did it justice in English, we enlisted Margaret Jull Costa to take care of the translation.
Jull Costa is probably the most distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese we have, with a CV as long as the arm of the law, that includes works by Javier Marias, Jose Saramago and Eça de Queirós, as well as two Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prizes.
‘The Sicknessis refreshingly clean in its storytelling yet very complex in character’
Anthony Furey, Times Literary Supplement
‘Tyszka is a perceptive, original writer. He has brought an unusually sophisticated understanding to a wonderfully intense, little novel. No sentimentality, no polemic, just emotion at its most resonant’
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
‘Powerful writing [which does] not let you off or let you down’
Susan Hill, The Lady
‘Well-pitched, gentle and suggestive … philosophy in the story’
Renée Rowland, Skinny
All in all, The Sickness is a wonderful, wonderful novel, and we’re all waiting expectantly for Tyszka’s next outing. Since it was published in Spanish, he has co-authored an acclaimed biography of Hugo Chavez, and c0-written a film, Zamuros Way, with director Javier Mujica.
Last February we published Geoffrey Strachan’s translation The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah, a young French-Mauritian writer of considerable talent who won the FNAC Fiction Prize for the French edition, also shortlisted for the Prix Femina and Prix Medicis. The Last Brother gathered a string of excellent reviews, and was relased in paperback just a few days ago. The paperback’s publication coincided with its realease over the Atlantic, where it is already causing quite a stir.
Graywolf Press is an independent not-for-profit publishing company based in Minnesota. It is now in its thirty-seventh year of publishing and remains committed to fostering creative and imaginative writing that reflects America’s diverse cultural makeup. Recently, were delighted to welcome them as co-pubilshers for two of our translations: The Last Brother and Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen (translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, released here in May).
