Posts filed under 'Working class literature'

Between Languages: The Politics of Class, Race, and Translation in the Novels of B. Traven

February 26, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Todarello

Such is how the frontier in Traven functions: an arena of capital that both equalizes and reproduces extant racial hierarchies.

The identity of novelist B. Traven has spawned a delightfully layered and debated array of theories, stipulations, and investigations. Best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, later adopted into a well-loved film by John Huston, Traven was the pseudonym of a German- and English-language writer who, in various hypotheses, has been the collaborative result of several individuals, an imprisoned actor, an enthusiastic explorer of Mexico, and a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. The most fascinating aspect of this mysterious identity, however, lies not solely in the individual’s life, but also in the entangled multiculturalism and various iterations of his works, which render American landscapes in German language, examine the intersection of class and race politics, and create narratives in which complexities of social agency are examined in both local and international contexts.

If you’re reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its English translation, it would be be hard to guess that it was written by a German author, let alone intended for German-speaking leftists, living in German-speaking countries in the interwar period. Even in the original German, the book bears no obvious trace of Europe or European culture—aside from the language, of course. It feels, on the contrary, quintessentially American, falling easily into the category of the western and full of the genre’s tropes and generic dictates. At least for this reader, it felt odd to be reading one’s way through many of the familiar elements of the western, in a language not commonly associated with it.

The novel takes place in a post-revolutionary Mexico during the interwar years, and its protagonists are white American vagabonds, property-less and looking for work. There are oilmen, Mexican “Indians” and Mexican ladinos, or mestizos. There are bandits, train heists, and Federales. There is gunplay. And there is gold. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was originally written and published in German as Der Schatz der Sierran Madre by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1927, and was part of Büchergilde Gutenberg’s mission to provide impoverished workers with access to cheap entertainment and Bildung. The current Büchergilde Gutenberg website tells us, for example, that the publisher was founded in 1924 to facilitate easier access to Bildung for members of the working class, doing so by means of affordable but well-crafted, premium books. Bruno Dreßler, Büchergilde’s first chairman, had in mind the idea of a proletarian cultural community, a “proletarische Kulturgemeinschaft”; the publisher saw itself as part of proletarian literature and culture at a time when such a thing perhaps still existed, though its contours and possibility—or impossibility—were, even then, debated by Marxist critics and thinkers of every stripe. Even Diego Rivera, a card-carrying communist, argued that, properly speaking, there could be no such thing as proletarian art within capitalism. Only after the dictatorship of the proletariat has “fulfilled its mission,” Rivera writes, after it has “liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society,” can there be a proletarian art. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot by Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi

August 24, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Mariam Moustafa

If this letter were a boat, / I would sail down the Nile to reach you.

When Nasser commissioned the construction of the Aswan High Dam—a project pivotal to his legacy of modernising Egypt—most of the migrant builders who came from Upper Egypt were farmers who were unfamiliar with industrial machinery and faced hazardous work conditions. This week’s Translation Tuesday features a set of epistolary poems that relate the story of this historic project through the correspondences of a migrant worker Hiragy and his wife Fatma. These poems, drawn from the start of Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi’s The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot, were written when the poet lived amongst the labourers in Aswan who came from his village of Abnoud. One of the Arab world’s most respected vernacular writers—a true poet of the people—El-Abnudi’s works are social documents that chronicle the history of Egypt. In Mariam Moustafa’s translation, the emerging language of technological modernity is conjured with sensitivity, and the various registers of labour and longing are given emotional resonance. We are thrilled also to feature an audio clip of El-Abnudi himself reading the first two letters in Arabic—for our readers to appreciate why he too is known as “the sound of Egypt.”

“Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi always emphasized that his poems were meant to be listened to, not just read, and recorded most of his poems. I grew up listening to El-Abnudi reciting The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot, and was unsure how to convey the profound emotions that I hear in his voice to an English-speaking audience. A translator can communicate the meaning of sentences, expressions, and even untranslatable words to their target audience, but how can the emotions heard through the heart and soul be translated? In translating and revising this piece, I wanted English readers to feel and hear his voice, and asked constantly: “If El-Abnudi wrote these poems in English, what would they sound like?” This translation is my way of expressing gratitude to the poet, whose voice attracted me as a kid, enlightened me as a teenager, and kept me connected to my roots as a young woman.” 

— Mariam Moustafa

Letter 1

The addressee, the most precious diamond,
The marvelous pearl,
My wife, Fatma Ahmed Abdel Ghafar.
The address, our village of Gabalyat El Far.

This is my first letter to you, my love,
Sent from Aswan where I now work.
If I’d surrendered to the shame of being late,
I wouldn’t have written this letter.
Forgive me, Fatma, for the long wait.
I am sorry, I am ashamed, I am abashed.

It has been two months since you shed your tears.
I still remember how they burned my calming hand.
I promised you then, “Before my train reaches Aswan,
My letter will be in your hands.”
You didn’t believe me, you said:
“You’re such a liar. I know you’ll forget.”

I wish that moment could have lasted longer,
But my friends pulled me inside the train.
Their pull troubled my heart.
A fire raged in my soul as I left you, and our kids, Aziza and Eid.
The train began to move,
My heart plummeted.
I ran to the window and screamed,
“Fatma, take care of Aziza and Eid.”
The train screamed too,
Screeching off as if escaping a fire.
I heard your voice next to me, far away.
“My heart and soul follow you to Aswan, habiby.”
I threw myself inside the train, into the crowd,
And I cried aloud.
Our large village, where we could walk around for a whole day,
Was gone in the blink of an eye.

Forgive me, my love, for being late.
If this letter were a boat,
I would sail down the Nile to reach you.

Finally,
I send to you, to my village, and to my children,
A thousand greetings and salams.

Your husband,
Hiragy.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Salted Fish Shop (A Sonnet)” by Yam Gong

August 17, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Dorothy Tse and James Shea

Hear from Hong Kong poet Yam Gong, winner of the Workers’ Literature Award.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a sonnet from the award-winning Hong Kong poet Yam Gong, translated by Dorothy Tse and James Shea. Rows of dried salted fish dangle in Hong Kong’s streets but, here, Yam Gong’s woefully romantic working-class speaker singles out one as an object of his adoration. First appearing in his 1997 collection, And So You Look at Festival Lights along the Street, this poem shows Yam Gong—himself a former mechanical technician—as a shrewd voice of labour and the everyday.

The Salted Fish Shop (A Sonnet)

It hung there for a long time, that salted fish
On the first day of work I used a pole
to hang it up and I started thinking
this salted fish is so handsome
surely someone is going to pick it
but day after day it hung there upright
and not a single grain of salt fell
Today someone should pick it
Looking at it every morning I think every day
this same thing every day I look at it
and slowly it became my hope each day
until my boss came to me today and said
You look as dumb as a salted fish
Don’t bother coming back tomorrow READ MORE…

The End of Eddy Review: Édouard Louis’s story of rejection, queerness and trauma in working-class France

May 29, 2017  |  in Reviews  |  by Madeline Jones

He tried with such violent passion and self-betrayal, even self-degradation, to fit in with these people—his people

Édouard Louis’s debut novel The End of Eddy gives voice to a demographic often excluded from mainstream literature—the elusive “white working class” so frequently cited by politicians and publishers lately—while also telling the story of a young man who is completely rejected by that same group. In this apparent contradiction lies the work’s most remarkable achievement: to illuminate the lives of, and even empower, the narrator’s own antagonists—without forgiving them.

Bear in mind this is a work of autofiction, á la Knausgaard’s My Struggle opus or Sergio del Molino’s Lo que a nadie le importa, completed when the author was just twenty years old. Any editor would expect a manuscript so early in a writer’s life and career to lack “perspective,” to need some “distance,” especially given the drama and violence in this story in particular. Most memoirists don’t like to be too close to the time and people they’re writing about—and I did have to continually remind myself I was not reading a memoir while falling headfirst into Louis’s story. The lumps the character Eddy has taken have certainly not gone down, but that they are still swollen and purple is just what makes the read so engrossing, and makes the strange duality of the characters’ sympathetic and reproachable natures believable.

The book was first published in France in 2013 to great acclaim, making the now 24-year-old something of a literary star. Out this month in the U.S. with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and translated by Michael Lucey, the work has begun to receive a lot of attention in English, too. Louis has had his critics, however, particularly regarding the work’s believability—a plight that perhaps inevitably threatens the autofiction writer. There is something inherently uncomfortable about reading such a novel; you can’t settle in and let the story carry you to a made-up place and time, but at the same time you can’t walk away feeling you know something for sure, something you can report to a friend later. One can’t help but want to know after all, is it real or not?

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Icelanders” by Vanda Rozenbergová

May 23, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

But it’s wintertime, it’s been snowing a lot and as long as the weather stays like this the sky will be the same every day.

Shortlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, it will not be unfair to say that Vanda Rozenbergová is a master of the short story form. In this story, she explores domestic tensions and dashed dreams through the skillful use of a child narrator.

I was in my room playing with my toy cars but Becko kept taking my black sports car away so I had to give him a slap on the hand, Stop it, Becko! I said. I’d been working on a racetrack for my lorries but because it was a Sunday I had to listen to my mum cursing ‘cause the kitchen is next to my room. “Bloody Sundays,” she said, then I heard a pot lid bang on the floor and a knife strike a chopping board. I used to think she was crying but she was just moaning aloud about having to cook. “I’m as lonely as little orphan Annie,” she kept shouting but Daddy and I had no idea who little orphan Annie was. And there’s another thing I don’t get: why does my mum keep doing stuff she hates, why does she keep roasting meat, peeling potatoes, grating carrots, baking and frying, and why does she always clean up afterwards but never sit down with us to eat and instead say she’s had her fill, having breathed in all the cooking smells. And then in the morning she pulls my trousers up to my ears, bundles me into the car and starts doing her hair as we’re driving and tells me with hairpins in her mouth to eat all my sandwiches at school ‘cause she made them for me even though she didn’t feel like it, she hates making sandwiches, as if I didn’t know she hates making them. I’m sure by next year I’ll be making my own sandwiches. But why does she keep on doing stuff she hates? Why doesn’t she just stay in bed and rest and receive visitors, why doesn’t she give me, Daddy, and Becko a hug and ask us to bring her a cup of tea?

When I ask her about it she blames it all on Daddy, but he’s totally not like her, he loves to lounge around and crack jokes, never in a hurry to go anywhere, not even to work. All my friends like him, and sometimes they go to see him for a chat ‘cause he works in the kebab shop next to our school. He doesn’t serve people at the counter, he’s at the back prepping vegetables. He brings home kebabs and doughnuts but Mum doesn’t eat that kind of stuff so it never makes her happy. Becko is not my real brother, I’ve made him up. I told Dad about him and he said that it was OK, that there was this other world and Becko does exist there. When he said that he was lying on a rug under the window looking at the sky, and then he told me a secret, which is that sometimes on his way home from work he stops by the hospital to see his friend who’s sick. I didn’t know what to say so I asked if at least his friend had a nice room, if it had a telly and stuff like that. Of course there’s a telly, said Daddy, and went over to the next room to put some Icelanders on the stereo. Because my Dad loves Icelanders. He loves Icelandic music and Icelandic people.

READ MORE…