


Europe is tired. During the twentieth century, Europe has spent itself on wars. ideologies, and Utopias. Right now, Europe is doing what people are always happiest doing. Europe is looking more and more like an open market, a yarmarka, a fair, a bazaar. Money is the lingua franca of Europe and European unification. Money is the most natural of languages. There is a seller for everything, just as for everything there are buyers. And while the ideologists of European unification are still tearing their hair out over a European identity (forgetting that identity is always articulated by contrast to an Other, which Europe has done with enthusiasm throughout its history), the European-ness of Europe is being determined by life itself. the Chinese are settling Eastern Europe (Budapest has a China Town event though it hasn't been given the name officially), and Germans are buying summer houses in Sweden and Portugal. The Dutch are snapping ip apartments in Moscow, the Serbs are buying in Budapest, the Italians in Croatia, the Muscovites in Italy...The migrations are not only moving North to South and East to West, as the demographers have feared they would, but also West to East, and South to North, and round and round in circles. Dutch tomatoes, German yogurt, French cosmetics, Italian shoes. Who could keep track of all that has occupied Eastern Europe? The occupation is sensual, exciting and pleasurable; if it hadn't been, someone would have objected already. Invisible money rustles, clinks, and pours from pocket to pocket. While Europe's thinkers are searching for a harmonious formula for a new European-ness, America has virtually occupied Europe, promptly unifying the European East and the European West.And I am likely to presume she knows what she's talking about, having lived through fascism, communism, and rabid nationalism. She has lived in many cities in Europe and in the United States and finally decided to reside in Amsterdam after being deemed a 'witch' by the press in Croatia. Admittedly, I haven't yet read any of her novels which I will undoubtedly do in the near future. So much of the book contains thoughts and reactions to the effect of Communism, the reshaping of history of each new country formed, and how Eastern and Western Europe interact culturally in a continent where border hopping is a routine experience and that now includes countries in the East that had never been a part of that equation. She describes how she fits into the equation of this 'new' Europe as a citizen, but more importantly she fits in as a woman writer and overall how Eastern European women writers are portrayed:
Similar differences in treatment exist between literature and--women's literature. While literature gladly bears the burden of universalist values, women's literature wrestles with narrow, inborn specifics. When women write about sex, for instance, their perspective is treated as female, while when men write about sex, their perspective is perceived as universal. Although every writer is a "personality," "a self," in the practice of literary theory, literary history, and sociology, women writers are invariable "treated" in formations, in groups of two, three or four, especially if they come from small countries. Two Bulgaria women writers, three Eastern European women writers...Gender-oriented female literary critics are seldom much help. It turns out that a sisterly concern for the status of writing women has contributed to the promotion of women writers, but also to keeping the sisters ghettoized, with one difference--the ghetto has become more visible and loud. The long-awaited right to create one's own self-definition in terms of gender, ethnicity, and race ultimately, in most cases, becomes a nightmare and a punishment.As many minority writers will tell you, this is the truth, especially if they are women.

But they know the crooked smile and also have been milkboysThese are the urban scenes we know and Turell captures the melancholy with the details he chooses. The poem's poignancy lets us enjoy our 'city' wherever it may be, and makes us want to immediately go for a walk in the city you love the most.
before they got their wrinkles
and I'll walk on from West Bridge
I'll go in over the Central Station
I'll pass it in grey light and it will be lightly veiled
it will as always resemble an old tear-streaked film
and it will stab my heart as it always does
the usual alkies will there waiting for nothing
the young hitchhikers will stand there with the backpacks and their cartons of milk
hurried and harried people will wait for their connections
families will come with suitcases and baby carriages to take a weekend with the family in the country
and I'll stand in a corner and be overwhelmed
and not be able to do anything about it and not want it either
just be overwhelmed by all that life and the swarm
wet eyes without clear reason

And this brings us to the Best Translated Book Award 2010 longlist and oh, what a list it is. If you are tired with all the same titles showing up on the end of year best of lists then this should be a refreshing change of pace. From the slim and disturbing to sweeping epics, this list contains the best literary works translated into English in 2009 that the world has to offer. We all know about Philip Roth and Barbara Kingsolver, but what of Cesar Aira, one of the best writers working in Argentina today or the eminent Egyptian writer Gamal al-Ghitani? Even if you only chose a couple of books to read from this list, you will be impressed with the quality of craftsmanship, imagination and innovation that is apparent in all of these works. From Belgium to Chile, from Israel to China, this list gives a glimpse of what other writers around the world are contributing to the global literary landscape that only continues to broaden its scope. I can assure as one of the nine judges for this prize, it was painful to narrow it down to twenty-five. I can only imagine the pain we will all have to endure when we cut it to ten titles...
2010 Best Translated Book Award: Fiction Longlist
Ghosts by César Aira.
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (Argentina)
(New Directions)
The Ninth by Ferenc Barnás.
Translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchváry. (Hungary)
(Northwestern University Press)
Anonymous Celebrity by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão.
Translated from the Portuguese by Nelson Vieira. (Brazil)
(Dalkey Archive)
The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker.
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. (Netherlands)
(Archipelago)
The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño.
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (Chile)
(New Directions)
Wonder by Hugo Claus.
Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim. (Belgium)
(Archipelago)
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada.
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. (Germany)
(Melville House)
Op Oloop by Juan Filloy.
Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. (Argentina)
(Dalkey Archive)
Vilnius Poker by Ričardas Gavelis.
Translated from the Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas. (Lithuania)
(Open Letter)
The Zafarani Files by Gamal al-Ghitani.
Translated from the Arabic by Farouk Abdel Wahab. (Egypt)
(American University Press of Cairo)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas.
Translated from the German by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen. (Austria)
(Ariadne Press)
The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven.
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu. (Israel)
(Melville House)
The Discoverer by Jan Kjærstad.
Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. (Norway)
(Open Letter)
Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.
Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull. (Russia)
(New York Review Books)
Desert by J. M. G. Le Clézio.
Translated from the French by C. Dickson. (France)
(David R. Godine)
There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night by Cao Naiqian.
Translated from the Chinese by John Balcom. (China)
(Columbia University Press)
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk.
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. (Turkey)
(Knopf)
News from the Empire by Fernando del Paso.
Translated from the Spanish by Alfonso González and Stella T. Clark. (Mexico)
(Dalkey Archive)
The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch.
Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston. (Poland)
(Open Letter)
Rex by José Manuel Prieto.
Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen. (Cuba)
(Grove)
Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda.
Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. (Spain)
(Open Letter)
Landscape with Dog and Other Stories by Ersi Sotiropoulos.
Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. (Greece)
(Clockroot)
Brecht at Night by Mati Unt.
Translated from the Estonian by Eric Dickens. (Estonia)
(Dalkey Archive)
In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman Waberi.
Translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball. (Djibouti)
(University of Nebraska Press)
The Tanners by Robert Walser.
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. (Austria)
(New Directions)

It wasn't so much Diabelli's stubborn insistence on being right that alienated me as it was Johanna's smugness; and when she spoke of the circumstances of our lives, she always hinted at a still prevalent but next to unrecognizable form of suppression, consisting of all of us repeatedly being used to our disadvantage--primarily to demonstrate to several other people, at our expense, that the reassuring feeling they have that all things they do behind our backs are an indispensable precondition of our continued existence is entirely justified--and yet, while she said that sort of thing, she believed herself to be free of the stereotypes of this kind of existence, in which she herself would use others, pointing out their dependence, especially when it was a matter of their dependence on her, to confirm her own independence, to which she unconditionally subordinated the events of her private life--for example, the coming party.Fritz becomes enured to the idea of the party and we meet the people of the town in a conversation about the smoke stacks that escalates into ridiculousness. Enter Mr. Jagusch, the building inspector, Jacksch, the city gardener, the man just called 'the Town Planner' and the woman called 'the City Manager'. As it goes on, and it does go on, we begin to see Jonke's satire of bureaucracy. There is also a subtle mocking of Austrian society and the pretense of class that makes the party simultaneously comical and grotesque. But what saves us from dismissing Jonke's premise of repeating a party exactly the way it happened a year before as a mere literary exercise is Fritz's remorse of the loss of his girlfriend who literally 'vanished into thin air'. Fritz is explaining to Johanna what happened with his girlfriend and it shows Jonke's ability to create the real, the surreal and the emotional amongst a backdrop of loosely related scenes that increase their sense of the bizarre and the fantastical. Fritz is retelling Johanna about how he lost her on the way to the train station:
I suddenly saw her walking on the other side of the street, turning down an avenue that ran through the fields of snow towards the train station, and having seen her, I stood motionless--though not without casting a happily hopeful glance at her gently swaying figure moving through the rows of trees--until I saw that she was all ready to leave on a trip, exactly as arranged, that she was having a hard time carrying two large suitcases, and so I thought, well, I guess we'll still be going away together today on that trip we've been planning for so long, and naturally I was already looking forward to using all the different means of public transportation at our disposal, and so I finally began to run after her, of course I wanted to cross over to her side of the street to help her carry her luggage, but I was prevented from doing so by the traffic that suddenly seemed very busy at that intersection. Unfortunately, she hadn't seen me, so she continued walking purposefully along the avenue, without turning around, and only then did I succeed in crossing the street and hurrying after her as quickly as I could, already out of breath, until in the middle of the road, I can't explain it, she had, there's no other way to put it, you know, because it was impossible that she could already have reached the station that was still miles ahead of us, she had vanished into thin air, or become invisible, you know, simply gone, yes, and even her footsteps in the freshly fallen snow on the sidewalk simply stopped where she had disappeared, didn't continue either doubled back or sideways, there were only two long wide fresh imprints from the suitcases she had put down, yes, at that point of her life everything about her that could have left any visible traces had come to an end.Johanna responds to this story by suggesting that perhaps he made the whole thing up and that his search for her is some sort of useless ritual that keeps him bound to the city. After denying this and reiterating that he everything he told was true, Johanna replies:
Yes, I'll gladly believe you because even reality is often a good invention.And that, dear readers, is the essence of Gert Jonke. The party continues and eventually Fritz believes it was successful if depressing:
So it had turned out to be exactly the same party as last year, right down to the smallest details: much as I could no longer tell which photos were from last year's party or which were from the party this year, it was exactly the same now with the pictures surfacing in my memory: when I thought of moments or events from the party last year or the party this year, I couldn't tell the pictures apart, they were also turning up in twos in my head, absolutely identical silhouettes and chains of associations from both events: when I thought over my worries about the party, I no longer had the faintest idea whether I was worrying about this year's party or last year's: as though, in my head, both parties had been identically depicted, each on its owntransparent film and then laid over one another with all the elementscoinciding...Jonke plays with the concept of fiction while also incorporating the rhythms and phraseology of music into his narrative. The title of this novel is named after Carl Czerny, an Austrian pianist and composer. He applies Czerny's musical 'studies' to a literary form that is reflected in repeating dialogue, different voices and using those voices as if they were instruments performing a symphony together. This high aim is lofty, but not always satisfying. The more affecting part of the novel is Gradus and Parnassum (A Step to Parnassum) which is also named after Czerny, this time referring to a collection of instructional piano pieces. Fritz continues as the narrator as he and his brother Otto search for their old music professor's piano studio inside the Conservatory. Unintentionally, the get locked in the attic with 111 pianos and thus begins the story of what happened to these two promising musical students. Fritz, an alcoholic who is detoxing, had some success as a composer but hasn't produced anything of merit in years except long bouts with drinking. Otto, never as talented as Fritz, couldn't succeed as a pianist so he ended up building an empire as a piano mover.
End of the line! the conductor yells; I push my way out of the streetcar and proceed onward and upward to the university. as on every other day; everything seems at the moment to have run its course again, but while I am looking from a window in the corridor on the second floor how the sheen-glinting streetcar tracks, over ad pass the heat waves of which multicolored swarms of butterflies aflutter in a summer bursting forth now are skimming and are woven into the air of this day like a many-colored pattern, alive and whirling, one of those dimwit assistants whom I still have to put up with suddenly draws me off to the side and whispers with a hoarse voice into my ear: I have a history of music for you; I'm holding a history of music for your use, so I think you should be grateful to me...Then he presses an envelope into my hand and vanishes into the nearest auditorium, awkwardly fleeing my glance as if he were embarrassed by me but at the same time even more for me.Jonke's imagination is mesmerizing, especially when it balancing on the fine line between the real and the surreal. This comes to life in his relationship with architecture in the chapter Caryatids and Atlantes--Vienna's First Guest Workers. As luck would have it, our narrator falls for a caryatid:
It was almost as if I were touching the caryatid across the distance from me to her, as if I could already feel her very deeply without having to cleave the surging stream of air between us, to swim toward the shoreline of her voice so as to gather up some of the flotsam and jetsam of her scarcely begun sentences from the breakers of her glances, trained on me still and now suddenly dropping down over me like a veil. It seemed to me that I was "hearing" something, although "hearing" wasn't the right word; rather, it was an iridescent flutter and shimmer of shadows twinkling through the district.I don't care if she is made of stone, that is just damn beautiful writing. And like all his writing, full of comic brilliance and a satiric sneer that doesn't quit. Jonke flips the literary finger to method and tradition and the idea that as human beings we have any control over the chaos of life. He proves his point mainly through exaggeration, but there is enough tempering with a light narrative hand that doesn't drive the reader to incredulity, only to feel that he is one on the joke.

Reading Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole is like being lost in someone else’s nightmare where there are no exits. Karinthy creates an existential version of hell, stunning the reader not by blatant displays of horrifying circumstances, but by a gradual series of small failures that defeat and degrade the narrator and the reader. The narrator, Budai, takes the wrong door at the transit lounge and instead of going to Helsinki for a linguistics conference his final destination is an unknown city with an unknown language, an unknown nightmare.
Karinthy gives us no reprieve from the beginning. Budai is dropped off at an overcrowded hotel where, after he realizes he is not in Helsinki,decides that he will stay there until the next morning when he can go to the airport to catch a flight to Helsinki. And that’s when the never-ending lines begin. We wait with Budai in a long line until he finally reaches the ticket counter. After attempts to communicate with the receptionist in several languages—French, English, Finnish, Russian and German—he receives a room key after sacrificing his passport. And to another line we go with Budai, this time for the elevator. He spots a sign on the wall, written in the native language, that he attempts to find an identifying factor between this language and others—Cyrillic,Arabic, Chinese and Latin, but without any success. Oddly enough, Budai is able to recognize numbers and after stops on each floor and hoards of people getting on and off, he finds his floor and finally his room.The room resembles any other large city hotel room furnished with the usual bed, desk and bathroom. Since Budai has procured a bed for the night, hunger takes over and he ventures into the unknown city in search of sustenance. This is where Karinthy gives us description but no clues, as if Budai is an any man in a nameless city of the future where there is no distinguishable hint of a predominant ethnicity, just a conglomeration of all races. He waits in line at a restaurant while he tries to note any physical commonalities that might suggest people from a particular region:
Unfortunately there was a queue here too, quite a long one at that, because they only let in as many guests as were leaving so it was rather slow progress.He tried to size up others in the queue without drawing attention to himself. Some were white, some coloured; right in front of him were two coal-black, wire-haired, young men, a little further off an oriental-looking, pale-yellow woman with her daughter, but there were some tall Germanic types, one tubby Mediterranean gleaming with perspiration in his camel-coloured coat, a few brown-skinned Malays,some Arab or Semitic people, and a young redheaded woman with freckles in a blue woolen jumper, carrying a tennis racquet: it was hard to tell what race or shade formed the majority here, at least in front of the restaurant.
On the streets of this nameless‘mother city,’ Budai is pushed along, unable to resist the current created by the crowds moving around him. We continue on with Budai in his quest for food that morphs into a string of failures due to his inability to communicate with anyone. From the first, we feel the primal expressions of “the crowd” with its disregard for the individual, its coarseness and its brutality:
Back in his room he discovered that his body was covered in blue and green bruises from the blows he had received in the street when fighting hi sway through the crowd. He was not only bruised but tired and shocked to realize that he had not accomplished anything and had made no contact with anyone, neither with people back home, nor with people waiting for him at his destination. Neither at home nor at Helsinki would they have any idea where he had vanished. The strangest thing though was that he himself had no clue, not for the time being anyway: he was no wiser now than he had been on arriving here. Furthermore, he had no idea how he might set about finding out, about leaving, about where to go, about whom to speak to or what procedure to follow…He has a bad feeling and felt deeply uneasy, thinking he must have missed something or failed to do something, something he should have done but couldn't think what. He tried the phone again in his anxiety, fretfully dialing numbers anywhere, but it was late at night now, the phones kept ringing and only rarely did a sleepy voice respond and then in that peculiar,foreign-sounding, incomprehensible and indistinguishable language that sounded like stuttering.
And so it goes with Budai, a horrific stream of missed opportunities that lead to deeper isolation. And as readers, we are just as trapped as he is. The long,unsettling paragraphs of description we cannot turn away from because Karinthy leads us to believe that there might be hope just on the other side of the page. But there never is. We want so much to help Budai, help him find a way out, all the while being disconcerted that we know we would not fare any better in the same situation. We know that if he does not escape this city he will run out of money, which he does. We know that he will lose his hotel room because of this, which he does.We know that he will not get his passport back annihilating any chance of escape, which he doesn’t. We feel just as isolated and suffocated as Budai caught in an existential urban nightmare where we merely exist, but do not matter.
Written in 1970 and considered a modern classic in Europe, it is difficult to avoid comparing Karinthy to Kafka. It is, in fact, inevitable. Budai suffers humiliation,isolation, homelessness, loss of motivation, intellectual atrophy, brief imprisonment, loneliness that leads to lapses in his own morality, yet we never get to the apex of horror. Instead we drudge along on his degrading journey of imminent failures waiting for a moment of absolute despair or absolute hope. Because we never get either and so we encounter, ourselves, a sense of failure.
One element that seemed strangely absent from Metropole,is that Budai barely mentions his wife, his job, his friends. There is an obligatory nod to his past, but no time spent on what he misses about his former life, only the fact that he needs to escape where he is. Without this nostalgia or sentimentality, there is an even stronger sense of the dark night of the soul, an existential crisis that registers only with annoyance at where he is, but never to connect the reader with any real emotion of loss.
As a reader, we are drawn into Karinthy’s nightmare and Budai’s continual bad luck. For pure existential travails and societal anomie, this is a classic to be read. But I can’t help thinking, “What if Kafka had written it?”
el mundo es una rodajaTranslated, I think this is:
amarilla
plana
y ardiente
maiz
antorcha de la noche
the world is a wheelThis was the perfect introductory poem for me to translate (and I could be totally missing the nuances even though it only is constructed in fourteen words) as well as to represent my first visit to Guadalajara. The other poem that I thought was wistful and perfect was also by Christoph Janacs entitled, "poetica":
yellow
flat
and ardent
corn
the torch of the night
I think this translates to:Porque crees que me has comprendidoen este poema no hay
has dejado de comprenderme.
Antonia Porchia
honmbres ni animales
ni cosas, en este poema
no hay sentencias
ni metaforas, en este poema
solo hay palabras que dicen:
en este poema no existe
nada salvo nosotros
in this poem there are noOkay, that's a really, really loose translation. But it is something like that and the sentiment is what a poem should be. Who knew I would have to come to Jalisco to appreciate Austrian poetry?
men or animals
no things, in this poem
no sentences
or metaphors, in this poem
there are only the words that say:
in this poem there is only us.
