TRANSLATIONS
Raw Humanity in any Language
Travel travel teaches is no us exception. about ourselves, Whether and through literary a memoir or a fictional autobiography, a cult writer experimenting with narrative or an unreliable narrator sowing doubt about what’s real, these five books offer different perspectives on what’s at the heart of the human ordeal. With offerings from Argentina, Israel, Russia, South Korea, and Yugoslavia, even those stuck stateside can get a new perspective.
MOSTARGHIA
Maya Ombasic, Donald Winkler (Translator), Biblioasis (AUG 6) Softcover $14.95 (224pp), 978-1-77196-283-4, MEMOIR
“Nietzche was right. It’s upon the death of those one loves that they become for us a shining star,” admits Maya Ombasic in her memoir, Mostarghia. Ombasic was twenty-seven years old when her father died—the same age he was when she was born. The intervening years contained the Bosnian War, the end of communism, exile, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. As Ombasic’s father says, “All tragedies of peoples have their origins in family histories.”
As displacement and the war’s fallout embed instability into her family life, Ombasic struggles with the blessing and curse of her father. Many of his strengths exacerbate his weaknesses. Bohemian and patriarchal, his personality holds heaven and hell, containing moments of poetry and prophesy but also creating almost unbearable burdens for Ombasic and her mother. After her father dies, Ombasic seeks to resolve all that was unresolved between them in life. Her memoir ripples with the tension of these two great hearts each trying to shoulder an outsized burden.
The complex currents of Ombasic’s relationship with her father are haunted with larger tragedies and triumphs. Subtly and with lyricism, Ombasic unpacks her father’s role in her history alongside the role of their hometown, Mostar, not to mention the Balkans, religion, communism, war, displacement, and nostalgia. The memoir scrutinizes the complexity of identity and the way that labels and circumstances shift in-groups and out-groups, sometimes severing people from themselves. Her portmanteau— Mostarghia —embodies the fact that “It’s no simple matter for us to free ourselves from the Balkans and their timeless madness.”
“They say the war began on a different date for everyone,” but, as Mostarghia demonstrates, for some the war never ended; it only settled into a tideland of sorrow, with the past as an unbearably distant shore and the present full of endless questions about a time that would never come again.
KLOTSVOG Margarita Khemlin, Lisa Hayden (Translator) Columbia University Press (AUG 27) Softcover $15.95 (272pp), 978-0-231-18237-9, LITERARY
Maya Abramovna Klotsvog, a Jewish Ukrainian mathematics teacher born in 1930, comes of age during the Soviet Union’s post-war era of power and becomes an exemplary Russian woman, wife, and mother in every respect. If you believe this, you should never play two truths and a lie.
Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog tells Maya’s story in the form of a fictional memoir. Maya emphasizes that people “lack the persistence to live. Especially certain people. I have always had persistence and understanding.” And she does. In spades. With cunning that’s as breathtaking as her denials, Maya’s memoir casts the shadow of her sinuous dramatics.
Always aiming for more personal security, Maya navigates the cultural undercurrents of Russian society without acknowledging the toll. Manipulating the desires of those around her, she trades on her femininity and beauty until the other person’s utility expires. Then she moves on decisively, brooking no argument. Maya’s revelations often hide in repetitive sentences that create a sense of distance and disassociation from what she refers to, with perversity, as “just the facts” before stating that facts are “not the point.” Her flippant shifts between grand statements and immediate dismissals generate suspicion about her perceptions and what’s happening in reality. The challenge is discerning where and if she’s gotten facts twisted.
Klotsvog is a story of everyday darkness told by the ultimate unreliable narrator. Armed with endless justifications, Maya’s compelled by the power of what she sheds, whether it’s her Jewish heritage, her Ukrainian roots, her failed relationships, or her self-awareness. Yet part of what makes her confusing and compelling is the core of practical ambition, survivorship, and threat that lies beneath her vanity. As Maya vibrates on a frequency between ruthless self-determination and charming narcissism, Klotsvog infects its audience with a compulsion to determine which dominates.
THE SCENT OF BUENOS AIRES Hebe Uhart, Maureen Shaughnessy (Translator) Archipelago (OCT 15) Softcover $24 (392pp) 978-1-939810-34-2, SHORT STORIES
There’s something a little mysterious at work in Hebe Uhart’s The Scent of Buenos Aires, but it’s the ordinary mystery of other people. These thirty-eight short stories function like a panopticon, each dipping into one person’s purview and leaving after capturing the briefest impression. Poised somewhere between narrative and sense memory, Uhart’s lens looks into sundry lives and renders the act of surveillance both venal and holy.
Much like the people the collection is concerned with, these stories occupy an intermediary space. They are completely fulfilled in their individual arcs and interstitial within the greater picture they create. They don’t offer answers or even questions so much as momentary glimpses of the incidents that provoke both.
There’s a fascination with people in limbo: those who are outsiders and insiders all at once and those who are at a point of transition, whether it’s the large, wandering family in “Mister Ludo,” the man drawn into the orbit of another passenger on the bus in “The Old Man,” the student newly arrived in the city in “Boy in a Boarding House,” or the visiting scholars who are shepherded by a cynical university employee in “Events Organization.”
Shaughnessy’s translation is seamless as it transfers Uhart’s material into colloquial English, making it easy to fall into the rhythms of the characters’ lives and the coded emotions that idioms encapsulate.
The Scent of Buenos Aires is concerned with the social and communal, but with a wink and a nudge toward the ridiculous habits of people. Uhart suspects, loves, and laughs at each of his characters in equal measure because he knows that, when it comes to the array of human emotion and motivation, “one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins.”
SEVEN SAMURAI SWEPT AWAY IN A RIVER Jung Young Moon, Yewon Jung (Translator) Deep Vellum (NOV 5) Softcover $14.95 (112pp) 978-1-941920-85-5, AUTOBIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
Cult favorite Jung Young Moon’s Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River is a meditation on the nature of existence that’s mediated through the question of what constitutes a novel. It is a “story about Texas, but at the same time, a story that deviates from being a story about Texas.”
Written in a vein of conjecture, this is a hybrid narrative, both a memoir and a work of fiction. It’s a monologue crafted from a cascade of intertwined thoughts. A discussion of chili leads to a contemplation of beans which becomes a story about the origins of tofu that transforms into a factoid about Ben Franklin that reverts back to the role of tofu as Korean prison food which finally mutates into a story about Dallas, dogs, Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Kennedy assassination. The book goes on like this ad infinitum with impressive fluidity, with one example giving rise to another like a lucid dream.
Reality is plastic, particularly when it comes to other people, and Moon is fascinated by what people think and how their unknown, unfathomable interiority is expressed in the world. As he traces the cause and effect of such expressions, there’s a suggestion that, in the end, no matter what’s observed, there’s no reality beyond what the interpreter makes of it.
At times an absurdist narrator, at other times stoic, Moon is always in on the philosophical joke. The book does and doesn’t “really have much to say,” and calls itself “a novel that even a passing dog would laugh at.” By embracing this nether space, Moon creates a darkly comic meta-text about the liminality of what we experience and create.