In translation

Rita Horanyi is a recipient of a 2017 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the second of three essays by…

Imre Kert√©sz is Hungary’s sole winner of the Nobel Prize for literature

‘Kazantzakis was a writer in constant conflict with his verbal idiom and in structural collision with language itself. Whoever reads his novels is impressed (or annoyed) by the gothic grandiosity of his rhetoric, the romantic extremism of his contradictions, the quest for a certain redemption that never comes and finally, his relentless efforts to construct a literary work that would fuse genres, forms and styles. And here exactly lies his significance as a writer.’

The most famous writer of the Netherlands Antilles appeared on the rooftop, wearing what seemed like a doctor’s short-sleeved shirt. Under the parted wiry hair, his shaven ebony face was awash with the dark blue hues made by the sunlight breaking through the blue vinyl covering of the bar. Arion’s poems, at times mystical, speak of how the Antillean poet senses himself loved by the elements on the island where he was born. The breeze is known to be more forgiving on Cura√ßao, dreamier, and kinder than on Aruba, where physicians say the constant, pushy north-east wind provokes disease in the muscles and the spine. This superstition was confirmed as soon Arion sat down before me: a gust entered his physician’s shirt through the collar, pushing the buttoned fabric outwards, as if tugging at him.

Sawako Nakayasu’s 2015 translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa and Sho Sugita’s 2017 translation of Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems of Hirato Renkichi each introduce an English-speaking audience to a key figure in Japanese modernism. Hirato Renkichi, born in 1893 in Osaka, has been hailed as Japan’s first futurist poet; Chika Sagawa, born in 1911 in a village on the northern island of Hokkaido, its first female modernist.’

We may approach Yan Lianke’s 1997 novella The Years, Months, Days through another, perhaps rather unexpected, work — Richard Matheson’s iconic 1954 novel, I Am Legend. The protagonist of the latter work, Robert Neville, finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world in which humanity has been ravaged by a virulent bacillus. Lianke’s novella is set against a similarly apocalyptic landscape. Following a devastating drought, the entire population of a remote Henan village flees, leaving behind only an old man and a stray dog.’

It would be wrong, however, to regard Binet’s novel as not much more than a sophisticated and hugely entertaining send-up. He sees, certainly, the absurd aspects of semiotics and the other ‘sciences’ his characters profess. But he also registers their allure and fascination. The clue to discovering what that allure and fascination might be has to do with the particular source of his preoccupations. When Theory crossed the English Channel, the Atlantic and then travelled to the Antipodes, it left behind its French playfulness.

Fifty years on, One Hundred Years of Solitude is still providing profound insight about our evolving human tale where horrors co-exist with wonders, where absurdities don’t provoke a blink.’

The key distinction between The Woman on the Stairs and Schlink’s earlier fiction is that the past acted on those characters in ways that were hidden to them, but drawn out through the narrative. Here, an unspoken past acts on the protagonist and the narrative asks us to believe that his conversion to a man of empathy occurs without any direct confrontation with his personal and national history.’

You’re five or six or seven years old, sitting in the dark in a cinema. You’re casting anxious glances to…