Loosed in Translation discussion

via James Wood:

A young man, hectic and dirty, sits on a park bench in a cold city. He is wild, nervous, seems to fiddle with his soul. Beside him, an old man is holding a newspaper. The young man begins a conversation. In its course, the old man reveals that he is blind. He asks the young man where he lives. The young man decides to lie, and names a pleasant square, somewhere he could not afford in his present circumstances. The blind man knows the square, knows the building, in fact. What is the name of the landlord again, asks the blind man. The young man says the first word that comes into his head: ‘Hippolati.’ Ah yes, says the blind man, Hippolati, that’s right, he knows the name, it was on the tip of his tongue. The young man is enjoying this; he froths his lies up into greater extravagances. He reminds the old man that Hippolati is something of an inventor, that he invented an electric prayer book. Yes, says the blind man, he recalls hearing some thing like that. And, Hippolati was for seven years a cabinet minister in Persia, adds the young man. Ah yes, says the old man.

Now the young man, who is clearly unstable, begins to get angry. Why is the old man so blandly gullible? Why is he agreeing to these ridiculous lies? But instead of accusing him of being a dupe, he does the opposite, and bizarrely accuses him of not believing his stories. He yells at him:

Perhaps you don’t even believe that a man with the name Hippolati exists! What obstinacy and wickedness in an old man – I’ve never seen the likes of it. What the hell is the matter with you? … Let me tell you sir, that I’m not at all accustomed to such treatment as yours, and I won’t stand for it.

The old man looks frightened, and moves away as fast as his legs will take him, running with his small, geriatric steps.

Knut Hamsun’s greatest novels – from which this is a typical scene – throttle reason. In Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894), the Norwegian writer founded the kind of Modernist novel which largely ended with Beckett – of crepuscular states, of alienation and leaping surrealism, and of savage fictionality. He took from Dostoevsky the idea that plot is not something that merely happens to a character, but that a really strange character leads plot around like an obedient dog. He took from Strindberg the idea that the soul is not a continuous wave but a storm of interruptions – something ‘patched together’, in Strindberg’s words. In Hamsun, characters provoke apparently pointless encounters which they then disown or annul at whim. They are epistemological brawlers, always challenging meaning to a fight. They invent the scenes through which they move, and thus invent themselves afresh on every page. More than most fictional heroes, the hero in Hamsun writes the novel we read, plots it for us. Yet, like escaped convicts, these heroes erase their tracks as they proceed, and this seems to be hapless rather than willed: they carry no continuous memory of what they have said or done from scene to scene. They seem only to be escaping themselves.


The rest of this article can be found here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n23/james-wo...



I am in agreement with Wood: Hamsun's best novels are those written in the 1890s, which still have a startling power (I have a soft spot for Pan, but they're all outstanding). Hamsun is best-known for the much later novel (and the won that won him the Nobel Prize) The Growth of the Soil, which is a quite fine, but very different sort of duck. All of Hamsun's best novels have been recently re-translated by Sverre Lyngstad, as some of the earlier translations had numerous errors. The version of Hunger by Robert Bly should be avoided; on the other hand I prefer James McFarlane's Pan to Lyngstad's. Unfortunately Hamsun is known today more for being a Nazi sympathizer than a great writer (oh stupid politics!), though the Yiddish writer (and later Nobel winner) Isaac Singer said this of him: "The whole school of modern fiction springs from Hamsun."

I also have a soft spot for Pan (and I read McFarlane's translation...). Hunger is also awesome. I plan to read more by Hamsun, I think he really understood character development in a different way--a combination of physical/visceral organic biology and random chance.

That's good to know about the translations too. Thanks! I pretty much always avoid anything translated by Robert Bly as a rule.

Pan & Mysteries are great, and I really enjoyed the August trilogy.

Sverre Lyngstad has done a lot of great work. I think he is responsible for all of the Sigurd Hoel books. Road to the World's End is pretty great, if you can still find a copy.

Also, I believe he did A Sudden Liberating Thought, by Kjell Askildsen. The first story in this collection is especially memorable for a unique description of a boy's first sexual experience. (The Scandinavians are wonderful with coming of age stories. Even in film, is there anything better than Fucking Amal/Show Me Love?)

That's a good question. The first two are


Wayfarers (Landstrykere)
August


The third is either The Road Leads On (Men Livet Lever) or The Ring is Closed (Ringen Sluttet).

Wayfarers was published by Sun & Moon Press. You can probably still find a used copy for a reasonable price on Amazon.

I only found the other two in my university library, I think in editions from the 30s. This was 12 years ago, so I can't follow up for you. (I remember that some of the Hamsun books in there were donated by Saul Bellow)