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  FOUND IN TRANSLATION

  Selected by

  Frank Wynne

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  About this Book

  About the Author

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  AN APOLLO BOOK

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  About Found in Translation

  ‘Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.’ —George Steiner

  It is impossible to overstate the influence world literatures have had in defining each other. No culture exists in isolation; all writers are part of an intertwining braid.

  Found in Translation brings together one hundred glittering diamonds of world literature, celebrating not only the original texts themselves but also the art of translation. From Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan, by way of China and Brazil, some of the greatest voices of world literature come together in thunderous chorus. If the authors include prize winners, some of the translators are equally famous – D. H. Lawrence and Edith Wharton translate classic Italian short stories, and Victoria Hislop has taken her first venture into translation with the only short story written by Constantine P. Cavafy.

  This exciting, original and brilliantly varied collection of stories takes the reader literally on a journey: it’s the perfect way to travel the globe, and to travel in time.

  CONTENTS

  Welcome Page

  About Found in Translation

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Miguel de Cervantes

  The Glass Graduate

  Pu Songling

  The Tiger Guest

  E. T. A. Hoffmann

  The Sandman

  Alexander Pushkin

  The Shot

  Wilhelm Hauff

  The Severed Hand

  Theodor W. Storm

  Immensee

  Ivan Turgenev

  The Dog

  Gustave Flaubert

  A Simple Heart

  Leo Tolstoy

  God Sees the Truth, But Waits

  Pédro Antonio de Alarcón

  The Tall Woman

  Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

  The Fortune Teller

  Enrico Castelnuovo

  It Snows

  Alphonse Daudet

  L’Arlésienne

  Émile Zola

  The Attack on the Mill

  Giovanni Verga

  Malaria

  Bolesław Prus

  A Legend of Old Egypt

  Guy de Maupassant

  Mother Savage

  Knut Hamsun

  Secret Sorrow

  Anton Chekhov

  Rothschild’s Fiddle

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Kabuliwala

  Constantine P. Cavafy

  In the Light of Day

  Gabriele D’Annunzio

  San Pantaleone

  Jalil Mammadguluzade

  The Post Box

  Maxim Gorky

  Twenty-Six Men and a Girl

  Ichiyō Higuchi

  Child’s Play

  Thomas Mann

  The Path to the Cemetery

  Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay

  Mahesh

  Horacio Quiroga

  The Pursued

  Robert Walser

  Kleist in Thun

  Zsigmond Móricz

  Seven Pennies

  Premchand

  The Chess Players

  Lu Xun

  Kong Yiji

  Nescio

  The Freeloader

  Franz Kafka

  In the Penal Colony

  Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

  Sorrow-Acre

  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

  The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright

  Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

  The Tattooer

  Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  Rashōmon

  Bruno Schulz

  The Street of Crocodiles

  Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz

  The Birch Grove

  Isaac Babel

  Salt

  Josep Pla

  A Conversation in St. James’s Park

  Jorge Luis Borges

  The Library of Babel

  Banaphul

  What Really Happened

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Details of a Sunset

  Nina Berberova

  The Resurrection of Mozart

  Halldór Laxness

  An Inland Fishing Trip

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Gimpel the Fool

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  The Milk of Death

  Irène Némirovsky

  We Once Were Happy

  Daniil Kharms

  The Lecture

  Samuel Beckett

  Ping

  Máirtín Ó Cadhain

  The Hare-Lip

  Dino Buzzati

  Seven Floors

  Sait Faik Abasıyanık

  The Boy on the Tünel

  Mercè Rodoreda

  The Salamander

  Naguib Mahfouz

  The Answer Is No

  Saadat Hasan Manto

  Toba Tek Singh

  Julio Cortázar

  Axolotl

  Bohumil Hrabal

  A Dull Afternoon

  Ismat Chughtai

  The Quilt

  Heinrich Böll

  Action Will Be Taken

  Clarice Lispector

  Happy Birthday

  Satyajit Ray

  Two Magicians

  Leonardo Sciascia

  The Long Crossing

  Italo Calvino

  The Poisonous Rabbit

  Shūsaku Endō

  Incredible Voyage

  Pramoedya Ananta Toer

  All That Is Gone

  Yukio Mishima

  Patriotism

  Kōno Taeko

  Full Tide

  Gabriel García Márquez

  The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow

  Samira ‘Azzam

  Tears for Sale

  Camara Laye

  The Eyes of the Statue

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

  The Voice of the Turtle

  Thomas Bernhard

  The Crime of an Innsbruck Shopkeeper’s Son

  Aharon Appelfeld

  Cold Spring

  Ismail Kadaré

  Before the Bath

  Maryse Condé

  The Breadnut and the Breadfruit

  Xi Xi

  A Woman Like Me

  Khalida Husain

  Dead Letter

  António Lobo Antunes

  Before Darkness Falls

  Antonio Tabucchi

  Waiting for Winter

  Oh Jung-hee

  Garden of My Childhood

  Dubravka Ugrešić

  A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun

  Quim Monzó

  Family Life

  Roberto Bolaño

  Last Evenings on Earth

  Herta Müller

  Oppressive Tango

  Hamid Ismailov

  The Stone Guest

  László Krasznahorkai

  Bankers

  Paweł Huelle

  Silver Rain

  Yu Hua

  On the Road at Eighteen

  José Eduardo Agualusa

  The Man with the Light

  Manon Uphoff

  Desire

  Teresa Solana

  The Son in Law

  Miljenko Jergović

  You’re the Angel

  Etgar Keret

  The Nimrod Flipout

  Kim Yŏng-ha

  Lizard

  Dorthe Nors

  She Frequented Ceme
teries

  Mirja Unge

  Oranges

  Clemens Meyer

  In the Aisles

  Acknowledgements

  Extended Copyright

  About Frank Wynne

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  In memory of David Miller

  INTRODUCTION

  I have a memory of the first short story that made an impression on me that is so vivid, so visceral that the hair on the back of my neck still prickles thirty years later. I would have been fourteen, perhaps fifteen, when I read it, sitting in Miss Collins’ French class, in Sligo Grammar School. She had told us to read “En mer” by Guy de Maupassant, a brief story, no more than five pages long, whose sparse, plain language was just within the grasp of our rudimentary French. It is the simple story of an accident aboard a fishing trawler manned by two brothers. On their return to port, the net is almost lost in a heavy squall and the younger brother’s arm is trapped between the ropes and the gunwale. To save the arm would mean cutting the rope and losing the valuable net. The elder brother instead drops anchor and, eventually, the fishermen manage to free the arm, now shattered and horribly mangled. Gangrene quickly sets in. I can still remember sitting at my desk, reading the sentence where the younger brother “… began to cut his own arm. He cut carefully, painstakingly, slicing through the last tendons with a blade as sharp as a razor; soon there was nothing but a stump.” I apologise for this spoiler, but an even greater emotional shock awaits the reader in the final sentences.

  This was the story that first offered me a glimpse of the unique power of the short story. Maupassant’s tone is detached and unemotional, something that makes the horror all the more devastating. I began to devour short stories wherever I could find them – I remember the profoundly unsettling feeling of reading Ian McEwan’s stories in First Love, Last Rites, and my first encounters with John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor. Long before I was fortunate enough to stumble into a career as a translator – or had an inkling of what such a peculiar shapeshifter might be – translators introduced me to other masters of the genre: to Chekhov and Pushkin, Borges and Calvino. I discovered that a short story has the matchless ability to capture a mood or a moment, to halt time, to suspend the commonplace and imbue everyday objects with startling power. A short story can conjure a whole world in a handful of pages, it can be poignant, tragic, funny or surreal, it can leave a reader tearful, terrified or inexplicably serene, it can be as fleeting and unfinished as lives glimpsed from a moving train or as forensically precise as an autopsy report. In the words of the great American writer, Walter Mosley: “A good short story asks a question that can’t be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.”

  Although every language, as it emerges, develops an oral tradition of storytelling intended to entertain or edify – countless anecdotes, parables and fables that range from the Book of Job to the folk tales told by Scheherazade to Sultan Shahriyar – the short story as we know today is the most recent literary genre. It begins to flourish in the nineteenth century – almost three hundred years after the novel – spurred by the rise of literacy in industrialised countries and the appearance of magazines and periodicals eager to publish shorter fictions. As William Boyd succinctly puts it: “The short story arrived fully fledged in the middle of the 19th century and by its end, in the shape of Anton Chekhov, had reached its apotheosis.”

  Even taking this narrow definition of a short story, the task of selecting one hundred from the countless stories translated from any language, from any country is – to say the least – a daunting task. So, when I was asked to edit this anthology I was both preposterously excited and utterly terrified. Obviously, it is impossible to read every story; how then do you decide when you have read enough? Since an introduction is usually the last part of a book to be written, I now know the answer: you will never have read enough.

  From the outset, I decided that I wanted to cast my net as widely as possible, to offer a glimpse of as many countries and cultures, as many languages as would fit between these covers and simultaneously to try to chart a course from the seventeenth century to short masterpieces of the twenty-first century. The usual suspects are here – the Russians, the French and the Germans who (with the British and the Americans) dominated the short story form for almost a century – but there are also stories from countries as varied as Guinea and Vietnam, and stories translated from Azerbaijani and Gikuyu. There are a dozen writers in these pages who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature and others who are all but unknown outside their homelands.

  These, then, are the writers. But with the exception of those few authors who have translated their own work (Isak Dinesen, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), the words you are reading are those of translators. If, as Susan Sontag says, translation is “the circulatory system of the world’s literatures”, then translators are the beating heart that makes it possible for stories to flow beyond borders and across oceans. Their task is as simple as it may seem impossible: to quote Günter Grass, “Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.” It is not a matter of finding equivalent words (since there is never an exact equivalence), but of weighing the weight and heft of words while striving to preserve the cadence and the rhythm of a sentence, to reinvent a pun, to produce a voice that lives on the page. Like a pianist transforming a written score into a performance of the Goldberg Variations, or an actor taking a play and becoming Hedda Gabler, a translator must interpret and perform, while hewing as closely as possible to the shape of the original. It is a process that is thrilling and frustrating, often challenging and always rewarding. The debt we owe to translators often goes unacknowledged; we talk about having read Tolstoy or Proust when actually we have read Constance Garnett or C.K. Scott Moncrieff. We talk about the style of García Marquez or Murakami, but the style we so admire owes much to Edith Grossman or Jay Rubin. All literature is a continuum, an intertwining of voices and languages, of dialects, and it is impossible to imagine the evolution of the English novel without the availability of translations. As Milan Kundera says: “… it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew constant inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself, it was Flaubert’s tradition living on in Joyce, it was through his reflection on Joyce that Hermann Broch developed his own poetics of the novel, and it was Kafka who showed García Marquez the possibility of departing from tradition to ‘write another way’.”1

  Some years ago, the British novelist David Mitchell co-translated The Reason I Jump with his wife Keiko Yoshida. Interviewed about the experience, he said: “The exercise has confirmed my long-held suspicion that my translators are three times cleverer than me, with a better command of English as well as the ‘into-language,’ plus a knowledge of the mysterious art and science that is translation itself. As a writer I can be bad, but I can’t be wrong. A translator can be good, but can never be right. Translators are jugglers, diplomats, nuance-ticklers, magistrates, word-nerds, self-testing lie detectors, and poets. Translators rock.”

  Every anthology, by its nature, is subjective, yet none is truly the work of a single editor. Instead, it is the result of countless conversations and squabbles with friends who champion a particular story or author, with readers who passionately insist that X is the finest short story writer who ever lived and others equally adamant that X is meretricious and wildly overrated. It is impossible to overstate the debt I owe to the editors, readers, writers, and especially to the fellow translators who have guided me. In reading the stories recommended to me, I rediscovered the thrill of finding voices that are new to me, and the ineffable pleasure of rediscovering authors (often in new translations). Editing an anthology, I have discovered, is a microcosm of a readin
g life; it is a journey filled with startling finds and occasional disappointments. An anthology is a miniature library of stories that one particular editor feels everyone needs to read. But just as space on bookshelves is limited, so too are the pages of any collection. The final choice presented is inescapably personal and, like the lists of 100 Greatest Novels of All Time beloved of Sunday supplements that immediately trigger family feuds, Facebook rants and disbelieving wails, every anthology is bound to frustrate and infuriate by some of its choices.

  I have never much liked the word “anthology”; to my ear, it has a textbook ring of authority at odds with the curious cabinet of wonders that make up any collection. But I have always loved the old English term “rattle-bag” (famously a title used by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes); it has the clank and clatter of things found, scavenged, unearthed and retrieved, all jostling between the covers, clamouring for attention. But however modest its intentions, every collection aspires to the ideal described by Robert Graves: