For fans (and soon to be fans…) of Blue Has No South: three new short-short stories by Alex Epstein, translated by Becka McKay, up at Electric Literature’s blog, the Outlet. And with this note I’m very happy to announce that Clockroot will be releasing another collection of Alex’s in 2011—details to come!
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—
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.
As a continuation of yesterday’s post: today an interview with Alex Epstein, author of Blue Has No South, conducted by A’Dora Phillips.
A’DORA: Is Hebrew your mother tongue?
ALEX: I was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to Israel with my family when I was eight, without knowing a word in Hebrew. So, I don’t really have a mother tongue—in order to write in Hebrew I had during the years, in a way, to forget my Russian. 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.
Your stories are wonderfully complex—in their wide range of reference, their tone, their blend of genres and mix of registers. I imagine that for both you as writer and Becka as translator this must have raised even more concern than usual about what might be lost in translation?
This is exactly why I am so grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Becka: she always tried to find the best solution possible to keep the “lost in translation” effect to a minimum. She is a poet, and consequently has a sharp eye for the single word, for the meaning of a single word in a very short prose piece.
It was important to me and to Becka to try to maintain the same poetics that my stories have in Hebrew: for example, the relationship between the story and the margins surrounding it, the white page.
Can you say a little about your involvement in the translation process?
I read all the translations, and provided some comments during the process. But the most important thing to say here is that eventually I was just a reader, and writers are not the best readers of their work, of course: the final decision is always made by the translator. On a few occasions Becka asked me to make alterations to the original, so that the story would work in English in the same way it does in Hebrew.
Becka mentioned that the English version of Blue Has No South is not an exact representation of the original. Why did you make the decision not to include some stories and to add others?
We decided to make the book a better representation of my short work, and so a few of the longer stories were left out and replaced by newer short-short ones. But even with these changes, more than one hundred stories appear in both the Hebrew and English versions of the text, so ultimately they are very much alike.
Beyond the changes you made to the collection, how does the English translation of Blue Has No South “feel” to you? Some writers, for instance, say they have no relationship to their work when it appears in another language and others say that it gives them a fresh perspective on their writing. Any thoughts about this?
I do feel that it’s definitely my book, and part of what makes it feel that way is the process, seeing one version of the translation of a single story, and then seeing a new version, and yet again: that is exactly how I write, draft after draft after draft, so the shortest story can take months to write (and now, to translate).
Do you live full-time in Israel? And, big question—one that ultimately may not be answerable—how would you characterize the current climate of Hebrew-language literature?
I do live in Israel, in Tel Aviv. Israeli contemporary literature is very hard to characterize—one thing that’s obvious, though, is that we have a lot of exciting voices, in different styles, exploring different themes. As everywhere, in the last years we have seen a shift from the short form towards the novel. But it seems that I am going in the opposite direction.
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.
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.
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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.
Come visit us this week in Denver at AWP 2010! Exhibit hall A, table D14. You may even catch Alex Epstein and Becka McKay signing Blue Has No South. (And we’ll be featuring a special guest appearance from Akashic Books.)
On Saturday, April 10th, Alex is giving the introduction at the Denver Film Society’s Evening with Etgar Keret. Hope to see you there—
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(OK, a few minutes on Wikipedia educates me that “Mile-High” isn’t high altitude. So I can’t prove my title claim yet. But I can say that we will have truly stunning literature in translation, one heck of a banner, and we would love to see you.)
Up at Zeek magazine, three stories by Alex Epstein, translated by Becka Mara McKay, from Blue Has No South, which we’re thrilled to be bringing out in April. Alex and Becka have a rather amazing number events scheduled this spring, from the PEN World Voices Festival to Chicago’s Global Voices Program to the LA Times Book Fair to our own Schoen Books: keep an eye on this page for updates!
In Etgar Keret’s description: “The short texts of Alex Epstein virtuously echo the great tradition of world literature in a truly original manner, as the tension between the classical and the intuitively improvised creates in the reader’s mind the literary equivalent of a cross between Mozart and Miles Davis.”
