Best European Fiction 2013 Read online

  BEST

  EUROPEAN

  FICTION

  2013

  EDITED AND

  WITH AN

  INTRODUCTION

  BY

  ALEKSANDAR

  HEMON

  PREFACE BY JOHN BANVILLE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  PRAISE FOR Best European Fiction

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  space

  [SLOVAKIA]

  BALLA

  Before the Breakup

  [MACEDONIA]

  ŽARKO KUJUNDŽISKI

  When the Glasses Are Lost

  [MONTENEGRO]

  DRAGAN RADULOVIĆ

  The Face

  reality

  [GEORGIA]

  LASHA BUGADZE

  The Sins of the Wolf

  [BELGIUM: FRENCH]

  PAUL EMOND

  Grand Froid

  [ARMENIA]

  KRIKOR BELEDIAN

  The Name under My Tongue

  [RUSSIA]

  KIRILL KOBRIN

  Last Summer in Marienbad

  art

  [MOLDOVA]

  VITALIE CIOBANU

  Orchestra Rehearsal

  [IRELAND: IRISH]

  TOMÁS MAC SÍOMÓIN

  Music in the Bone

  [FINLAND]

  TIINA RAEVAARA

  My Creator, My Creation

  memory

  [HUNGARY]

  MIKLÓS VAJDA

  Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame

  [TURKEY: GERMAN]

  ZEHRA ÇIRAK

  Memory Cultivation Salon 157

  [PORTUGAL]

  DULCE MARIA CARDOSO

  Angels on the Inside

  [LATVIA]

  GUNDEGA REPŠE

  How Important Is It to Be Ernest?

  death

  [UKRAINE]

  TANIA MALYARCHUK

  Me and My Sacred Cow

  [SPAIN: CASTILIAN]

  ELOY TIZÓN

  The Mercury in the Thermometers

  [BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA]

  SEMEZDIN MEHMEDINOVIĆ

  My Heart

  [AUSTRIA]

  LYDIA MISCHKULNIG

  A Protagonist’s Nemesis

  body

  [FRANCE]

  MARIE REDONNET

  Madame Zabée’s Guesthouse

  [LITHUANIA]

  IEVA TOLEIKYTĖ

  The Eye of the Maples

  [BULGARIA]

  RUMEN BALABANOV

  The Ragiad

  women

  [UNITED KINGDOM: ENGLAND]

  A. S. BYATT

  Dolls’ Eyes

  [ESTONIA]

  KRISTIINA EHIN

  The Surrealist’s Daughter

  [POLAND]

  SYLWIA CHUTNIK

  It’s All Up to You

  men

  [LIECHTENSTEIN]

  DANIEL BATLINER

  Malcontent’s Monologue

  [SPAIN: BASQUE]

  BERNARDO ATXAGA

  Pirpo and Chanberlán, Murderers

  [SERBIA]

  BORIVOJE ADAŠEVIĆ

  For a Foreign Master

  marriage

  [SLOVENIA]

  MIRANA LIKAR BAJŽELJ

  Nada’s Tablecloth

  [DENMARK]

  CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT

  Camilla and the Horse

  [ROMANIA]

  DAN LUNGU

  7 P.M. Wife

  sons

  [SWITZERLAND]

  BERNARD COMMENT

  A Son

  [UNITED KINGDOM: WALES]

  RAY FRENCH

  Migration

  [IRELAND: ENGLISH]

  MIKE MCCORMACK

  Of One Mind

  Americans

  [ICELAND]

  GYRÐIR ELÍASSON

  The Music Shop

  [NORWAY]

  ARI BEHN

  Thunder Snow and When a Dollar Was a Big Deal

  INDEX BY COUNTRY

  INDEX BY AUTHOR

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHIES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS

  Copyright

  PRAISE FOR Best European Fiction

  “Best European Fiction 2010 . . . offers an appealingly diverse look at the Continent’s fiction scene.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “The work is vibrant, varied, sometimes downright odd. As [Zadie] Smith says [in her preface]: ‘I was educated in a largely Anglo-American library, and it is sometimes dull to stare at the same four walls all day.’ Here’s the antidote.” FINANCIAL TIMES

  “With the new anthology Best European Fiction … our literary world just got wider.” TIME MAGAZINE

  “The collection’s diverse range of styles includes more experimental works than a typical American anthology might … [Mr. Hemon’s] only criteria were to include the best works from as many countries as possible.” WALL STREET JOURNAL

  “This is a precious opportunity to understand more deeply the obsessions, hopes and fears of each nation’s literary psyche—a sort of international show-and-tell of the soul.” THE GUARDIAN

  “Readers for whom the expression ‘foreign literature’ means the work of Canada’s Alice Munro stand to have their eyes opened wide and their reading exposure exploded as they encounter works from places such as Croatia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia (and, yes, from more familiar terrain, such as Spain, the UK, and Russia).” BOOKLIST STARRED REVIEW

  “[W]e can be thankful to have so many talented new voices to discover.” LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “[W]hat the reader takes from them are not only the usual pleasures of fiction—the twists and turns of plot, chance to inhabit other lives, other ways of being—but new ways of thinking about how to tell a story.” CHRISTOPHER MERRILL, PRI’S “THE WORLD” HOLIDAY PICK

  “The book tilts toward unconventional storytelling techniques. And while we’ve heard complaints about this before—why only translate the most difficult work coming out of Europe?—it makes sense here. The book isn’t testing the boundaries, it’s opening them up.” TIME OUT CHICAGO

  “Editor Aleksandar Hemon declares in his preface that at the heart of this compilation is the ‘nonnegotiable need for communication with the world, wherever it may be,’ and asserts that ongoing translation is crucial to this process. The English-language reading world, ‘wherever it may be,’ is grateful.” THE BELIEVER

  “Does European literature exist? Of course it does, and this collection of forty-one stories proves it.” THE INDEPENDENT

  Preface

  It is not only in French that the words translate and traduce bear a close affinity. Legend has it that John Braine’s novel of ambition and opportunism in 1950s Britain, Room at the Top, in its Swedish version was very nearly entitled Vinden—‘The Attic’—until a vigilant editor thought to double-check. It is also said that in a passage in one of Sean O’Casey’s plays of Dublin working-class life where a character speaks of the ‘little chislers’, that is, children, an earnest Japanese translator rendered the colloquialism as ‘small stone-masons’. One laughs, of course, but at the same time one does sympathise with the hapless traducer. Language is a sly and treacherous medium.

  We are all familiar with Robert Frost’s mournful contention that poetry is what gets lost in translation, but meaning itself can go subtly or grossly astray in the crossing from one tongue to another—not so much tripping lightly, one might say, as merely tripping. The problem, as any translator will ruefully remind us, is that in the original text meaning is not fixed, but is always more or less ambiguous. This is so not only in verse, but can be true of
the most seemingly limpid passages of prose. You sit down to write a letter to your lover, or your bank manager, thinking you know exactly what you have to say, yet when you finish and read over what you have written you notice that the sense is not quite as you intended. Who speaks here, you wonder? The answer is, language itself, wilful, subtle, coercive. We think we speak, but really it is we who are spoken.

  Even when language seems at its most docile, the sense, or non-sense, of a phrase can turn on the most innocent-seeming effect. Take that comma in the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. In the original the first proposition is written thus: ‘Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.’ Wittgenstein in his early work was fond of symmetry, and certainly this is a handsomely symmetrical sentence. However, the rules of punctuation in German are strict, and by those rules a comma is called for here, at the halfway point in the sentence, making for a nice caesura.

  Yet the translators of the 1961 London edition of the Tractatus, Pears and McGuinness, flexing the looser muscles of English, render the line as: ‘The world is all that the case is, as the German indicates.’ Thus at the very outset of this tangled text the reader meets with uncertainty. Does Wittgenstein mean to say that the world is all, that the case is, as the German indicates, or, as the English seems to have it, that the case is that the world is all? These are, surely, two separate propositions, and though the difference between them may seem slight, it is not negligible, especially in a work that sets out to explore and even prescribe the limits of language. In the German version of proposition 1 the emphasis is on the allness of the world, while the English seems primarily concerned with what is the case or state of affairs in the world. Wittgenstein himself might have devoted a whole section of his later Philosophical Investigations to the effect of that apparently innocuous comma.

  So who would be a translator?

  Occasionally, of course, a translation chimes happily with the original. The poetry of Paul Celan is notoriously difficult to render into another language—indeed, it is a question whether the attempt should be made at all, given the poet’s agonised relation to German, the language of the monsters who administered the Holocaust. Yet great and inventive translations have been made of his work, notably by Paul Hamburger and John Felstiner. In his search for a way of dealing with, if not expressing, the horrors suffered by the Jews in the Second World War, Celan formulated a negative aesthetic—a 1963 volume of his poems is titled Die Niemandsrose, ‘The No-one’s Rose’—and again and again he inverts usages, twists and bends them, turns them inside-out. For instance in the poem ‘Weggebeizt’, ‘Etched Away’, he speaks of

  das hundert-

  züngige Mein-

  gedict, das Genicht

  which Hamburger renders as

  the hundred-

  tongued pseudo-

  poem, the noem

  and Felstiner, wonderfully, as

  the hundred-

  tongued My-

  poem, the Lie-noem

  In both these instances, ‘noem’, for ‘Genicht’, is a stroke of genius. Compared to what Seamus Heaney has called Celan’s ‘tortuosities’, or the knotty intricacy of the Tractatus, the novel, you might think, would surely present few problems for the translator. In fact, fiction is just as difficult to translate, if not more so, than verse. Here, too, the Frostian lament asserts its sad truth. The late John McGahern liked to make a simple distinction: there is verse, he would say, there is prose, and then there is poetry, which may be conjured in either medium. Thus the poetry of prose, no less than of verse, stands to lose badly when it is filleted from one language and fed into another.

  For a novel or a short story even in its original state is already a translation. The version it presents of reality is as far from actual reality as our dreams are from the events of our lives out of which they propagate their lovely or malignant blossoms. In our lazy way we tend to imagine that a piece of fiction is a direct statement of a set of facts or factual images when in fact—in fact!—fiction is a kind of dream-metaphor, a moulded and mannered traducing of ‘what really happened’. This is the wonderful fact about fiction, that we know it is all made up, a farrago of marvellous lies, yet we regard it as if it were somehow all true—which it is, of course, although the truth of fiction is not the same as the truth of life.

  When we consider it at all carefully, we realise that there can be no such thing as a translation. What a translator produces is a new thing, and when he finishes, there are two works where before there was one. That is inevitable, given the nature of language, and given that there are languages. The Book of Babel is legion.

  Who would be a translator?

  Coda: Worrying that I might make a blunder, a thing easily done in this context, I consulted a Swedish friend on the matter of the word, or title, Vinden. Is not vinden the Swedish word for ‘wind’? It is. But also it means, indeed, ‘the attic’. But should the title, the mis-title, not have been Den Vinden? No, because den vinden would mean ‘that [particular] attic’. Ah, the infinite undependability of words.

  JOHN BANVILLE

  Introduction

  1

  For some time now, I’ve felt compelled to convince the hypothetical reader—presumably ever-ready to grab the remote or download more shades of grey on the Kindle—that it is necessary to read difficult and/ or translated works of literature. With considerable effort, here and there and everywhere, I’ve tried to build an argument based on the presumed benefits of such reading. For some time, being in that situation annoyed me terribly—to the point of my being tempted to say to the reader: take it or leave it.

  What was bothering me, I realized, was that I sought confirmation in numbers. I strived to convert readers to my point of view so that they could buy the Best European Fiction anthology en masse, which would then confirm the utility and social value of the whole project. I was, as it were, marketing it, suggesting to small audiences around the world that they were an avant-garde of the great army of readers gathering just beyond the horizon, about to realize what they have been missing by not reading the anthology and translated literature.

  And it turns out I don’t care about the numbers anymore, even if they’re pretty good, as the anthology has, over the past four years, introduced more than a hundred European writers to English-language readers, and generated a vast number of translations from more than forty European languages. The presence of those writers and their work is now indelible. The connection has been established and the flow of communication is ongoing.

  2

  For the past few years, every single review of the anthology brought up the question: What is European fiction? I am happy to report I have no clue. This is the fourth Best European Fiction anthology I’ve edited and I’m not any closer to a clear picture, let alone a definition, of what particular qualities of writing, other than loosely geographic, could be defined as European. True, there are intellectual domains or formal approaches European writers are conspicuously comfortable with, particularly when compared to their American colleagues: fragmentariness; dialogue with other writers across cultures and history; experimental cheekiness and love of absurdity; disinclination to entertain by deploying TV-friendly banalities masked as social commentary; presumption of the reader’s intelligence; willingness to reach for the far ranges of both humor and seriousness; a firm conviction in the transformative powers of literature. But of course, for every piece that exemplifies one of the above, I could find—in the anthologies I’ve edited—a counterexample. Perhaps one constant and unchanging aspect of European literature is precisely its slipperiness—it cannot be collared, reduced to a marketable formula, or posited as the absolute opposite to American literature. The reason for that ought to be obvious: Europe is nothing if not an intricate entanglement of languages, histories, borders, and varieties of human experience. It is not only complicated—culturally, intellectually, geographically—but is ever in the process of becoming increasingly more so.


  For the past few years, Europe seems to have been on the verge of collapse, due to the financial shenanigans rooted in the belief (so dear to Americans) that the free market and capitalism would bring us endless joy and money. The European Union, which, like many an empire, appeared solidly eternal not so long ago, might not be able to outlive the ongoing debt crisis. Europe, as it were, might not survive itself. What heretofore seemed unquestionably real might turn out to be a foolish fantasy. The rule of apparent reasonability has approached its end and there is, shall we say, a widespread surge in absurdity. The reality of Europe is being renegotiated. If there is a need to reconsider—or indeed abandon—the intellectual and formal limits of realism, Europe provides plenty of justification. Perhaps significantly, the crisis of the European domain coincides with the crisis of the print form—the book and the related human project known as literature are undergoing a transformation with uncertain outcome. One should read European fiction not so much for the purposes of understanding it, but rather just to keep up with its accelerating history and to see how literature reinvents itself in trying to keep up with it. The understanding might have to wait.

  3

  When you come right down to it, no human experience appears translatable or understandable outside itself. The world looks different from each individual position—everyone is inescapably locked in a worldview. But it is precisely in overcoming that existential circumstance that humanity lives up to its potential; indeed, in transcending the biological and ontological individuation, humanity becomes imaginatively and conceptually possible. What allows for the ascension from the individual to the human kind is language—we are impossible as a species that recognizes itself as such without the belief that words can convey experience. Out of that belief writing comes; without that belief literature—as the depository of the entirety of human experience—is impossible.

  But language is far more than a code necessary for transmission of existential information. Language being merely a code would imply that the world is figured out before the words are spoken or written, that we can only speak and write what we know. As a matter of fact, language— and literature as the field of its actualization—serves us to negotiate the mysteries, to enter not only the unknown but the unknowable as well, and find ways to say what is unsayable or, even, unspeakable. Which is why imprecision is as essential to language and literature as precision. It is in the continuous search for the right word that we find meaning; it is in the failing to find the exact word that new interhuman spaces open. What great book or poem was easy to read or translate? It is in trying to grasp Proust that we fall in love with his work. Pursuing meaning in literature is the meaning of literature.