Translation Prizes 2012
Adrian Tahourdin
Two of this year’s translation prizewinners were first published in
their original languages in 1947, which hints at the intriguing prospect
of a world library out there waiting to be rendered into English. Four
of the five awards – the Arabic, French, German and Spanish – are annual
fixtures, joined on this occasion by the Flemish.
Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber) was born in 1930 in a village in
western Syria. According to his latest translator Khaled Mattawa, he was
“unable to afford formal schooling for most of his childhood”; instead
he learnt the Qur’an and memorized classical Arabic poetry.
 He later gained a degree in philosophy from the University of
Damascus. In 1955–6 Adonis was imprisoned for membership in the Syrian
National Socialist Party, after which he and his wife settled in Beirut
and became Lebanese nationals. He now lives in Paris.
For several years Adonis has been talked of as a possible Nobel
Prize-winner, yet he remains, as Eric Ormsby pointed out in a review of
an earlier translated collection, A Time Between Rose and Ashes (TLS,
April 14, 2006), “relatively unknown in the English-speaking world,
largely for lack of good translations”.
Ormsby prefaced that comment with the observation that Adonis’s
“impact on the Arab literary world has been huge, if controversial”, and
that he is “deemed the most provocative and successful innovator of
Arabic verse in our time”. In the words of the critic Marilyn Hacker,
Adonis is “recognized as one of the most important poets and theorists
of literature in the Arab world . . . . His influence on Arabic poetry
can be compared with that of Pound or Eliot on poetry in English,
combined, however, with a radical and secular critique of his society”.
Khaled Mattawa has been working on his translations of Adonis’s work
for two decades and wins the Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for translation
from Arabic for his compendious Selected Poems (399pp; Yale University
Press; $30; 978 0 300 15306 4). Mattawa, who is himself a published
poet, writes of his approach: “Much of Adonis’s early poetry makes
frequent use of rhyme, but I have not tried to replicate his rhyming.
The same can be said for meter. Given that Arabic metrical feet are
quite different from Western ones, I have not stuck to any metrical
pattern, even when the poems are metrically composed”.
Adonis’s work is acknowledged to be densely allusive, drawing on the
work of the great Arab poets of the past, while also paying tribute to
European poets such as Nerval and Baudelaire.
Although Mattawa’s Introduction is informative, his notes (four pages
to nearly 400 pages of poetry) sell the reader a little short on the
influences. Where the work is baffling – the sense in lines such as “We
are a single face, / my shirt is not made of apples and you are not a
paradise”, or “My neck is a ladder climbing the horizon / and my head is
a blue sun”, is not immediately evident – a little more assistance from
the translator would have been welcome. Mattawa suggests that Adonis
“has entrusted language with the role of stretching our conceptual
faculties while trusting the reader’s natural ability to occupy new
realms of thought out of sheer curiosity”.
The work, as translated into English, rarely appears overtly
political, although Mattawa explains that The Book of Siege (1985) found
its source in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This collection
includes a lengthy meditation (in long lines) on enforced darkness,
“Candlelight” – “I return to the warm companionship of the slim candle .
. .” . Elsewhere he writes “‘I will never return to my country,’ said a
young woman almost crying. / Indeed, how miserable it is to be an Arab
today”. There is lyricism aplenty too, as in “The rose leaves its
flowerbed / to meet her / The sun is naked / in autumn, nothing except a
thread of cloud around her waist”.
Mattawa points out that “Adonis has been a consistent critic of
Western societies’ and governments’ treatment of the rest of humanity”,
and that he is “a seasoned and controversial public intellectual . . .
[but] first and foremost a poet”. In August last year, he urged
President Bashar al-Assad to step down.
Louis Paul Boon (1912–79) was a Flemish author of mainly historical
epics and scabrous novels. Very little of his work has been translated
into English, which makes Paul Vincent’s version of My Little War
(125pp. Dalkey Archive Press; paperback, $12.95; 978 1 56478 558 9)
particularly welcome.
The book, a series of vignettes, gives a vivid impression of Belgian
life under German occupation: “Now the Germans were here, and really
people shouldn’t go around saying that all Flemish nationalists were in
the pay of the Germans . . .”. We hear about Mr Swaem who runs a factory
that made boots throughout the war, first for the Organisation Todt and
then for the Wehrmacht, and of “Boone, who lived next door and sold
tires to the German army and had earned a fortune from it”. Elsewhere,
we learn that
“. . . there’s been an assassination attempt on Hitler and there’s a
revolution going on and they’re already fighting in the streets of
Hamburg and Berlin and Kiel, the sailors are destroying their own
weapons and the army is fighting against the S.S. – there’s been a
revolution just like in 1914–18 and the war is over. And it’s not true,
Hitler isn’t dead and there isn’t a revolution just like in 1914–18 and
the war isn’t over – the Germans commandeer all the remaining cars and
the first V-1 flies overhead.”
The novella first appeared in Flemish in 1947 as Mijn kleine oorlog.
Vincent, winner of this year’s Vondel Prize, has produced a fluent and
idiomatic version (apart from one jarringly anachronistic note, where he
refers to “African American or Native American” soldiers). In a
Translator’s Note, he explains that the book had a “three-stage
publishing history”, during which the author “toned down the Flemishness
of its idiom, and bowdlerized some of its physical and sexual
explicitness. Ironically, Boon’s (successful) accommodation of a wider
readership in the Netherlands attracted growing criticism in Flanders,
where he was seen by many as compromising his youthful revolutionary
principles”. Vincent has chosen the 1960 Dutch edition.
Comedy in a Minor Key was also published in 1947, as Komödie in Moll.
Its author Hans Keilson (who died last year, aged 101) was a
psychiatrist who worked with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.
He had fled Germany in 1936 and settled in Holland (his parents were
to die in Auschwitz).
The novella is set in Amsterdam during the Second World War and tells
the story of Marie and Wim, a couple in their twenties who have taken in
a refugee, Nico, a Jewish perfume salesman.
The situation produces comic moments, as when the cleaning lady
mistakenly opens the wrong bedroom door and is confronted with him (she
doesn’t give him away).
But there is pathos too: Nico is in poor health, and the doctor who
pays regular visits ingeniously suggests to Marie and Wim that they
explain to their neighbours that he calls on them in order to listen to
music. Nico doesn’t survive the novella and the couple’s attempts to
dispose of his body clandestinely produce further dark comedy. Damion
Searls wins the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Translation from German for his
elegant version.
Véronique Olmi’s punchy, short first novel Bord de mer was published
in 2001 by the admirable Arles-based firm of Actes Sud. (Olmi was born
in 1962.) The narrator of Beside the Sea, a single mother who is being
treated for depression, takes her two sons Stan (nine) and Kevin (five)
for a first holiday to an unnamed seaside town, where it rains
ceaselessly – “The rain was spattering against our window, poison
released from above” (later, raindrops are likened to “gobs of saliva”).
The Hindu
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