Not<\/del> a Country<\/i><\/a> rightfully condemns. Despite the careful and insightful translation, however, the narrative voice driving Miano\u2019s entire book made it nearly impossible for me to move from sympathy to full-hearted empathy. Perhaps this narrative style was intended to make the horrors of the story less immediate; the effect, with so many explanatory asides and all its descriptions at a remove, made the story feel like a copy of a copy of a copy of a story I had once been told about \u201cAfrica,\u201d writ large. The country is a nameless one (not Cameroon); the rebellion is a vague one (not like any of the civil wars or unrest in recent history); and the village\u2019s primitiveness is so stark as to feel unreal. Cameroon is, in reality, far more complicated and modern than we might be led to believe from this novel. To give just one example: for all the abject poverty suffered throughout the continent, cell phone usage is extraordinarily high because of its advantages for communication and even for finances. I hoped for a novel that would give me a clearer picture of Cameroon (or even Africa) as it is now, and I was disappointed to read a novel that told me, at a remove, about an idea of Africa. Ultimately, I found myself scratching my head: what was different or special about this novel that the French Voices committee had seen fit to grant money toward its publication in English? The only answer I can plausibly think of is that it is a historical document of sorts. Its explanations and descriptions may provide a certain context to readers scarcely aware of Central Africa. But that hardly seems like reason enough to publish and share a book.<\/p>\nIn contrast, Budapest<\/em> continued to shock me and amaze me as I turned its pages toward its end. It seems odd that it should have surprised me: I had read most of it about six years ago after being given an excerpt, in French, to translate into English. It was an assignment from my French teacher, who had discovered the book while abroad with her husband over break. The two of them knew French and English and, preferring not to privilege one translation over another, had bought the two versions of Chico Buarque\u2019s original. (To this day, when somebody mentions their knowledge of Buarque as a famous musician, I have to mentally square that with my image of him as a solitary author.) The whole book itself centers on doubles and replacements and, yes, repetitions: a phrase at the beginning recurs in the book\u2019s final pages; the two cities and the narrator\u2019s two lives seem to parallel each other with the same struggles and challenges, even as the narrator becomes a copy of himself, replicating in Hungary the same ghostwriting work he had done in Brazil, until he surpasses the master for which he has ghostwritten\u2014an appropriate parallel to the moment when he realizes, in Brazil, that his boss has trained many young employees to write as perfectly, as precisely as he does, to the point that he worries he cannot even think a thought without their having already set it down on paper. As he finally writes a poem of his own, he realizes that \u201cThe words were mine, but they had a different weight. I wrote as if I were walking through my own house, but in water.\u201d The clarity and beauty of this image is not atypical of the entire book; each page glides with a musical fluidity fully enabled by Alison Entrekin\u2019s keen translation\u2014one that manages to portray in English the grammatical quirks of (at times) Hungarian-flavored Portuguese or a Portuguese that reflects a Portuguese-fractured phrase in Hungarian. I could remember the process of carefully converting each sentence from the French my professor had given me to English; even accounting for the fact that I was translating a translation, Entrekin\u2019s work outstripped mine entirely. I closed the book, and images came unbidden of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s narrow alleyways and quarrelsome relationships, and the ever-yellow (or is it ever-gray?) of Buda and Pest seen from the air, the two halves of the city split by the Danube.<\/p>\nI did say this wasn\u2019t much of a matchup. On the soccer field (or, ahem, football field for all you non-Americans reading my embarrassingly provincial commentary), Cameroon has been a frontrunner among the many teams hailing from the African continent, but its literary entry into the Tournament of Books can\u2019t even get a single goal past Brazil\u2019s writers\u2014especially not when that team includes Chico Buarque and Budapest.<\/em><\/p>\nThe score\u2019s a pretty clear-cut one: 4-0 Brazil. <\/p>\n
——<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Zuckerman is Digital Editor of<\/em> Music & Literature. His writing and translations have appeared in<\/em> The White Review, the<\/em> Los Angeles Review of Books, Best European Fiction, and<\/em> The Quarterly Conversation. In his free time, he does not listen to music.<\/em><\/p>\n——<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This match was judged by Jeffrey Zuckerman. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. The last time I watched a soccer game was in the last World Cup, in July of 2010. I had just graduated and moved off campus with my roommate from college. Down the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[46356,56526,4816,56536,56516,56546,1646,56556,56386],"class_list":["post-298176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-alison-entrekin","tag-budapest","tag-chico-buarque","tag-dark-heart-of-the-night","tag-jeffrey-zuckerman","tag-leonora-miano","tag-review","tag-tasmin-black","tag-world-cup-of-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317456,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298176\/revisions\/317456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}