For the Love of Translation

I'm not fluent enough in any other languages to translate very well, myself, but I'm slightly obsessed with comparing translations to find the best one. Anyone who loves books from other cultures has got to do a little work to make sure they're finding the best rendition of their favorite works.

I realized this most emphatically during my sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence College, when I was reading Tolstoy's "War and Peace" for a class with my favorite professor, Fred Smoler. My fellow classmates and I were absolutely loving the book, devouring it; it was for a lecture class, and everywhere you went on campus, people were engrossed in it.

A vacation break came while we were reading it, and during my drive back home to North Carolina, I stopped by my dad and stepmom's then-home in Annapolis to visit for a couple days. I forgot my book when I journeyed on to NC, but I knew Mom had "War and Peace" on the bookshelves at home. (As a child, I'd sometimes stared at the immensely thick tome and wondered when I would read it.)

So my first night home, I pulled the book off the shelf and curled up on the couch to enjoy it. After I realized I'd read the same paragraph ten times and not retained a word of it, I thought to look at the translation credits. Sure enough, it was a different person than the translator of our version, which is Ann Dunnigan (Signet Classic, 1968). If you've ever tried to read "War and Peace" and found it as enthralling as eating sawdust, I urge you to pick up Dunnigan's translation and discover one of the greatest classics in literature.

In other cultures, if you like Eastern literature, Red Pine is an incredibly talented translator. He has an extensive body of work, and his version of the Tao Te Ching is remarkable.

At the Very Beginning, There Was Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut gets credit for this entire blog, little though he'd want it, were he still alive. Am I the only one still mourning Vonnegut's death? Surely not. I bet John Irving's still pacing his halls, if no one else.

When I heard the news, I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. I focused on finishing the new Pynchon book as fast as possible, so I could start 'tribute reading' all the Vonnegut books I had. (Neither easy tasks, by the way. Have you seen the new Pynchon? It could stop a bullet! Likewise, tribute reading a prolific writer like Vonnegut is not a task for the faint of heart.)

So now, a week or so and a Cat's Cradle, Deadeye Dick, Player Piano and introduction to Breakfast of Champions later (with many more books yet to go), I am forcibly struck by the absence of the love letter I never wrote to Kurt Vonnegut. It was the force of this realization that drove me to start a blog, so I could tell the online world how much Vonnegut meant to me, since I never told him while he was alive.

Vonnegut is probably doing triple axels in his grave right now, assuming they buried him wearing ice skates and he's somehow magically online reading this post. I can just imagine him: "Good Lord! Why are you cluttering up the collective consciousness with odes to an absurd, deceased writer?" Maybe he'd quote a relevant Bokonon poem, or maybe he'd just say, "Hi-ho."

Regardless, here it is:

O Greatest of Kurts,

This letter's been a long time coming. Half my life ago, my hands cracked open the cover of "Breakfast of Champions", and when I closed the book again, I was changed forever. I suppose part of my love for you will always be the fourteen year old who was so astonished to find that somebody else out there found the world as funny and pathetic and hopeful and sad as I did.

I think that's where your greatness lies - and don't scoff, because you truly are a great writer. Your books are incredible, the way you interweave humor and pathos, effortlessly, naturally, with a brutal harshness and a sweet poignancy.

It is remarkable. It is, in fact, purely Vonnegut.

Maybe that's what I admire the most - that your style can't be imitated, and you imitate none other. Maybe it's the honesty that shines through your work, even as you protest that everything you say is untrue. Maybe it's the kinship I feel reading your mockery of mankind's pretense that we're better than human, and your celebration of the fact that we are, after all, only imperfect, blundering, frail, self-delusional humans.

Really, that's all we need to be. Thank you for pointing it out, again and again and again. Thanks for all the laughs, the sorrow, the catharsis. Thanks for being you. I can't imagine a world without you, but thank god you wrote all you did, because even after your death, you are still in the world with us.

I love you, Kurt Vonnegut. You are greatly missed.