PEN America 14: The Good Books

CONTENTS

The Good Books: A Forum

The Book of Disquiet | Wayne Koestenbaum

Don Quixote | Alice Mattison

Kiss of the Spider | Woman Jessica Hagedorn

Plutarch’s Lives | Anne Fadiman

Kingdom’s End and Other Stories | Amitava Kumar

The Essential Haiku | Aimee Bender

Mythologies Maurice | Berger

If on a winter’s night a traveler | Alan Michael Parker

The Book of Psalms | Binnie Kirshenbaum

The Ambassador | Karen Russell

La Bâtarde | Eileen Myles

The Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld | Joanna Scott

The Cave | Martha Cooley

Cleaned the Crocodile’s Teeth | Terese Svoboda

The Gift | Lila Azam Zanganeh

The Secret of the Unicorn & Red Rackham’s Treasure | Pasha Malla

Day of the Oprichnik | Gary Shteyngart

Madame Bovary | Alice Elliott Dark

Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) | Lynne Tillman

Our Lady of the Flowers | Michael F. Moore

Chinese Tales | Srikanth Reddy

Sketches from a Hunter’s Album | Yiyun Li

Marcovaldo: or The seasons in the city | Maureen Howard

The Book of Disquiet | Paul LaFarge

The Green Sea of Heaven | Paul Kane

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams | Joshua Furst

The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry | Bob Hicok

Picasso’s Mask | Jed Perl

Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke | Neil Baldwin

Tian Wen: A Chinese Book of Origins | Arthur Sze

What I Saw | Phillip Lopate

Don Quixote | Jaime Manrique

The Book of Disquiet | Honor Moore

Guide to the Underworld | Rika Lesser

Fortunata and Jacinta | Antonio Muñoz Molina

The Second Sex | Catharine R. Stimpson

Isaac’s Torah | Elizabeth Frank

Madame Bovary | Roxana Robinson

The Odyssey | Alan Cheuse

A Woman’s Story | David Ulin

Remembrance of Things Past | David Shields

Ashes for Breakfast | Susan Mitchell

Data from the Decade of the Sixties | Edmund Keeley

Anna Karenina | Bruce Ducker

Dark Back of Time | Dave King

The Uniquiet Grave | Thomas Beller

Yehuda Amichai: A Life in Poetry | Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Marcovaldo: or The seasons in the city | Daniel Orozco

Remembrance of Things Past | Anne Landsman

Closely Observed Trains | Janet Burroway

The Book of Sand | Thylias Moss

Late into the Night | Jim Moore

In the Dark of the Heart | Meena Alexander

Sorrow | Nora Eisenberg

The Children of Heroes | Madison Smartt Bell

Cosmos | Albert Mobilio

Collins Gem Pocket French Dictionary | Stanley Crawford

The Book of Disquiet | Rabih Alameddine

Art

The War on All Fronts and Tower of Babble by Brian Dettmer

Projections by Jenny Holzer, photographed by Attilio Maranzano

From the 48th Congress of International PEN

Introduction | Salman Rushdie

Luminescences of Words | Norman Mailer

The Imagination of the State | Kurt Vonnegut

Citizens of Language | Toni Morrison, Heberto Padilla,

Susan Sontag, Derek Walcott

The Three Circles | John Barth

When I Was Young … | Yehuda Amichai

Translators: Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell

In Opposition | Isabel Allende

Woof and Bark | Breyten Breytenbach

The State Has No Imagination | Nadine Gordimer

Dostoevsky in the Ruins | Kobo Abe

Buridan’s Ass | Danilo Kiš

Translator: Sarah Arvio

A Logic of Daring | Edward Said

From Voice to Voice | Saul Bellow, Günter Grass,

Breyten Breytenbach, Adam Zagajewski,

Vassily Aksyonov, Allen Ginsberg,

Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag

One Conference More | Günter Grass

From the Floor | Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood, Norman Mailer

And Yet the Books | Czeslaw Milosz

Translators: Robert Hass & Czeslaw Milosz

A Reservoir of Freedom | Per Wästberg

Growing Up | Iva Kotrla

Translator: Unknown

Art

Drawings by Paul O. Zelinsky

Book by Yuichi Yokoyama, Translated by Taro Nettleton

World Voices 2011

Risk | Marcelo Figueras

Translator: Frank Wynne

V1agra C1alis | Asaf Schurr

Translator: Asaf Schurr

And Other Tales, Millennium | Andrzej Sosnowski

Translator: Benjamin Paloff

Ethical Code for Writers | Pasha Malla & Moez Surani

On Writing | Alain de Botton

Three Panels from the Sextine Chapel | Hervé Le Tellier

Translator: Ian Monk

Against Desire | Matt Donovan

Reflections of a Minister, At Delphos | Ernesto Cardenal

Translator: John Lyons

Literature | Quim Monzó

Translator: Peter Bush

The Little One | Najat El Hachmi

Translator: Peter Bush

Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh | Madeleine Thien

The Dancer | Ludovic Debeurme

Translator: Edward Gauvin

Contributors

Acknowledgments

THE GOOD BOOK: A FORUM

At a planning session for the annual PEN World Voices Festival, someone suggested that we stage a bit of guerrilla theater: Ask writers in town for the event to bring a favorite book, and swap it with the Gideon Bible in their hotel rooms.

Whether or not such an idea is feasible (or even advisable!), we decided to orchestrate a virtual adaptation on the pages of PEN America and encouraged writers to play along:

Imagine you’ve been invited to the world’s greatest book swap.

At this make-believe event you’ll join fellow writers and readers from around the world in one place (where? when? you tell us) and you’ll bring a beloved book to trade. There are just two guidelines:

Since literary translations make up such a small portion of what gets published in the U.S. (less than 3 percent!), and since PEN is devoted to fostering international understanding through the promotion of literature, please bring a book originally written in a language other than English. Let us know which translation you plan to bring.

Write a note explaining what the book means to you and what you hope it might mean to the recipient.

More than fifty novelists, poets, translators, and editors replied, selecting books from ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, medieval Spain, and Qing Dynasty China, among many other periods and places. Their reasons for those choices—and their visions of what that perfect book swap might entail—are on the pages that follow.

Enjoy.

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET | WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

The world’s greatest book swap will occur on September 26, the day Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou, Spain. We will hold our swap in Portbou itself, to honor a legendary location where literature died, where a mania for words reached a sudden terminus. Although the logical book to bring to this memorial swap would be Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin—and although, in my copy, between frontispiece and title page, I’ve tucked a dried flower that I’d like to claim I found in the outskirts of Marseilles, the city where Benjamin took hashish (in fact, a friend sent me the flower, already dried and pressed, from a village in Maine)—the swap’s rules forbid bringing books by Benjamin, whose shadow already falls so heavily over the proceedings. Instead, I will bring a book that in spirit closely resembles Benjamin’s impossible Arcades; I will bring Richard Zenith’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, which the Portuguese poet wrote under the mask of his semiheteronym Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon.

I choose The Book of Disquiet because it was published only after Pessoa’s death, and therefore embodies the frustrations, postponements, cancellations, rejections, depressions, futilities, and hiding places that odd writing entails. I choose The Book of Disquiet because it is in fragments, because it vaguely resembles a novel but has no plot, because it attempts to make of pathos a shining vocation, and because, giving precedence to daydreaming and fantasy, it refuses to cede the throne to practicality, to reality, to common sense, or to community. Although at the book swap readers and writers will shower each other with greeting and cordiality, we won’t kid ourselves that literature must always culminate in friendship or must always arise from kindly impulses. No. The Book of Disquiet is a melancholy, pessimistic assemblage, containing tedium and fever and withdrawal. Like Proust, Pessoa seemed to find temporary salvation in delivery boys. (Lift-boys?) And though I don’t know if Pessoa took drugs, I’ll guess that whatever forces (chemical, historical, psychological) drove Georg Trakl to cocaine, and drove Benjamin to his final morphine, also drove Pessoa toward the anodyne rapture that multiple selves—heteronyms—offered, and toward the lofty friendlessness of which The Book of Disquiet, in tatters, is a lasting monument.

DON QUIXOTE | ALICE MATTISON

To the third biennial Great Worldwide Book Swap in Pamplona this summer, I plan to bring my immense, bright red copy of Edith Grossman’s translation of Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, only partly because I’ve heard that the cafés will be handing out free glasses of rioja to people carrying books originally written in Spanish. Don Quixote, which I resisted for decades—unable to penetrate the flowery translation my husband read in college—turns out, in Grossman’s unpretentious prose, to be irresistible. It’s not just hilarious, though it is that; it’s intensely moving. Don Quixote steadfastly believes that he is a medieval knight, and that’s about as funny and heartbreaking in seventeenth-century Spain as it would be today. His delusions—elaborate, well-defended—make a certain surreal sense. Strangers struggle to manage a deluded but lovable old man without hurting him. And sometimes making fun of him is inescapable. Some chapters are excruciating—this is, after all, serious mental illness they are taking so lightly. I knew the story of Don Quixote; I didn’t know that it was so psychologically subtle and acute. And postmodern: In the second part, written after the first part was published, Don Quixote runs into people who have read the earlier book.

My only hesitation in bringing Don Quixote to the book swap is that I hate to part with it. The red hardcover book jacket is decorated with a gorgeous brass helmet. I doubt I’ll ever reread the whole thing, but opening it at random and reading a little is delightful. Plus it was expensive. I may cheat and bring it home again (though a 940-page book will take up a lot of room in my luggage). I know from past participation that in the days before the big swap, people wander around, books under their arms, talking about everybody else’s books. (I couldn’t make it to Bangkok four years ago, but loved Helsinki in 2009. I brought David Ferry’s translation of Horace and came home with Pride and Prejudice in Polish.) On the big afternoon in Pamplona, when everybody else is swapping books in the bullring, I may be asleep in the hotel, wiped out by all that wine and literary talk, with Don Quixote in my suitcase.

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN | JESSICA HAGEDORN

1 The book swap will take place at an imaginary karaoke dive called Heaven, located in an abandoned, rotting mansion in the Malate section of Manila.

2 I plan to swap my first-edition hardcover copy of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Colchie and published in 1979.

3 This astonishing, groundbreaking, intricate, multilayered novel—composed of nothing but an extended dialogue between two men in a jail cell and footnotes sprinkled throughout—fucked me up in the best possible way when I first read it as a young writer. Doors flew open in my brain. Doors leading to other doors, worlds within worlds.

4 Did you know that Manuel Puig lived for a time in the West Village, on Bedford Street?

5 Why has Puig been forgotten?

6 May the recipient of this priceless gift get his/her mind beautifully fucked up, too.

PLUTARCH’S LIVES | ANNE FADIMAN

I propose not a swap (that Gideon Bible can stay in the nightstand drawer) but a donation. What the next patron of the Motel 6 needs is a copy of Plutarch’s Lives. The best translation is the seventeenth-century version by John Dryden, spiffed up a couple of centuries later by Arthur Hugh Clough. In the life of Alexander the Great, I’d like to highlight the passages about the copy of The Iliad, annotated by Aristotle, that Alexander kept under his pillow, next to his dagger. He wasn’t the most sensitive guy in the world, but imagine how much worse he would have been if he’d slept only with the dagger, and not the book.

KINGDOM’S END AND OTHER STORIES | AMITAVA KUMAR

You are a new immigrant in New York and whenever you pick anything up in a store you calculate what it means in rupees. A cauliflower, you find out, costs more than what you would pay for three chickens at home. You hoard your meager wealth because you see it all slipping away in the future. But then, one day, at your university bookstore, you see a book with a name on its spine—Saadat Hasan Manto—and this name makes the distance between you and your birthplace collapse.

The stories have been translated, by Khalid Hasan. It doesn’t matter. You want to be a writer, and Manto was a great writer. You know that because you have read his story Toba Tek Singh in school. (The inmates from a mental asylum are being transferred to the other side of the border after the partition of India. The mad protagonist doesn’t grasp the idea of the border. He doesn’t know where he belongs. At the story’s end, he lies dying in the no-man’s-land between the two nations.) In addition, you are drawn to Manto’s use of news to produce brief, biting pieces of social satire. His reports are savage in their brutality. You like this very much.

Lost in this new country, in Reagan’s America, you think about buying the book that afternoon because it will be a handy guide to achievement. That is how the middle-class soul, conscious of the forbidding cost of the hardcover, begins to rationalize the purchase. If there are any doubts in your mind, they quickly dissolve when on the first page that opens under your thumb you read: Dedicated to the memory of Saadat Hasan Manto, who was never to see any of his work translated during his lifetime …

Later, you read the stories and are pleased. But either right away or during later rereadings you discover that you can’t always guess what the words in the original were. You know the titles of the individual stories and you write the original names on the page where it says Contents. But the stories themselves, that is to say the language of the original, the words in Urdu, cannot be recovered. Memory is failing you. Everything around you is in English. You speak in your language mostly on the phone, when talking to relatives and friends. The stories that were to take you back home become reminders of a different complication. That is important, too, this discovery that you have become a translated man.

THE ESSENTIAL HAIKU | AIMEE BENDER

I’d bring Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku. I guess the Gideon Bible’s presence here sparked this choice; if I were to swap it out of a hotel room, I think these haikus might do very well as a substitute, for a traveler groping in a drawer for a little insight or comfort. Each poem is a gift of stillness and awareness, and reading them actually does calm the mind. Hass highlights three writers in particular, three historical masters of the form—Basho, Issa, and Buson—and they are at times profound, hilarious, and intensely vivid.

My friend Chris has quoted this Basho poem often:

Even in Kyoto—

hearing the cuckoos cry—

I long for Kyoto

And isn’t that kind of longing a reminder of something inexplicable about traveling and newness and also familiarity and stability? There are hundreds of such gems in this book.

Below: The War on All Fronts, 2010, altered books (set of five), 7-3/4 x 8 x 6". Images courtesy of the artist and Saltworks.

MYTHOLOGIES | MAURICE BERGER

Dear Reader,

I’ve taken a book for myself, and leave this one in the hope that you will find it interesting enough to take in turn. The rules of this event challenged me at first: Bring a book that is meaningful in some way, that has changed your thinking or even your life, one that must have been translated into English from another language. I am a cultural historian who studies the relationship between race and culture in the United States, and the books that occurred to me first were written originally in English: W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

But one work in translation, by the French literary critic Roland Barthes, remains among the most influential for me: Mythologies. For decades, it has served as my guidebook for understanding the way pictures and other cultural artifacts convey meaning. First published in Paris in 1957, the Mythologies I read was the eloquent 1972 English translation by Annette Lavers. I was twenty, working on my undergraduate honors thesis on the role of language in modern art. The copy I leave for you is the same slightly dog-eared volume I held in my hands thirty-five years ago.

Mythologies is a tour de force of cultural analysis, a series of twenty-nine short, erudite essays that touch on a range of subjects: the opportunistic relationship between politicians and photographers; the implications of modern society’s insatiable hunger for synthetic materials; the way children’s toys embody adult anxieties and preoccupations; the psychology of selling detergent; the Cold War metaphors of good and evil in American wrestling; the psychosexual paradoxes of striptease. What these essays have in common is their ability to expose the fabrications, distortions, and contradictions masked by what Barthes calls contemporary myths.

In Mythologies, Barthes helps us to see that our media and popular culture—photography, journalism, film, advertising, sports, theater, television, products, publicity campaigns—resonate with myths: messages crafted to deceive, manipulate, inspire, influence, lull, and excite desire. These myths lend an aura of innocence to the disquieting, underlying realities of our everyday lives, helping to mask, or make us comfortable with, our limitations, our ambivalence, our intolerance. They are the nimble co-conspirators of the businessman, the adman, the politician—agents of manipulation charged with disguising the undesirable, making bearable the unbearable, whitewashing paradoxes and conflicts that threaten to disrupt the social order.

The iconic image of the 2008 presidential campaign was Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster, distributed independently by the artist and then adopted by the Obama campaign. The poster was one of the most celebrated and influential campaign images in recent memory, hailed by political pundits for its effectiveness and quickly acquired by the Smithsonian Institution. Whenever I encountered the brightly optimistic image, however, I was overcome by a sense of unease. I could not shake the feeling that behind the poster’s message of hope and redemption lay another, more troubling meaning.

Turn to page 116 of Mythologies. Here, in the book’s longest essay, Myth Today, Barthes analyzes a photograph that appeared on the cover of Paris Match in 1955, an image of an Afro-French child dressed in the uniform of the French military. His hand is raised in salute. His head is tilted upward. His raised eyes are fixed in the distance, presumably on the tricouleur, that great symbol of French militarism and civility. Beyond the literal representation of a black soldier boy giving the French salute, the cover suggests to Barthes a more calculated political message: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. Thus, in a nation then involved in the violent war of independence being fought by its colonial subjects in Algeria, the photograph communicated ideas about race and power in modern France meant to appease the magazine’s anxious or guilty white readers.

Barthes’s analysis of the cover of Paris Match has stuck with me throughout years of writing about the cultural nuances of race in America. And it haunted me during my encounters with the Hope poster. The poster’s bold, vivid portrait of the man who would soon be president radiates an aura of confidence as well as hopefulness. But the swath of white paint that rakes across Obama’s face—in a picture devoid of the color brown—propels the image into the realm of myth. This simple formal device transforms the black candidate into an icon of the post-racial politician: half African, half white American, unencumbered by the tortuous legacy of slavery and segregation. Obama is depicted as black and white, race-specific and race-neutral, a blank screen onto which we are invited to project our dreams and aspirations. Much like the cover of Paris Match, the poster’s mythic messages served to reassure white voters by appealing to their biases and vulnerabilities: Vote for me because I am just like you; vote for me because I am unthreatening; vote for me and claim the racial largesse that is expected of you; vote for me and assuage your guilt.

As you can see, there may be no more appropriate book than Mythologies to trade at a swap meet devoted to translation. For most of my adult life, Barthes’s formidable text has helped me to translate the almost imperceptible language of contemporary myth into its constituent language of manipulation and distortion. If myths are a virus that infects our reasoning and clouds our judgment, then Mythologies is a vaccine of sorts, a means of fortifying ourselves against those who have no qualms about appealing to our limitations and weaknesses. Read it carefully. Apply its lessons. It will alter the way you see and understand the world.

IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER | ALAN MICHAEL PARKER

Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I went to the train station with my friend A. to pick up a package. It was later than we thought; even in the central train station where the clock’s so careful, even in that permanently nocturnal miasma, the air felt later, the light seemed a version of earlier light. A., whom I didn’t know well, had a claim check for his package—a book, he thought, sent from another country, the packaging stamped with the scowls of dictators and financiers pretending to be populists.

Were the trains running? We only noticed departures. A. claimed his package at a window. We could hear a baby cooing somewhere, although children and small animals make the same noises. The same is true of readers, A. said, trying to be sardonic. That A. never knows when to stop.

We sat in the café, the one with the marzipan like sand (or a memory). We decided to read by turn, despite the noisome crowd, our legs pressed together at a little table in the back. Of course A. began, his voice stentorian, his manner affected. His hand flew around his face like a little bird, his fingers jittery. I couldn’t help thinking of the little bird flying above a little desert of marzipan; the moment of reading seemed to be