April 21

“I’m absolutely convinced that publishing being in the hands of businessmen is just a passing episode.”

—-Carlos Barral

Every year’s the same at around this time. The number of illiterates in this country is on the increase, but this seems to be unimportant, there are more and more Book Days and it’s up to me to explain why we have to read. Yesterday, on the radio, I was invited to explain to listeners in two seconds why they should be encouraged to read. For them literally to be encouraged, I replied. I was going to add: and at the same time to achieve the spirit’s salvation, Musil’s ideal. I didn’t say this, it struck me as excessive and also I’d have overstepped the two-second limit.

I am no longer so rigidly literature-sick. Or, rather, I begin not to understand why I must advocate reading. Let every illiterate in this country do what he wants, of course. Besides, I hate virtually the whole of humanity and I spend the day planting mental bombs against all those businessmen who publish books, those departmental managers, market directors on the wire, and economics graduates. I plant mental bombs against them and against their disciplined followers and the rest of the world in general. So I wonder why I should lend them a hand and recommend that they read books if I only wish them ill, if I only want their stupidity to grow and for them to crash, once and for all, as they travel on the train of ignorance that we all pay for, but that one day they will pay a high price for, falling into the bottomless pit of failure, taking themselves elsewhere, into a different industry. What’s more, I loathe them so much that I’d be delighted if they were obliged to read, if a perfidious decree appeared from somewhere, a drastic order to become acquainted with books, and suddenly this country’s cities turned into libraries of forced, chaotic, daft intellectual activity.

In this way the failure of these haughty illiterates’ lives would be twofold. On the one hand there would be the already in itself resounding failure of all life, to which would be added that brought about by contact with literates—nobody doubts by now that to be a writer is to tail—not to mention with books, those astonishing “extensions of memory and imagination” that we take to beaches and cause to fail, not by reading them but by burying them in an unconscious great book of sand, very different from Borges’s.

This would be my revenge for the calls to advocacy that always arrive at around this time and for the constant doubts that plague me and drive me wretchedly to say that no one can be advised to read, but also drive me to think that really, however much I don’t like it, I should advocate reading, albeit only in a stylized way by saying, for example, that there’s nothing to say, except that, without literature, life has no meaning. But, of course, I can only convince those who read of this. And the fact is many of those who read believe it’s an obligation, and they are almost more dangerous than Pico’s moles because they convey an obvious sensation of boredom, they seem not to have read that memorable statement by Montaigne: “I do nothing without joy.”

With this statement, Montaigne wished to indicate that the concept of obligatory reading is a false one. If he came across a difficult passage in a book, Montaigne left it. The point is he saw in reading a form of happiness. Like Borges, who said that a book must not require effort. Borges agreed with Montaigne, though he loved to quote Emerson, who contradicted Montaigne and, in a great essay about books, asserted that a library is a kind of magic box. The best spirits of humanity are imprisoned in this box by an enchanter, and they’re waiting for our word to come out of their silence. We have to open the book, then they awake.

That said—I wish to distance myself from any new temptation to advocacy—the company of literature is dangerous, so much so that I’m really not sure I should applaud people I value for reading a lot and getting so involved in books; you see, I wish them well, and anyone who has read Kafka, for example, is perfectly aware “how much exces­sive anxiety for nothing” (to quote Pessoa) there is in literature.

As Magris says: “Kafka was perfectly aware that literature distanced him from the territory of death and enabled him to understand life, but leaving him outside. Just as it enabled him to understand the greatness of his Jewish father, a model man, but did not exactly enable him to be like him.”

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it leaves us outside it. It’s hard, but sometimes it’s the best thing that can happen to us. Reading and writing search for life, but they can lose it precisely because they’re focused entirely on life and on the search for it.

It may be the melancholy of the evening in which I am writing, but the truth is I’m talking about an inextricable knot of good and evil, of light and shade inherent in reading and literature. All this is hard, why fool ourselves? It’s a difficulty that, according to Gombrowicz, good literature has as the product of an instinct to sharpen spiritual life. There are times when I would recommend reading to my worst enemies.

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it tells us what can be, but also what could have been. There is nothing sometimes farther away from reality than literature, which is constantly reminding us that life is like this and the world has been organized like that, but it could be otherwise. There is nothing more subversive than literature, which aims to return us to true life by exposing what real life and History smother. Magris knows this very well, he is deeply interested in what could have been, had History or human life taken another course. Anyone who’s interested in this is interested in reading. This is not advocacy. After all, there are times—like now—when I wouldn’t recommend reading even to Pico’s moles, even to my worst enemies.

Translated by Jonathan Dunne.Ěý

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Jovanka Živanović’s novella, Fragile Travelers, also contains a dreamer. Her name is Emilija, or Ema, which is surely not a coincidence. In her waking life she is a high-school teacher. In her dreams she is much more: philosophical, introspective, able to fly, carrying a serpent baby in her womb. Dream things. And she has, perhaps accidentally, captured a man within her dreams.

Petar Naumov, an architect, lucky with the ladies, and bored at home, is this man. The opening chapter, which is narrated with a cool detachment that juxtaposes pleasingly with the later chapters which are told almost entirely in first-person, has Petar’s wife return home to discover that he might have been burned up in a house-fire, although the evidence for this is more than a touch sketchy. On the fourth page of the novella we are told, “On his way to buy some coffee, Petar ended up in a woman’s dream—and got stuck there.” So has he died, or is he missing, or has something else entirely occurred?

Lest this concept frighten the less intrepid reader, Živanović takes pains to assure us that this novella, though it may explore difficult themes in a challenging manner, will remain, in terms of style, light and welcoming. Here is Petar’s wife Anđelija reflecting on her life immediately upon discovering that her husband has likely burned to death:

She’d just come back from a seminar organized by a well-respected, globally renowned insurance company where she had recently secured herself a job. She’d learned how to convince people that there was nothing more urgent or more important than insurance.

This playfulness continues in chapter titles, which includes such examples as Chapter 8, “Association Games are for Experienced Players Only,” or Chapter 7, “The Importance of Hydro Potential in Maintaining Mental Hygiene.”

These chapters alternate relatively smoothly between Petar and Ema as they explore these dreams and attempt to come to terms with the people they have ended up becoming, and how that reflects on the man or woman they wish to be. Such introspection runs the risk of coming across as maudlin and self-indulgent, akin to the plaintive musings of a sullen sixteen year old, but by using the idea of the dreamer and the dreams, these traps are almost entirely avoided, and instead Živanović is able to dig deep to discover the true yearnings of her characters while retaining a light tone. Consider:

I admired everything about him because of my idiotic enthusiasm for people who could do everything that I couldn’t: pilots, parachutists, divers, surgeons, high-rise window washers, professional prostitutes, jugglers, and practitioners of other marvelous crafts.

It is hard not to smile at the phrase ‘idiotic enthusiasm.” Živanović’s writing reminds one of Gonçalo Manuel Tavares habit of blending the clever with the witty or, perhaps closer to home, the writing of Svetislav Basara, particularly the funnier parts of The Cyclist Conspiracy, or the entirety of Chinese Letter. Živanović remains aware, however, that a character thinking a thought is not sufficient to elevate it to the profound. Again borrowing from Flaubert, when characters think with humdrum thoughts, a similar technique of italicisation is utilised. For example: “My accomplishment was really something to take my hat off to.” Instantly the text elevates the banal by drawing attention to it.

Petar and Ema, as the novella progresses, become bound closer together as Petar begins to understand the dream world in which he has found himself, and Ema comes to terms with her inner and outer fragility. Wanting—or needing—a protector isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness, and being able to protect another person doesn’t always mean that you are strong.

It’s worth noting that, although the word “dream,” or some variation thereof, has been used ten times in this review, Fragile Travelers is, in fact, a readable, concrete, tangible piece of work. Yes, there are times when a character’s brain will (metaphorically) jump from his head and frolic in the grass like a sheep, but more often the novella is written to be understood—it is well anchored in reality. This is a novella about dreams that refrains from being dreamlike. The occasional use of an omniscient narrator further anchors the text, which provides the reader with the comfort that, no matter how far the text may roam, there is always a light shining the way home.

I know everyone is still reeling from not being able to correctly guess all the finalists for the 2015 BTBA fiction and poetry shortlists before yesterday’s official announcement, so we’ll just cut right to Vince’s review:

What to make of Vano and Niko, the English translation of Erlom Akhvlediani’s work of the same name, as well as the two other short books that comprise a sort of trilogy? Quick searches will inform the curious reader that these short pieces (what contemporary writers would call flash fiction) resemble fables and that Akhvlediani’s characters sound a bit like Vladimir and Estragon, Clov and Hamm, and any number of Beckett creations. Which is not to say that Akhvlediani is a Beckett imitator or that his work is really all that Beckettian. The two share a tendency to explore philosophical questions through seemingly simple characters and their exchanges, but the dialectical approach is about where it ends. Which is not to say that Akhvlediani is not an absurdist. That rigid title might not fit perfectly, but it is through such a lens that I was able to find joy in Vano and Niko.

Full disclosure: I read Akhvlediani’s book, translated by Mikheil Kakabadze, immediately after finishing a short story collection by an American writer who clearly took notes during her MFA workshops. Subsequently, I enjoyed the sparseness of Vano and Niko, the immediacy of the prose, the lack of character development, and total abandonment of unnecessary description. If Hemingway’s old adage is correct, that prose is architecture not interior design, then Vano and Niko is a set of beams and girders without walls.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Full disclosure: I read Akhvlediani’s book, translated by Mikheil Kakabadze, immediately after finishing a short story collection by an American writer who clearly took notes during her MFA workshops. Subsequently, I enjoyed the sparseness of Vano and Niko, the immediacy of the prose, the lack of character development, and total abandonment of unnecessary description. If Hemingway’s old adage is correct, that prose is architecture not interior design, then Vano and Niko is a set of beams and girders without walls.

While the writing is not what any MFA workshop would condone, which, again, was refreshing, the book is more than a mere set of bare exchanges. Many of the brief pieces contain philosophical gems or, at the very least, food for thought. It is not without surprise that I learned of a Georgian university adding Vano and Niko to its curriculum. There are parable-like moments that could open heady discourse, yet I still can’t get past the simple pleasure of the book’s absurdity. Shall we be the academics who sift for meaning or shall we be like Vano and Niko and simply exist?

The most striking philosophical indictment came in the book’s second section, “The Story of a Lazy Mouse,” specifically a chapter called “The Teacher Fox.” The story is a simple one: a fox is tasked with raising seven baby chicks. He teaches one to count to six, then the next to count to five, and so on until the seventh chick is taught nothing. Each chick is aware of a limited number of days passing: the chick who only knows how to count to three understands that the sun has risen only three times. The chick who knows no numbers doesn’t care. No days have passed. It’s all the same.

So what’s going on? I see something here about man-made construction of value and the ridiculousness of imposing order on nature or the fluidity of signifiers. But the story ends with the fox quizzing his chicks:

How many of you were left during the springtime?
“Six,” answered the first chick, which only knew how to count to six.
The fox swallowed the first chick for giving the wrong answer.

The fox continues to ask his chicks questions they can only answer incorrectly. And he eats all of them, save for the last chick who, knowing nothing, answers “none.” The fox spares the chick temporarily—“since there were ‘none’ left, what would he eat?”—but the chick ends up eating the fox because the chick was uneducated and didn’t know that chicks are not supposed to eat foxes.

I laughed at the end of the story, but I couldn’t help but search for something deeper in this odd tale. The stupid rigidity of roles? The inherent flaws in education? How the process of true knowledge is impeded though the hierarchical structure of teacher-student? Maybe. I could tease it out and write a review that favors this reading (maybe write a paper and publish it—tenure here I come!), but imposing meaning on this silly story would perhaps mean that Akhvlediani gets the last laugh. From the grave, he managed to get me to apply analysis to a story that seems to be about the absurdity of analysis. The joke’s on me!

I didn’t realize this until Karen pointed it out, but Dalkey has a available on their website. Looks like all of these ask the same six questions—all of which are interesting and worth asking, but lead to some pretty entertaining comments when applied to writing from Liechtenstein. Witness:

Do you see your work as fitting into the traditions of European fiction—or indeed any national or regional tradition?

I’m not part of a Liechtenstein tradition of literature, because there is no Liechtenstein literature, and never has been. There are a handful of authors in Liechtenstein, but they are individuals and solitary; there are no groups and no common ground. [. . .]

Are there any exciting trends, movement, or schools in contemporary Liechtenstein fiction? Who do you feel are the overlooked contemporary authors writing in Liechtenstein who should be more widely read and translated?

How could there be one? Literature and publishing need a critical mass in order to function. The Nanoprincipality of Liechtenstein isn’t even remotely close to this size. There’s also the fact that for the past century our national sport has been banking secrecy, keeping absolutely silent and discreet. [. . .]

Are there enough publishing outlets in Liechtenstein for contemporary fiction? Is there a market for literary fiction in Liechtenstein?

No. There isn’t a publishing house that would bring out the professional, long-term, and programmatic literature that comes out in and around Liechtenstein. That would presume a small national market: let’s say, to be generous, that such books would sell 500 to 800 copies. Those numbers are all the reason that there isn’t a publishing house here. It would only be possible if the government decided to use state funds for such an endeavor. Since literature is always a betrayal—especially considering Liechtenstein’s banking secrecy—we’re far more likely to have a Royal Liechtenstein Space Station on Titan than to finance a publisher of Liechtenstein’s literature.

Do you want your work to be translated? Why or why not?

No, of course not. I never would have taken part in BEF 2011 if the Archbishop hadn’t ordered it and if the royal service hadn’t threatened me with confiscation of my state-subsidized electric bike.

Brilliant! Dead serious that this makes me want to read Sprenger’s story . . . He sounds so entertaining.

On a sidenote, I’m really not sure how you’re supposed to answer the “do you want your work to be translated” question. If anyone says no, it’s for reasons that are likely pretentious and irritating. And the most common answer to yes has to be that translation helps you reach a larger audience, and, in this context, reinforces the belief that you’re only a “real author” if your work is available in English. But I’m maybe reading too much into this . . .

Regardless, I wish all interviews were this entertaining.

¹ Anyone know more about Nigg? Very interested, but there’s next to no info online . . .

Best European Fiction for 2011 has hit the bookstores and review sections of your favorite cultural papers, but there’s some pretty bad non-fiction behind the best fiction Dalkey offers.

Sometime in April of 2010 I was informed that my story (“My Girlfriend”) was to be included in the 2011 Best European Fiction edition (as the Croatian representative, yay!). This was, naturally, quite a delightful piece of news for me; an opportunity to reach the vast English speaking market, as writing in so-called small languages can be quite a limitation to one’s literary ambitions. Dalkey received my story not in Croatian, but in English; it was I who translated it. As a conscientious author, and not wanting to be misread nor derided for my command of the lingua franca of the universe, before I’d sent it in, I had it (proof) read by a few native speakers, including my American professor of creative writing (American as in born, raised, writing and teaching in the U.S.).

All seemed well; no one from Dalkey contacted me except to sign a contract that allowed the publisher to use the story, or parts of it, for their advertising and other purposes. There was nothing in the contract about the text of the story itself, nothing about editorial interventions, proofreading etc. And why should there be? Even in “uncivilized” non-EU and non-U.S. countries (such as mine) we know that a publisher/editor ought to consult the author should they think it necessary to change their text. And one would expect this to be doubly true of Dalkey who are hailed as the trailblazer of translated fiction in the English-speaking world, are producing a report on best practices in publishing translations and have in fact published a guide to editing translations (!)

As no one contacted me about any edits, I presumed everything was fine with the story. Imagine then my astonishment when the Anthology arrived at my doorstep (in December 2010) and I realized that a diligent Dalkey editor not only made quite a few interventions in the text, but they also inserted (!) a piece of text that changed/determined sex of my narrator! As this gender/sex ambiguity is one of the thematic pillars of my story, this benevolent editorial intervention (which made the narrator a man and the relationship heterosexual!) completely changed my story, its aims and effects. To be sure, the author is not, nor can they be, the owner of the interpretation, but surely they should be the owner of their text? The copy editor’s job is not to rewrite or retell the story in their own words—but rather to intervene as little as possible and if they do change something, to check with the author before the text goes to print. Is this too much to ask of Dalkey? And is it unfair to ask this: Would this have happened to me if I had been an American author?

Needless to say, I was utterly shocked, appalled and flabbergasted by this act—especially as Dalkey (and this ambitious publication) was the last publisher I expected to get this kind of treatment from (I had my stories published in the UK before; in Chroma Journal and on Pulp.net, and both editors communicated with me about any/every edit). Also, this editorial gender-(re)assignment surgery was to me not only an artistic but also an ideological insult. I’m a lesbian writer, or rather—a writer who happens to be a lesbian—and I also happen to be a gender theorist—so whenever I write I’m absolutely conscious of the factor of identity and how important it is to play with it, subvert it. I would have thought that a reputable American publisher would be aware of such issues and of how language constructs reality and vice versa.

I don’t write straight stories; and I don’t want anyone to be straightening my stories, in any way, sexual or textual—and certainly not without my consent. I wrote to Dalkey to say I was sorry my story was ever published in the anthology under my name because their “editing” turned it into somebody else’s. It’s a piece of fiction I would never produce. This didn’t impress them much. The editorial director, John O’Brien said he didn’t know why these changed were made and offered to have a conversation (between myself and Dalkey) published in their magazine CONTEXT in which we would, in a civilized manner, discuss the matter (and presumably allow them to call the shots again). A barbaric creature from the Balkans, I never replied to his email.

Finally, I’d like to share with you the concrete details of editorial/proofreading interventions, so you can judge whether they were needed. To be sure, even if they had been, the mere fact no one ever contacted me to confirm I was OK with them (and they had at least half a year to do so, for the meager 5 pages of my story), they never asked for my authorization. If you have a look at the list of the “edits,” you’ll notice that not only did they change the rhythm of the story, the syntax and the sound but they went so far as to (re)interpret the story for the reader. How patronizing—both on myself and the readers.

Here are some of the more problematic edits (the first one is horrific, but the other ones weren’t pretty to look at either):

original:
Although she is blind, when we go out my girlfriend likes to make herself up. Sometimes I get a feeling she is flirting, but I suppose I’m just being paranoid.

edited:
Although she can’t see herself (why change this?), my girlfriend likes to make herself up when we go out. Sometimes I get a feeling she is flirting WITH OTHER MEN (nb: nowhere in the story do I suggest the narrator is a man!) etc.

—

original:
Some will say it’s as good as cheating, but those are the dull people always ready to explain to you the difference between love and fiction.

edit:
Some might say this is cheating, but only the same sort of dull people who’re always happy to explain the difference between love and make believe to you.

There is a big difference between the word FICTION and “make believe.” FICTION also refers to WRITING. why they had to change this one is BEYOND ME.

—

original:
Maybe some of the girls were boys, too.

edit:
Maybe some of the girls were actually boys anyway.

Why change this sentence?

—

original:
And now, after four years, it’s sort of passé, a matter too inappropriate to discuss

edit:
And now, after four years, it’s sort of too late – it would be too delicate to bring it up.

PASSE is not the same as too late. It has its own register, meaning and TONE. If I used it, that’s because I WANTED to use it. There was NOTHING wrong with the original, so why change it?

—

original:
She can tell the time by the smell of the stuff in the pan.

edit:
She can tell how long something’s been frying by the way it smells.

Why change this sentence? why, why, why?!

—

original:
When they hear my girlfriend is blind, most often people will first remember the downsides of dating a blind person, like missing out on the best part – the exchange of meaningful looks, the foreplay of signals, the silent innuendos.

edit:
When they hear my girlfriend is blind, most often people will first remember the downsides of dating a blind person, like missing out on the best partS OF BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP – the exchange of meaningful looks, the foreplay of signals, the silent innuendos.

WHY ADD THAT BIT? Those are NOT the best parts of being in a relationship, actually.

They’re part of the DATING.

I hope this letter will be a valuable lesson to the reading/writing/translating community and the publishers of the world. I know editor’s job is stressful one, but this fact by no means should relieve them of the responsibility for the mistakes they make. If I had a dentist pull out a wrong tooth or plumber flood my bathroom instead of fixing the pipe, I’d do my all to make them face to the consequences of the crappy job they’d done. As I’m sure Dalkey editors would do, too. Because no one likes walking the world toothless; and this is how things are done in the civilized world.

Sincerely,
Mima Simić

All posts in this series can be found here. And today’s entry is from THA REALIST Edmund Wilson ³ on Michal Ajvaz.

The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz, translated by Andrew Oakland

Language: Czech
Country: Czech Republic
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Pages: 336

Why It Should Win: Nabokov + Borges + Swift = Ajvaz; Dalkey Archive is one of the premiere publishers of translations; praised by the Hipster Book Club; much better than Ajvaz’s The Other City

“The Book You All Must Choose to Win BTBA 2010, Unless You Are All Pompous Egoists Like That Ass Nabokov”

by THA REALIST Edmund Wilson ³

You know, the Kingdom wasn’t such a bad place until that pompous ass Nabokov got up here. I had a nice run of about five years, just me and the deity talking over those really interesting questions of language and reality, the relationship between them, how this all pertains to novels. Wittgenstein would drop by from time to time. It was nice. But the inevitable had to happen sooner or later, that old émigré son of a bitch had to die sometime. So Mr. Genius of all Geniuses finally kicks himself over, and here he comes floating up on butterfly wings—I mean, puh-leeze, butterfly wings? where’d those even come from?—and let me tell you, for any of you who think the deity is full of Him/Herself, you should have seen it when Nabokov floated on up to the Kingdom of God . . . “oh, gee Mr. Nabokov, tell me how you channeled Pushkin for that—excuse the pun—god-like translation. Tell me again how unconventional you were when you wrote Lolita . . .”

It was enough to make me sick, if sickness had any meaning up here, although I have to admit, it was plenty fun watching the old man get all in a lather over that “idiot son” of his (his words, not mine) claiming to have spoken with his ghost. He was in such a rage, and impotent to do a thing! Guess real life isn’t like “The Vane Sisters,” is it Nabby! Heh, heh, heh . . . You should have seen him the day T.O.O.L.—that’s what he calls it, tool that he is—the day T.O.O.L. was published. You’d have thought the fallen angel had returned there was so much commotion. I have to give it to him, the Kingdom really shook that day.

But anyway, I digress. I bring up Nabokov—pompous ass that he is—only to introduce The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz, the book that hack Nabokov would have written if he had any real talent, instead of just ego. It takes little butterfly-boy’s favorite conceit—that whole bit about language being reality and vice versa—but he transports it to an island world Nabokov couldn’t have dreamed up if he wrote ten Pale Fires. He populates this island with a civilization that makes Zembla look like the little podunk backwater it is—I mean, he describes it in detail for a good 150 pages, half the book, and I was riveted the whole damn time! Waterfalls inside of houses! Walls made of water! Telling time via smell! It was all so truly creative, and the best thing was that every one of these beautiful details doubled as a metaphor for the way language mediates reality. Oh, and no kiddy porn in the whole book. Imagine that.

The plot of the book is that years ago a European took a trip to this island, and now he’s making a sort of ethnological study of it from what he remembers. At the center of their society is this Book that they hand around and all write in—like a pen and paper Wikipedia. And then after the narrator is done describing the society that gave rise to this incredible Book, then Ajvaz indulges in the Borgesian conceit (he hates Nabokov too, by the way), the Borgesian conceit of a book within a book that tunnels down into itself nearly down to infinity. The book as reductio ad absurdum—brilliant! And we read this book alongside the narrator—which is a great book in and of itself, despite (or because of) it’s near-infinite nature—and this book-within-a-book-within-a-book comes to reflect on the whole society the narrator has just spent the previous 150 pages describing in such staggering detail. It’s all so brilliant. You can just turn to a page at random, and I bet you there will be a line or a sentence or a paragraph there that you could muse about for the rest of the day.

Really, if you extracted all the genuine talent in Nabokov (minus that cancerous lump of an ego) and tossed in a liberal dash of Borges and a touch of Swiftian satire, well, there you would have Michal Ajvaz. The book is surely the most staggering translation to be published in 2010.