Readers familiar with Babel won't find anything radically different here, but Vinokur's new translation reminds us that when...
Does the world need another translation of Isaac Babel?
The Russian short story writer, executed in 1940 during one of Stalin’s purges, is correctly regarded as one of the masters of the form, but English versions of his writing are not hard to find. As translator and editor Vinokur points out in his introduction to this new collection, Babel’s Red Cavalry was available in the United States as early as 1929, in a translation by Nadia Helstein—which, in turn, formed the basis of perhaps the best-known English-language edition of his fiction: Walter Morison’s Collected Stories, published in 1955. Nearly half a century later, Peter Constantine updated and expanded on Morison’s efforts in The Complete Works, edited by Nathalie Babel Brown, one of Babel’s daughters. And yet, as Vinokur also argues, to read all these translations in isolation is to miss the point. “Translations, according to one school of thought,” he writes, “are supposed to be mortal, because immortal originals deserve frequent and thus provisional retranslations.” Language, in other words, is living, which makes translation, first and foremost, not only a matter of engagement, but also an act of animation. Vinokur illustrates this by his selections and his renderings. Gathering 73 of Babel’s stories, his book essentially mirrors Morison’s with some exceptions, making the lineage explicit in content and design. As for the work itself, it’s deft and pointed: funny, dark, and often caustic, unsentimental at the core. In “Shabbos Nahamu,” a poor Jew tricks first a wife and then her innkeeper husband to provide for his own family. The narrator of “Guy de Maupassant”—one of Babel’s best-known stories—regards language as seduction: “A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time,” he tells us. “The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You must turn it once, but not twice.” And yet, as ever in Babel's writing, fable yields to something sharper, the indifference or unattainability of everything. “From his window,” Babel closes “Dante Street,” one of his later stories, “he could see the Conciergerie, the bridges cast lightly across the Seine, an assortment of blind hovels pressed close against the river, the same breath wafting up to him. Rusted rafters and tavern signed, creaking in the wind.”
Readers familiar with Babel won't find anything radically different here, but Vinokur's new translation reminds us that when it comes to Babel, too much is never enough.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3595-6
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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