Lost in Translation Update

Back in January, I decided I would read 6 books translated from other languages this year.

Here's how it went.

I started out the year reading Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke, translated by Anthea Bell. After loving both Inkspell and Inkheart, this was a big disappointment. It was slow, it wasn't captivating, and it was way too long. A bad way to start.





Then, in about May, I read Ghosts by Cesar Aira, translated by Chris Andrews. Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about it:

Aira, an unusual Argentinean author (How I Became a Nun), writes a compelling novel about a migrant Chilean family living in an apartment house under construction in Buenos Aires. New Year's Eve finds the hard-drinking Chilean night watchman, Raúl Vinas, hosting a party with his wife, Elisa, their four small children and Elisa's pensive 15-year-old daughter, Patri. Moreover, ghosts reside in the house: naked, dust-covered floating men, mostly unseen except by Elisa and Patri. The novel engineers a clever layering of metaphorical details about the building, but gradually focuses on Elisa's preparations for the party and her conversations with her daughter about finding a real man to marry. Prodded perhaps by her isolation within the family, Patri accepts the ghosts' invitation to a midnight feast, at her life's peril. Aira takes off on fanciful sociological analogies that seem absurd in the mouths of these simple folk, so that in the end the novel functions as an allegorical, albeit touching, comment on his characters' materialism and class.

Yes, it was curious. Too much for my taste. I don't know if this falls in the magical realism genre. Or if it was just too literary for me. But, I didn't really like it.

With two strikes against me, I didn't jump into any other works in translation until the end of the year. Then, with a lingering deadline, I thought maybe I could still make it work.

I read the highly touted Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson, which seems to be something a lot of book bloggers have read and many have loved. I almost gave up on it several times, because the first 100 pages were soooo slow and way too much philosophizing. If I had had anything else to read at the gym one day, I wouldn't have finished it. As it was, it turned out to be pretty good.

Here's what I said on GoodReads about it.

In part 2, it finally started picking up and engaging me. It's the story of Renee, a woman in Paris who is a concierge to a building full of rich and elitist tenants, who are also intellectually barren and incurious. She spends her free time reading Marx and studying phenomenology with her Tolstoy named cat as only companion, hiding her mind in an attempt to not step outside of prescribed class barriers.

When she meets Mr Ozu, a new resident (the first new resident in the building in 20 years! What kind of stifling and rigid kind of place is this?), she finds a like minded friend. The section where they identify the true nature of each other is charming--Renee underhandedly quotes Anna Karenina, but not without Mr Ozu's recognition and then reciprocation. Though she enjoys conversation and meals with him, finally able to reveal her true self to another, she continues to struggle internally to truly accept a friendship with someone from such a different background.

This is also the story of a precocious and intelligent 12 year old Paloma, daughter of some tenants, who is unhappy, not able to share her true self with her family. She builds a friendship with both Mr Ozu and Renee and is able to find hope and goodness that has previously eluded her. Both she and Renee pour out their thoughts in diary form, which is how the entirety of the book is written.

As for the title, which has been so alluring to me: "Madame Michel (Renee) has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary--and terribly elegant."

Then, I read Here's to You Jesusa by Elena Poniatowska, translated by Deanna Heikkinen. It started out strong, but I ended up really disliking it. Another disappointment

From my GoodReads:

Here's To You, Jesusa! chronicles the life of Jesusa, a tough, argumentative, spirited, and pragmatic Mexican women who was a young adult during the Revolution. The book is in her voice, and she goes from one ordeal to the other, always managing to come out on top, no matter how challenging. She is very poor and doesn't settle down anywhere for long, so the book skips around quite a bit. This made it hard to read-- it didn't hold together very well for me, and I skimmed through some of it, an...more

Here's To You, Jesusa! chronicles the life of Jesusa, a tough, argumentative, spirited, and pragmatic Mexican women who was a young adult during the Revolution. The book is in her voice, and she goes from one ordeal to the other, always managing to come out on top, no matter how challenging. She is very poor and doesn't settle down anywhere for long, so the book skips around quite a bit. This made it hard to read-- it didn't hold together very well for me, and I skimmed through some of it, and eventually stopped reading with 70 pages left.

I understand that Poniatowska was trying to capture an authentic poor Mexican woman's voice, but I would have like a bit more self examination into how all these events shaped the woman Jesusa was. (For example, the death of her mother when she was young, her father inability to stay in one place for long, an abusive step-mother.) It's all descriptive, but not much more.

The book starts out with a forward by the middle class woman who supposedly finds Jesusa somehow and then spends years interviewing her and learning her story, and who then writes a book about her life. I loved this part and would have liked to see more interplay between the "author" voice and Jesusa.

So, with completing four books, I gave up. I have a few more on my to-read list for next year, so I'm not giving up altogether, but I guess I didn't too well with the selection. That, or maybe I'm just an unsophisticated American through and through and can't really appreciate translated works.