BookPeople is a bookstore. Our goal is to sell books and to make money. We have other goals, but we always want to make sure we sell books and make money. Therefore, our online presence is also about selling books. With that in mind, the BookPeople blog is a positive place. I don’t really review books here as much as I tell you what I’ve enjoyed reading, and why. I don’t tell you about the books I didn’t like. But I’m currently reading and reviewing all of Melville House’s novella series, and I promise, with their diverse selections focused towards a wide reading circle, that I won’t like them all. When I don’t like a book, I won’t lie, but I will focus on something that I find interesting. The more I dislike a book the more vague my interest will become. So, with that disclaimer, here’s my fairly vague review of Nikolai Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarrelled.
The first thing that struck me about How the Two Ivans Quarrelled was the title. It’s a wonderful title that is so straightforward and bland that it becomes humorous. Like the singer who sings a song about falling in love called ‘Falling in Love’. This quirkiness continues throughout the book. Taking long paragraphs to tell us about each character’s eyes, and each character’s nose, and each character’s clothing. All the while using more exclamation points than I thought possible in a story only eighty-four pages long. This unimaginative title, longwinded description, and overuse of silly punctuation would be frowned upon today. If Zadie Smith published this book, it’d be trashed. But Ms. Smith didn’t write it, and it wasn’t written recently, it’s one-hundred and eighty-five years old. So we not only forgive those flaws, but we relish them. They help us escape to another time, with tints of nostalgia and elegy.
What else do we forgive? What other beloved books do we cherish not despite their flaws, but almost because of them? Don Quixote is an odd book that is made up, largely, of dialogue. The dialogue is as unbelievable as the main character. Quixote’s interactions with his future tormentors, if looked at objectively, are silly. But if you forgive the lack of realism, you find yourself laughing. You can even find great wisdom in Don’s odd conversations.
Kenzaburo Oe is a wonderful writer, maybe my favorite writer, but his narratives are often interrupted by odd little vagaries. Oe’s protagonist (always a protagonist) will walk into a room and see a poem sitting on a table, he’ll then interpret the poem for ten pages. It feels less important to the plot, and more important to Oe. He just wanted to talk about something, so he did. I forgive him because I like talking about some of the same things he likes talking about.
I like books, but I find myself being really mean to them sometimes. The books that I’ve forgiven for small infractions, and tried to meet them on their terms, have been the most rewarding experiences in my reading life. Too often I’ve gone the other way, tossing a book aside because I found one unseemly wart. I’ll try not to do that anymore.
~Master Bookseller Brian Contine
BookPeople 
Speaking as a Russian translator, I’m happy to assure you that Russian literature is littered with punctuation that seems silly in English–but not necessarily so in Russian. It’s easy to forget, when translating, that marks of punctuation are used differently, often very differently, from language to language. Merely copying punctuation blindly can produce a kind of grammatical false cognate. Had someone else done the translation (I have no idea who did this one), you may well have had a significantly different reaction to the book.
Marian,
I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to translation. Last year I read Edith Grossman’s wonderful book ‘Why Translation Matters’. The book introduced me to some new questions pertaining to translation, and I have been trying to form a solid formula for analyzing translated books since then. I can’t imagine trying to translate a 200 year old story, but maybe you can help me with a question: should a translation of a 200 year old book feel like it would have 200 years ago? By that I mean, if english and russian have changed over this time period, should a translator not only focus on bringing the text into english, but also into the 21st century? This doesn’t speak to your comment, but I’ve been wanting to ask a translator this question for a while, so I took this opportunity.
Brian, What a great question. My short answer is yes, the translator should evoke the earlier era, but it’s the foolish translator who thinks s/he can write as if s/he lived in that time. As Walter Arndt once said about translating Pushkin (and I’m paraphrasing), “It’s not that we haven’t read everything Pushkin did, it’s that Pushkin didn’t read everything we have.” I like to think of translating older works as an opportunity to bring in vocabulary and syntax that we don’t use anymore but that are still meaningful. I think the translator evokes rather than (pretends to) recreate. There is one other issue to be considered with older works, and that is the rate of change in language. Mid-nineteenth-century Japanese is almost incomprehensible to the modern Japanese person, but we understand Dickens quite well. Russian changed relatively little from Gogol’s time through the Soviet era (why this is would be a longer post). (Now, it’s changing at lightning speed.) So a contemporary Russian will feel very close to those Russian classics as far as language goes.
“I think the translator evokes rather than (pretends to) recreate.”
Great line. A translator seems to be more of a collaborator in creation rather than someone who simply dictates words from one language to another. I wish we (I’m guilty as well) paid more attention to translators. Pevear and Volokhonsky get a lot of attention, Edith Grossman’s Don Quixote is wonderful, and I’m in love with Lydia Davis in general, but I’m mostly ignorant when it comes to translation. I looked at your website, a lot of info there. Nina Berbova is someone I’ve looked at before, but never read. Do you have a recommendation for where to start with her? Thank you.
Brian, Berberova wrote one of the great long stories of the last century. It’s in The Tattered Cloak: “Astashev in Paris” (a very bad title not my doing). I still haven’t read Davis’s Bovary but am looking forward to it mightily.