{"id":430602,"date":"2020-04-27T14:55:06","date_gmt":"2020-04-27T18:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=430602"},"modified":"2020-04-27T15:42:58","modified_gmt":"2020-04-27T19:42:58","slug":"good-will-come-from-the-sea-by-christos-ikonomou-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/04\/27\/good-will-come-from-the-sea-by-christos-ikonomou-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Good Will Come from the Sea” by Christos Ikonomou [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Julia Sanches<\/strong> is a translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Daniel Galera, Claudia Hern\u00e1ndez, and Geovani Martins, among others, and is a founding member of Cedilla & Co.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Good Will Come from the Sea<\/em><\/a> by Christos Ikonomou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Archipelago Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ halfway through Christos Ikonomou\u2019s Good Will Come from the Sea<\/em>, as the titular story wound to an end, I realized I hadn\u2019t been breathing. My eyes were trained on the text, moving determinedly down the page, but my breath had caught somewhere between my lungs and the roof of my mouth. As Lazaros the Bow searched the island for his lost son\u2014\u201cIf Petros went into the Dragon Cave that night,\u201d the narrator muses, \u201cand if the cave stretches, as they say, whole kilometers beneath the island, and if the island is, as they say, hollow in places, then at some point he\u2019ll surely be able to hear him\u201d\u2014my breath remained shallow and my attention focused.<\/p>\n

It feels odd to read a book positing the distant aftermath of an economic crisis that for years left Greece gasping for air right as we\u2019re in the midst of another economic crisis whose lasting effects remain to be gauged. I wouldn\u2019t say this book leaves me with a sense of hope. But it does leave me with an aftertaste of resilience. In an interview<\/a> that framed Ikonomou as the \u201cAccidental Prophet of a Country in Crisis,\u201d the author claimed he wanted his work \u201cto show what it means to be human in a world that rapidly changes in a not very human way.\u201d Good Will Come from the Sea<\/em>, the second collection of Ikonomou\u2019s stories to come out in Karen Emmerich\u2019s faultless translation, is populated by people fighting to maintain their livelihoods and dignity under circumstances beyond their small, human control. To say this is a book about the crisis would be too limiting. Rather, it is a book about people staring foggily into a future difficult to discern while trying to navigate an unmarked present.<\/p>\n

Much of the tension across the collection is generated through repetition\u2014the book echoes like a cave\u2014and through a sort of temporal pulsion, a single moment stretched dangerously thin and then compressed in the second it takes for something to happen. The characters in each piece seem suspicious of the past, uneasy in the present, and understandably wary of putting too much stock in the future. The collection\u2019s title\u2014\u201cgood will come from the sea\u201d\u2014echoes across the book with a hint of despair but also of its sister feeling, hope, rolling the reader steadily toward the end.<\/p>\n

The collection is composed of four rather long stories, all of them set in the same place, featuring Greeks from the mainland who have moved to one of the less-affected, myth-steeped islands of the Aegean Sea in search of refuge. Here history and myth are a very distant backdrop, and the locals refer to the newcomers as \u201cforeigners\u201d who in turn refer to them as \u201crats.\u201d The conflict between both is set up in the opening piece, \u201cI\u2019ll Swallow Your Dreams,\u201d which takes place over one night and follows a group of friends who have gone to a place called the Refuge to celebrate Easter. One of them, Tasos, is a sort of village philosopher and the man seemingly responsible for the adage that will tiptoe across these stories: good will come from the sea<\/em>. Humiliated after a run-in with the rats, Tasos vanishes into one of the many caves that riddle the island, never to be seen again.<\/p>\n

In \u201cKill the German,\u201d one of the collection\u2019s more demented stories, Chronis, a young wheelchair-bound man who reads voraciously, has an active imagination, a pet scorpion, and a rollicking, sometimes cringey, sense of humor\u2014Karen Emmerich\u2019s skill as a translator is particularly tickling in this description: \u201cIt\u2019s a neologism. Or maybe a neoplasm. . . A psychic edema where I\u2019d prefer some psychedelica\u201d\u2014stares out his window at the house across the way, plotting the rescue of the girl the old man locks in his room every night. \u201cDon\u2019t listen to the other foreigners,\u201d Chronis says, \u201cgood will come from the sea not in a rowboat or on a ship, but in a floating wheelchair.\u201d It\u2019s a line that both explodes the notion of the mythical hero and positions him as the \u201cgood\u201d. Unsurprisingly, the closing image of Chronis clawing his way up to the room of the old man is a sad one, and his motivations for rescuing the girl\u2014\u201cYou don\u2019t know her,\u201d he tells us. \u201cIf you saw her you\u2019d understand. Like a doll. Soft blond fuzz. A body that glows like a candle in church\u201d\u2014are at best suspect.<\/p>\n

In \u201cKites in July,\u201d Artemis and Stavros linger by the ashes of the ouzeri they had been renovating by the seaside in an old building owned and abandoned by Artemis\u2019s uncle, who lives in Germany. (Germany, the real villain in this story.) As they envisage the ouzeri they will one day run, which they have decided to name Good Will Come from the Sea, their hopes for it extend beyond the restaurant itself and encompass the entire island, the entirety of the country, a brighter, fairer (read: less corrupt) world for them to live in. But there are rules, they are warned, and there are people who have been eyeing the location of their restaurant for years. Soon enough, their dream goes up in flames. Good Will Come from the Sea will never be any more than that\u2014a dream.<\/p>\n

Lazaros the Bow, the protagonist of the titular story, runs a taverna where his son Petros had worked until being hired away by a loud, monied man called Drakakis, under whose watch he disappears. Here, the good that will come from the sea is not some mythical hero or vague expectation, but a boy. Lazaros \u201ccloses his eyes for a moment and tries to imagine how it\u2019ll be. How it\u2019ll be to see Petros coming from the sea. He\u2019ll come from the sea, that\u2019s the only thing that\u2019s certain. Good will come from the sea. . .\u201d As each paragraph builds in tension and the thread of Lazaros\u2019 hope that he will find his son grows tauter and tauter, the prose takes on a prayer-like cadence. When Lazaros yells \u201cPeeetroooos! Petraaaakis!\u201d it is followed three times by the statement \u201cHis mouth loves his son\u2019s name,\u201d and three times Lazaros wonders what a man is called once he loses his child: \u201cWhat do they call you if you lose your child, what do they call you, what, what, what do that call you, what. . .\u201d Emmerich handles these incantations seamlessly, delivering to us the speech of a man driven to the edge of reason by sorrow, the words with which he tries to summon his son back to life standing somewhere between the ravings of a lunatic and the disciplined prayer of a man of faith.<\/p>\n

There is a story that I\u2019ve failed to mention, because I am still trying to put my finger on it, that weaves itself through the collection. In it, a young woman ministers to an aging father with a tenuous grasp on reality who, in moments of frenzy, sees all around him signs of an impending end. \u201cThese are signs,\u201d he says. \u201cJust like back then, it\u2019s the same way now, too. Only now it\u2019ll be worse. Now the end is coming. The real, final end.\u201d Some of the signs, echoes of stories past and presages of stories to come, are \u201cpeople disappearing into caves and fish coming out onto dry land and paralytics getting up out of their wheelchairs.\u201d A sense of disquiet is generated in the spaces between the text not unlike the disquiet we feel when we read about climate change, the pandemic, political corruption, unchecked capitalism, and economic collapse. The feeling that life is closing in on us. We are living through a present in which all around us are harbingers of the end times and yet we, much like Lazaros and Chronis and Artemis and Stavros, just keep trudging on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Julia Sanches is a translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Daniel Galera, Claudia Hern\u00e1ndez, and Geovani Martins, among others, and is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":423572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[2176,70472,70462,70482,18056,37876],"class_list":["post-430602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-archipelago-books","tag-christos-ikonomou","tag-good-will-come-from-the-sea","tag-julia-sanches","tag-karen-emmerich","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430602","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=430602"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":430972,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430602\/revisions\/430972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}