While Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge 8 has been running for almost two months now, thus far I haven't really been able to contribute much. Today's post, though, is an attempt to rectify that with something a little different. You see, while the inspiration is Japanese, the end product is Welsh - and the style is excitingly unique. I shall explain...
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Paul Griffith's The Tilted Cup: Noh Stories (review copy courtesy of the publisher) is another of the wonderful slices of writing from The Cahiers Series, a coproduction between Sylph Editions and The Center for Writers & Translators at the American University of Paris. Each of the cahiers is a slim, aesthetically-pleasing volume, running to about forty pages, and they all have some sort of connection with translation.
This particular cahier is of special interest to J-Lit fans as it takes classic stories from Japanese Noh plays (slow productions which use wooden masks to convey emotions) and condenses them into brief, elegant short stories in English. While it sounds a little unorthodox, it's actually a decision which works very well, as the original stories are less complete tales than thought-provoking vignettes - and they are all very well-known in Japan, on a par with such tales as the Arthurian legends or Aesop's fables.
Several of the choices touch on the supernatural, depicting encounters between humans and spirits. In 'Hagoromo', a fisherman agrees to return a spirit-being's cloak to enable it to return to the heavens and, in return, is allowed to witness a heavenly dance - an indescribable event:
"The fisherman never tried to describe what he then saw, not to his beloved, not to his friends, not, when he was an old man, to the children of the village. He had seen something; that much they all knew. They would look into his eyes, for a trace of it. Of course, there was nothing to be seen."
'Hagoromo', p.13 (Sylph Editions, 2014)
The first story, 'Tadanori', also introduces a spirit, when a monk sleeping beneath a cherry-blossom tree is watched over by a ghost - the poet the monk is seeking -, and in 'Kayoi Komachi' we hear of a poetess, a ghostly lover and spilt wine which never reaches the floor...
Another theme is the occurrence of chance meetings, as detailed in 'Hachi no Ki'. In this story, a ruined, exiled nobleman decides to show pity on a traveller on a cold winter night, and while the outcome is perhaps the most predictable of all the stories, it's still elegantly done. In contrast, 'Hanjo' tells of a chance meeting between two young lovers, where fortune conspires to put obstacles in the path of their happiness, leaving the woman to abandon hope of ever finding the man again.
As much as the stories are fascinating, though, the real beauty of The Tilted Cup is in how the tales are told. The title itself comes from the writer's preface, which he begins:
"Translation tilts the cup, and the text takes on a new shape. What spills over, the translator hopes, is not lost to the ground but held in the ambience of that which remains." (p.5)
In fact, by taking stories from Japanese into English, and converting them from drama to prose, Griffiths is making a double translation - or, as he puts it, tilting the cup at least twice. Happily for the reader, it doesn't appear that too much of the essence has splashed out onto the ground ;)
Griffiths has brought the stories into the new language (and genre) with some beautiful writing, and he has a pleasingly light touch with words. In 'Kantan', a tale of a student, a pillow and some spell-binding dreams, one of the images is described thus:
"Thereupon a messenger in court uniform arrived to tell him the emperor had died, and had named him heir.
Why? The messenger didn't know. That wasn't his job."
'Kantan' (p.17)
There are many more examples of sly winks to the reader, but let's not give too much away here...
What stands out most about the collection, however is the way in which several of the tales play with the structure to make the story stand out. In 'Fujisan', the brief text is shaped in the image of the famous mountain, and 'Teika', which recounts the perfect love between a princess and a poet, takes the form of an incomplete sentence, one which circles back on itself and could almost be read continuously.
The best of these, though, is 'Saigyozakura', in which a famous poet laments the visitors who journey to see his famous cherry-blossom tree - and disturb his tranquillity. However, a spirit chides him for blaming the tree:
"It seems to me, said the flowers, that you carry human nonsense within you. Only the fool thinks himself raised above folly."
'Saigyozakura' (p.36)
The beauty of this one, however, is what you discover when you glance at the end notes. You see, this one is a story within a story, for if you look back at the text, there is another, similar tale hidden within, just waiting to be discovered by the careful reader...
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As always with the cahiers, there's far more to the work than just the text. The book also includes several photographs by John L. Tran of contemporary Japan, interspersed between the stories and perhaps reflecting them in a new light. Many of them focus on empty hallways in covered shopping strips, cold, shiny and fairly claustrophobic. For people who have visited Japan, they're fairly familiar images, yet the absence of people, and the forbidding, rolled-down shutters, give the pictures a slightly more sinister, other-worldly air...
...which brings us nicely back to the stories :) The Tilted Cup is a beautiful work, another perfect coffee-table piece (for if I ever get a coffee table), and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in Japan, Noh plays or Japanese shopping centres. It's not a book which will take long to read, but it's certainly one you'll be dipping back into time and time again...
It's been a while, but I've finally found a few hours to devote to the other two beautiful Cahiers I received from Daniel Medin at the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris. Last time, I looked at an interesting piece from László Krasznahorkai and an alphabetical guide to the life of a translator - today's offerings are just as interesting and varied :)
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Shades of the Other Shore, like many of the cahiers, is another mix of prose and imagery. Writer Jeffrey Greene and artist Ralph Petty are two Americans with a new life in France, and their words and paintings provide an outsider's view on the country. Petty's vivid watercolours accompany Greene's mix of poetry and prose nicely, but (of course) I'm more focused on the literary side of the partnership...
The writing shows some interesting juxtaposition at times (e.g. Jeanne d'Arc and Steve Irwin...), but many of the pieces come back to the two constant themes of his mother, who lives with him in France, and death. In 'On Hoarfrost', the writer turns cleaning his frosty windscreen into something deeper in his attempts to remove the white, equalising covering:
"My mother is already seated in the car, engine running with the defroster blowing, and as I scrape away the hoarfrost, her face and figure emerge from under the glass, looking out as if I were exhuming her from the next world into this one."
p.8 (Sylph Editions, 2013)
'The Silent Gardener' treads a similar path, but in a more poetic vein:
"My mother sleeps under a fig tree
with no leaves, only the spring sun" (p.16)
The title also seems to examine this preoccupation with 'the other side', although he might just be talking about France. If I'm honest, this wasn't really my thing, but there were some nice lines, and the pictures were very pretty :)
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The second work was one I was a little more interested in checking out as it was by a writer whose work I've enjoyed before, Gao Xingjian. While all the work I'd previously read by the Nobel laureate had been prose works, the subject of this cahier is a short play, originally written in French, translated (by Claire Conceison) into English directly, but with a possible Chinese version in mind.
The play, Ballade Nocturne, is a short piece, with a focus on music, pictures and dance. There are just four roles: a musician, two dancers and an actresss who also plays a character called 'she'. Anyone familiar with Gao's prose work, especially Soul Mountain, will recognise the focus on shadowy pronouns as descriptors...
'Elle', the focus of the piece, is all woman:
"On dirait une femme nature,
mais pas fatale.
On dirait une femme perdue,
mais sans rien de public,"
p.2 (Sylph Editions, 2010)
"One might call her a natural woman,
but not a femme fatale.
One might call her a lost woman,
but not a common whore." (p.17)
First we are introduced to her as a person, then the writer positions her as a representative of her gender in a battle of the sexes:
"Oh là là, femme contre homme,
une dure bataille.
Qui sera le vainqueur?
Et qui sera conquis?" (p.4 )
"Oh la la, man versus woman
a tough battle.
Who will be the conqueror?
And who will be conquered?" (p.19)
In the eternal struggle, Gao suggests that men need first to understand women to be worthy of them.
This theme of the struggle is taken up more literally as the play continues (at one point, the musician - the only male character - is trussed up and dragged off stage!). It's very clear that 'she' is protesting against a man-made world and would like to propose some alternatives:
"et s'il ya une religion en laquelle croire,
ce sera notre propre corps." (p.11)
"and if there is a religion worth believing in
it will be our own bodies." (p.29)
If women ruled the world...
There is an intense focus on what is going on around the actors, and the cahier is full of stage directions, descriptions of the background music, and the dances the two dancers are to perform. To an uncultured novice like myself, it's all rather arty, and Ballade Nocturne is described in the translator's introduction as a 'polymorphic' work, one which can't be pigeon-holed into 'theatre', 'dance' or 'art'.
As always, there is an abundance of beautiful extras. In addition to Conceison's insightful introduction, the 'reader' is treated to Gao's beautiful ink-wash illustrations, as well as the original French-language version in a pamphlet insert. It's a book which is a joy to read and admire - being totally honest, I'm not completely sure I'd enjoy sitting through the actual play though!
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The Cahiers Series produces beautiful pieces, coffee-table books for those interested in good literature and translation, and I'm very grateful to M. Medin for sending some my way. Sadly though, with two young kids around, they're unlikely to be sitting on my coffee table any time soon. Perhaps some of my readers will have more luck with that idea...
One of the perks of blogging is that sometimes people send you stuff unexpectedly, and that's especially good when it's books in your area of interest. Recently, Daniel Medin, from the Center for Writers & Translators at the American University of Paris was kind enough to send me a few titles from The Cahiers Series, coffee-table books for those interested in translation and translated fiction. The books are short, elegant and visually pleasing - and (as you'll see) the content's not bad either ;)
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First today is Diplomat, Actor, Translator, Spy, a fascinating little pamphlet by French translator Bernard Turle (translated into English by Dan Gunn). In this short work, Turle talks about his life as a translator in twenty-six short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet. The cahier is accompanied by photos from Gunn's childhood (which, while sounding a strange idea, works well), making for a real bilingual collaboration.
It's a fascinating insight into the day-to-day life of a translator, and the changes brought about in this field by technology. Turle explains how the spread of the Internet has allowed for a new relationship between translator and 'translated' and discusses his growing relationship with the English language. It's one he first describes as exciting (an escape from the realities of French) and later intrusive (an imperialistic tongue...). He also talks about how translation can sometimes be confronting as you can't always choose what you need to translate (there's some horrible, gut-wrenching stuff out there which some poor soul has to convert from one language to another...).
For me, the best part was the fact that a French insert of the original text was also provided, allowing me to compare (and criticise!), which just goes to show that translation is an art, one that can be discussed until the cows come home. In fact, this is even reflected in the choice of title. While the original title is Le traducteur-orchestre, the English title has echoes of a John Le Carré novel (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), perhaps playing on a comment Turle makes in section E (for 'Espion' or 'Espionnage'):
"Le traducteur est un espion à la solde de l'écrivain." (p.5)
"A translator is a spy whose paymaster is a writer."
p.12 (Sylph Editions, 2013)
Now that's not a description I'd heard before...
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The second of today's choices will be of particular interest to many of my readers (well, those who have a passion for fiction in translation, anyway). animalinside (words by László Krasznahorkai, images by Max Neumann, translation by Ottilie Mulzet) is a short collaboration where the Hungarian writer reacted to the German artist's surreal pictures of a dog-like figure (as seen on the cover). There are fourteen pictures, and for each there is one chapter, around two pages in length.
While it may sound short and trivial, it's anything but. From the very beginning, Krasznahorkai fans will feel themselves to be in very familiar territory. The text consists of long sentences, flowing powerful prose (that feels more like poetry). There's a constant, dark feel to the monologues - menacing, threatening, and at the same time claustrophobic.
The focus is on a shadowy 'I', an entity which at times is trapped, constrained and frustrated:
"Every space is too tight for me. I move around, I jump, I fling myself and yet I'm still inside that one space which is too tight for me, unbearably small, although at times it is only exactly just a bit too tight, and it is exactly then, when it is exactly just a bit too tight, that it is the most unbearable..."
Part IV, p.14 (Sylph Editions, 2012)
These ideas occur over and over again, and the repetition adds to the sense of restriction.
At other times though, the 'I' is a frightening, omnipotent force, greater than the cosmos, a being that threatens to rip you apart:
"...if one day I set out, no matter what you do it is completely hopeless, in vain do you try to resist, it will be of no use because you don't know who I am, and you don't know me, and your not knowing me protects me from your preparations, I am an invisible enemy, and you shall know very soon what invisible means, and chiefly, you will know what enemy means, because I am not just any kind of enemy, not even an enemy, but a blow that smites, that strikes down then and there and onto those exactly when, where, and onto whom it wants to..." (Part VI, p.19)
It's tempting to try and pin down just exactly who 'I' is. Is it Death, fate, cancer, ruin? Speculation is fun, but it's easier just to enjoy the rage and anger...
Perhaps animalinside is a work which reflects on our dull human existence, with people trapped in imaginary cages of our own making. The 'I' comes from inside our own bodies - the seeds of our destruction are already inside us...
...and, apparently, it looks like a dog with no fore-legs ;)
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The cahiers may only be forty-pages long each, but they are wonderful little books. As well as being interesting in their own right, the texts are complemented by the images chosen, providing a wonderful reading experience. They're well worth a look, and I'm grateful to have had the chance to check them out - merci, Monsieur Medin ;)
