Multiple Reading Personalities

I don’t know what is wrong with me lately — I just don’t seem able to get into a book. I did make my struggling way through Antigone and I, and I’m slowly reading the first tome of Les Mille et une nuits (Arabian nights), but I keep postponing Sophocles and… pretty much anything else. Ironic, since for the first time in almost a year (well, ten months), I have enough time on my hands that I could pretty much tackle anything I’d like. I’m allowing myself the break, though, and letting myself waste time reading blogs and articles. Perhaps the blog-thirsty part of my brain has its reasons?

What I talk about when I talk about running was however an easy read, perhaps because of Murakami’s specific qualities. I am a somewhat conflicted Murakami fan – I can absolutely understand why one wouldn’t like him very much, but I always fall under the charm of his white sentences and his flimsy tales. I was a little cautious about this specific book – I don’t run, and this is ostensibly a memoir on running, though it touches on such themes as writing, aging, self-discipline and self-image. I was interested in reading it mostly because I am making my own efforts to adopt a regular exercising discipline. My sport of choice is swimming, which I envision as some sort of active meditation. I felt there might be some things Murakami had to say which would resonate with me. There were, especially in the early pages, and I would certainly recommend that book as a motivational tool for wannabe-healthier bookworms. I also found some reading pleasure in the book, though not as much as in the Murakami novels I have read.

There are two conflicting qualities which I very much enjoy in Murakami: one is a talent for silence (what he doesn’t write or just barely mentions always seems to be the most poignant and most ferocious part of what he has to say), the other is very personal, almost surreal perception of the world, with his knack to incorporate a devious pseudo-American pop-culture touch as the magical element of the world. By “devious pseudo-American pop-culture touch”, I refer to his treatment of a certain modern American iconography from a non-American perspective (witness the use of Colonel Sanders in Kafka on the shore, the title What I talk about etc., the use of music in his work, and so on. And note that I use “American” in the loosest sense – a sense which would for instance allow me to lump in Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky with “American pop culture”). It might be an obtuse conversation to Americans, a recycling of surprisingly-chosen American clichés strung together with masking tape and bubble gum; however, this distorted, childishly-naïve vision of the “outside” and the “beyond” speaks to the distorted, childishly-naïve vision I also developed through whatever American “cultural goods” (!) reached over the ocean and came into my life before I was old enough to process them rationally. It’s a pictorial, emotional rendition of a fantasy. Of course, Murakami’s vision and mine are very different (different ages, different locations; and to make matters worse, some of the oldest lessons I learned about the US were given by manga versions of classics such as Tom Sawyers), but there is a surprising amount of commonalities.

To go back to Murakami’s silences – they are plentiful in What I talk about when I talk about running despite his trying to push himself to articulate certain personal truths. Most of the time, I’m not very convinced by these efforts. When he writes about heading “towards a taciturn, unadorned maturity” or about his supposedly unlikeable personality, his modesty feels like an intermediary truth and disappoints compared to the moments when you are left to infer your own conclusions from a one-sentence description of his wife welcoming him at the end of a race in which he didn’t do well, or when he mentions that the frame of his triathlon bike is inscribed with “’18 Til I die’, the name of a Bryan Adams hit. It’s a joke, of course. Being eighteen until you die means you die when you’re eighteen”. Killing the “joke” is an interesting way of creating a silence the reader can no longer easily fill (this is not the joke you were expecting from a middle-aged man reflecting on aging). It takes a mundane anecdote to a more interesting state of imbalance. All in all, the quiet, slightly disjointed collection of essays manages to create these empty spaces regularly.

The dreamlike quality of Murakami’s best writing, however is mostly lost here. By dreamlike I don’t mean “ethereal”, but his collage approach to fiction. That’s of course probably to be expected with a book that doesn’t want to be fictional, but I was still a little let down  – I felt Murakami had been trying to channel his writing too vigorously, that he had let go of the “use your imagination” explicitly whispered to him by his instinct. There are a couple passages when that innate fantasy is perceptible (for instance when comparing himself to “Danton or Robespierre eloquently attempting to persuade the dissatisfied and rebellious Revolutionary Tribunal, [trying] to talk each body part into showing a little cooperation”, before remembering what happened to Danton and Robespierre; or when he repeatedly refers to global warming as a “villain”); but all in all, his unique way to feel seemed diluted. The rhythm of the writing still felt right in its flair for the right detail, for snappy titles and in the dialogue feel of the argument (I know nothing about Japanese literature so cannot form any kind of definite opinion on this, but it seems to me that there is a rhythm to American-English dialogue that informs Murakami’s writing – adverbs used as a conclusion at the end of a paragraph or as a sentence introduction, a sort of concessive balance of sentences often starting in “but” or “and”, a relaxed “whatever-ness”…).

I realize what I just wrote might seem fairly negative – not that it was a bad book, but in that it was not the best Murakami… Of course! And yet the book got me thinking for a couple of days, and I even got a copy for a friend who is a runner. Isn’t it strange how the more you read and try to think about your reading, the more layered and inconclusive your thinking seems to get?

Translation.

The word with its sibilants is one of my favorites, the word as it slides like doors, like a pint of beer on a copper counter, with a rustle, from one place to another, the hint of geometry in it — one of the most basic transformations, the mirror image, so familiar and yet subtly altered by the very process of being reflected, or as is the case, translated. So much better than the presumptuous French “traduction”, as if you were leading anything from anywhere… Side notes, tangent – that’s what I think about when I think translation.

For years I didn’t think much about it; I was “translating”, sometimes, for work, a questionnaire or a presentation from English to French or, against all rules (but I didn’t know that), from my native language into my second. I was often the unofficial translator of choice, in part because I spoke decent English, in part because I was happy to, but I wasn’t naming what I did. It was just “writing in English”, or “putting it in French” — or at most, “traduire”. The innapropriate French word was a shield: as long as translation was only traduction, I could enjoy it casually. I liked it because it put me in touch with English, and in English, everything is simpler for me. Except, of course, complexity, but that was not the goal.

(My guess is that everything is simpler in English because my command of the language is so much more rudimentary that my thinking has to follow suit. In this regard, maybe my trying to improve my English is an enormous mistake that will eventually deprive me of the safe haven of a familiar but still foreign language).

Then two things happened: first, Sophia Coppola catapulted the phrase “lost in translation” into my life, and translation became incredibly alluring — mysterious, nostalgic and sexy. My younger sister enrolled in translation studies, and I realized I was a little jealous, but only the tiniest bit; mostly I was fascinated. Translation had become something both otherworldly – a puff of smoke in blue light — and something real, something an actual person who brushes her teeth twice a day was concerned with.

That’s how translation entered my consciousness, and how I started paying attention to it. It’s become one of these magic words — like ”gin fizz” or “by the sea”, for instance – that makes me pay attention. This is why I knew I had to read Vengeance du traducteur when I heard about it (first on Stella Polaris’s blog, and then all over the Internet); this is also the probable reason I didn’t enjoy it very much. I expected it to be a fun novel, which it is; I wasn’t expecting it to be the next Great Novel, which it isn’t; but I was also expecting it to give me some insight into the process of translation, which it really didn’t. I was expecting it to be more elegant than it is. It’s not so much that I expected it to be a greater novel than I expected it to be a different novel. In other words: it’s not his fault, it’s mine.

Because of this little disappointment, I don’t know if you can trust me to review the book, but here are my impressions: Vengeance du traducteur is a smart novel which tries a little too hard. It follows a translator (let’s call him, as he introduces himself, Trad) working on a novel about a triangle between a writer, his translator and his secretary/ mistress. Unsatisfied with the novel, Trad decides to break the Golden Rule of translation and to meddle with the writing; however, he soon notices that his interfering has consequences way beyond the closed world of the book.

This story line worked fairly well for me, and Trad’s language when he let it loose was alternatively sensual, wicked and whimsical, all with the clear mastery of a cultured writer with a musical ear. However Matthieussent seems to have found this too easy, and he added more levels, more complexity, notably through endless dream scenes, dramatic suggestions that maybe nothing is quite as it seems and reality could be elsewhere, a generous helping of heavy-handed symbolism, and a jump back in time to 1937 Paris with Dolores Haze, the actress and woman Nabokov’s Lolita became when she left her literary nymphet self behind. All of this felt a little too much, a little too referential, a little too reverential.

Early on in the book, Trad mocks his writer who indulges in adjectives and adverbs; perhaps he should have heeded his own advice and lightened up his own tale.