Tag Archives: Arabic literature

My Book Year 2019

The year 2019 is almost over and it is time to look back at my reading and blogging experiences.

After a hiatus, I started again to blog more or less regularly and I hope this will be also the case for 2020.

As for my reading, I didn’t keep a diary to track down the books I read this year, but the number is approximately 130, so roughly two and a half books per week, of which around 60% were fiction, 40% non-fiction. Almost all books I read were “real” printed books, only one book was read electronically. I read books in four languages (German, English, French, Bulgarian).

Every book year brings interesting discoveries, pleasant surprises, some re-reads of books I enjoyed in the past, and a few disappointments. Here are my highlights of the last year:

The most beautiful book I read in 2019: Arnulf Conradi, Zen und die Kunst der Vogelbeobachtung (Zen and the Art of Birdwatching)

Best re-reads in 2019: Michel de Montaigne, Essais; Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser; Salomon Maimon, Lebensgeschichte (Autobiography)

Best novels I read in 2019: Marlen Haushofer, Die Wand (The Wall); Uwe Johnson, Jahrestage (Anniversaries); Jean Rhys, Sargasso Sea

Best poetry books I read in 2019: Thomas Brasch: Die nennen das Schrei (Collected Poems); Johannes Bobrowski, Gesammelte Gedichte (Collected Poems), Franz Hodjak, Siebenbürgische Sprechübung (Transylvanian Speaking Exercise); Yehuda Amichai, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai; Anise Koltz, Sich der Stille hingeben (Surrender to the Silence); Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately It Was Paradise; Vladimir Sabourin, Останките на Троцки (Trotzky’s Remains); Rainer René Mueller, geschriebes, selbst mit stein

Best Graphic Novel I read in 2019: Art Spiegelman, Maus

Best SF novel I read in 2019: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Doomed City

Best crime novel I read in 2019: Ingrid Noll, Halali

Best philosophy book I read in 2019: Ibn Tufail, The Improvement of Human Reason

Best non-fiction books I read in 2019: Charles King, The Moldovans; Charles King, Midnight at the Pera Palace; Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom; Adriano Sofri, Kafkas elektrische Straßenbahn (Kafkas Electric Streetcar); Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Lucy Inglis, Milk of Paradise; Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash; Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand Books

Best art book I read in 2019: Hans Belting, Der Blick hinter Duchamps Tür (The View behind Duchamp’s Door)

Best travel book I read in 2019: Johann Gottfried Seume, Spaziergang nach Syrakus (Walk to Syracuse)

Biggest book disappointment in 2019: Elena Ferrante, Neapolitan Novels

Favourite book cover in 2019: Ivo Rafailov’s cover for the Bulgarian edition of Marjana Gaponenko’s Who Is Martha? (this edition is upcoming in January 2020)

Most impressive translator’s work: Jennifer Croft’s translation of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk; Vladimir Sabourin’s translations in his Bulgarian poetry anthology Радост на Началото (The Joy of the Beginning)

Most embarrassing authors in 2019: Peter Handke; Christoph Hein; Zachary Karabashliev

Good as always: Vladimir Sorokin, The Blizzard; Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart; Ismail Kadare, The Traitor’s Niche; Jabbour Douaihy, Printed in Beirut; Georg Klein, Die Zukunft des Mars (The Future of the Mars); Phillipe Claudel, Le rapport de Brodeck (Brodeck), Kapka Kassabova, Border; Naguib Mahfouz, The Midaq Alley

Interesting Authors I discovered in 2019: Samanta Schweblin, Mouthful of Birds; Olga Tokarczuk, Flights; Isabel Fargo Cole, Die Grüne Grenze (The Green Border); Hartmut Lange, Das Haus in der Dorotheenstraße (The House in the Dorotheenstraße); Erich Hackl, Abschied von Sidonie (Farewell to Sidonia)

And which were your most remarkable books in 2019?

© Thomas Hübner and Mytwostotinki, 2014-9. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and Mytwostotinki with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Подкрепете Ашраф Фаяд – осъден на смърт защото пише поезия!

Ашраф Фаяд е палестински поет който е бил осъден на смърт от Кралство Саудитска Арабия.

Престъплението за което той е осъден на смърт: той пише поезия!

На 14 януари ще се проведе в света прочит на поезията му в много страни да подкрепят Ашраф Фаяд и свободата на словото.  

На 14 януари ще стартира Sofia MENAR фестивал – и ще има четене!  Радвам се много! Благодаря на Мая Ценова и организаторите на Sofia MENAR фестивал – успех!

Призовавам моите български приятели и всички хора за които свободата на словото е нещо важно, за да подкрепят Ашраф Фаяд. Елате!

Повече информация тук и тук:

A List: Global Readings for Poet Ashraf Fayadh, Sentenced to Death in Saudi Arabia

 

 

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-6. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

June Rain

16 June 1957 – a rainy day but always to be remembered as a black day in the lives of all families in a small town at Mount Lebanon, the stronghold of the Maronites in Lebanon, the day when everybody’s life changed forever in this community.

The rivalry between the two dominating clans, the Al-Ramis and the Al-Semaanis had been lingering since a long time despite the fact that intermarriage between the clans was not rare and that all were Christians of the same denomination. In a church, the conflict that is triggered by political and personal issues, explodes – and in the end 24 men are dead.

Eliyya, the son of one of the victims, comes back to his home town for a visit after having lived for more than twenty years in the United States. He wants to meet his old and nearly blind mother – and to find out who his father – a man whom he has never met – was, and why and how he died. But this is not an investigation that aims in finding a culprit, as the two Armenian photographers suspect that were witnesses of the church massacre and that may or may not have shot photos from the gunfight. For Eliyya it is also an attempt to find out why his mother has sent him away from the small town so early on in his youth, first to school in Beirut and then to study abroad. And what about the rumors that he was conceived after his fathers death?

Eliyya wants to find out where he comes from and why his life in exile is so unhappy and the sense of purpose is drifting away from him because he is for some reason unable to create lasting friendships or relationships with people. He goes to different areas of the town where the two clans live and talks to people who were either witnesses of the events or knew the victims of the massacre intimately. What we read is therefore a mosaic of voices told by different characters.

While reading the book, I realized that some of the traits of the people in the community that the author is describing are typical for many areas in the Mediterranean. The machismo of the small town and its men has a lot in common with what one could find also in Sicily or the Accursed Mountains in Albania for example. An exaggerated pride in traditions and an allegedly prominent lineage (frequently invented), the badmouthing of and gossiping about “the others”, to whom all possible negative characteristics are attributed, the widespread misogyny, the contempt for those who don’t join in the frequent violent skirmishes between the clans, the cult of the gun that plays such a dominating role in this society – it has very little to do with the usual stereotypes (the “bad guys”in this book, if we may call them like this, are all Christians – Muslims are practically absent in this novel) we are used to when we come from a “Western” country.

The author got the inspiration to this novel from a murder in his home town, and he goes to great length to present us a multi-faceted story; the complicated relationship between the people is revealed by the life stories of some of the minor characters, for example the baker who lived during the civil war on the “wrong side” of the town, i.e. surrounded by people from the other clan – being only a baker didn’t protect him in the end. The tailor who takes so much interest in his good looks and his gun. Or the two Armenians, descendants of survivors of the genocide in 1915 whose ancestors found refuge amongst Arabs, but who feel estranged from the community in which they live after the catastrophe in the church. There is Muntaha, a neighbor of Eliyya’s family and the best friend of Kamileh, Eliyya’s mother, who knows a few things that the others don’t know. And there are of course Eliyya’s parents: Yusef, his father, a gambler and womanizer and there is, most importantly Kamileh, Eliyya’s mother who is in a way the real centre of this novel. We get to know her well as readers and we begin to understand that there is also another side to her than that of the constantly bickering, stubborn, and harsh old woman. But as a result of the events she had to go through, she was never able to share this side with her husband or her son or anybody else.

The novel has a very elaborate structure and the author knows obviously exactly about what he is writing. The motives of his characters, as difficult as they seem to be understandable in the beginning, make much more sense while the story moves on. It is also a story of exile – not only Eliyya spends his life abroad, also many of the other characters have been emigrating at least temporarily to some godforsaken place in Brazil, Venezuela or Australia, some of them just coming home in time to become part of the group of men that perished in the church massacre (the “incident”, as it is called by almost everyone).

One of the aspects of this novel that I found most interesting was the author’s analysis of the already mentioned machismo of this very traditional society. It is not only about guns, but also about cars, something to which most of us can relate probably much more easily. The author mentions a rather revealing development – at a certain moment in the late 1950’s, early 1960’s, American cars are getting more and more replaced by German cars:

“…it was tempting to say that they found in German cars a kind of toughness and durability they had missed in the American cars…Mixed in with all of that praise for mechanics was also a general fascination with the German nation for having confronted the whole world by itself in WWII, which was a reason enough for pride, despite its eventual loss.” – (The Falange, the fascist Lebanese party that has as an almost exclusive power and support basis in the Maronite community in Mount Lebanon was never hiding the fact that they were inspired in many respects by the Nazis, SS-like uniforms of their paramilitary militias that are responsible for some of the worst crimes in the Middle East included.)

One of the most interesting paragraphs in the book for me was when the author is explaining how the people were getting used to the sound of the different kinds of gunfire – with the single shot at point blank range being the most chilling since the distance is too short to fail. But there are even absurd cases like those people who are sending a tape with recorded gunfire to a brother in Australia – the poor guy is allegedly living in a place where he is deprived of that sound! That is so grotesque, it is even funny. 

“And then there was the unverified claim that Abu Saeed’s neighbours and relatives started shooting into the air one day, refusing to tell the reason for their joy. The secret didn’t come out until days later, thanks to some women who sent out news outside the quarter that Abu Saeed had been experiencing a constant erection and was worried sick about it. He’d consulted numerous doctors and the day it finally ‘slept’ for him, as they say, all his family and neighbours fired their rifles in celebration.”

I couldn’t help but bursting out laughing when I imagined the whole family and neighbourhood celebrating the receding erection of their leader – hilarious!

Jabbour Douaihy, a professor for French literature in Beirut, was a new name to me. I am glad I read this multi-layered and -voiced novel that didn’t only give me a much better insight and understanding in the reasons for the violence in Lebanon and the Middle East in general, but that is also due to the great abilities of the author as a storyteller a book that will stay very long with the reader. It can be also read as a kind of Bildungsroman of its main character, but that is only one of the various approaches to this rich and thoughtful book. 

In the end we see Eliyya saying good-bye to Kamileh, and it is very probably the final farewell. On his way back to the United States, Eliyya is getting rid of some excess baggage. That is sometimes very helpful – not only while traveling, but in life in general.

June Rain

Jabbour Douaihy: June Rain, transl. by Paula Haydar, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, Doha 2014 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-6. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


Reading/Reviewing Plans

The end of the year is approaching with fast steps. This year I haven’t been so active as a blogger as last year until recently – German Lit Month brought me back to the usual pace – and I have done more blog posts on poetry and translations than the year before; also I did more posts in German and one in Bulgarian too. Book blogging is a dynamic process and the focus of such places will always be subject to small unplanned changes, but I will keep also in the next year my habit to publish reviews of books that were interesting to me.

As you already know when you follow this blog on a regular basis, my taste in books is rather eclectic. I am definitely not a person who is permanently scanning bestseller lists or is jumping in on discussions about books that were – usually for marketing reasons – the “talk of the town”. Therefore I avoided so far reviewing books by Houellebecq or Knausgård; it is difficult to not be influenced by the public discussion that focuses frequently on aspects that have very little to do with the literary quality of the books by such authors but a lot with their public persona and their sometimes very controversial opinions about certain topics. Not that the books by these authors are necessarily bad, but I prefer to read without too much background noise. So I will come also to these authors, but most probably not in the near future.

My blog tries to be diverse, but without quota. But of course my choice is subjective and I am aware of the fact that probably most readers will find many authors/books on this list that are completely unknown to them. If you look for just another blog that is reviewing again and again the same exclusively Anglo-saxon authors, then this might not be the best place for you. If you are eager to discover something new, then you are most welcome. 

There are no ads on this blog and this will also not change in the future. There is zero financial interest from my side to keep this blog alive, I do it just for fun. Please don’t send unsolicitated review copies if you are an author or a publisher. In rare cases I might accept a review copy when contacted first but only when I have already an interest in the book. All blog posts contain of course my own – sometimes idiosyncratic – opinion for what it is worth. In general I tend to write reviews on the positive side. When a book disappoints me, I tend to not write a review unless there is a strong reason to do otherwise.

These are the books presently on my “To-be-read” pile; which means they are the one’s that i will most probably read and review within the coming months. But as always with such lists, they are permanently subject to changes, additions, removals. Therefore I (and also the readers of this blog) will take this list as an orientation and not as a strict task on which I have to work one by one. 

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

Jim al-Khalili: The House of Wisdom

Ryunosunke Akutagawa: Kappa

Rabih Alameddine: The Hakawati

Sinan Antoon: The Corpse Washer

Toufic Youssef Aouad: Le Pain

Abhijit Banerjee / Esther Duflo: Poor Economics

Hoda Barakat: Le Royaume de cette terre

Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention of Morel

Max Blecher: Scarred Hearts

Nicolas Born: The Deception

Thomas Brasch: Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne

Joseph Brodsky: On Grief and Reason

Alina Bronsky: Just Call Me Superhero

Alina Bronsky: The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Dino Buzzati: The Tartar Steppe

Leila S. Chudori: Pulang

Beqe Cufaj: projekt@party 

Mahmoud Darwish: Memory of Forgetfulness

Oei Hong Djien: Art & Collecting Art

Dimitre Dinev: Engelszungen (Angel’s Tongues)

Anton Donchev: Time of Parting

Jabbour Douaihy: June Rain

Michael R. Dove: The Banana Tree at the Gate

Jennifer DuBois: A Partial History of Lost Causes

Isabelle Eberhardt: Works

Tristan Egolf: Lord of the Barnyard

Deyan Enev: Circus Bulgaria

Jenny Erpenbeck: The End of Days

Patrick Leigh Fermor: Mani

Milena Michiko Flašar: I called him Necktie

David Fromkin: A Peace to End All Peace

Carlos Fuentes: Terra Nostra

Amitav Ghosh: In an Antique Land

Georg K. Glaser: Geheimnis und Gewalt (Secret and Violence)

Georgi Gospodinov: Natural Novel

Georgi Gospodinov: The Physics of Sorrow

Elizabeth Gowing: Edith and I

David Graeber: The Utopia of Rules

Garth Greenwell: What Belongs to You

Knut Hamsun: Hunger

Ludwig Harig: Die Hortensien der Frau von Roselius

Johann Peter Hebel: Calendar Stories

Christoph Hein: Settlement

Wolfgang Hilbig: The Sleep of the Righteous

Albert Hofmann / Ernst Jünger: LSD

Hans Henny Jahnn: Fluss ohne Ufer (River without Banks) (Part II)

Franz Jung: Der Weg nach unten

Ismail Kadare: Broken April

Ismail Kadare: The Palace of Dreams

Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor (Editors): The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia: 1965-1968

Rosen Karamfilov: Kolene (Knees)

Orhan Kemal: The Prisoners

Irmgard Keun: Nach Mitternacht

Georg Klein: Libidissi

Friedrich August Klingemann: Bonaventura’s Nightwatches

Fatos Kongoli: The Loser

Theodor Kramer: Poems

Friedo Lampe: Septembergewitter (Thunderstorm in September)

Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star

Naguib Mahfouz: The Cairo Trilogy

Curzio Malaparte: Kaputt

Thomas Mann: Joseph and His Brothers

Sandor Marai: Embers

Sean McMeekin: The Berlin-Baghdad Express

Multatuli: Max Havelaar

Alice Munro: Open Secrets

Marie NDiaye: Three Strong Women

Irene Nemirovsky: Suite française 

Ben Okri: The Famished Road

Laksmi Pamuntjak: The Question of Red

Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra

Georges Perec: Life. A User’s Manual

Leo Perutz: By Night Under the Stone Bridge

Boris Pilnyak: Mahogany

Alek Popov: Black Box

Milen Ruskov: Thrown Into Nature

Boris Savinkov: Memoirs of a Terrorist

Eric Schneider: Zurück nach Java

Daniel Paul Schreber: Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Carl Seelig: Wandering with Robert Walser

Victor Serge: The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Anthony Shadid: House of Stones

Varlam Shalamov: Kolyma Tales

Raja Shehadeh: A Rift in Time

Alexander Shpatov: #LiveFromSofia

Werner Sonne: Staatsräson?

Andrzej Stasiuk: On the Way to Babadag

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar: The Time Regulation Institute

Pramoedya Ananta Toer: A Mute’s Soliloquy

Pramoedya Ananta Toer: The Buru Quartet (4 vol.)

Lionel Trilling: The Middle of the Journey

Iliya Trojanov: The Collector of Worlds

Bernward Vesper: Die Reise (The Journey)

Robert Walser: Jakob von Gunten

Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance

Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence

Marguerite Yourcenar: Coup de Grace

Galina Zlatareva: The Medallion

Arnold Zweig: The Case of Sergeant Grisha

Stay tuned – and feel free to comment any of my blog posts. Your contributions are very much appreciated. You are also invited to subscribe to this blog if you like.

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Men in the Sun

That people are leaving their home countries because they want to find a better life somewhere else is a phenomenon that is probably as old as mankind itself. But to me it seems that the extent and speed of this migration has increased a lot in the 20th and 21st centuries beyond anything experienced before.

Apart from the increase of the number of migrants, there is something else that puzzles me about this development: the cynicism and application of double standards towards migrants. While those of “us” westerners who work for some time or permanently abroad (like the writer of these lines) are usually labeled “expatriates”, the words that are used to characterize someone who for good reasons is looking for work in a wealthy country of the West are “economic migrant”, “poverty migrant”, “illegal immigrant”, “asylum shopper” – and these are still the more friendly terms.

When during the existence of the Iron Curtain migration from Eastern Europe was extremely limited, and those who tried to flee were leaving their countries in very dangerous circumstances, these migrants were branded as heroes and freedom fighters who wanted to leave behind a terrible communist dictatorship; now when the same people leave their places for the same reason – an unbearable situation for themselves and their families – they are usually downgraded linguistically a lot.

And those who flee by boat via the Mediterranean to Europe, or to Australia via the Indian Ocean: they all could be saved, but better let them drown so that less of “them” cause “us” any trouble…Welcome to the world of hypocrisy! – the same world that doesn’t give a damn about the civilians and children that fall victim to the drone assassinations of the “West” and starts a discussion about the moral implications of this extra-legal killings on a large scale only in that moment when some of the victims happen by chance to be one of “us” (i.e. Christians from Western countries).

Forced migration, ethnic cleansing, the attempt to cross borders in search for a better life, and the situation of exile in general are important topics of the literature of the last decades. The story Men in the Sun by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani is a classic in this respect.  

Three Palestinian men that lost their homes in Palestine during the events of 1947/48 (the Naqba, or catastrophe, as it is called by the victims) are in the center of the story. They lead a rather miserable life without any perspective in the huge refugee camps in Jordan, Iraq and other Arab countries. (As an aside: also the Arab countries apply double standards; while “the Palestinians” are usually considered the victims of Zionism/Imperialism, most of the real Palestinians are less welcome by these countries and still live in refugee camps, decades after their eviction. Only Jordan granted the majority of them citizen rights.)

Kuwait, in the early 1960s developing its oil industry, was in this moment for many of these men a kind of Promised Land. Once you made it there (illegally), you had – with a little bit of luck, connections and backshish – a chance to get an employment based on a temporary contract. A unique opportunity to support your beloved one’s in the refugee camps, pay for a decent education for your siblings, or prepare to get married.

Basra in Iraq was at that time the place from which many small groups left to make their way past the border guards through the desert. Smuggling refugees was (and is) a very profitable business, and so we witness our three main characters looking for an affordable and reliable guide.

Kanafani made a very good decision to introduce each of the three men, their background and their way of thinking, their different character and outlook on life in a separate chapter.

There is Abu Quais, the oldest of the group. A farmer by profession, who is missing his olive trees in Palestine and who hopes to make enough money in Kuwait to be able to buy saplings for a new olive grove somewhere. In his fatalistic, a bit stubborn way he seems very characteristic for the Palestinian peasant, or the peasant in general.

Then there is young Marwan, who stands up to the financial demands of a particular unpleasant businessmen who insists on a high advance payment and no guarantee for success for the undertaking. Marwan quickly emerges as the unofficial leader of the small group, and we can almost be sure that with his energy and optimism, he can be very successful in Kuwait – if he gets there at all of course. 

And then there is the good-hearted, naive Assad. After his brother stopped to send money from Kuwait (he got married and supports his own small family now), he had to stop his studies and tries to get now also to Kuwait.

And there is of course the guide, Abul Khiazuran, who promises to smuggle them in the water tank of his truck through the border checkpoints. If only it wouldn’t be so terribly hot in the empty water tank – but it will be ok, if they don’t have to wait very long at the checkpoints. Otherwise…

For the reader it is not a surprise that this journey ends in a disaster. When the driver pulls out the bodies of the three men after the border crossing, he – like the reader – is asking himself a startling question:

“The thought slipped from his mind and ran onto his tongue: “Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?” He turned right round once, but he was afraid he would fall, so he climbed into his seat and leaned his head on the wheel. “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything? Why? – The desert suddenly began to send back the echo: “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why?”

What struck me also about this story was the deep symbolism of the fact that the bodies are deposed at a garbage dump; this is how much a refugee’s life is worth. And also the fact that the driver lost his manhood literally as a result of his fight with the Israelis, and is now interested in only one thing: money is of course also charged with a symbolic meaning.

One more thing: there are no antisemitic slurs in any of Kanafani’s stories of this collection of stories. Sure, the Jews/Israelis are the enemies of these people; those who are responsible for the loss of their homes, their miserable lives in the refugee camps, and the loss of many lives too. But the enemy is not a demon, just someone who took away the land and existence of people who have lived in Palestine for hundreds of years.

The other stories in this collection are also very good; I was particular impressed by The Land of Sad Oranges, a short story about a family who is forced to flee their home and escape to Lebanon. The few oranges that they can take with them make them cry; a memory of what they lost and will probably never see again.

Ghassan Kanafani (born 1936) was one of the most talented Arabic prose writers. Born in Palestine, he had to leave his home at the age of 12 and shared many experiences of the people in his stories. He became also a political activist and joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine of George Habash. Fortunately, his work is not that of a political propagandist; it shows the suffering of the people of Palestine, and asks for empathy from its readers, not for agreement with a political program.

Kanafani was killed by a car-bomb explosion in 1972 in Beirut, together with his niece. Nowadays the assassination would have been executed by a drone. I suppose some people may call that “progress”.

Kanafani

Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder 1998

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

L1, L2, indirect – and a few more words on translations

When I have some free time, I love to browse blog posts of my fellow book bloggers. It is always interesting to see what the colleagues and friends are doing, which books I missed but should read soon, what they think about books I reviewed recently – and sometimes what they are thinking about other book-related topics.

As I have said several times before, I am much more aware now of the fact that translations matter and are extremely important. Even when you can speak and read five or six languages it will still widen your horizon beyond imagination when you have access to translated books. The availability and also the quality of translations are therefore two of the most important defining elements of an existing book market.

In an older blog post which I have just recently discovered, one of my favorite blogger colleagues, Caroline from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat, was writing about an interesting book by David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? – Translation and the Meaning of Everything. Among other authors Bellos has translated the Albanian author Ismail Kadare into English – from the French, not the Albanian language. This is called “indirect translation”, contrary to the direct translation from the source to the target language. Depending on the question if the translator translates into his or her native language, or from his native language into the target language, direct translations are differentiated into so-called “L1” or “L2” translations. Many experts view L2 translations with scepticism or reject them completely, while some consider indirect translations as acceptable when there are no translators available for this particular combination of languages.

I think what counts at the end of the day is the quality of the translation, no matter if it is L1, L2, or indirect. Of course, chances that the translation is excellent are much higher with direct translations. When writers are sometimes using a language that is not their native one, why shouldn’t some translators be able to do the same? (Since Nabokov grew up bilingual, I wouldn’t include him in this list of writers, but there are plenty of them and not the worst) –

An indirect translation might be a kind of second-best solution in cases when there are really no translators available for this particular combination. For Kadare it shouldn’t be a problem to be translated directly into English, since there is not one, but plenty of literary translators for that combination.

But Kadare is a special case: he revised and rewrote all his books that were originally published in the time of communism in Albania when he prepared them for publication in France. That means that a translation of the same book from French to English contains a sometimes very different text than when you would make a direct translation from the Albanian version. And for the novels originally published before 1990 Kadare considers the French and not the Albanian version as the “real”, uncensored text. The revised editions of the pre-1990 novels of Kadare in Albanian language were published after the French versions, if I am not mistaken. For the past-1990 novels, the situation is different: as far as I see they are translated directly from Albanian to English because there is no need for a text revision.

There are also other authors we know mainly from indirect translations. The works of Israel Bashevis Singer are usually translated from English – there are even a lot of people that think Singer was an English-language author. Especially in the case of the translations of Singer to German that is a real pity: Yiddish is so close to German, so why not translate the books directly? (The result would be a very different text, much more close to the original, as I can say from practical experience when I made a sample translation of one of his stories once from the original text to German, comparing the result with the “official” translation from English)

Why do publishers choose to publish indirect translations instead of direct ones? One reason may indeed be a shortage of available translators for the respective combination – although this case may be much rarer as some publishers make us believe. But the problem exists: when I investigated for the possibilities to translate a book from Indonesian to Bulgarian, I realized that there is only one person who can do the job – now imagine if he would be not available for some reason: the only option remaining would be to work with an indirect translation. Otherwise the book would be never available for the potential readers whose native language is Bulgarian and who don’t read in other languages. Although an indirect translation might not be perfect, in the best case it could be a reasonable approximation of the original text. And that would be still far superior then the virtual non-existence of a book in that particular language.

Another reason for indirect translations may be that in some cases publishers can save money – it is cheaper to translate from languages where you can find plenty of competing translators than from languages where there are only a very few translators, or where possibly the translation rights might be cheaper to acquire (depending on the contractual relationships between the involved publishers, the author and the literary agency).

Also literary agents can play a role in this process. Agents try to increase the income of their clients (and by that their own income), so they try to redistribute money from other stages of the book value chain – mainly the publishing houses, but obviously to a growing extent also from translators – into the pockets of their writing clientele, by auctioning off book and translation rights, increasing the royalties for the author, etc., and by that forcing everybody else in the book value chain to decrease their income. There is nothing wrong with this in principle, as long as professional and ethical standards are respected, which is not always the case.

A particular vicious example is a recent case in which Egyptian bestselling author Alaa al Aswany and his agent Andrew Wiley (together with Knopf Doubleday publishers) are involved and that was made public by the Threepercent website of the University of Rochester.

A completely unacceptable treatment of a literary translator – and hard to believe but obviously true: a world famous author, the Godfather of all literary agents and a renowned publishing house use their combined power and leverage to cheat on a hard working professional, for reasons that are as it seems of exclusively pecuniary nature.

By the way, I find it very interesting to see the approach of different writers to the question of translations of their works. While some authors take a great interest and discuss details of the translations with their translators, or even organize like Günter Grass (on their own costs) workshops for their translators to ensure a high quality of the translations, others like Thomas Bernhard show the extreme opposite approach. From an interview with Werner Wögerbauer, conducted 1986 in Vienna:

“W.: Does the fate of your books interest you?

B.: No, not really.

W.: What about translations for example?

B.: I’m hardly interested in my own fate, and certainly not in that of my books. Translations? What do you mean?

W.: What happens to your books in other countries.

B.: Doesn’t interest me at all, because a translation is a different book. It has nothing to do with the original at all. It’s a book by the person who translated it. I write in the German language. You get sent a copy of these books and either you like them or you don’t. If they have awful covers then they’re just annoying. And you flip through and that’s it. It has nothing in common with your own work, apart from the weirdly different title. Right? Because translation is impossible. A piece of music is played the same the world over, using the written notes, but a book would always have to be played in German, in my case. With my orchestra!”

And for those of you who are familiar with Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt’s books with the untranslatable titles Quand Freud voit la mer and Quand Freud attend le verbe, it may be not surprising that I am very sympathetic to Bernhard’s opinion. A translation is indeed always a different book, and sometimes – as is the case with the terms created by Freud in the framework of psychoanalysis, the meaning and specific connotation of central words and expressions are so inseparably linked to the particular language in which they were created (in the case of psychoanalysis: German) that each translation is already an interpretation, over-simplification, reduction of ambiguity, and even falsification of the original text. – But I guess I am digressing a bit. The highly interesting books by Goldschmidt would deserve a more detailed review as is possible here.

Translations are a wide field – I have the feeling that I will return to the issue again sooner or later.

Bellos

David Bellos: Is That a Fish in Your Ear? – Translation and the Meaning of Everything, Particular Books, 2012

Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt: Quand Freud attend le verbe, Buchet Chastel, 2006

Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt: Quand Freud voit la mer, Buchet Castel, 2006

Chad W. Post: A Cautionary Tale

Chad W. Post: The Three Percent Problem, Open Letter, e-book, 2011

The interview with Thomas Bernhard was originally published in the autumn issue 2006 of Kultur & Gespenster, the English translation by Nicholas Grindell was published here.

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 

Diary of a Country Prosecutor

Diary of a Country Prosecutor (also published under the title Maze of Justice) is a partly autobiographical short novel by Tawfik al-Hakim; it was first published in 1937. Al-Hakim based the book on his personal experiences as a Prosecutor.

The narrator is a young Public Prosecutor from Cairo that works in a small town in the Nile delta. He keeps a diary in which he describes his life and thoughts in this rather dull, boring place, surrounded by usually illiterate fellahin and a few a bit more wealthy traders and village dignitaries and state representatives, like the umdah, the local mayor, and the ma’mur, the officer in charge for the public order in the district. Some judges, ushers, legal assistants, and ghafirs (sentries) complete the cast of characters of this novel – almost. Because there are also two somehow elusive characters in the book: the beautiful peasant girl Rim and the mysterious and eccentric Sheikh Asfour who usually knows more about what’s going on than all representatives of the state together but who prefers usually to keep his knowledge for himself.

The book starts with a crime. Someone shot at Kamar al-Dawla Alwan, but there is no visible motif nor is there a suspect. The Public Prosecutor describes the investigation and it is soon obvious that the reader cannot expect a classical whodunit. In fact, the search for the perpetrator is not so much what drives the story, but the absurd way how the law is exercised.

It is revealing what the narrator says about the two judges with whom he is working. One is terribly slow and usually charges all defendants as guilty, the other is terribly fast (because he wants to catch the 11 a.m. train back to Cairo in time every day) and charges also all defendants as guilty. The law is based on the Code Napoleon, a foreign import completely alien to the fellahin who don’t understand anything about it.

“The usher went on calling out names. The type of charge had begun to vary and we were entering a different world, for the judge was now saying to the accused, ‘You are charged with having washed your clothes in the canal!’ – ‘Your honor – may God exalt your station – are you going to fine me just because I washed my clothes?’ – ‘It’s for washing them in the canal.’ – ‘Well, where else could I wash them?’ – The judge hesitated, deep in thought, and could give no answer. He knew very well that these poor wretches had no wash basins in their village, filled with fresh flowing water from the tap. They were left to live like cattle all their lives and were yet required to submit to a modern legal system imported from abroad. – The judge turned to me and said, ‘The Legal Officer! Opinion, please.’ – ‘The state is not concerned to inquire where this man should wash his clothes. Its only interest is the application of the law.’ – The judge turned his glance away from me, lowered his head, shook it and then spoke swiftly like a man rolling a weight off his shoulders: ‘Fined twenty piastres. Next case.’”

Even more outrageous is a case in which the ‘speedy’ judge is in charge:

“A decrepit bent-backed man with a white beard came forward, hobbling on a stick. The judge pounced on him with a question: ‘You expended reserved wheat?’ – ‘it was my wheat, your honor, and I ate it with my family.’ – ‘Pleads guilty. One month with hard labour!’ – ‘A month! Do you hear, Muslims! My own wheat, my own crop, my own property…!’ – The policeman dragged him away. As he went, he stared at those in court with goggling eyes as though he could not believe that he had heard the sentence aright. Surely his ears must have deceived him and the spectators must have heard the truth. For he had stolen no man’s wheat. It is true that the usher had visited him and ‘reserved’ his wheat, appointing him as a trustee until such time as he paid the government tax. But the pangs of hunger had seized him violently – him and his family; so he had eaten his own wheat. But who could possibly regard him as a thief on that account and punish him for stealing? It was impossible for this old fellow to understand a law which called him a thief for eating his own harvest, sown by his own hands. These were crimes invented by the law to protect the money of the government or of private creditors; but they were not natural crimes in the eyes of the poor farmer, whose simple instinct could not find any sin in them. He knows well enough that assault is a crime, and murder is a crime, and theft is a crime; for all these involve an obvious aggression against somebody else and reveal clear and evident moral turpitude. But ‘expending reserved property’ – and this was something whose principle and definition he could not grasp. For him it was purely a formal, legalistic crime, whose impact he must go on enduring without believing in it at all.”

Tawfik al-Hakim’s book is first of all a powerful attack on the state of the legal system in his home country, which didn’t even try to establish justice – but ‘the law’. It shows the situation in its full absurdity and frequently with a savage humor that borders the macabre: there is a scene where the town barber, under the supervision of the Public Prosecutor and a pathologist, is dragging corpse after corpse out of first one grave and then another in a muddled attempt to locate the body of a woman who has been murdered. ‘The comedy is grim, but comedy it is’, as Booker Prize Winner P.H. Newby says in his foreword to the edition I read. That someone is arrested for the murder that is clearly innocent, is just adding to the picture.

Al-Hakim was a liberal; he studied law in France in the 1920s and started a career as a Public Prosecutor in Egypt but got quickly very disappointed and pessimistic. He is today considered a classic of modern Arabic literature. He was the Arab world’s leading dramatist, as well as a major writer of novels and short stories. Diary of a Country Prosecutor (elegantly translated by the young Abba Eban, later to become a famous Israeli diplomat and politician) is a brilliant book in the tradition of Gogol and Kafka; and I am afraid that it hasn’t lost its relevance even today.

al-Hakim

 

Tawfik al-Hakim: Diary of a Country Prosecutor, transl. by Abba Eban, Saqi Books, London 2005

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Endings

The fictitious village of al-Tiba is located somewhere near the desert, probably in Saudi Arabia, although it might be almost anywhere in the Arabian peninsula.

Life in this region depends on the availability of water. And since several years, the usual rainfalls become less and less and this is a real threat for the survival of the village and the people. The drought is not a temporary problem but a permanent danger and has become the trigger for changes, changes that are described in Abd al-Rahman Munif’s novel Endings:

“Drought. Drought again! When drought seasons come, things begin to change. Life and objects change. Humans change too, and no more so than in their moods.”

The novel consists of three parts. The first part gives a general description of the village life, the second part introduces the main character, Assaf the hunter and the other characters, such as the Mukhtar (head of the village) and Abu Zaki, the carpenter. But also animals play a great role in this novel. There is Assaf’s hunting dog, and there are the animals that are hunted by Assaf and the other villagers and occasional guests from the city.

Assaf is a loner, a person that is considered as odd by the villagers and that is the subject of ridicule and jokes. But on the other hand everybody in the village appreciates his skills as a hunter. Assaf tries – without big success – to explain to the other villagers and the people that come sometimes from the city to kill wild animals that it is important to hunt only when there is a need. Assaf understands the concept of sustainability, contrary to the the other villagers and the city folk.

During the drought period, game becomes practically the only food source. Now the villagers get closer to Assaf and want to embark on a big game hunt together with some visitors from town. A terrible sandstorm leads to a catastrophe: Assaf (together with his dog) gets killed. The depressed villagers take his body home and – this is the third part of the book – during a vigil for Assaf they tell each other stories (which are based on classical Arabic stories), that reflect the life of animals and more rarely men in the village.

After Assaf’s funeral, a group of the men, headed by the Mukhtar, drives to the city to lobby for the construction of the dam that was promised to them a long time ago. Without the implementation of this project, al-Tiba seems to be doomed.

The book is for various reasons remarkable. Endings is told by an omniscient narrator in a quite impersonal style. Very few of the characters have really individual traits. The village and the desert seem to be the true main characters of the novel, and the animals have at least the same importance for the story as the people.

Munif describes the deep difference between the city and village culture, and although he seems to sympathize with the villagers, he obviously doesn’t put much hope in them. This becomes clear when he describes how they look at the living Assaf, whom they consider as at least odd, or even half crazy. And that not only because of Assaf’s obvious preference for a solitary life in the desert and on the hunting grounds, but also because they fail to see Assaf’s point about the use of the resources the village has. Over-usage can and will destroy the village in the end, unless the villagers change their minds.

For a moment, under the deep impression of Assaf’s tragic death and the night they spent to honor him, the villagers wake up from their usual lethargy. Whether they will be successful with their intervention in the city in order to lobby for the construction of the dam, Munif doesn’t tell us. But his own experience as an economist in Saudi Arabia, and later in other Arabic countries, made him very pessimistic.

Abd al-Rahman Munif was born 1933 in Amman, Jordan, where he also grew up. Later he studied law in Baghdad, and oil economics in Belgrade. He held high positions in the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, published several books on the nationalization of the Arab oil industry and was chief editor and publisher of the influential journal al-Naft wa-l-Tanmiyah (Oil and Development). But his open criticism of Saudi Arabia resulted in his being stripped of Saudi citizenship and also his return to Iraq was blocked for the same reason, his criticism of those in power.

After that Munif embarked on a career as full time writer, mainly living in Paris. He published fifteen novels, among them the series Cities of Salt, a monumental quintet that can be seen as the arguably most remarkable work of modern Arabic fiction. In 2003, one year before he died, Munif published a book Notes on History and Resistance, in which he recalled the Iraqi uprising against Britain in 1920 and that ended with the infamies of the recently returned collaborators of the world’s only superpower – in Munif’s words

‘the most ignominious and shameless opposition of the world, a collection of kiosks selling lies and illusions’.

Since that time, things have gone even worse. Munif’s books haven’t lost their urgency and literary power and strength.

 

munif-endings

 

Abd al-Rahman Munif: Endings, transl. Roger Allen, Interlink Books, Northampton 2007

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.


The Last Storytellers

What a wonderful book!

Richard Hamilton, a BBC journalist with a weak spot for Morocco has collected some of the stories that are told until today by the traditional storytellers in Marrakech. The storyteller, once a fixture of each Arabic tea house, is unfortunately a craft that is disappearing quickly thanks to the ever-present TV or other electronic gimmicks in each coffee shop or tea house nowadays. And that is a real cultural loss. At least some more of the stories of this maybe last generation of master storytellers are preserved in this book.

Hamilton visited Morocco many times, and with the assistance of a local guide he was able to track down some of the most extraordinary masters of oral storytelling. Once he made a personal contact with them and convinced them to tell him some of their stories in order to preserve them for posterity, it was not difficult anymore. A stream of wonderfully crafted stories was recorded on tape and translated from the local dialect into English.

37 stories told by Moulay Mohamed El Jabri, Abderrahim El Makkouri, Ahmed Temiicha, Mohamed Bariz, and Mustapha Khal Layoun form the main part of The Last Storytellers, Hamilton added an insightful Introduction that gives not only detailed information regarding the making of this precious book but that gives also a short account on the role of oral storytelling in the traditional Arabic societies. Barnaby Rogerson, who wrote an excellent biography of the Prophet provides an instructive foreword.

So, if you loved the 1001 Nights and you want to know about The Red Lantern and how it changed the life of two very different brothers, or about The Girl from Fez, you will not be disappointed. I am quite sure you will enjoy this book very much and maybe you will say in the end It is good – just like the Prime Minister in the story The King and His Prime Minister. And there will be a much deeper meaning in this sentence as you may think right now.

I read The Last Storytellers in a traditional tea house in Amman which was just the perfect place for it. But no matter where you read it, The Last Storytellers is a truly enchanting and captivating book.

The-Last-Storytellers

Richard Hamilton: The Last Storytellers, I.B. Tauris, London New York 2011

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

To be reviewed

This is my actual “To-be-reviewed” list – which means that I will very probably publish a write-up of these books on my blog within the next months. But don’t be surprised when I add reviews of books that are not on this list. The list is just giving you an idea what you can expect (among others) in the near future on this site.

Tawfik al-Hakim: Diary of a Country Prosecutor

Jim al-Khalili: The House of Wisdom

Fabio Antoldi / Daniele Cerrato / Donatella Depperu: Export Consortia in Developing Countries

Abhijit Banerjee / Esther Duflo: Poor Economics

Joseph Brodsky: On Grief and Reason

Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers

Beqe Cufaj: projekt@party

Mahmoud Darwish: Memory of Forgetfulness

Oei Hong Djien:  Art & Collecting Art

Anton Donchev: Time of Parting

Michael R. Dove: The Banana Tree at the Gate

Patrick Leigh Fermor: Mani

David Fromkin: A Peace to End All Peace

Amitav Ghosh: In an Antique Land

Georgi Gospodinov: Estestven Roman

Richard Hamilton: The Last Storytellers

Ludwig Harig: Die Hortensien der Frau von Roselius

Albert Hofmann / Ernst Jünger: LSD

Hans Henny Jahnn: Fluss ohne Ufer (River without Banks)

Ismail Kadare: The Siege

Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor (Editors): The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia: 1965-1968

Orhan Kemal: The Prisoners

Theodor Kramer: Poems

Sean McMeekin: The Berlin-Baghdad Express

Wilhelm Raabe: Die schwarze Galeere

Deborah Rohan: The Olive Grove

Anthony Shadid: House of Stones

Tahir Shah: In Arabian Nights

Raja Shehadeh: A Rift in Time

Werner Sonne: Staatsräson?

 

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.