One Is None - Kätlin Kaldmaa , Anything Could Happen - Jane Putrle Srdić & Dissection - Jane Putrle Srdić

Late last week I thought I had finished up my Women In Translation posts, with my review of “Why I Killed My Best Fried”, however in Friday night’s mail delivery three slight collections of poetry in translation arrived...just in time for the weekend.

The collections are published by Periscope a “new imprint from A Midsummer Night’s Press, devoted to poetry in translation into English.” As their website says:

“This name reflects how, just as a periscope lets us see around corners, translation allows us to see between languages,” explains publisher Lawrence Schimel, “even if there is not always a straight line of sight, as if often the case when translating poetry, where the translator must often recreate a metaphor or meaning in the target language.”

This collection seeks to focus especially on those voices which often find it much harder to be translated, especially into English. Schimel explains that for its initial titles, Periscope has focused on women poets who have published at least two books in their own languages but have not yet had a translation into English.

According to the Translation Database compiled by translation publisher Open Letter Books, over the past two years only around 26% of the translations published in the US were by women authors. (And needless to say, poetry represents only 15-17% of translated titles in this same two-year period.)”

The first three titles were released in November 2014, “One Is None” by Kätlin Kaldmaa (translated from the Estonian by Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov), “Anything Could Happen” by Jane Putrle Srdić (translated from the Slovenian by Barbara Jurša), and “Dissection” by Care Santos (translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel). I’m going to briefly review all three works, each book running to forty odd pages, they are quite easily read in a single sitting.

Kätlin Kaldmaa’s “One Is None” opens with the section “None”, a sunrise, a poem about her Bosnian lover and then a declaration of love:

From “declaration of love”

V

and i want to keep you amid all the world’s madness, and i

want you to accept me as i am, workaholic and always away,

and to be here when i get back, and to wait for me and call

me and ask if i’ll be home soon, and if i want something to

eat when i arrive, and i want the dullest life in the world, to

go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time,

and tell you every day “shush now”, when instead of

sleeping you talk and talk nonstop, and get up when you

can sleep no more and rustle around next door, and listen

to your dreams, and let you read mine, with no hope of

their coming true, and i want to feel how you brush my

neck with your hand when you pass the writing table, and

hear how you half laughingly curse your colleagues at the

other ends of the world, and i want you never to have to leave,

always and only to come, i want to argue with you about our

children’s names and nationalities.

The section “None” follows, which actually appears in the book as “NONE”. We move to a hatred of falling on love, and endless list of lovers all over the planet, includes the relentless snow and timelessness in Iceland, and we have references to Estonia being the last on a list of “developed countries”.

This is a work that explores identity, what is it to be Estonian? Or Icelandic? Or Bosnian? German? Swiss? How can people from these war torn countries live in exile? Each one of the “lover” voices in the poems reveal a little about these countries and the formed views from their culture, Bosnian facing war through to the Swiss who hasn’t experienced anything like that and naively wants to change the world to a “Swiss” view.

The only common bond is love, with sex being an amusing outcome. Playful and engaging language made me read these poems with a smile of my face, an ephemeral questioning of identity, nationality and patriotism.

If you would like to read more about Kätlin Kaldmaa, (as per all of the poets in this collection) she is interviewed at the Huffington Post here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-r-enszer/poetry-in-translation-a-conversation-with-katlin-kaldmaa_b_6097122.html?ir=Australia Her interview ending with the very poignant question and answer:

Enszer: Is there anything else that you would like the English-language audience to know about your work?

Kaldmaa: Read more literature in translation! I grew up on literature in translation and I still read more foreign literature than Estonian. There are less than a million of us, so there's not enough writing power to fill the needs of this particular reader. That is one of the reasons why I love English language - thanks to this language I can read so many books I couldn't otherwise. Read literature in translation. Read literature in translation. Thank you!

Jane Putrle Srdić’s “Anything Could Happen” also features relationships and opens with a poem that needed to be written to explore her relationship; the poem doesn’t end as she thought it would!

The apocalyptic “Air Cage” talks of birds falling from nests or has us dying whilst caged, humanity needs a better connection to nature, we need to prioritise and follow our desires as our time is coming to an end. There are poems dedicated to the creation of poetry, as Srdić explains in her interview at Huffingtton Post, poetry “is a sudden shift in understanding how things and events are interconnected. How thought works on different levels. The same action can be concrete and abstract; can happen in the human and the animal world.” This concept very much brought to the fore with a poem that mixes the embarrassment of littering with the boredom of sex in the work “I forgot my panties in that apartment with shelves of wooden veneer”.

From “Explorers Wonder”

Things used to be simple:

if you were slow, some beast would eat you.

The quick sometimes fell off the edge.

Today I’m safely surrounded by walls of books,

most unread. Each is a new world

that opens into even more unknown

ones and makes me feel discouraged.

We also have the exploration of language and the difficulty of conversing if you’re from two different regions. Jane Putrle Srdić’s interview can be read here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-r-enszer/poetry-in-translation-a-c_1_b_6107194.html?ir=Australia

“Dissection” by Care Santos is probably the most accessible of the three works, with the prose style , quite readily recognisable. As a novelist she writes “in both Catalan and Spanish, and for both adults and young readers, Care Santos she is the author of over 40 books in different genres, including novels, short story collections, young adult and children’s books, etc. Her most recent adult novel Desig de xocolata, won the 34th Ramon Llull Prize.”  Her works have appeared in French, German, Greek, Dutch, Italian, Norweigan, Portuegese, Romanian, Swedish, Polish and Hebrew and independent publisher Alma Books has released her novel “Desire For Chocolate” in June this year (translated by Julie Wark).

Her book opens with “Self Portrait” a poem where her soul is bared to the reader from the moment you open the work:

From “Self Portrait”

Of love, it’s better not to say anything:

there is nothing more useless on this earth

than what we can’t keep.

So that the only thing I have

is my tenacity to join, night and day,

one word to the other.

With them I shape sentences

                                which in turn form paragraphs

that in their turn are stories,

but it is something that many are able to do,

perhaps better than I do.

                                Or with greater success.

So here I am.

I am thirty six.

I’m not good for anything.

This is a work of a woman scorned, an unloved woman, and one who needs to forget. Although this is possibly the most “accessible” of the three works the final book in the collection is the opposite of the searching for love in the other two works and leaves quite vivid images of an emotionally scarred woman lingering long after you’ve read the final poem. Santos’ interview can be read here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-r-enszer/poetry-in-translation-a-c_2_b_6107228.html?ir=Australia

A wonderful collection of translated poetry and A Midsummer Night’s Press is to be commended for bringing these works into English, as if there isn’t enough Women In Translation available in the prose sections of your bookshop, you can just imagine the very very limited amount available for poetry. You can purchase these books online at http://amidsummernightspress.com/WP/category/titles/periscope/ for US$25 for all three book. A thank you to the publisher too for sending these postage free to Australia, most appreciated. 

Why I Killed My Best Friend - Amanda Michalopoulou (translated by Karen Emmerich)

I believe this will be my last Women In Translation Month book review for 2015, with only three more days left in the month, the Melbourne Writers Festival calling and a “to be read” pile that is growing faster than weeds in a newly planted spring garden (and you know as you pluck one weed it means two more grow in its place don’t you?), it would appear as though I’ll be randomly selecting my titles without the “female filter” in place. It’s been a great month with some wonderful discoveries and even though I’ve been involved for two years now, I am still amazed at the minimal representation by world renowned authors. The more I dig, the more I learn.

Today’s book is published by Open Letter, as was the very impressive “Lies, First Person” by Gail Hareven which I reviewed a few days ago. Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press, and as you may know the University is the home of the three percent website, which includes databases of translated works, reviews, news , and home to the Best Translated Book Award.

Amanda Michalopolou’s “Why I Killed My Best Friend” opens with a nine-year-old narrator telling us of her move from Nigeria back to their homeland of Greece, leaving behind her father:

Aunt Amalia looks like one of those actresses who plays the role of the old maid in Greek movies. But she’s a very modern old maid: she goes to the movies alone, takes off one shoe in the middle of the street to scratch her foot with her heel, whistles old songs like “Let Your Hair Down” or “In The Morning You’ll Wake Me with Kisses.” When she was young she got an idea in her head: she wanted to marry Constantine, who back then was prince and later became king. She didn’t want anyone else. When Constantine married Anna-Maria –who’s from Denmark, where they call her Anna-Marie – Aunt Amalia told my parents that she was giving up on marriage: she dug a hole in her head and buried all the bouquets and wedding dresses. Whenever anything bad happens, she digs a hole in her head and shoves it in there. Now she’s telling me to do exactly the same.

Well in all honesty our story opens with a short piece by a thirty-five year old narrator, Marie, but it is not until Chapter Three that this character becomes formed, it is the same narrator as the nine year old narrator and we alternate chapters between the two versions of our story teller. Until such time as they merge.

At school Marie meets a girl, Anna, from Paris, who quickly becomes her best friend. She is the daughter of revolutionary parents and whilst spending a lot of time at Anna’s house Marie learns of the Greek struggle, and attends protests with Anna’s mother Antigone.

The alternating Marie (the 35 year old) is now a “professional” protester, she works part time in a school or other odd jobs, and it is through her school work that she meets this precocious child, the daughter of Anna. We then flash straight back to Marie as a nine-year-old. These sections giving us the foundations of their friendship, the cement that binds them together.

Once we forward back to current times we find Marie is now living with a gay man Kayo, who she secretly desires, he is also a protester/activist and they travel the world together to “restore social desire”, she is also estranged from Anna:

“They presented it to us immaculate, marble, smelling of disinfectant, like and airport bathroom. Cold white fluorescent lighting. Private security guards. The Athens Metro is a moving walkway that transports us home after hours of low-paying, back-breaking work. It feels like the inside of a bank, exudes an air of industriousness and order. Music and food are prohibited. Human activity of any sort is avoided. In Europe people at least make themselves at home in their metro, they sing, they sleep in it's warmth – after all, no European government care enough to actually solve the problem of homelessness. We take it a step further: we hide our homeless, we kick them out of the station at Omonia. They mar the Europeanized image of prosperity we’re hoping might attract the business of multinational corporations. Sweep the dirt under the rug! Was the new metro designed for people so exhausted they’ve become zombies? Is this the new Athens we’re so proud of? This imitation of Brussels? Say no to this asphyxiating state ‘security’! Say no to the Olympic spirit being promoted by multinational corporations! So no to the paternalistic aesthetic regulation of our city’s working class”! Bring your guitars and your sandwiches. Come help us give the Athens Metro the color and life we all deserve.”

Whilst the prime tale is that of friendship and overbearing relationships, it is also a study of the Greek crisis from a local’s point of view, originally published in 2003 a year before the Olympics in Athens, it is an expose of what the working class and the activists think of these events.

Our story moves back and forth from a young Marie to the current older Marie. Her best friend Anna is an overpowering youth, always dismissive of Marie’s ideas, her drawings (Marie wants to be an artist), relationships, she even becomes jealous when Marie has breakfast with Anna’s father “He’s my dad”. These experiences coming to the fore as they experience growing up, boys and their own independence.

The parallels to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series and the similar feel to “My Brilliant Friend”, detailing Lila and Elena’s relationship as children is very obvious. We also have the Greek political climate instead of the political times in Naples.

I lock the door of my room and regress to a time when I thirsted for black. Only now, instead of using black paper, I draw in black on a white background. Black, and ochre too. I sketch the prehistoric animals in the Lascaux caves, as I remember them from the books I pored over at the library. Horses, bison, cows, deer. I practice doing feet and tails for a while, then start to draw little  creatures in miniature. Tiny animals entering enormous caves. Or gigantic animals trying to squeeze through the mouths of microscopic caves. The mismatches proportions transport me straight into the realm of fairytale, offering me that particular comfort of children’s drawings. As a child, you’re presented with a rigid world of predetermined sizes and power relations. You lie down on the floor with a piece of paper and deconstruct it all – you draw blue roots on the trees, people with no fingers, see-through bellies with babies inside; you bestow life and take it away again with your colored pencils. With faith and rage you change the world.

I haven’t mentioned too much here about the overbearing dominance of Anna over Marie and their estrangement, nor the title, you will have to read this yourself to see what “Why I Killed My Best Friend” means, is it literal?

An insight into the political scene in Greece in the late nineties and early 2000’s as told through the eyes of a woman who struggles with relationships and has always been dominated, there are a few hidden gems (the story of Marie’s missing finger is one) and the characters are real and you can easily associate with their plight. As a political novel as well, what better way to end than one of the many manifestos peppered throughout:

In the name of progress, modernization and the Olympic ideal, the average Greek citizen has been led to believe that the swift Europeanization of his daily life, in the service of rabid profit-seeking, is the only way to proceed.

No One Will See Me Cry - Cristina Rivera-Garza (translated by Andrew Hurley)

Women In Translation Month is a great opportunity for me to sort out my bookshelves, find female translated literature, make a new “to be read” pile and see how far through that pile I can get. With Cristina Rivera-Garza’s “No One Will See Me Cry” I personally have absolutely no idea why this book is sitting on my shelves, I don’t recall buying it, I don’t recall reading anything about it which would have prompted my purchase, although I did plan a “World Heritage Listed” literature challenge in 2014, which never got any traction and this work was on my planned reading list – why? I have no idea. However I am glad it was on my shelves....let’s see why.

Our novel opens with Joaquín “a tense man, a man who feels comfortable only on the margins of days, behind mirrors” a morphine addicted photographer working at the insane asylum photographing the inmates.

One of the inmates, Matilda, asks him “How does one come to be a photographer of crazy people?” and this sparks a memory in Joaquín, he’s met her before, in a bordello:

Like all the other women whose portraits he had made in that particular bordello, Matilda chose the scene and the poses. Some of the women preferred to remain in their own rooms, lying on the same mattresses they worked on. Other, though, suggested a visit to a nearby brook. Some removed their clothes without the slightest hesitation, while others chose exotic Chinese regalia, and a few decided to face the camera in their customary dishabille. They had all no doubt seen the erotic postcards then in vogue on the market, and although Joaquín explained that heir photographs had no commercial value whatsoever, most of them went through efforts partly ludicrous, partly sincere ti imitate the languid or provocative poses of divas such as Adela Eisenhower or Eduwiges Chateau. Then, as the session went on and Joaquín’s unthreatening attitude managed to create a tenuous confidence, some of the models, never many, would begin to “flow,” as he called it. When that happened, it would be slow, almost subterranean, and might even pass unnoticed. At those times, Joaquín always thought about the movements of a sunflower. Sometimes it was just a gesture of amazement, a flicker of shyness or disgust and tiredness, the interrogation barelu visible on the face: “What the hell am I doing here?” And then the women would turn inward once more, to the place where they saw themselves as they wished to see themselves. And that was the exact place that the photographer yearned to know, yearned to halt forever. The place where a woman accepted herself. There, seductiveness did not turn outward, nor was it one-way; there, in a gesture indivisible and unique, seductiveness was not a hook but a map. Joaquín was convinced that it was possible to reach that place. Joaquín Buitrago had still believed in the impossible that day when Matilda removed her clothes with no embarrassment whatever and, reclining on the marble table as she sought his eyes behind the lens, she asked him:

“How does one come to be a photographer of whores?”

Joaquín becomes obsessed with Matilda, a fellow liver on the margins of society, and hatches a plan to get closer to her, and her story by beforeinding the asylum’s Chief Doctor, eventually getting to borrow Matilda’s file. Joaquín researches Matilda’s background in the local library.

We then enter a period of “interviews” or discussions between Joaquín and Matilda and we learn that she is originally from a vanilla growing village, and moved to the city to be under the care of her uncle at age fifteen. Matilda’s story of moving from housekeeper to lover to cigarette factory worker to prostitution is slowly revealed to us:

In Mexico City, twelve percent of the women between fifteen and thirty years of age were prostitutes, or had been at some time. Many of them were orphans and single women, although there were also widows, married women, even women with children. They had been maids, seamstresses, washerwomen, machine operators, and street vendors, and they had probably never earned more than twenty-five centavos a day. Of those who bothered to answer the questions on the registry, half reported that they had been forced into prostitution by poverty, the other half by vice, or a certain personal propensity for the profession. The story that Matilda decided to tell the women where she worked was that she had been dishonoured by a furtive love affair. Lying skilfully, she told of her seduction by a law student and, tears coming to her eyes, she related in detail his cruel abandonment of her and the inevitable expulsion from her family home. They had all told the same story since Santa made it famous, and they had all proven its efficacy. It softened the hearts and wallets of the men that paid them for their services, and also left the men convinced that fornication had actually been an act of charity. Thus, the morality of both the men and their whores remained unsullied.

But this is not a simple tale of a former prostitute being sent to an insane asylum and then coming across a photographer from her past. We follow Matilda’s journey from housekeeper onwards toward love and living in a desolate silver mining village with an engineer who is certain he’ll make his fortune, she is wooed by six metres of pure silk.

We also have Joaquín’s tale, of morphine addiction, of staring at the ceilings, of being disinherited by his own family, unless he can become clean of the drug, his wasted talent, his propensity for remaining alone.

Light also plays an important part in our tale, the stark black and white photographic image being brought to life with our two protagonists through many references to daylight, night time, the qualities and shades of light, breaks in clouds and more. Verbally we are given a wonderful image of the starkness of the times.

We also have the historical element, what progress means to Mexico in the 1920’s, the political influences of the time and of course a detailed historical analysis of insanity treatment. There is one chapter in the novel which explores a number of inmates of the asylum, the self admitted, the morphine addicted, the religious fervours, schizophrenics and the notations of the attending doctors.

In an interview for “BalleTrista” author Cristina Rivera-Garza explains how the work came about, from finding a medical file in an archive:

CF: Joaquín and Matilda, the two protagonists of No One Will See Me Cry, are very damaged people, and the book is quite dark in tone. What was your inspiration for these complex characters?

CRG: She comes directly out of a medical file I found at the archive of the General Insane Asylum—her picture, in which she could not hide a smile, fascinated me from the very beginning. It was a gesture I could not accommodate easily in my notion of insanity or mental institutions or even history at large. A novel is at times just that: a place for a gesture that seems to be out of place.

Joaquín emerged out of the initials an anonymous photographer wrote at the bottom of some porn portraits taken during the early twentieth century in Mexico City. How does someone become a photographer of the mad?—that question, not the most optimistic of all, defined his character.

For the full interview go to http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue5/features_1.php

Beautifully researched and poetic in style and tone, in summary this is an novel full of ephemeral  snippets, a story of unrequited love, an historical gem, a search for meaning in a world that is progressing too fast. Another glittering addition to my Women In Translation Month reading.

Lies, First Person - Gail Hareven (translated by Dalya Bilu)

I have absolutely no idea why I put this work to one side when it arrived on my doorstep in February this year. Maybe the blurb on the back cover talking about “Jewish diaspora”,  and “Hitler” simply didn’t appeal right then, maybe I was simply snowed under. I can tell you that I am disappointed in myself for not picking this book up earlier, it is the highlight of my Women In Translation Month this year.

To make things easier, I’ll start with the plot, our narrator, Elinor, is a writer, and she writes a newspaper column from the viewpoint of the fictional Alice (from Alaska), her column focuses on Jerusalem, everything through the eyes of somebody who is awestruck, she came here to paint the light. All the sordid details are left aside as Alice wonders at her colourful, rich surroundings.

Elinor had a tough upbringing, living in a hotel with her prescription drug addicted mother, her ineffectual father and her older sister Elisheva, but more on her later.

Very early on, as a reader we start to question ourselves, are we reading Elinor here or are we reading Alice?

My pigtail-sucking Alice is a perfect idiot and a chronic faker. She isn’t capable of producing a single straightforward sentence, and her description of my childhood is, of course, completely false. That’s what she’s like, that’s how I created her, and I take full responsibility for her falsifications and for the small pleasures they afforded me.

But what about my own account? Is it truer? More reliable? Was my childhood really as grim as I describe it? Were the no moments of grace in it? No dewy lawns of happiness?

But back to the plot, Elinor is contacted by her Uncle Aaron Gotthilf, as he is coming to visit Jerusalem to apologise for his controversial book “Hitler, First Person”. A work where he attempted to inhabit the mind of Hitler, a work he wrote whilst staying with Elinor, her mother, father and sister at their hotel when our narrator was a child, a time when Aaron continually raped Elinor’s older sister Elisheva.

Elinor decides that she must visit her sister in the USA to warn her that Gotthilf has found her and may find her sister. Elinor and Elisheva are somewhat estranged but not after we learn of Elinor being the only family member to believe the rape stories and nursing her sister after a mental breakdown. So a visit to see her after all these years is going to open up a lot of old wounds. By the way, Elinor and her ideal husband Oded have to grown up children, who also live in the USA, time for a visit.

Two days before the flight, when I was downtown making final arrangements, I suddenly changed direction and completely cast off the illusion of the tourist vacation. In a last minute decision I went up to the men’s office, and after greeting the secretary, without waiting to hang up my coat – I slipped into the library.

When I left the house to do some last minute shopping for the trip, I had no idea that I was about to do an about-face, no such plan entered my mind, and only when I was standing in a children’s boutique to choose one more cute garment for my niece, I was suddenly overtaken by a recognition of what was really ahead of us. Suddenly I couldn’t stand the illusion of sweetness and light and the pretense. Things are not what they seem, and collaboration with deceivers is a crime.

I left the pile of sweet little dresses and blouses on the counter, and got ready to prepare myself – and perhaps also my husband – to confront reality. I had been cocooned enough, I had let him cocoon me enough, and I couldn’t carry on like this.

Elinor meets with her sister, hears of her tale towards “wellness” and it appears as though we are heading towards a nice happy ending... but are we?

We were already next to the care when four heads rose in unison at the sound of a screech in the sky. A flock of geese flew over us in an arrowhead formation, and pierced me with a superstitious dread that rose in a flash from my tailbone to the bottom of my skull. The wild geese flapped heavy wings, and their screeching seemed to announce some curse to come. One after the other they screeched above our heads. Flapping and flapping and emitting remote, obscure cries, like a distant witness. One tortured screech after the other, never together.

I won’t reveal any more of the plot for those who intend to read this book, however I will say that this is not a simple plot driven novel, we have many, many layers at play here. First off we have a main character who has invented a talented writer, how reliable is our narrator’s voice?

The next morning I was already able to tell him that he was making a big, if common, mistake in his reading of Lolita; that the book was pervaded by a consciousness of sin; that the utter ruin of Lolita is conveyed through an unreliable narrator, and that the reader together with Humbert Humbert are clearly aware of the fact that there is no restoration and atonement is impossible.

Early on in the book we start to question our unreliable narrator, in our case is atonement possible?

We also have the book “Hitler, First Person” which our narrator quickly reads and gives us a summation, she then reads it in detail and gives us further conclusions, as a reader you know there is no such book, but you cannot help to go along with our narrator’s telling of this fictional fiction. Is author of “Hitler, First Person” an unreliable voice? We know he is a monster, is there a parallel to Lolita? So many questions, so many layers, so many things to have you mind racing as you devour this masterful construction of a book.

We also have red-herrings, or are they actual prophecies? “Hitler, First Person” concludes with “with a reference to the sun” will our book have a similar conclusion? Aaron Gotthilf becomes “the bottom dweller”, “first person” and a raft of other names as our story unfolds, is there a theme here as he slowly becomes a non-person?

As a reader you become complicit in Elinor’s tale and her actions, you then begin to question your own moral stand point, am I all of a sudden becoming a “bottom dweller”?

This is an absolute gem of a book, although written in a simple journalistic style (Gail Hareven’s creation does write for newspapers) there are so many levels that his book plays on. In my opinion an absolute moral to make the Best Translated Book Award lists for 2016.

Mr Darwin's Gardener - Kristina Carlson (translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah)

To date, on this blog, I have reviewed seven of Peirene’s seventeen releases to date, I have read one other (“White Hunger” by Aki Ollikainen) and actually didn’t get around to writing up a review, maybe one day!!! I have absolutely no qualms in purchasing any of their titles as I am yet to come across a shocker. I have favourites, I have some that didn’t raise me to great heights, however they are always a quality presentation with a surprise of some description in store. The “short” concept also is appealing to me, as it acts as a nice counterbalance to some of the weightier behemoth’s I occasionally attack (and not always successfully!) I do own every title they have released so it is only a matter of time and I will have reviewed all of their catalogue for you.

Why all the preamble? Well, today’s title, “Mr Darwin’s Gardener” by Kristina Carlson (translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah), would be the most “experimental” of the Peirene titles I have read to date. I use the word “experimental” as I have heard somebody else use it to describe this book, personally I hate that description as it can automatically alienate a number of potential readers, I would prefer to call it “less conventional”.

On the surface our story is about Thomas Davies, a man stuck down with grief over his wife’s death, he is left alone to raise two young children who are “not quite right”, and by the way he’s Charles Darwin’s gardener. Our story opens on with a section called “A Sunday In November” and although written in the first person, we see the story unfolding through various parishioners’ eyes, as they are off to church. A number of them think about godless Thomas working for a godless man (Darwin), he is shunned:

Do-gooders understand disease and even death, but not the fact that I want to be alone. Solitude is what they themselves fear most.

When I was out of my mind and the children were asleep, I wrote:

The silence of plants calms the mind. I am glad that plants do not run off like animals or fly away like birds. They stay put for hundreds of years, like oaks, or they vanish for winter and rise from the ground like the blue lily of the east, and they spread joyously like the balsam that flings its seeds far.

When Gwyn was dying, I did not think about where she was going, but about what she was leaving. She was abandoning Catherine, John, and me. She did not leave abruptly. Death held the door ajar for many months.

I wrote that a plant dies easily, and annual’s stem withers after the seeds have developed.

The villagers believe it is not worthwhile for a family such as ours to carry on living. They think that is the law of nature. In his newspaper article, Lewis put thoughts in my mouth that many find pleasing in their terribleness.

Anything goes, whether it comes from God or science or one’s own head. As long as the evidence supports a notion one believes anyway. Village theology amounts to raking with a flea comb. Inappropriate thoughts are tidied away. At the same time, the hair falls out.

Of course that was Thomas Davies’ voice, some others are harder to decipher, others very simple as they’re named, some voices go for pages, some for just a paragraph. The second section, “A stranger in August”, sees the arrival of a stranger and our various narrators hypothesise on who this stranger is, “it is because Mr Darwin lives here, and godlessness is a worse threat than in neighbouring villages”, the stranger must be here to sell Bibles, deluxe ones of course.

Each character’s narration is sprinkle of their own views on the matter at hand, and these layers, from various viewpoints, slowly build to give you a semblance of a perceived truth, but in reality it is like trying to follow a dust mote with your eyes in the bright light, you have very little substance and is any of it true? Perception is the truth here.

Our novella is set in the 1870’s, twenty years after “Origin of Species” was first published and although Charles Darwin himself does not feature as a character his gardener is the main core of the spiral of innuendo, gossip, hypothesis and rumour.

Section three – “At the anchor” reveals a little about how, as a reader, you need to decipher the wheat from the chaff, the substance from the froth, who is speaking here:

Man has only three hidey-holes from life: booze or sleep...

The third is a woman.

I was thinking of death.

A man goes mad if he cannot escape his life for a short while. His head can’t stand life for days on end. Perhaps that’s what troubles Thomas, and he hasn’t yet found the cure.

A Christian will help another Christian. When a victim of circumstances rejects this help, it is as if he were placing a lump of manure on a palm held out for a warm handshake.

Fresh manure is warm, too.

A rock of offence will not hurt us, for a Christian must forgive. I forget how many times, I’ve no head for maths.

What about a head for drink?

Section four, “The Second Advent”, starts to bring all the village rumours toward the common theme of Thomas Davies. The murky waters are becoming clearer.

My Hume claims that in country places, a rumour about a marriage will take flight more easily than any other. But he is wrong there, for accidents and diseases excite people far more. The joy of being able to impart such engrossing news, and be the first to spread it, is much greater.

Very much like “The Alphonse Courrier Affair, by Marta Morazzoni (translated by Emma Rose), which I reviewed at the start of Women In Translation Month this is the story of a small village and the gossip and innuendo, here overshadowed by religious beliefs.

A spacious mind engages with big questions, whereas small souls are satisfied with crumbs to chew on.

Our book finishes with a section called “In Spring”, a time of renewal perhaps?

Unconventional would be a word to describe this book, however it is not so extreme that you cannot make sense of it, I did take about 20 or so pages to warm to the style and decipher the narrative structure, once I was there it was a very enjoyable read, with the many layers of voices slowly building a focused view. The lingering doubt remains as so many voices are far from the mark of the perceived truth, so it leaves you with that feeling, what is truth? Blend that with a religious flavour, the all pervading nature (our main man is a gardener), with the shadow of Charles Darwin and there are many many angles to pursue here. Another worthwhile publication from Peirene Press.

Beside The Sea - Véronique Olmi (translated by Adriana Hunter)

As mentioned earlier in the week, this week I am going to review three works from Peirene Press as part of my female reading for “Women In Translation Month”. To date eight of Peirene Press’ eighteen published titles have been written by female writers, and in 2016 two of the three releases are written by women so 50/50 representation here, a great result when you look at some other publishers and their lack of female representation.

Next year they are releasing “Her Father’s Daughter” by French author Marie Sizun (translated by Adriana Hunter) and “The Empress and the Cake” by Austrian writer Linda Stift (translated by Jamie Bulloch). Translator Adriana Hunter translated Peirene Press’ first ever release, the work I look at today, Véronique Olmi’s “Beside The Sea”.

Don’t let the title fool you into thinking this is a nice seaside story, one of “sea change” tales of endless blue skies, soft sands, rolling waves, romance and finding one’s self in a new open environment. There are family seaside snacks, local fairs, sand castles and waves but not as you’d expect. For starters there is no sunshine; the weather is grim from the start, with incessant rain:

The next day was really bad luck, it was raining again. Apart from the dim morning light it was hard not getting day and night confused in that town. There wasn’t much room for the light, no one had arranged for it, you could tell that right away. I don’t know what the time was when I woke, but the kids were already up, there were by the window having a raindrop race: they each chose one at the top of the pane and the first to reach the bottom was the winner.

I wondered what they could see through the window, what the rain was hiding.

Our novella starts with a night-time bus trip, the last bus out of town, towards the sea, for our first person narrator and her two children Stan and Kevin. We know right from the start that this is their first, and last, ever trip, even including holidays.

A bleak scene slowly builds to be even bleaker as everything deteriorates, even the weather, and as a reader we learn more and more about our narrator, the evidence of a broken single mother starts to become compelling as we learn of simple things, like the children having to carry the bags “because ever since I broke my collar bone I’ve had trouble carrying stuff.”

As the dark undertones build your mind starts racing towards a horrendous conclusion, a predetermined reason why this will be the last ever trip by this family. Our narrator’s world is thoroughly BLACK, it is dark, it is doomed, every waking hour is a struggle, and how on earth can you let your own children loose into a place as desolate as her own world? When the only shining light in your day is your kids, how can you let them grow in a place that’s barren of warmth, love, affection?

That’s how I should have spent the rest of my days, in bed with my kids, we could have watched the world the way you watch telly: from a distance, without getting dirty, holding on to the remote, we’d have switched the world off as soon as it fucked up.

Our book captures the darkness of depression, the mark of “black-dog” the depths of despair for sufferers and does it in such a sympathetic tone, that as a reader you want to reach out and rescue this woman. The treatment meted out by strangers, the clinging to hope by the innocent children, forced to grow up too soon, the poverty and attempts at trying to instil some dignity all build and build until you hope the pre determined conclusion is not a reality. “Page turner” that’s what a short Amazon blurb should read!

It’s not often you come across sad works, depressing books that are at the same time engaging , the ones that come to mind generally include substance abuse as well for example “Even The Dogs” by Jon McGregor, but here we have a thoroughly wretched story that you can’t avoid reading.

If you want a portrait of a single mother suffering depression look no further, this is the one character study you should pick up, I promise you’ll be impacted.

As an aside, Peirene Press donate 50 pence from the cover price of £8.99 to the Maya Centre, an organisation who provides long term counselling and psychological support to some of the most vulnerable women in the British community, victims of domestic violence, childhood abuse, even war and conflict. They provide a service for women who do not have access to other options, free of charge. So even purchasing this book helps, in a small way, the realities that the work addresses.

Next up in my week of Peirene Press reviews, something completely different, the Finnish “Herra Darwinin puutarhuri” (‘Mr Darwin’s Gardener” by Kristina Carlson). 

Stone In A Landslide - Maria Barbal (Translated by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell)

This week I am going to look at three books published by Peirene Press, of course all by female authors, given we are still participating in Women In Translation Month. Peirene Press specializes in contemporary European novellas in English translation. Part of their “charter” is to only publish books of less than 200 pages, which are best-sellers and/or award winners in their own countries. They publish three titles per annum in a “theme” and today I’m going to look at a novella from their first series “Female Voice: Inner Realities”, their second book actually published, “Stone in a Landslide”, by Maria Barbal, translated from the Catalan by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell.

Maria Barbal was born in 1949 in the region of Pallars Jussà, and moved to Barcelona in the 1960’s graduating with an Arts degree from the University of Barcelona. In 1984 this work, (“Pedra de tartera”), won the Joaquim Ruyra prize and this was simply the start of a string of literary awards including the National Catalan Literature Prize in 1993 for “Càmfora”. For an article by Maria Barbal, “Who I am and why I write?” go to Catalan Literature Online here. http://www.lletra.net/en/author/maria-barbal

“Stone in a Landslide” covers a lifetime in only 126 pages. Our story opens with our first person narrator, Conxa, explaining the realities of being female and the fifth of six children in a small village. At age thirteen this unsure young girl takes her first ever trip away from her village to a neighbouring village to go and live with her mother’s sister, Aunt Tia, who is childless. Conxa is an extra pair of hands to help on the land.

I closed my eyes and those first days of my new life seemed very far away: the nights I cried myself to sleep remembering each and every person from home, the times I would wake with a start, and the anxiety that didn’t leave me all day. How quickly I got used to such a great change! But if I counted it up, I’d already been away for half a year. And now I felt, not fully, but almost as if I’d been born in Tia’s house.

When you knew Tia well, you came to love her, because she didn’t begrudge what she gave you as long as you followed her orders to the letter. Decide, then act, that was her, and she didn’t likfe to be contradicted. Like my mother, she was not demonstrative, but in her own way she showed affection. A glass of fresh milk, still warm from the cow, beside my plate, without a word. I knew they saved it for the calves, or if there was more than enough, they took a few litres to the Augusts’ to earn a peseta or two.

Oncle kept quiet, like that first day on top of the mule, but he wasn’t bad-tempered. I wore myself out helping him. He worked and worked. I learnt to do everything, outside the house as well as in. Exactly as they had shown me, without any touches of my own which they might think showed a lack of respect.

The passage of time is handled in an interesting way with this work, what may seem like minor events (having a glass of milk six months after arriving) show the development of the character over great stretches of time. Conxa marries, and has a child, a girl, both events themselves not appearing in the story itself but happening in between the chapters. We learn of Conxa expecting a second child

A boy will be a man. And a man has the strength to deal with the land, the animals, to build. But I didn’t see it so clearly. When I thought about the families I knew well, I saw the woman as the foundation stone. If I thought about my home, it was my mother who did all the work or organized others to do it. Not to mention Tia. The woman has the children, raised them, harvested, took care of the pigsty, the chicken coop, the rabbits. She did the housework and so many other things: the vegetable garden, the jams, the sausages...What did the man do? Spent the day doing things outside. When a cow had to be sold. When someone had to be hired for the harvest. It wasn’t obvious that the man did more or was more, but everyone said, What is a farm without a man? And I thought, What is a house without a woman? But what everyone had always said weighed on me. I only knew that I wanted a boy.

The development of our narrator is smooth however the innocence of only living in two small villages is retained throughout. This is a personal tale, of one woman living in a small secluded region, and that naivety shines through as the Spanish Civil War breaks out, events happen to Conxa without her having an iota of understanding why. As a beautiful counterpoint to numerous Spanish and Catalan works highlighting the Civil War where the politics are played out throughout, this is a fresh voice of the personal impact of those events. Quite simply a story of a woman with three young children who had never moved beyond two villages being impacted by the War.

As mentioned earlier, the passage of time here is very smooth and years disappear with the turning of a page, however this doesn’t leave you at all confused or grasping for an event that may have been significant. Our narrator Conxa has a simple life and therefore the simplicity is repeated whilst we turn the page.

Not a complex tale, nor a political tale, this is a personal rural tale, one which captures the lives of so many people who would have been in similar situations in Spain in the 1930’s.

Diorama - Rocío Cerón (translated by Anna Rosenwong) - 2015 Best Translated Book Award (Poetry)

You’re going to have to forgive me from the get go on this one. As you’ve probably guessed I’ve recently had a bit of an obsession with Enrique Vila-Matas and when I read his recent work “The Illogic Of Kassel” I came across a section that I thought totally relevant to the poetic work “Diorama” by Rocío Cerón.

I dreamed of fields of grass where beatniks were grazing, fields that split into more fields and then into killing fields like a sprawling nightmare. And then I dreamed (in the part of the night closest to me waking and, therefore, to my cheerful morning mood) that somebody stole my shoes in those fields and told me that the common revered model of the “great man” was the opposite of poetry and the irreducible individuality of being unique. This view was the opposite of the poetry of the unique existence (ephemeral, unrepeatable), which did not need to be written, but only – and above all – to be lived. This second part of the dream, with its agreeable observations on the poetry of individuality, must have influenced my excellent mood the following morning, which was indeed the norm.

Onto “Diorama”, the winner of this year’s Best Translated Book Award for Poetry, and the excellent “Translator’s Note” at the opening of the collection:

Translating Rocío Cerón’s Diorama was at first baffling. As an experienced translator and as a less than conventional poet myself, I know better than to seek clarity or narrative or concrete structure in experimental poetry. Nonetheless, it is precisely this sort of legibility that readers often demand of translated work, which can result in selection bias; difficult, experimental, or what Cole Swenson calls “immanent” poetry is often left untranslated in favor of the more familiar and legible. It is essentially impressionistic, stubbornly elusive, and at times outright hallucinatory.

This book is presented in two sections, the English translation and the original Spanish versions. This may seem an odd approach, but when you learn that Rocío Cerón’s “enveloping, fierce live performances” mean you would gain a lot by trying the lines aloud for themselves “attentive not only to sound and rhythm but to the play and gripping of the words in the mouth.” “This is a work that demands to be spoken and heard”. Not only that, Cerón accompanies her works “with carefully orchestrated multimedia presentations that include still images, text, and film”. 

Opening with ‘Pinhole, 13 ways to inhabit a corner” we have:

I

Ostriches in flight – there are women whose words are ash trees. Shadow stitch together harbors of air. In the midst of the stampede, a hand rests on the arc of a kneecap. Cigar and smoke. Rosy cypress sleep. The scent reaches far beyond the border. From the bureau – power, smile destroyed/ocher temptation, strophic enjambed body. Vestibule.

For comparison’s sake here is the same section in Spanish

I

Huyen avestruces – hay mujeres cuyas palabras son fresnos. Sombras hilvanan puertos de aire. Entre la estampida reposa la mano sobre el talud de una rodilla. Habano y humo. Rojizo ciprés el sueño. El olor sigue más allá del borde. Desde el buró – poder, sonríe, destruida/tiento ocre, cuerpo estrófico en el quicio. Vestíbulo.

As we can already see the rhythm, tempo, sound and structure is very similar indeed. As an experiment I put the Spanish text through the Google translate tool – this is the output:

I

Huyen ostriches - there are women whose words are ash. Shadows weave air ports. Among the stampede hand rests on the slope of a knee. Cigar and smoke. Red cypress sleep. The smell continues beyond the edge. Since the bureau - power, smiles, destroyed / ocher touch, strophic body in the doorway. Lobby.

A simple comparison (albeit a lazy one using Google) but already after five lines of poetry I can see a significant difference. ‘Rosy” or ‘red’? ‘Arc of a kneecap’ or ‘slope of a knee’? ‘Far beyond the border’ or ‘continues beyond the edge’? And sorry a 'vestibule' is a 'vestibule'...it's not a 'lobby'!!! Each and every comparison showing the deft poetic, linguistic, rhythmic touch added by translator Anna Rosenwong.

This is not a simple work to read, as our translator points out, it is best read aloud. However it drags you along building towards a mighty crescendo, making the “live performance” frenzy a reality as we move from a ‘Pinhole’ to a ‘Flyover’ through the longer poems ‘A Hundred And Twelve’ ending with ‘Sonata Mandala To The Penumbra Bird’. Only running to seventy five pages, there is a lot packed into this short work (including a photo).

Poetry not my forte on this blog, but I purchased this book based on the Best Translated Book Award win and the comments on the Three Percent website:

David Shook, the co-founder and editorial director of Phoneme Media “congratulates translator Anna Rosenwong for her masterful translation of Rocío Cerón’s Diorama, our first book of poetry and one of the most fascinating and important books to have been published in Mexico this century. Phoneme Media is incredibly grateful for the support of the BTBA’s judges and organizers, to Three Percent and its indefatigable director Chad Post, to our fellow shortlisted publishing houses, translators, and authors, and to our readers around the world. Congratulations, Anna and Rocío, on receiving this much deserved award!”

The opening “Translator’s Note” is a must read as it details the religious, cultural experiences, it leads you to avenues you didn’t know existed, and even the “smells” referenced. I must admit it was a very enjoyable read, one to be taken slowly and absorbed, a work that doesn’t need to be written it needs “to be lived”.

Ana María Matute - Women (Not) in Translation

The Miguel de Cervantes Prize was established in 1976 and annually it honours the lifetime achievement for writing in the Spanish Lanuage, this includes writers from any Spanish speaking nation. Quoted as the “most prestigious” Spanish language prize the award of 125,000 euros is nothing to be sneezed at. Since inception there have been four female winners (in the forty presentations) with Elena Poniatowska from Mexico being the most recent in 2013, the first being in 1988, Spanish writer María Zambrano Alarcón, the second the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz in 1992 and the third Ana María Matute in 2010.

Whilst it is staggering to only have four winners in forty years, what is even more amazing is the lack of translated works (into English) available for Ana María Matute. Besides being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 her list of awards and recognitions runs to twenty-three entries in the anthology “A Thousand Forests In One Acorn”. I can find “Soldiers Cry By Night” (translated by Robert Nugent and Maria Delacamara – Latin American Literary Review Press 1995), “The Trap” (translated by Robert Nugent and Maria Jose De La Camara - Latin American Literary Review Press 1996), “Celebration in the Northwest” (translated by Phoebe Ann Porter – University of Nebraska Press 1997) , “Fireflies” (translated by Glafyra Ennis – Peter Lang Publishing 1998), and “School of the Sun” (translated by Elaine Kerrigan – Columbia University Press 1989). “The Heliotrope Wall and Other Stories” was published by Columbia University Press in 1989, translated by Michael Scott Doyle. All of these works are out of print, and as you can see, are published by small publishers.  With forty-four works appearing in her bibliography in “A Thousand Forests in One Acorn” the amount of work available in English is extremely limited, if you can lay your hands on any at all!!

Born in Barcelona in 1925, she was put into the care of her grandparents at age eight for health reasons and moved to Mansilla de la Sierra. Just prior to her eleventh birthday the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War “superimposed on her childhood memories” and this is “reflected in most” of “her early books, whose protagonists are children with a vision of the world that makes a distinction between the real (adult) world and fantasy”. (Valerie Miles). Her trilogy (‘Olvidado Rey Gudú’, ‘La torre vigía’ and ‘Aranmanoth’) set in a medieval court is the work that Ana María Matute chose as a representation of her work in the anthology “A Thousand Forests In One Acorn”.

And so, all these matters attended to, the time came for the Queen to gather together her advisors in a very private assembly to disclose to them something that had remained dormant in her mind and heart through her long years of thought and confinement.

Once they were gathered in her private chambers, the Sorcerer, the Goblin of the South, and the handsome Almíbar – although he was not essential, since in such circumstances he usually fell asleep: it was only a matter of courtesy – the Queen addressed her true – and perhaps he only – friends:

-          Dear friends, the time has come to make an important decision regarding Gudú to emphatically and definitively secure the crown and the glory of the Realm for him. And as your lessons and my own experience have taught me, an essential condition has become very clear for endowing him with a unique virtue in this regard.

She was silent for a moment, one of her few weaknesses was a penchant for solemnity. Her friends listened attentively:

-          My dear friends, she repeated, with her customary sweetness and strength, the matter is simple and complicated at the same time, and this is why I am in great need of your arts and wisdom. The decision is to, once and for all, render Gudú completely incapable of any form of love for others.

This is a fantasy tale of potions, severe consequences should the Prince shed a tear, a plot with a water nymph to become human flesh and placate Gudú’s desires and more. In a short excerpt of only thirteen pages, the tale from “Olvidado Rey Gudú” (“The Forgotten King of Gudú”) – translated by Lisa Buscov-Ellen – our writer has managed to suck this reader into wanting to know the outcome of such an evil plot, removing the capacity to love. Unfortunately this whetting of my appetite is all in vein, the book is not available in an English translation!!!!

Ana María Matute personally addressed the fantasy style in the “Coda” section of Valerie Mile’s anthology.

My intended style of writing forms part of the magic, you understand, of the magic of literature, of literature as invention. So that has always existed in my books and stories. But if you have to take into account the time in which I had to live and develop as a writer. It was the Francoist era. First, when I was eleven years old the civil war broke out right in front of me and after I was fourteen, in my adolescence, I lived through a very long postwar period.  And that left a mark on all of us, marked us decisively. This explains why I had to find a lung to breathe and to fight this man and his system. Pequeño tentro or Primaria memoria are realist, but not entirely. This is always a more poetic part. I think that social realism really killed Spanish literature for a while and I wanted to get away from it. I didn’t renounce my rebelliousness or my strong social criticism by writing literature instead of social reporting. I haven’t limited myself to telling, to narrating. I imagine. I invent. In any case, I have travelled a lot and I’ve seen how women are treated in the world and I’ve come to the realization that it’s not solely the heritage of Spain. But in a country like ours and at that time there were strong inherited prejudices.

I think the four from forty winners of the Miguel de Cervantes Prize already tells us this. It’s a pity more of Ana María Matute’s work is not available in English and personally I’m disappointed that the tale of the King of Gudú is not available, I’d love to know how he goes without an ability to love!!!

Baboon - Naja Marie Aidt (translated by Denise Newman) - 2015 Best Translated Book Award

Short stories, short review.

Born in Greenland, Danish language writer Naja Marie Aidt won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2008 for this short story collection (originally published as ‘Bavian’), and the translation, her first work to appear in English, was the recipient of the 2015 PEN Translation Prize. Add to the list of honours, a longlist appearance for the US based Best Translated Book Award, it meant my purposely delayed reading of these fifteen short stories to co-incide with Women In Translation Month was only heightening my sense of anticipation.

A collection which includes the surreal, the all too real, twists, simple incidents, it is not a work which can be easily classified. However the theme of fractured relationships kept bubbling to the surface.

We have stories with divorced couple, a couple with an adopted child revealing their extra marital affairs to each other, an abusive mother who beats her two-year-old child, a minor shoplifting incident which spirals out of control...

The story “The Honeymoon” explores a couple on their way to the matriarchal city of Olympus when they are attacked by a William Blake quoting savage.

Clearly the women had all the power here. He and Eva had read about it. The whole island functioned as a matriarchy; the order of succession went from mother to daughter. The women owned everything, whatever was worth owning. And here he saw it in practice; in any case, that’s what he thought. The women ran the businesses with an iron fist. The gathered outside the shops and bars, standing in small groups with their hands on their hips, and, with agitate hand movements and loud shouts, the bossed around the older boys and men who had snuck in to take a break from working. Old men with little children on their hips, boys in the middle of sweeping or carrying in goods, men dragging heavy bags home from the shops, men sweeping the stone steps, men washing dishes in the kitchens of the restaurants, whose eyes he met through the open windows. The women frightened him. There was a self-confidence in their eyes when they looked at him that he’d never seen in women before. A clear strong energy, a power, and the deep satisfaction that that power gives. Without undertones of either anger or vindictiveness. No disdain or cloying sweetness. No hint of a wish to be accepted, acknowledged, or liked.

In “The Green Darkness Of The Big Trees” we have a narrator who can only find peace and happiness whilst wandering alone in a garden:

That night I woke up crying, bathed in sweat. I had dreamed that in one single night a hurricane had stripped the leaves off all the trees in the world. I was in despair. Bare black trunks and a trembling stillness. I cried over my loneliness, which I only now understood. And I scolded myself. How could I think that you desired my company? In the mirror I saw a pathetic figure, unshaven, half bald, gray, dull red eyes with an empty expression. I couldn’t stop crying. I stayed in bed all the next day. It was Friday, I was weak and warm. I staggered down to buy a few groceries. It wasn’t until Tuesday that I returned to the garden. But I was unable to enter my silver maple. It rejected me. Or was it the opposite? The tree was silent. I felt unworthy. That’s how I was standing there, limp arms hanging at my sides, staring at the tree, at the yellow and light green leaves at its base, my legs shaking under me, wearing a coat that was far too big, when you walked up behind me, stood there quietly for a little while. I felt your gaze, and then saw you turn around. I saw your back. I saw you hurry away. In no way can I blame you for avoiding me. I would’ve done the same.

This is a collection that explores the breadth of human emotions and interactions, with “The Car Trip” giving us the all too familiar tale of what your life would be reduced to when you take four kids in a car to a summer holiday house. From a sulking teenager, seeking their own independence, through to a screaming baby, forget the romance you thought may happen whilst you are away, here is the reality.

Poetic in style, it is no shock to know Naja Marie Aidt has numerous published poetic works and linking her up with the translator Denise Newman is a coup de grace with Newman a published poet (three collections). At no stage did I find any of this varied collection cumbersome or slow, although there is a wide range of styles, from short sharp bursts, the melancholic wanderings. There is a hint of the surreal in the final story “Mosquito Bite” where our protagonist has a one night stand, where he can’t recall the full outcome, notices a mosquito bite the following day and his healthy life slowly deteriorates along with his relationship with his brothers and sisters. Is the one night stand linked to his health failing, is this some kind of metamorphosis, is it simply a mosquito bite?

This is a very enjoyable collection and a worthy inclusion on the Best Translated Book Award longlist, personally I am looking forward to Open Letter adding to Two Lines Press’ release of Naja Marie Aidt’s work with their upcoming publication “Rock, Paper, Scissors”.

Ekaterina Togonidze - Women (Not) In Translation

Google “Georgian literature”....you’ll get references to books written by people from the American state of Georgia, you will also get references to English Literature written in the early 1700’s (the “Georgian” era), you need to dig a little to find the references to literature written by people from the Eastern European Country of Georgia.  The Georgian National Book Centre have a decent amount of information about the history of Georgian literature and rightfully celebrate the fact that the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2018 has confirmed Georgia as the Guest of Honour Country.

What is disappointing in their materials is (yet again) the lack of female representation, with Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili and Tamta Melashvili the only female representatives from sixteen writers in their projects to have works translated into another language in 2014.

If you are interested in exploring Georgian Literature in more detail, the Georgian National Book Centre has a wealth of information here http://book.gov.ge/en/ including links to databases of translated works here http://www.nplg.gov.ge/ec/en/euro/search.html

Today I look at Ekaterina Togonidze, (try Googling her!!!), winner of the Best Story of the Year in 2012 for her novella “The other w-a-y” (which has been translated into German but not English), a work which became the basis for her script for a full-length feature film. Her short-story collection “Anestezia” won the Best Debut Award at the 2012 Saba Annual Literary Competition. This is an annual literary prize founded in 2003 “aiming to reveal the best book of the year. The jury considers every literary work of the previous year published in Georgia, including original writings, translations of foreign literature into Georgian and foreign translations of Georgian works.” (‘Georgia Today’) A graduate in Journalism from the Tbilisi State University she became a news programme anchor and then a morning programme presenter in Georgian Public Broadcating. Her most recent novel “Asynchrony” was nominated for the Best Novel of the Year in the Saba Literary Award. A story about Siamese twins Lina and Daina who die in mysterious circumstances. Their absent father Rostom learns of their existence first through the fact of their death, then, page by page, from their poignant diary entries. More on this book here http://book.gov.ge/en/book/asynchrony/17/

Nice resume, pity you can find only one (yes one) of her works in English. The short story “It’s Me” (translated by Natalia Bukia-Peters & Victoria Field), which appears in the Dalkey Archive Press anthology “Best European Fiction 2015”.

A decent length short story, it is a first person narration about image and identity. Opening with a description of a recurring dream with a small child knocking on a door, with her head bowed and not answering the question “Who’s there?” we then switch to a television studio where our protagonist is being interviewed. The interview itself takes little (if any) of the story, and it is more a case of our writer explaining how she got there, her growth until this moment:

When I was a child, it made me unhappy when people told my mother I didn’t look anything like her. I thought she was beautiful. As I grew up, it made me unhappy when they said that I did look like her. As I reached puberty, my nose grew longer and my eyebrows became thicker.

When I went to university, I moved to the capital. Here, nobody knew my mom and no one could compare our features. I liked it, but I found it difficult to live alone and even harder to be among people. In the evenings I gazed at the fireplace, thinking I would drown in sadness. I waited impatiently for parcels from the village and scoffed down my mom’s plum sauce, chicken, and fresh cheese.

During my first vacation, I happily scurried home to Mandaeti, where the fruit had its own special flavor and the air smelled totally different.

Our story then leads to the reason our narrator is on television, she is the model example of the benefits of cosmetic surgery. Over the years she has completely changed her physical appearance, to the extent that she now lives with the cosmetic surgeon (who she calls “Daddy”). He moulds her to his desires.

During the television program there is also a wine tasting segment where the audience taste five wines in five different receptacles, as it turns out the wine is the same in each container but the flavour is different depending upon which container it has been drunk from.  “The type of vessel changes the constituents”.

A parallel story of our narrator who has had her own vessel (her body) changed to suit her lover’s desires.

A young girl awkward and alone, who struggled to maintain relationships becomes a celebrity at the hands of a surgeon.

As per all of my reviews I will not reveal the ending, you will need to read it yourself to understand where our protagonist ends up. A compact characterisation, a tale of forging an identity, of insecurities, and individuality. Another writer whose work I would like to explore further, pity there’s nothing else of hers available in English!!! Let’s hope “Asynchrony” will be picked up by a publisher and translated!!! We can hope....

Night - Vedrana Rudan (translated by Celia Hawkesworth)

Fancy spending a night with Tonka? She’s a foul-mouthed mother of one, who is watching tv with the volume turned down and a remote control in her hand. Besides the insomnia, she’s awaiting dawn where she’ll leave her husband, Kiki , for a younger man, Miki.

Welcome to the protagonist from hell, created by Croatian writer Vedrana Rudan. In an interview with Dalkey Archive Press, Ana Lucic said to Rudan “You use a lot of vulgarities. Not a style of writing is usually associated with women writers”, the response?

“I have never thought of myself as a “woman.” I am a human being who lives in a country in an age that allows the poor only one weapon in their duel with life, and that’s swearing. Swearing is the scream of a victim, their only normal way of speech. If they don’t swear aloud, they swear inside. There are many people out there who, after they read my book, realized what rage was brewing inside them. I am a loser, I don’t have lots of money, I don’t have power. But, I have an opportunity to express my rage and not many people have this opportunity. I didn’t want to break any rules, I didn’t even know that there were rules in literature. And this thing about how some people think only men can swear”

This is a 211 page work, which has a short prologue (explaining that Tonka is addressing us, as though an actress in a one person play) and then one “break”. It features long paragraphs that continue for numerous pages. Our “monologue” is being addressed to us (the reader), who interrupts every so often with an inane question. The basic plot of a sleepless, damaged woman, venting her hatred of the planet, whilst she prepares to run away with a younger man captures you from the opening lines of the main book itself:

I’m looking at the Ikea clock on top of the TV. The television is on, but the sound is off. There are some old women talking about something or other. Or maybe they aren’t old. They just have grey hair. And no teeth. I’d look like an old woman too, but every three weeks I pay Alexandra a hundred marks to dye my hair red. I’ve spent four thousand marks on dental work so I can laugh with my mouth open. But...I don’t laugh like that. When I was fourteen, the dentist pulled out my top left incisor. For years I laughed with my mouth closed. We were poor. My mother, my grandmother, and I. I bought myself my left tooth for my twenty-fourth birthday. I didn’t have a big smile even then. I still grin that way.

We learn of her poor upbringing, why she has no father, her bitterness towards her mother and grandmother, and throughout the Croatian vs Serb tensions and the horrors of war. The random killing of women and children, people having their throats cut, being thrown down wells, the rape and pillage, the concept of “motherland” and what people are fighting for all come bubbling to the surface, as Tonka rants her views toward us. As the imaginary reader who asks the inane questions, we appear more interested in the sexual connotations of the stories and keep bringing Tonka back to the stories of affairs, the tale of her best friend’s husband, who is drafted after a liaison with the director of the Defence Office’s wife. All of the tales bringing home a reality that people are more interested in the trivialities of life, they don’t want to hear about the horror.

Nothing is sacred and if you have strong opinions on just about any current affairs matter you are in for an ear bashing from Tonka. Her point of view is rapid fire on all matters, from the Twin Towers, to Coca Cola, to the media, Bill Clinton, Taliban, Serbs, men, women who stay with me, old people, young people, they’re all in Tonka’s sights.

Written whilst Vedrana Rudan was suffering a deep depression  this is not a book where I can quote larger sections without profanities or distorting the “stream of consciousness” style.  In the aforementioned interview, Rudan speaks of her “influences” whilst writing this work:

When I was writing this book I was going through a terrible depression. I had lost my job . . . I can’t even remember from which newspaper. I would wake up and think: this is the end! I am fifty-three-years old, nobody wants my work, and is there any life without writing? OK, OK, I have two kids, a husband, home, garden, my cat and my mom, but, between you and me, all this doesn’t give me an orgasm on a daily basis. I sat down in front of the typewriter, yes, a typewriter, and entered into a duel with the world that doesn’t know that someone in Croatia, sitting at the kitchen table, is at work one of the world’s greatest novels. I found a publisher immediately, I have no explanation for that. 

In a world where we are offended by strong language, where war atrocities are sugar coated to be palatable to the reading public, this book is a breath of fresh air simply by not playing to the expected rules. Confronting is a possible word, although it is worthwhile reading Rudan’s interview at the Dalkey Archive Press website here, simply to give you a taste for her style, her bitterness, her fighting to highlight the Croatian atrocities, put the interview on steroids and you’ve got a rough idea of what this book contains!!! If cynicism, conspiracy theories, candid use of a mirror up towards a society run by corrupt officials is your thing, then I suggest you give this work a try. Whilst potentially missing much of a plot and skipping back and forth as Tonka rambles, the mental unravelling of our protagonist is a voice that needs to be heard. Not fitting a usual narrative structure could also upset a few readers, however there are gems a plenty to make you double-take and check that you in fact inhabit the same planet as the people featured here.

Vedrana Rudan also has a story in the “Best European Stories 2015” anthology, a work titled “My Granddaughter’s Name Is Anita” (translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac) This story was the catalyst for me exploring her work further, and laying my hands on “Night” as reviewed above. A different musing on relationships:

My head is in the closet. I am sniffing my blouses. I count them. Forty-three colorful babes watch me merrily. White, green, red, pink, pale green, the color of water, black, I even have one the color of dirt. A big, dull, dark-brown blouse I don’t dare take it out of the closet because it is a gift from my husband. When he gave it to me I thought, God, you know nothing about me. A dark-brown blouse. A mound of dirt by a freshly dug grave.

There are a lot of common themes here, ribbons on wreaths, sex as a function, expensive clothes, porn films, maternal love, movies the opposite of real life. A sharp short story highlighting the perils of marriage.