Hello and welcome to Marnie’s monthly book recs! Once a month I’ll be writing about a few books I’ve read around a specific theme. To start us off, this week I’ll be talking about books written either in or about translation.
There are pieces of classic literature that have become so well-known in our culture that it’s easy to forget that they are translations - books like The Three Musketeers or Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Cinderella was not an English princess but a German one and long before Disney created the Mouseketeers, Alexandre Dumas was commenting on French political conflict.
But for the most part a lot of us in English-speaking countries don’t read a lot of contemporary works in translation. Prior to working in a bookstore there were few and far between in my regular reading line-up - something I’ve been trying to rectify recently.
When I think about reading works in translation, I remember something my friend Margaret told me about adapting Shakespeare for the stage when we were in school. Shakespeare is essential reading for high schoolers across the states, but while we’ve all read Romeo and Juliet, maybe acted out a scene awkwardly for the class, very rarely were we taught the context of Shakespeare’s plays. When our drama club performed “Twelfth Night,” Margaret told me that Shakespeare was the pop culture writer of his time. The language that we all think of as frilly is laden with sexual innuendo and political commentary - but the references have often passed out of our collective consciousness. Most of us don’t know that the word “nothing” was slang for a vagina - so the play “Much Ado About Nothing” loses its double entendre and overt sexuality, even while being read by hormonal teens!
Reading translated works can be a bit like this. One is suddenly plunged into a world that they are missing the political and social context for and I think this likely explains why many of us hesistate to start a book translated from a language we are unfamiliar with.
“Babel” by R.F. Kuang is a novel deeply concerned with what it means to translate, and the meaning that is lost when we try to conflate words from across cultures. Written in English, this book explores the history of the British Empire while trading the industrial revolution for a magical one. Automation occurs when language magicians create language match-pairs - words from different languages that have similar, but differing meanings.
Maintaining the magic requires a wide and intimate understanding of language, and when European languages have been thoroughly ransacked for valuable match-pairs, English scholars begin to require native speakers of languages from further afield. Robin Swift is taken from his home in China as a child, and raised with the sole purpose of being able to translate Cantonese to English. He’s brought to Oxford, where he meets other students like himself, whose languages have been commodified by the English Empire. They are given access to the privilege of wealthy students, while also experiencing racism and resentment when they leave their idyllic home in the halls of Babel, the translator’s institute.
“Babel” is many things - a coming of age story, an alternative history, a powerful anti-imperialist manifesto - and of course a meditation on translation. Throughout Robin’s education, we learn, as he does, the political challenges in interpreting language, particularly from a Western perspective. One of Robin’s professors explores this theme in one of Kuang’s more direct passages on this topic:
“He argued that there are two options: either the translator leaves the author in peace and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him…Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to make ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language? … Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
I imagine this is a question that many translators contend with - we live in a world shaped by empire and even our language is not immune from its effects. Publishing is a field that struggles with this balance - the battle between marketability and authenticity often dictates what gets published and read widely. The next three books on my list are novels that I think found an interesting balance - I entered their universes with a fairly limited understanding of the social contexts behind each work and found myself pulled along for a ride in world’s simultaneously familiar and foreign.
“The Adventures of China Iron” by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona MacIntyre is a fascinating collaboration between an Argentine author and two Scottish translators, that explores Scotland’s participation in the colonisation of Argentina.
“The Adventures of China Iron” is a queer, feminist retelling “Martín Fierro” - an epic poem about gaucho culture that is a foundational piece of Argentine Literature. The protagonist is Fierro’s unnamed wife from the original work - abused, impregnated, and abandoned when her husband is conscripted to protect the Argentine border against native people. She is given her name by a Scottish woman - Liz - who brings China on her quest to save her husband - who has been similarly conscripted. Liz represents a true history of Scottish farmers who emigrated to South America during the Highland Clearances and contributed to the British colonisation of Argentina - a fascinating history with which I was completely unfamiliar.
The two women share what would, in modern times, be considered an epic road trip, as they travel across the country by horseback. Much of the book is a love letter to the pampas, a grassland that covers 460,000 square miles in South America and which was heavily colonised by European tenant farmers in the 1800s. China and Liz learn about each other while travelling through the pampas and fall in love on their journey. But when the pampas become inhospitible to them, they travel to Indian territory, where they find true freedom amongst the indigenous people of Argentina. There they find a queer utopia, where gender, sexuality, and monogamy is challenged and they can, at least for a while, live closer to the land. Even China’s abusive husband finds freedom in this space, as he relinquishes his macho persona and makes amends for the pain he caused her.
While the novel covers a violent part of Argentine history, more than anything it is a joyful exploration of finding freedom in oneself by rejecting imperialism. Even the narrative structure challenges traditional linear story-telling, dictated more by the landscape than by time passing. While there is conflict, there is very little sense of urgency, and I read this book slowly, over the course of several weeks.
While translation can be an act of violence, “The Adventures of China Iron” is an example of how it can also be an act cross-cultural communication - and a message of hope.
Hope is sparse in the next book on my list - “The Old Woman with the Knife” written by Gu Byeong-Mo and translated by Chi-Young Kim. Korean media has been coming out with some of the hardest hitting critiques of capitalism and apathy in recent times - evidenced by the cultural phenomena of Squid Game and Parasite, or the lesser known Space Sweepers (a favourite of mine)! “The Old Woman With the Knife” is no exception - telling the story of an elderly female assassin known only as Hornclaw.
Recruited as a young woman, Hornclaw is an effective killer because of how easily disregarded she is as a women without money or family connections. Despite the violent nature of her work, Hornclaw often has to deal with the same issues of any workplace - bureaucracy, disrespect, and challenges from younger male colleagues. As she ages and her health begins to flag, Hornclaw begins to question her life of isolation and must imagine what her place in the world will be if she can no longer kill.
“The Old Woman with the Knife” is a crime thriller that is particularly concerned with the role of gender and age in South Korean society, especially as capitalism upsets traditional familial structures.
Family is a major theme in my final book - “Strange Beasts of China,” written by Yan Ge and translated by Jeremy Tiang.
In this science fiction tale, our unnamed narrator tells the stories of the different species of beasts that reside in the the city of Yong’an, in the Fujian province of China. Beasts are humanoid creatures who have mysterious and sometimes fatal relationships with humans. Their position in society varies - some are seen as valuable and others looked down upon, though all exist in the margins. The narrator is an amateur cryptozoologist and author, who has been raised in close connection with many types of beasts and seeks to understand them more intimately.
Of all the books listed, this is the one in which I was most aware of the fact that I was reading a work in translation. I was enchanted by the tales of the beasts, whose stories began like fairy tale creatures before merging with modern life but often I didn’t know what to make of them. I am sure each beast represents a specific commentary, but I didn’t know enough about contemporary Chinese politics or culture to be able to understand it with the same level of intimacy of a Scottish or American text. The novel begins with the definition of the Mandarin word for beast reading:
Originally used to describe the act of hunting, the meaning of the word shifted over time to the object of the hunt, the prey. More than a neutral word for animal, shòu denotes the absence of humanity, and carries the connotations of savagery and wildness.
Clearly then each beast speaks to the role of the marginalised members of society, but with names like “Flourishing Beasts” and “Sorrowful Beasts,” it was clear that they represented specific roles or experiences with which I was unfamiliar. The nuance and irony felt lost on me, but I think in many ways that is the point. The translators chose to keep the text closer to the author than the audience, with impressive effect. I was floating in a world completely foreign to me, and aware of my outsider status throughout. Not all parts of the world are designed for the consumption of English-speakers, and in translation we can only get so close to the original text before we must face that knowledge.
I loved all these books and am keen to discuss them further - if you’ve picked any of them up let me know about it in the comments! And if you have an recs for works in translation send them my way. There’s something truly awe-inspiring about facing the scope of the world and knowing it can never fully be known by one person. Through reading translated texts we aren’t trying to know it all, but rather to expand our perspectives and understand our own places in a vast, complex world.
This got me thinking about Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley. People had STRONG feelings about it when it was published a couple years ago. A lot of folks felt it was a violation, corruption, debasement of a national epic. She basically un-academicizes the text, and brings it back to the pop-culture level of language. It’s juicy and gritty again, if also silly. It is in tone maybe a bit closer to the original than the elevated, beautiful, more literally translated versions from Heaney, Kirtlan & Porter, Tolkien, or Burton. The New Yorker has a good piece on it: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/31/a-beowulf-for-our-moment