Looking for new books to read this April? Look no further with this edition of What’s New in Translation, featuring new releases translated from Thai, German, and Brazilian Portuguese. Read on to find out more about Clarice Lispector’s literature of exile, tales of a collection of eccentric villagers, and a comic book adaptation of Bertolt Brecht.
Tales of Mr. Keuner by Bertolt Brecht and Ulf K., translated from the German by James Reidel, Seagull Books, 2019
Review by Josefina Massot, Assistant Managing Editor
If Brecht’s bite-sized, biting tales of Mr. Keuner can be thought of as a corpus, it isn’t by virtue of their “what,” “when,” “where,” or “how”: they deal with everything from existentialism to Marxist politics, have often hazy settings, and run the gamut from parable to poem; it’s the titular “who” that pulls these sundry musings together.
Until recently, their fellowship was purely formal: Mr. Keuner (also known as Mr. K) was practically nondescript, a mere “thinking man” whom Walter Benjamin traced back to the Greek keunos and the German keiner—a universal no one. This seemingly baffling figure would have made sense given the original tales’ fifth W, their “why”: since they were meant to edify general audiences, they would have gained from as null a champion as possible. After all, a man stripped of his traits is stripped of individuality, untainted by bias; he is the ultimate thinker, the voice of global truth.
Cue a second Mr. K, Ulf K. If he were any less skilled an artist (and I, a more charitable critic), I could just praise his attempt to render the Tales as a graphic novel. Drawing Keuner, whatever the outcome, is in itself a bold move, because it grants him qualities that take him from abstract rhetorical ruse to concrete character—from a universal no one to a singular someone. While apparently subverting Brecht’s conception of a featureless “thinking man,” this approach actually honors a Brechtian notion best captured in “What’s Wise About the Wise Man Is His Stance” (a tale that didn’t make Ulf’s selection but is clearly present in spirit): Keuner disregards a philosopher’s thoughts because he “sits uncomfortably” and “talks uncomfortably,” implying that wisdom isn’t just about intellectual (sub)stance but also, fundamentally, about physical stance. If Keuner is to be a true thinker, then, he must be given a body; the fact that Ulf does so is cause enough for celebration.
Luckily (I’m not prone to acts of critical charity), he also delivers in spades. His version of Keuner, rendered in lines and colors as sparse as Brecht’s prose, is a version of the playwright himself—the bespectacled man with the whimsical hairline and subtly curled lips at the top of every Google search. Ulf rarely gives him eyes, which fits the role as blind seer in which he often casts him. In “If Sharks Were Human,” for instance, Keuner denounces the tactics of extreme-right regimes by likening their officials to the feared, finned brutes: they provide “big celebrations” for the fish under their rule because “happy fishlings taste better than sad ones,” but they just as readily “lead [them] into war.” Ulf’s merit here is to add a dose of salient humor to wry irony: the prose alone might elicit a rueful half-smile, but the pictures of piscine soccer matches as a form of bread and games or of cute little fish wielding AK-47s will have us chuckling, all the more receptive to horror by virtue of contrast.
Ulf’s most interesting drawings aren’t those that highlight Brecht’s message, though, but rather those that reinvent his messenger. In “Hunger,” for example, Brecht’s Keuner denounces famine, but Ulf’s goes much further and actually does something about it: he’s shown raiding a bistro aptly dubbed “Schlaraffenland” (a reference to the mythical, medieval land of plenty) and then handing the nicked treats over to a group of starving compatriots. He’s not always a Bavarian Robin Hood, mind you, and “The Helpless Boy” is a perfect case in point: a youth gets mugged, a passerby finds him crying after the fact and asks why he didn’t scream for help, he says he did but no one heard him, and his interlocutor—trusting that no one will hear him now either—proceeds to mug him as well. In Brecht’s original Tales, Keuner offers the story as a warning against “silently allowing an injustice”; in Ulf’s, he’s featured as the shady passerby himself. He’s also seen perpetrating lighter (but still arguably questionable) acts: In “The Inferior Doesn’t Come Cheap Either,” he goes shopping for second-hand furniture to abide by Marxist standards of poverty, but—and herein lies the Ulfian twist—he does so at “Furniture King,” a double nod to monarchy and Western capitalism. These portraits could be read as Ulf’s own form of ironic censure, a means of laughingly showing that Keuner doesn’t always practice what he preaches. It’s clearly Ulf’s Keuner, though—not his creator—who chooses to picture himself as a potential actor in the scenes he bemoans, thus tacitly admitting that he’s not above them. This, if anything, is a sign of self-awareness, the definite marker of “the thinking man.”
By giving him a physical (and thereby moral) stance far beyond those intended by Brecht, Ulf redefines the Tales’ “who” and “why”: the clean, abstract voice of right and wrong becomes a full-fledged subject capable of both, much more in tune with our tangled times than with Brecht’s often binary take on his own. That Ulf can pull off such complexity in a cartoon (a medium often prone to simplification) is further proof of his genius. While his spin might strike some as an act of treason, I view it as a glowing tribute: in “The Reunion,” a man tells Keuner that he hasn’t changed in years. “Oh!” whimpers Keuner, distraught. “. . . How terrible!”
The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz, New Directions, 2019
Review by Paul M. Worley, Editor-at-Large for Mexico
Writers like Clarice Lispector are difficult to classify, with this unclassifiability being in many respects itself a kind of classification. Born into a Jewish family in 1920, before her second birthday Lispector fled what is now Ukraine, as it convulsed in the throes of Revolutionary Russia, eventually settling in Brazil. Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, composed when she was only twenty-three, was met with immediate acclaim, and the novel propelled her to superstardom in the realm of Portuguese letters. After her marriage to the Brazilian diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente, she would spend part of the next two decades of her life moving between diplomatic posts before leaving her husband and returning to Brazil, where her premature death in 1977 cut short one of the great literary careers of the twentieth century. Lispector may easily fit the profile of a “global” literary author, and yet her overlapping identities defy her comfortable accommodation within that category. Despite her cosmopolitan profile, she is intensely Brazilian, and despite her being grounded in Brazil, between her family’s journey and her own marriage, the first two-thirds of her life are defined by exile and living abroad. Further, in the early twenty-first century her status as a Jewish refugee from the Ukraine not only reminds us of that country’s ongoing political strife, but also of the global rebirth of anti-Semitism. Despite that fact that we are only two years removed from what would be the author’s 100th birthday, she seems startlingly representative of a contemporary world which is very much in flux.
One of Lispector’s earlier novels, A cidade sitiada (1949), has not received the acclaim of her other works, and may therefore appear to be an odd choice for English translation, especially since Johnny Lorenz’s rendering of The Besieged City (2019) follows Giovanni Pontiero’s earlier (1999) translation of the same novel. And yet, as New Directions begins to release more and more of Lispector’s work in translation, this novel will attain more of a following among critics and popular readers alike. That said, one can easily understand why most readers would set the novel aside given its strident, unreflective realism. I will call the novel cinematic, but only if the reader agrees that by this adjective I am referring to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1961 Last Year at Marienbad, and insofar as, like the movie, the novel is told in scenes whose relationships the reader must infer, and involves characters whose motivations remain as obscure on the final page as they are on the first. In other words, the novel is not one that a reader simply sits down and enjoys moving through, but one that unspools across multiple readings. One could say that it is a novel to experience and to be experienced rather than simply read. While many readers may find this aesthetic frustrating and alienating, the work’s brutal exposition of human existence would seem to be its signature achievement. While there are indeed people, places, and things that exist outside of ourselves, for each of us as individuals they only exist within the fantasies of our own minds. Despite the majesty and beauty of language itself, we all remain, essentially, trapped within our own heads.
As frequently noted by scholars and critics, the novel’s central character, Lucrécia Neves, appears to experience things “as they are” and “in the moment,” and be largely devoid of an interior life, as her chronological life appears to parallel the development of a small Brazilian town. As a person she, “see[s] everything,” yet what she sees is that “the secret of things was in that, by revealing themselves, they revealed themselves to be identical to themselves.” In the words of the narrator, Lucrécia “gave nothing of herself—except that same incomprehensible clarity.” As framing devices, the very titles of the work’s chapters tend to reflect this flattened sense of disjointed, disembodied, episodic experience. Having enjoyed the company of several suitors in the first half of the novel, the chapter in which Lucrécia discusses her possible marriage with her mother Ana is called “The Alliance with the Outsider.” Lucrécia’s decision to marry Mateus is only made clear at the beginning of the following chapter, “The Betrayal,” and even then the reader is told that “she went with Mateus’s friend to deal with the papers for her marriage.” While in the previous chapter it is tempting to simply view Mateus as an “outsider” to the town of São Geraldo, to the relationship between Lucrécia and her mother, and to Lucrécia herself, this unsentimental portrait of her arranging her marriage papers flips the script as it reveals Lucrécia to be equally an outsider to Mateus and his space in another city. With the novel being almost free of dialogue, the reader, not unlike in real life, is left to construct relationships out of winks, nods, and physical interactions. When Lucrécia, now married as Lucrécia Correia, writes her mother that, “Sometimes I die laughing, mama” from the witty things her husband says, the reader is left somewhat perplexed. Lucrécia does not seem capable of laughter, and at no point does Mateus do anything particularly witty. And yet . . .? We, like Lucrécia herself, appear to glide over the surface of things, our attachments figments of our own imaginations. Although the back matter describes her as living “happily ever after,” I’m unsure that Lucrécia has done anything other than lived, a radically honest proposition for considering the human experience.
For all the novel’s enigmatic and illusory qualities, Lorenz’s excellent and timely translation make it a wonderful read for readers prepared to enter fully into another kind of literary world. As unclassifiable as its author, the novel deserves far more charitable readings than it has received to date, a critical situation that speaks perhaps more to our own deep craving for stable meaning than the endless, raw experience of crafting meaning itself. Lucrécia Neves/Correia is a person portrayed and a life lived, held under a glaring light with little comment.
Arid Dreams by Duanwad Pimwana, translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul, Feminist Press, 2019
Review by Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil
From elevator attendants to prostitutes to children made of wood, Duanwad Pimwana’s Arid Dreams is by no means short on interesting characters. Brilliantly rendered from the Thai by lawyer-turned-translator Mui Poopoksakul (formerly Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large for Thailand), Pimwana’s English-language debut invites us to share the hopes, fears, and shortcomings of characters who are nothing like us, and yet everything like us. Reading these stories from cover to cover is like walking through a village: we see children playing, adults bickering, dreams crystallizing (and shattering)—all set against the background of a working-class Thailand. The result is a playful, humorous, and deeply insightful look at what it means to be a society (and human being) in the making.
Perhaps the greatest joy in reading Arid Dreams is its uncertainty, its ability to transform a character’s unpredictable thinking into the driving force of the narrative. In “The Attendant,” a lonely elevator operator describes what it’s like to work in “a coffin for the living,” a sharp contrast to his work as a farmhand during his youth. In “The Awaiter” (published in an earlier version on Asymptote’s blog in 2015), an unemployed, self-proclaimed “unlucky” man stumbles upon some money dropped near a bus stop and waits for its rightful owner (while simultaneously reflecting on what he might “really” be waiting for). In “Within These Walls,” a politician’s wife anticipates the death of her husband, realizing that she has been living in his shadow for far too long. “I’d never asked myself whether or not I liked the way we lived,” she reveals, in a confession that feels all too familiar. It’s hard not to root for her when she jumps out of bed with lipstick in hand to scribble all over those “perfect beige walls” (she had wanted green all along . . . ).
For every character who wins us over, there is another who makes us wonder. The profile is fairly consistent: insensitive, distasteful man who “hunts” for girls within a particular price range, is embarrassed when his wife doesn’t wear make-up, or believes that “the wife’s a sure thing” (so why not have some fun on the side?). The irony is that these men are often the ones narrating the stories, disclosing their own flaws and fragilities without even knowing. In a special feature published by Asymptote in 2014, Mui Poopoksakul highlights the ways that some contemporary Thai short stories “request—even breed—astute readers who bring in their own interpretations, question what they read, and perceive the multiplicity of meanings.” Here we have an example of just that. When a male uses the phrase “that slut of a mother,” or “my wife used to be stunning,” or “she’s just your everyday prostitute,” it’s assumed that the reader will catch the undertone. By trusting the reader’s perception, Pimwana invites us to coexist with her characters—to live within their world, rather than passively observing from the outside.
That world—full of discrimination, blindness and ignorance—is built through a language that is at once odd and elegant. Reading a single story is not enough; Poopoksakul’s choices as translator become clearest when the stories are threaded together—when the characters are seen as a unified cast. Though we might not expect to find a “slowpoke,” a woman “dressed to the nines,” or a man with a “screw loose,” we indeed encounter all three. This is what gives the village its collective charm, what makes the characters authentic, honest and incomplete. Just as Pimwana presents her characters as they are, Poopoksakul seems to present the stories as they are, honoring the subtle peculiarities of the original text. The result is a translation with a consistent and captivating style, if surprising at first.
In the final story, “The Second Book,” the narrator contemplates: “Who [suffers] more, a person who [knows] only the first half of a story or a person who [knows] only the last?” Arid Dreams is that rare collection that demands to be read in its entirety, with the understanding that, even still, we will never know the full story. We see each other in pieces: our hopes, our fears, our flaws, our failures. And sometimes we look for redemption in the strangest of places. This is a remarkable debut, an utterly curious and satisfying introduction to contemporary Thai literature.
*****
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