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Свой последний роман букеровский лауреат 1994 года Джеймс Келман (р. 1946) писал семь лет. Примерно столько же читателям понадобится, чтобы понять, о чем он. "Настоящий текст представляет собой перевод показаний, данных тремя, четырьмя или более людьми, которые проживают на оккупированной территории либо в стране, где задействована та или иная форма военного правления". Босния, Заир, Шотландия, Россия, США - "террортория" может быть любой...
Оруэлловская метафора, написанная языком Андрея Платонова, доведенным до крайней степени распада. Самая загадочная книга шотландского классика, подводящая итог всему XX столетию, - впервые на русском языке.
Оруэлловская метафора, написанная языком Андрея Платонова, доведенным до крайней степени распада. Самая загадочная книга шотландского классика, подводящая итог всему XX столетию, - впервые на русском языке.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
6 people are currently reading
240 people want to read
About the author
James Kelman
80 books270 followersKelman says:
My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else's. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, inner city tenement to the housing scheme homeland on the outer reaches of the city. Four brothers, my mother a full time parent, my father in the picture framemaking and gilding trade, trying to operate a one man business and I left school at 15 etc. etc. (...) For one reason or another, by the age of 21/22 I decided to write stories. The stories I wanted to write would derive from my own background, my own socio-cultural experience. I wanted to write as one of my own people, I wanted to write and remain a member of my own community.
During the 1970s he published a first collection of short stories. He became involved in Philip Hobsbaum's creative writing group in Glasgow along with Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead, and his short stories began to appear in magazines. These stories introduced a distinctive style, expressing first person internal monologues in a pared-down prose utilising Glaswegian speech patterns, though avoiding for the most part the quasi-phonetic rendition of Tom Leonard. Kelman's developing style has been influential on the succeeding generation of Scottish novelists, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Janice Galloway. In 1998, Kelman received the Stakis Prize for "Scottish Writer of the Year" for his collection of short stories 'The Good Times.'
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/au...
My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else's. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, inner city tenement to the housing scheme homeland on the outer reaches of the city. Four brothers, my mother a full time parent, my father in the picture framemaking and gilding trade, trying to operate a one man business and I left school at 15 etc. etc. (...) For one reason or another, by the age of 21/22 I decided to write stories. The stories I wanted to write would derive from my own background, my own socio-cultural experience. I wanted to write as one of my own people, I wanted to write and remain a member of my own community.
During the 1970s he published a first collection of short stories. He became involved in Philip Hobsbaum's creative writing group in Glasgow along with Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead, and his short stories began to appear in magazines. These stories introduced a distinctive style, expressing first person internal monologues in a pared-down prose utilising Glaswegian speech patterns, though avoiding for the most part the quasi-phonetic rendition of Tom Leonard. Kelman's developing style has been influential on the succeeding generation of Scottish novelists, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Janice Galloway. In 1998, Kelman received the Stakis Prize for "Scottish Writer of the Year" for his collection of short stories 'The Good Times.'
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/au...
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
dropped
June 13, 2023Kelman’s 2001 folly is the perfect exemplar of a terrible idea executed flawlessly. Seven years of careful work went into honing sentences of intentionally poorly translated prose from various unidentified warzones told by various unidentified narrators at various unidentified periods or spatial realms, or whatever. The result is a wilfully opaque novel that successfully vacuums all the splendidness from Kelman’s prose style, in the manner of a stubborn diner nimbly forking through the piles of pilau to remove all the chillis from his curry. The humour, the frenetic speed-of-thought, the brilliant accumulation of detail, the excellent ear for dialogue and dialect—all nimbly forked aside in favour of a flat, vastly unwise experiment from a writer bloated up on a Booker win. I managed fifty pages, and if the reviews here and elsewhere are to be believed, that was more than enough.
Read
April 27, 2024Problems with Inventing New Pidgins, Creoles, Dialects, Idioms
The Scottish writer James Kelman is often spoken of as an heir to Kafka (in reviews as far back as 1994, and probably before); he has written a number of books experimenting with Scots and English, as a way of expressing power struggles. Translated Accounts may be his most radical attempt to have unconventional English represent colonial and institutional violence and injustice. The book is 54 short chapters of eyewitness accounts, which the reader is meant to take as a dossier of atrocities, each of them translated from unnamed languages. Most of the testimonials are in one of several kinds of nonstandard English:
1. Texts that seem to be translated with the help of a (pre-AI) translation machine. As one critic puts it: "commonly, sentences are ungrammatical, misleading, and feature strange pasted-in pieces of vocabulary, suggesting a misused dictionary or computing resource: ‘Our attention now may be drawn to situations inter as between owner of the vicious dog leaping the garden gate that has bitten the skinny little child.’" (Sally Mapstone, review titled "Common Sense," in the London Review of Books)
2. Texts that seem to be recovered from corrupted digital files. The reviews I've read often mention one chapter in particular, in which a violent event is recorded in fragments, because the text keeps being interrupted by code fragments: "and its laughingand andto the guest in our country ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌Summaryinformationhatlanguageor@...." and so on (p. 30).
3. Texts where the "translations" "have been modified by someone of a more senior office," as Kelman says in his Preface.
4. Texts translated by persons not "native to the tongue"—as he also says in the Preface.
I think it might be possible to add to this list, but these are the basic categories. They are presented as modes of "translation," and therefore structurally analogous not only to actual translated texts, but to the invented dialects and creoles that are common in modern and contemporary fiction, from A Clockwork Orange to Matthiessen's Far Tortuga. At the same time all four strategies result in experimentation with the conventions of grammar and usage that can also be found in modernist texts from Stein and Joyce to McBride and McCormack.
All these is a promising setup for a bureaucratically generated dossier of atrocities, but Translated Accounts is difficult to read with any care, because it does not manage these "translations" in such a way as to enable the kind of close reading that all testimonies require. (I do not think the book is flawed because of a lack of direction of "plot" as some reviewers have said: a lack of closure is a genuine inheritance from Kafka, especially of course The Trial.)
The fact that modes of "translation" (invented idioms) vary from one chapter to the next, while the number of witnesses also varies (readers cannot be sure how many people's accounts are transcribed in the book) means that readers will pay special attention to style in order to deduce the identities of the narrators. For that reason it matters that the strategies are not consistent, or consistently believable as translations.
Mapstone noted that sometimes Scots (specifically Glaswegian) sneaks in even though Kelman apparently didn't intend it. There are also chapters that fall into a literary style emulating translation, in which Kelman's own (literary) voice can be heard: "Yes she offered herself to me. I never heard her laughter. She was a girl. Her laughter. She would have laughed, who does not laugh. I would have walked with her and our lips could not meet." (p. 157)
Many other passages, however, register Kelman's inconsistent and, I think, unconvincing sense of what a bad translation is, for instance here:
"Authoritys and other powers show ignorance of a crucial tautology that may be formulated if roughly, having sense as follows, we have been selected be virtue of our merits, these merits are worthy selection criteria. Further, that these merits, being specific, are of universal application. Upon selection power is/was taken from them [democratically-elected governments, dutiful-appointed]." (p. 154)
If I read this slowly and attentively, I have problems. Why is "authorities" misspelled? It's presumably a translator's error, or a transcriber's, and so I am on the alert for similar misspellings. If the translator is partly illiterate, that will have certain predictable consequences. The main portion of this paragraph is eloquent in an institutional mode, but under what circumstances could a long, well-formed sentence of this kind be interrupted by an ungrammatical phrase ("having sense as follows")? If the original text was competent institutional speech in its original language, and it was translated by a person who knew enough of about administrative speech to capture phrases such as "ignorance of a crucial tautology," then how could a phrase like "having sense as follows" end up in the transcript? The square-bracketed interpolation raises a similar question: it clarifies the antecedent ("them") in an elaborate and technical fashion, but it has a mistake ("dutiful-appointed"). What kind of speaker could have the competence to insert that bracketed correction but make a mistake as simple and unusual as "dutiful-appointed"?
Any invented or mimicked creole, dialect, or solecistic style will draw attention to itself, and so it needs to sustain close reading. Kelman's writing here is not up to this: he's better when he mimics Glaswegian, Scottish English, and administrative or legal English. Other forms of writing could have been outsourced, taken from unprofessional translators, or pre-AI translation engines—a variety of strategies could have produced texts amenable to the kinds of close reading the testimonies invite.
The Scottish writer James Kelman is often spoken of as an heir to Kafka (in reviews as far back as 1994, and probably before); he has written a number of books experimenting with Scots and English, as a way of expressing power struggles. Translated Accounts may be his most radical attempt to have unconventional English represent colonial and institutional violence and injustice. The book is 54 short chapters of eyewitness accounts, which the reader is meant to take as a dossier of atrocities, each of them translated from unnamed languages. Most of the testimonials are in one of several kinds of nonstandard English:
1. Texts that seem to be translated with the help of a (pre-AI) translation machine. As one critic puts it: "commonly, sentences are ungrammatical, misleading, and feature strange pasted-in pieces of vocabulary, suggesting a misused dictionary or computing resource: ‘Our attention now may be drawn to situations inter as between owner of the vicious dog leaping the garden gate that has bitten the skinny little child.’" (Sally Mapstone, review titled "Common Sense," in the London Review of Books)
2. Texts that seem to be recovered from corrupted digital files. The reviews I've read often mention one chapter in particular, in which a violent event is recorded in fragments, because the text keeps being interrupted by code fragments: "and its laughingand andto the guest in our country ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌Summaryinformationhatlanguageor@...." and so on (p. 30).
3. Texts where the "translations" "have been modified by someone of a more senior office," as Kelman says in his Preface.
4. Texts translated by persons not "native to the tongue"—as he also says in the Preface.
I think it might be possible to add to this list, but these are the basic categories. They are presented as modes of "translation," and therefore structurally analogous not only to actual translated texts, but to the invented dialects and creoles that are common in modern and contemporary fiction, from A Clockwork Orange to Matthiessen's Far Tortuga. At the same time all four strategies result in experimentation with the conventions of grammar and usage that can also be found in modernist texts from Stein and Joyce to McBride and McCormack.
All these is a promising setup for a bureaucratically generated dossier of atrocities, but Translated Accounts is difficult to read with any care, because it does not manage these "translations" in such a way as to enable the kind of close reading that all testimonies require. (I do not think the book is flawed because of a lack of direction of "plot" as some reviewers have said: a lack of closure is a genuine inheritance from Kafka, especially of course The Trial.)
The fact that modes of "translation" (invented idioms) vary from one chapter to the next, while the number of witnesses also varies (readers cannot be sure how many people's accounts are transcribed in the book) means that readers will pay special attention to style in order to deduce the identities of the narrators. For that reason it matters that the strategies are not consistent, or consistently believable as translations.
Mapstone noted that sometimes Scots (specifically Glaswegian) sneaks in even though Kelman apparently didn't intend it. There are also chapters that fall into a literary style emulating translation, in which Kelman's own (literary) voice can be heard: "Yes she offered herself to me. I never heard her laughter. She was a girl. Her laughter. She would have laughed, who does not laugh. I would have walked with her and our lips could not meet." (p. 157)
Many other passages, however, register Kelman's inconsistent and, I think, unconvincing sense of what a bad translation is, for instance here:
"Authoritys and other powers show ignorance of a crucial tautology that may be formulated if roughly, having sense as follows, we have been selected be virtue of our merits, these merits are worthy selection criteria. Further, that these merits, being specific, are of universal application. Upon selection power is/was taken from them [democratically-elected governments, dutiful-appointed]." (p. 154)
If I read this slowly and attentively, I have problems. Why is "authorities" misspelled? It's presumably a translator's error, or a transcriber's, and so I am on the alert for similar misspellings. If the translator is partly illiterate, that will have certain predictable consequences. The main portion of this paragraph is eloquent in an institutional mode, but under what circumstances could a long, well-formed sentence of this kind be interrupted by an ungrammatical phrase ("having sense as follows")? If the original text was competent institutional speech in its original language, and it was translated by a person who knew enough of about administrative speech to capture phrases such as "ignorance of a crucial tautology," then how could a phrase like "having sense as follows" end up in the transcript? The square-bracketed interpolation raises a similar question: it clarifies the antecedent ("them") in an elaborate and technical fashion, but it has a mistake ("dutiful-appointed"). What kind of speaker could have the competence to insert that bracketed correction but make a mistake as simple and unusual as "dutiful-appointed"?
Any invented or mimicked creole, dialect, or solecistic style will draw attention to itself, and so it needs to sustain close reading. Kelman's writing here is not up to this: he's better when he mimics Glaswegian, Scottish English, and administrative or legal English. Other forms of writing could have been outsourced, taken from unprofessional translators, or pre-AI translation engines—a variety of strategies could have produced texts amenable to the kinds of close reading the testimonies invite.
September 11, 2007
One of the strangest texts I've encountered. The book is a series of reports and interviews and stories told by anonymous victims and survivors of some unnamed police state bordering on martial law. The pastiche would be odd enough, structurally, even without the book's main conceit. Which is: these accounts all appear in "translation" (though the translator is not identified, and plus there seem to be multiple modes of translation, suggesting a small army in charge of these accounts), and the translations are often very bad, as if manufactured by individuals with only some vague inkling of the English language. The effect is really chilling. Most remarkably, Kelman ends up creating something like STORY from this insane morass. I think the book is brilliant, and sui generis. The only thing keeping me from that fifth star, is the fact that the work I put in was a little bit in excess of the reward I ultimately received. Anyway, I'm a weirdo. Not too many people would enjoy this, I'll bet.
i-want-money
March 23, 2013"How bad it was, how bad: Fleeting glimpses of a brutal, oppressive world through a dense fog of language"
The Telegraph 02 Jun 2001
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/47...
June 5, 2011
I appreciate what Kelman is trying to accomplish with the near unreadability of this book, but I question whether the payoff is worth the pain of having to slog through it.
December 27, 2019
Kellman intentionally frustrates any sort of easy understanding of what lies behind the 54 “translated” documents that compose this book. There are no names of people or of place, and there only allusions to places outside the area/country where these accounts are authored. Why the obscurity? In part I assume that it’s a reflection of the monitoring of movement and thought that the “securitys” maintain on the populace, hence everything is wrapped in a non-signifying gauze, which suggests a wound but not the particulars of that wound.
There is an obscure oppression to the events narrated in these accounts, though sometimes the murk clears enough to see what a particular narrator fears from the securitys, the authoritys, or the militarys. Relations between citizens/“colleagues” is at best clandestine, and it’s not clear whether normal family relations still exist, because trust itself is at a premium.
The nature of the translation was fascinating, though I was never convinced that speech/writing could degenerate into the strangely repetitive redundancies of person and self. There’s much to ponder in this book, as the surface of the text offers very little grasp on “events”, and it becomes necessary to try to plumb the interior of things, what’s actually underneath/behind the words. It’s a fascinating reading experience for that purpose, but it seems that much of what was achieved could have been done in a single, 25-page version…
There is an obscure oppression to the events narrated in these accounts, though sometimes the murk clears enough to see what a particular narrator fears from the securitys, the authoritys, or the militarys. Relations between citizens/“colleagues” is at best clandestine, and it’s not clear whether normal family relations still exist, because trust itself is at a premium.
The nature of the translation was fascinating, though I was never convinced that speech/writing could degenerate into the strangely repetitive redundancies of person and self. There’s much to ponder in this book, as the surface of the text offers very little grasp on “events”, and it becomes necessary to try to plumb the interior of things, what’s actually underneath/behind the words. It’s a fascinating reading experience for that purpose, but it seems that much of what was achieved could have been done in a single, 25-page version…
May 4, 2021
I'd agree that this text is one of the strangest that I've ever encountered.
Kelman has never been afraid to confront the challenge of unreadability. When I was reading this book I thought of Adorno's words" To write poetry after Auswitchtz is barbaric".
Kelman's language had cut itself off from its emotional base, the language is deprived of both its beauty and grammar, and also you can find there lots of ugly political jargon and neologisms. The reason lies behind the stories that were told in this sort of novel.
The author set lots of challenges for the readers.
It's definitely a new way of experiencing the process of reading. Perhaps, I would need to re-read it one day.
Kelman has never been afraid to confront the challenge of unreadability. When I was reading this book I thought of Adorno's words" To write poetry after Auswitchtz is barbaric".
Kelman's language had cut itself off from its emotional base, the language is deprived of both its beauty and grammar, and also you can find there lots of ugly political jargon and neologisms. The reason lies behind the stories that were told in this sort of novel.
The author set lots of challenges for the readers.
It's definitely a new way of experiencing the process of reading. Perhaps, I would need to re-read it one day.
January 8, 2024
James Kelman gives voices to the dispossessed in a nation under violent military rule, displaying a keen psychological insight to the victims under rule. The nameless lives, all written in the first person, evoke the underlying terror and anxiety that feels all too real.The result is a haunting and hallucinatory narrative, with voices and monologues reminiscent of those found in the works of journalist Svetlana Alexievich and the imprisoned self-consciounessness of Samuel Beckett.
(I read this book with the War in Ukraine and also the Israel-Palestine War in mind, and the book feels all too close to being a document of lives existing within these wars)
(I read this book with the War in Ukraine and also the Israel-Palestine War in mind, and the book feels all too close to being a document of lives existing within these wars)
September 23, 2020
Interesting novel and difficult read. The author has a very unique way of writing this novel and I can’t at this time come up with how I feel about it. This book is accurate in portraying the writing style of a translator taking notes from a person that is not from the same country. Even though it’s a first person narrative the translated aspect makes the head pound with repeated dialogue and incorrect grammar.
Read
April 1, 2024Amos Oz did this in one of his best “The Black Box '' relying on letters and telegrams exchanged between 3-4 voices to portray conflicts between generations within Israel.
It is a kind of “early narrative revival”.
The post modern memory reflects a yearning to lost past times when humanity was more passionate and closer to nature. With certain privacy.
It is an achievement by Mr. Kelman who never abandoned experimenting tools and styles.
It is a kind of “early narrative revival”.
The post modern memory reflects a yearning to lost past times when humanity was more passionate and closer to nature. With certain privacy.
It is an achievement by Mr. Kelman who never abandoned experimenting tools and styles.
April 24, 2025
I really like Kelman's other work but a worthy theme in a novel still needs something to entertain and transport the reader and this book did not do that for me.
December 7, 2015
Okay, I tried. I enjoy experimental fiction. B. S. Johnson is one of my favourite writers. Finnegan's Wake I think tremendous - funny, erudite, captivating, and of course very very clever. This book, however, flummoxed me. I did get halfway through, or actually over halfway through, but I ave decided life is too short for me to continue trying to pierce this ungrammatical, unidiomatic, tangle despite its timely dealing with violence, martial law, and the world we unfortunately have to cope with now. I can appreciate the writer's attempt to capture the moment, to give is a reading experience as difficult as the times we live in, but really how much of this do we need? I feel badly not completing this book; I rarely put a book down before finishing, even when I have to slog. This slog defeats me.
December 29, 2009
Headache inducing. Translated accounts is made up of 54 tales told by 3 or 4 different individuals living in a country under martial law in the near future. All of these stories appear to be translated from some other language into English and even then the English translations, which vary in method of translation, seem to be done either by a computer or someone who has very little grasp of the English language. Think about what happens when you ask Babelfish to translate a sentence from Japanese to English and you get the idea.
Once your brain starts translating the translated English into, well, English, there's some good stuff to be found, but I'm just not sure its worth all of the effort you have to put in.
Once your brain starts translating the translated English into, well, English, there's some good stuff to be found, but I'm just not sure its worth all of the effort you have to put in.
March 29, 2014
I knew this wouldn't be an easy book. I've read Kelman before and he never makes it easy for the reader. The idea of the book - various accounts of living in some sort of police state - was interesting to me. However, in practise it was really hard to get a handle on the story. None of the characters or narrators are named and while I understand the reasons for this, it made it very difficult to read. Also the plot doesn't really move at all and what action there is is repeated. Again, I can see what Kelman was trying to achieve but it made for a very sluggish read.
January 31, 2016
I love James Kelman, but this book dissappointed me because it was more upfront about it's political views as opposed to the way his other works of fiction use the characters and culture of Scotland to portray its faults and setbacks.
March 2, 2021
It’s an interesting concept, but the language used was convoluted.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews