2 and 2

At PRI’s “The World” an engaging take on cruelty & fiction, considering Karapanou’s Rien ne va plus and Veronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea:

In Véronique Olmi’s French bestseller, Beside the Sea, a mother brings her two children to a beachside hotel, then smothers them to death with a pillow. In Margarita Karapanou’s Rien Ne Va Plus, a married couple torture each other while the author punishes the reader with a series of contradictory plot lines. … Olmi is cruel to no conceivable end, but Karapanou uses pain to make a point.

Read here.

The latest issue of Words Without Borders reviews Blue Has No South:

One nameless character—one of many in these miniature stories—marvels midway through Alex Epstein’s recent collection, Blue Has No South, over “how suddenly” a “narrow space revealed its high ceiling.”  His wonderment is telling.  Epstein’s collection is something of a spatial triumph—microscopic stories (some are only single sentences long) with manifold compartments and a capaciousness belied by their slight appearance.

Read in full—

The author of The Geometry of God will be on the Book Club Hour of KZOO, a radio station sponsored by the Japanese Cultural Center in Hawaii, Monday night, June 28, at 6:30.

In the past few weeks, a gap has truly opened between blog posts I’ve intended to write and those I’ve accomplished.  But for now, let’s note simply that last week’s Publishers Weekly brought a review of Blue Has No South:

… With more than 100 short-short stories (many no longer than a few lines), there’s a frenetic buzz of activity, with recurring themes including chess, mythology, rain, angels, suicide, animals, muses, time machines, tragic love, aging, and painting, all sewn together in a Borges-meets-Kafka style. Some pieces slip into metanarrative, as with “Gibraltar, a Love Story,” a brief bit in which the author comments on the flaws in his tale about an elephant escaped from a zoo. Other pieces don’t tell stories at all, such as “The Flawed Symmetry of Romeo and Juliet,” which offers a critique of “the only lovers who see each other dead.” Often it isn’t the scraps of story that make the pieces work as much as the poetic language, as in a story involving the murder of a chess-playing writer. These deceptively simple snapshots certainly can deliver on a fast reading, but slow, close attention reveals layers of thought and complexity.

A review of Blue Has No South is up in the June edition of the new online venue [tk] reviews:

Epstein’s work grapples with overarching themes of geography and time, love and history, and the question of how art… is produced and what effect it has on its creator and the world.

There is no judgment in any of the stories, only… some emotional tone, most often of longing, sadness, the sense of distance between heart and home, the idea of loss and the passing of time.

Today and tomorrow we’ll be posting intern A’Dora Phillips’ interviews with Becka Mara McKay and Alex Epstein on Blue Has No South. Read on!—Hilary

Thirty-eight year old Alex Epstein is a well-known writer in Israel. He began publishing his work when in his early twenties and now has three novels and several short-story collections to his name. He was invited to participate in PEN’s 2010 World Voices Festival, attended the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2007, and presently Schusterman Visiting-Artist-in-Residence at the University of Denver. But despite his reputation, only now, with the publication of Blue Has No South, is his work available to English-language readers.

Epstein’s stories in Blue Has No South are short—some as brief as a single line or a paragraph, none more than a handful of pages. But beyond their brevity, it is hard to tidily sum up or summarily to characterize his work, which is both funny and poignant; which draws its references from classical mythology, history, religion, even science fiction; which is sometimes realistic and sometimes more fantastical or allegorical. The potent compression of the pieces make one think of poetry, but in an interview, Epstein maintains that his are stories, fictions, not poems or essays: “I call it fiction because when I write I am always concerned with the combination of narrative, characters and idea… I always try to relate not only to the story I am telling but also to the story that is not written, that exists only on the margins surrounding the page.”

Interview with translator Becka McKay

A’DORA: How did you come across Alex Epstein’s work?

BECKA: I met Alex through his participation the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program—I was in my last semester of coursework for my PhD in comparative literature at Iowa.

Why were you drawn to translate Blue Has No South?

Alex’s voice is a unique mixture of playful and poignant—his stories make the reader think, offering no easy answers. Upon reading a few of the stories in original Hebrew of Blue Has No South I really wanted to know what they would sound like in English. And practically speaking, I was beginning to write my dissertation at the time and I was drawn to the fact that the stories were so short that I could find a way to balance my progress on both projects.

Do you translate solely from Hebrew into English?

I do.

What are the qualities of Hebrew and English, respectively, that presented challenges to you, particularly as regards this work?

Alex’s work presents a challenging mix of registers—a single story can range from an everyday Hebrew to a high, almost Biblical language. Hebrew also expands by about 30 percent when it moves into English—by, for example, using contractions—and it was very important to me to try to preserve the compactness of the language as much as possible—succinctness is clearly an important element of many of these stories. In general I also tried to be true to a “sentence count” rather than (as is often tempting) cutting a very long and tangled sentence in two.

Did you find that you had to privilege one or two qualities of Alex’s work over others as you worked? If so, what did you feel was most important to preserve?

I wanted to preserve Alex’s voice above all else, but that is probably not a satisfactory answer to the question, since his “voice” is composed of different qualities depending on the story. In some stories it could be that the register-mixing makes it a uniquely “Alex Epstein” story, while in another it could be the subject matter, the length, the plot…

What makes Hebrew so much more compact than English?

In part it’s because Hebrew uses prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. For example, the words “the” and “and” are never standalone words—they are always a single letter prefixed to a word. Personal pronouns, such as “you” and “I” are often merely a letter or two attached to the end of a word. The following five-word phrase in English, “everything is because of you,” can be rendered in only two words in Hebrew.

How about the challenges presented by more ephemeral issues involved in the act of translation? For instance, Epstein’s work is steeped in (among other things) Eastern European and Jewish issues of heritage and culture. Are some of the references in his work more generally familiar to the Israeli reader than the American reader?

This, of course, is the key issue: how to translate those things beyond language—cultural references, literary allusions, etc. I find that in Alex’s work, a sense of displacement or unfamiliarity is already part of the original, meaning that the extra-textual references often seem to come (in a good way) out of nowhere, and this seems to work to my advantage in translation. I also feel that when something is very, very well written, no matter how “local” it may seem in the original, it manages to transcend that aspect of itself in translation. I think Alex’s work falls into that category.

I was struck by the punctuation in Blue Has No South. In a number of stories, we see an abundance of punctuation not frequently used in English.  Is punctuation generally used more abundantly and expressively in Hebrew? Or do Alex’s punctuation choices stand out as being uniquely his?

I think that Alex uses punctuation uniquely, and I don’t think of this as Hebrew/English issue as much as an Alex issue.

Can you say a little about your working process during the course of your translation?

Alex and I work pretty closely—he reads my drafts and comments on them and answers my questions. I feel very lucky in that he trusts my judgment and my ear—we’ve never had an argument or a disagreement about a translation that I can remember.

There is obviously a fairly wide variation in the length of the pieces, and I’m wondering if it was harder to translate the shorter pieces than the longer ones, or vice versa?

The English version of Blue Has No South is not an exact representation of the original—Alex chose not to include some stories from the original that he no longer likes or that he felt wouldn’t work in English, and he also included some new stories.

Are there any translators or thoughts about translation that are especially relevant to you as you work—in general as a translator as well as more particularly on Alex’s piece?

I really wish I had some kind of brilliant answer for this question. But in the end I have to take on every story as its own set of problems and challenges, and hope that I can render something that works in English while still being a kind of lens through which the reader can glimpse the original.

I know that you yourself are an author. Can you say a little about how being a writer and being a translator intersect?

As a poet, I find that being able to set aside my own work and use the same tools—for example, making choices, ransacking my own vocabulary, listening for the music in the language—in service of someone else’s work to be a kind of wonderful escape. I also think that being a translator has taught me to be a better reader in general, and that includes being a better reader of my own work.

This week brings a starred Publishers Weekly review of Adania Shibli’s Touch:

Touch
Adania Shibli, trans. from the Arabic by Paula Haydar, Interlink/Clockroot, $13 paper (72p) ISBN 9781566568074
Celebrated young Palestinian writer Shibli—a playwright, author and essayist now located in the UK—makes her American debut with an exquisite, powerful novella that transports readers to her West Bank homeland. In spare prose, Shibli follows an unnamed little girl, the youngest in a large Palestinian family, as she examines her world and tries to understand her place in it. Though focused on the finest details—flakes of rust against skin, the softness of grass—Shibli takes readers to the center of a family and a culture, using the same careful, dispassionate observation to report everyday events like the father’s shaving as she does to depict the death of a sibling in area violence. Like a great volume of poetry, Shibli’s first novel (her second is forthcoming from Clockroot) has rhythm and unexpected momentum, and cries for re-reading.

… And a wonderful review at the Electronic Intifada (in full here):

Whatever it is—a dream, memory fragments, poems folded into sun and grass—Touch is both remarkable and difficult, beautifully lucid and yet also mysterious. The book is divided into sections entitled “Colors,” “Silence,” “Movement,” “Language” and “The Wall” …. Within this framework the little girl comes of age, her ordinary experiences of first love, school mishaps and sibling rivalries rendered extraordinary by the sensuous prose, and intensified by the heartbreaking backdrop against which they occur, a death whose impact tears apart the fabric of her family’s life. …

This is not a book to be shelved once finished. It calls to you softly, insistently, until you pick it up again and allow yourself to be tugged back in… [P]erhaps this is what Touch can be called, a question, rather than a novel — that place from where all searches begin.

Adania Shibli, whose wonderful Touch Clockroot released in March, seems often to have such pithy, precise thoughts on translation (see here)—its limits, its futility, its urgency.  We regret not being able to head to London ourselves to see Adania at the Free the Word/International PEN festival, but you can find a write-up of one of her events here—a co-event with Ala Hlehel, who as we noted the other week, was the other honoree of the Beirut 39 unable to attend the festival in Beirut.

… what could be more uplifting than Adania’s answer to the final question about what Arabic literature influenced her. ‘To me, all literature is Arabic literature, because I read it in Arabic and therefore I feel it is Arabic. Tolstoy and Shakespeare – they are Palestinians!’

First, for those of you who are local: on Sunday, May 2, at 7 pm, Alex Epstein and Becka McKay will read from Blue Has No South at one of the Valley’s great independent bookstores, Schoen Books.  Afterward we’ll have a Q and A about translation, the short-short story in world literature, and whatever comes up. Please join us!

Alex has been at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York all this week. See him Friday at the “Short Stories: Past, Present, and Future” panel with Preston L. Allen, Aleksander Hemon, Yiyun Li, and Martin Solares, moderated by Deborah Treisman.

What virtues and challenges are unique to the short story? How flexible is the form? And why is it that, even now—after Poe, Chekhov, Hemingway, O’Connor, Nabokov, and Munro—the short story often gets less respect, in terms of prizes and critical esteem, than the novel? Join acclaimed practitioners of the form from Bosnia, Israel, China, Mexico, and the United States, for a conversation with The New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, about the past, present, and future of the short story.

On Friday evening, he’ll be part of the festival’s famous translation slam, which I wish we could make it to…

For those of you in Boston: on Saturday, May 1, Alex and Becka will read as part of the Bay State Underground’s reading series, at 236 Bay State Road (the basement of the AGNI offices) at 6 pm.

***

On Monday, Alex participated in Guernica magazine’s panel “The Diversity Test: Gender and Literature in Translation,” with Lorraine Adams, Esther Allen, and Norman Rush, moderated by Claire Messud.  Watch the panel online here. Many thanks to Guernica for hosting this event and making it available on the web.

You can also find a new interview with Alex, “Almost Blue: Israel’s New Borges,” and excerpt from Blue Has No South up at Forward.  And another interview here at the Jewish Week.

PEN also has an interview with Alex up here—

Alta Ifland: You were eight years old when you came to Israel from Russia, so I would like to ask you a question about the relationship between mother tongue and writing.  Paul Celan and Czeslaw Milosz… have said that a true poet can only write in his/her mother tongue.  What do you think of this?  What language do you consider to be your mother-tongue?  (Some writers, like George Steiner, claim that they don’t have a (single) mother-tongue).

Alex Epstein: I don’t have a mother tongue—in order to write in Hebrew I had, in a way, to forget my Russian.  It was one of the triggers that made an author out of me…   I guess that Hebrew “adopted” me—I write in Hebrew, I “live” in Hebrew, I dream in Hebrew, but since it’s not my first language, it’s more an “adoptive” tongue than a mother tongue.

Then there’s “Ten Approximations” from Blue Has No South up online, from PEN America 12: Correspondences.

A rich array of offerings—Alex and Becka are proving hard to keep up with! Western Massachusetts dwellers, we hope to see you Sunday.

Absinthe 13 showed up on my step last week, with not only what looks like an extremely tempting selection of Romanian literature, but a warm note on Rien ne va plus in the “Absinthe recommends” section.  I’ve been overdue to give Absinthe a well-deserved nod and thank you on this blog—for those of you who don’t yet know the magazine, it is a wonderful venue for translations from European literatures, and reviews thereof, and we at Clockroot were honored that it was one of the first places to welcome Ersi Sotiropoulos’s short stories in English, publishing the story “Stella,” which would later be collected into Landscape with Dog.  Check it out—