FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Selected by
Frank Wynne
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
AN APOLLO BOOK
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About Found in Translation
‘Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.’ —George Steiner
It is impossible to overstate the influence world literatures have had in defining each other. No culture exists in isolation; all writers are part of an intertwining braid.
Found in Translation brings together one hundred glittering diamonds of world literature, celebrating not only the original texts themselves but also the art of translation. From Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan, by way of China and Brazil, some of the greatest voices of world literature come together in thunderous chorus. If the authors include prize winners, some of the translators are equally famous – D. H. Lawrence and Edith Wharton translate classic Italian short stories, and Victoria Hislop has taken her first venture into translation with the only short story written by Constantine P. Cavafy.
This exciting, original and brilliantly varied collection of stories takes the reader literally on a journey: it’s the perfect way to travel the globe, and to travel in time.
CONTENTS
Welcome Page
About Found in Translation
Dedication
Introduction
Epigraph
Miguel de Cervantes
The Glass Graduate
Pu Songling
The Tiger Guest
E. T. A. Hoffmann
The Sandman
Alexander Pushkin
The Shot
Wilhelm Hauff
The Severed Hand
Theodor W. Storm
Immensee
Ivan Turgenev
The Dog
Gustave Flaubert
A Simple Heart
Leo Tolstoy
God Sees the Truth, But Waits
Pédro Antonio de Alarcón
The Tall Woman
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
The Fortune Teller
Enrico Castelnuovo
It Snows
Alphonse Daudet
L’Arlésienne
Émile Zola
The Attack on the Mill
Giovanni Verga
Malaria
Bolesław Prus
A Legend of Old Egypt
Guy de Maupassant
Mother Savage
Knut Hamsun
Secret Sorrow
Anton Chekhov
Rothschild’s Fiddle
Rabindranath Tagore
Kabuliwala
Constantine P. Cavafy
In the Light of Day
Gabriele D’Annunzio
San Pantaleone
Jalil Mammadguluzade
The Post Box
Maxim Gorky
Twenty-Six Men and a Girl
Ichiyō Higuchi
Child’s Play
Thomas Mann
The Path to the Cemetery
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay
Mahesh
Horacio Quiroga
The Pursued
Robert Walser
Kleist in Thun
Zsigmond Móricz
Seven Pennies
Premchand
The Chess Players
Lu Xun
Kong Yiji
Nescio
The Freeloader
Franz Kafka
In the Penal Colony
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
Sorrow-Acre
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
The Tattooer
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Rashōmon
Bruno Schulz
The Street of Crocodiles
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz
The Birch Grove
Isaac Babel
Salt
Josep Pla
A Conversation in St. James’s Park
Jorge Luis Borges
The Library of Babel
Banaphul
What Really Happened
Vladimir Nabokov
Details of a Sunset
Nina Berberova
The Resurrection of Mozart
Halldór Laxness
An Inland Fishing Trip
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Gimpel the Fool
Marguerite Yourcenar
The Milk of Death
Irène Némirovsky
We Once Were Happy
Daniil Kharms
The Lecture
Samuel Beckett
Ping
Máirtín Ó Cadhain
The Hare-Lip
Dino Buzzati
Seven Floors
Sait Faik Abasıyanık
The Boy on the Tünel
Mercè Rodoreda
The Salamander
Naguib Mahfouz
The Answer Is No
Saadat Hasan Manto
Toba Tek Singh
Julio Cortázar
Axolotl
Bohumil Hrabal
A Dull Afternoon
Ismat Chughtai
The Quilt
Heinrich Böll
Action Will Be Taken
Clarice Lispector
Happy Birthday
Satyajit Ray
Two Magicians
Leonardo Sciascia
The Long Crossing
Italo Calvino
The Poisonous Rabbit
Shūsaku Endō
Incredible Voyage
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
All That Is Gone
Yukio Mishima
Patriotism
Kōno Taeko
Full Tide
Gabriel García Márquez
The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow
Samira ‘Azzam
Tears for Sale
Camara Laye
The Eyes of the Statue
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
The Voice of the Turtle
Thomas Bernhard
The Crime of an Innsbruck Shopkeeper’s Son
Aharon Appelfeld
Cold Spring
Ismail Kadaré
Before the Bath
Maryse Condé
The Breadnut and the Breadfruit
Xi Xi
A Woman Like Me
Khalida Husain
Dead Letter
António Lobo Antunes
Before Darkness Falls
Antonio Tabucchi
Waiting for Winter
Oh Jung-hee
Garden of My Childhood
Dubravka Ugrešić
A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun
Quim Monzó
Family Life
Roberto Bolaño
Last Evenings on Earth
Herta Müller
Oppressive Tango
Hamid Ismailov
The Stone Guest
László Krasznahorkai
Bankers
Paweł Huelle
Silver Rain
Yu Hua
On the Road at Eighteen
José Eduardo Agualusa
The Man with the Light
Manon Uphoff
Desire
Teresa Solana
The Son in Law
Miljenko Jergović
You’re the Angel
Etgar Keret
The Nimrod Flipout
Kim Yŏng-ha
Lizard
Dorthe Nors
She Frequented Ceme
teries
Mirja Unge
Oranges
Clemens Meyer
In the Aisles
Acknowledgements
Extended Copyright
About Frank Wynne
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
In memory of David Miller
INTRODUCTION
I have a memory of the first short story that made an impression on me that is so vivid, so visceral that the hair on the back of my neck still prickles thirty years later. I would have been fourteen, perhaps fifteen, when I read it, sitting in Miss Collins’ French class, in Sligo Grammar School. She had told us to read “En mer” by Guy de Maupassant, a brief story, no more than five pages long, whose sparse, plain language was just within the grasp of our rudimentary French. It is the simple story of an accident aboard a fishing trawler manned by two brothers. On their return to port, the net is almost lost in a heavy squall and the younger brother’s arm is trapped between the ropes and the gunwale. To save the arm would mean cutting the rope and losing the valuable net. The elder brother instead drops anchor and, eventually, the fishermen manage to free the arm, now shattered and horribly mangled. Gangrene quickly sets in. I can still remember sitting at my desk, reading the sentence where the younger brother “… began to cut his own arm. He cut carefully, painstakingly, slicing through the last tendons with a blade as sharp as a razor; soon there was nothing but a stump.” I apologise for this spoiler, but an even greater emotional shock awaits the reader in the final sentences.
This was the story that first offered me a glimpse of the unique power of the short story. Maupassant’s tone is detached and unemotional, something that makes the horror all the more devastating. I began to devour short stories wherever I could find them – I remember the profoundly unsettling feeling of reading Ian McEwan’s stories in First Love, Last Rites, and my first encounters with John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor. Long before I was fortunate enough to stumble into a career as a translator – or had an inkling of what such a peculiar shapeshifter might be – translators introduced me to other masters of the genre: to Chekhov and Pushkin, Borges and Calvino. I discovered that a short story has the matchless ability to capture a mood or a moment, to halt time, to suspend the commonplace and imbue everyday objects with startling power. A short story can conjure a whole world in a handful of pages, it can be poignant, tragic, funny or surreal, it can leave a reader tearful, terrified or inexplicably serene, it can be as fleeting and unfinished as lives glimpsed from a moving train or as forensically precise as an autopsy report. In the words of the great American writer, Walter Mosley: “A good short story asks a question that can’t be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.”
Although every language, as it emerges, develops an oral tradition of storytelling intended to entertain or edify – countless anecdotes, parables and fables that range from the Book of Job to the folk tales told by Scheherazade to Sultan Shahriyar – the short story as we know today is the most recent literary genre. It begins to flourish in the nineteenth century – almost three hundred years after the novel – spurred by the rise of literacy in industrialised countries and the appearance of magazines and periodicals eager to publish shorter fictions. As William Boyd succinctly puts it: “The short story arrived fully fledged in the middle of the 19th century and by its end, in the shape of Anton Chekhov, had reached its apotheosis.”
Even taking this narrow definition of a short story, the task of selecting one hundred from the countless stories translated from any language, from any country is – to say the least – a daunting task. So, when I was asked to edit this anthology I was both preposterously excited and utterly terrified. Obviously, it is impossible to read every story; how then do you decide when you have read enough? Since an introduction is usually the last part of a book to be written, I now know the answer: you will never have read enough.
From the outset, I decided that I wanted to cast my net as widely as possible, to offer a glimpse of as many countries and cultures, as many languages as would fit between these covers and simultaneously to try to chart a course from the seventeenth century to short masterpieces of the twenty-first century. The usual suspects are here – the Russians, the French and the Germans who (with the British and the Americans) dominated the short story form for almost a century – but there are also stories from countries as varied as Guinea and Vietnam, and stories translated from Azerbaijani and Gikuyu. There are a dozen writers in these pages who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature and others who are all but unknown outside their homelands.
These, then, are the writers. But with the exception of those few authors who have translated their own work (Isak Dinesen, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), the words you are reading are those of translators. If, as Susan Sontag says, translation is “the circulatory system of the world’s literatures”, then translators are the beating heart that makes it possible for stories to flow beyond borders and across oceans. Their task is as simple as it may seem impossible: to quote Günter Grass, “Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.” It is not a matter of finding equivalent words (since there is never an exact equivalence), but of weighing the weight and heft of words while striving to preserve the cadence and the rhythm of a sentence, to reinvent a pun, to produce a voice that lives on the page. Like a pianist transforming a written score into a performance of the Goldberg Variations, or an actor taking a play and becoming Hedda Gabler, a translator must interpret and perform, while hewing as closely as possible to the shape of the original. It is a process that is thrilling and frustrating, often challenging and always rewarding. The debt we owe to translators often goes unacknowledged; we talk about having read Tolstoy or Proust when actually we have read Constance Garnett or C.K. Scott Moncrieff. We talk about the style of García Marquez or Murakami, but the style we so admire owes much to Edith Grossman or Jay Rubin. All literature is a continuum, an intertwining of voices and languages, of dialects, and it is impossible to imagine the evolution of the English novel without the availability of translations. As Milan Kundera says: “… it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew constant inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself, it was Flaubert’s tradition living on in Joyce, it was through his reflection on Joyce that Hermann Broch developed his own poetics of the novel, and it was Kafka who showed García Marquez the possibility of departing from tradition to ‘write another way’.”1
Some years ago, the British novelist David Mitchell co-translated The Reason I Jump with his wife Keiko Yoshida. Interviewed about the experience, he said: “The exercise has confirmed my long-held suspicion that my translators are three times cleverer than me, with a better command of English as well as the ‘into-language,’ plus a knowledge of the mysterious art and science that is translation itself. As a writer I can be bad, but I can’t be wrong. A translator can be good, but can never be right. Translators are jugglers, diplomats, nuance-ticklers, magistrates, word-nerds, self-testing lie detectors, and poets. Translators rock.”
Every anthology, by its nature, is subjective, yet none is truly the work of a single editor. Instead, it is the result of countless conversations and squabbles with friends who champion a particular story or author, with readers who passionately insist that X is the finest short story writer who ever lived and others equally adamant that X is meretricious and wildly overrated. It is impossible to overstate the debt I owe to the editors, readers, writers, and especially to the fellow translators who have guided me. In reading the stories recommended to me, I rediscovered the thrill of finding voices that are new to me, and the ineffable pleasure of rediscovering authors (often in new translations). Editing an anthology, I have discovered, is a microcosm of a readin
g life; it is a journey filled with startling finds and occasional disappointments. An anthology is a miniature library of stories that one particular editor feels everyone needs to read. But just as space on bookshelves is limited, so too are the pages of any collection. The final choice presented is inescapably personal and, like the lists of 100 Greatest Novels of All Time beloved of Sunday supplements that immediately trigger family feuds, Facebook rants and disbelieving wails, every anthology is bound to frustrate and infuriate by some of its choices.
I have never much liked the word “anthology”; to my ear, it has a textbook ring of authority at odds with the curious cabinet of wonders that make up any collection. But I have always loved the old English term “rattle-bag” (famously a title used by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes); it has the clank and clatter of things found, scavenged, unearthed and retrieved, all jostling between the covers, clamouring for attention. But however modest its intentions, every collection aspires to the ideal described by Robert Graves: