Sunday 26 April 2009

Astrotruckers

I've just finished reading Astrotruckers - a collection of short stories by Mikael Niemi.

The stories all involve some kind of philosophical or pseudo-scientific exploration against a general, entertainingly inconsistent, background of the future exploration of space. In tone they are wry and detached, and the language is often quite carefully spare and distancing. I enjoyed them a lot. As I was reading them, they reminded me of nothing so much as Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, and Invisible Cities - so as you can see I was beginning to think quite highly of this new book.

And then I started to wonder.

How similar are they really? Astrotruckers is "translated from the original Finnish by Laurie Thompson" and I can only read Calvino in translation also. Isn't it possible that what I read as a rather distanced style - which they do seem to have in common - is just an effect of the translation? Although there are similarities in content and approach, the strongest connection does come from the use of language, and it may not be there in the original.
This is an area I feel singularly unfitted to write about - however this is a blog, and writing about things for which one is singularly unfitted is what blogs are all about, so here we go.
I don't have fantastic language skills. The closest I can get to reading a foreign-language work comfortably in both the original and in contemporary English is medieval English - say as hard as the Gawain-poet. Chaucer is straightforward. So if for the moment we treat Fourteenth-century English as a foreign language (debatable), how do the translations of the works I know well stack up?
Mostly, I have to say, poorly. It is rare to find a translation with the same degree of bite and engagement as the originals. Mostly they seem bland, a little unreadable. You wonder why there was that much fuss about the original. So - from a casual, limited and unsystematic observation - the act of translation can result in the idiosyncrasies of the original becoming a little blurred. For a piece of fiction that I don't know, which is at least in part philosophical in content, might this come across as a sardonic detachment? Possibly.
But perhaps I'm comparing my experience of poetry in translation with translations of narrative - unfair, perhaps if poetry is about an explicit heightening of language. Arguably that has some truth, however Chaucer in particular is a poet with a strong focus on narrative. There was then no real alternative form for original story-telling; novels and short stories are a later invention in English. So I would submit that the comparison may still hold.
So. Inconclusive, perhaps. I should also note that a review at totally Sci-Fi is much less struck than I am with Astrotruckers, seeing it as essentially derivative of Hitchhiker and Space Truckers, amongst others- although a posting at "Oxford College distance learning" is more enthusiastic. Finally, therefore, a last question: because of the perceived and possibly false stylistic similarity to Calvino, am I seeing the collection as more impressive than I might otherwise?
(Astrotruckers, first published in Finnish in 2004, English translation, 2007)
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2 comments:

ken said...

"I started to write - equally grumpily - that he had rather missed the point of poetry (which, particularly for the poets of the last Century or so, was often arguably about challenging the status quo, and provoking a reaction"

Well it sort of changes over time doesn't it?

Poets used to be posh. Most of the 16th & early 17th century poetry that we remember these days (apart from that committed by jobbing playwrights) is about aristos talking to each other. Spenser, Sidney, de Vere, Greville, Donne, Herbert, Vaughn, Crashaw, all those bloody endless cavaliers, posh geezers the lot of them. (Some of them were poor, they still had class) OK, Milton made it from the scrivener's desk to the King's Court on the strength of his Italian verse, which is going some, for a fanatical Republican. And then he wrote himself out of the next King's prison with his English verse. (Didn't work for Raleigh!) OK, Milton's lot were pretty well-off really. Just not aristos. Marvell had some family connections in that line I think though he was more your sort of upper-middle-class merchant type, who hob-nobbed with the rich and famous. Apparently when Milton walked behind Oliver Cromwell's coffin at his funeral, in his official capacity as Latin Secretary, he was supported by his own three secretaries - Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and another poet whose name everyone now forgets, (including me). And Dryden somehow managed to be a government official in the Commonwealth at the same time as being a Roman Catholic. Great training for a Laureate!

But 18th century poetry is lower-middle-class. (For a slightly anticipatory meaning of "18th century" that actually runs from about the full stop on the end of "Paradise Lost" to more or less the 1770s when Burn's drinking bouts, Chatterton's harder drugs, and Blake's natural high greeted the glorious dawn of the Romantic era. Or in Chatterton's case, didn't, as he fell out of his pram just in time to miss it all.) From the Restoration to the American War you get jumped up clerks who want to be treated like aristocrats and resent it when they aren't - they want to join the party. And if they can't join it they stand on the sidelines and make snarly remarks under their breath and throw glace cherries at their masters and betters when they aren't looking. In those days even good poets made bad Poet Laureates because they were so cravenly fawning and pompously artificial (a word they would have used approvingly of course). Grub Street rules, and Grub Street hacks were craftsmen in pretty much exactly the same sense as their modern software-writing namesakes. Poetry was a skilled trade, intended to earn you money for less effort than working.

That's one reason 18th century poetry has been profoundly out of fashion for a long time. Both the Victorians and the Modernists looked down on people like that. (There are other reasons - its reputation is as longwinded, Latinate, pedantic, over-formal, pettily political, and concerned with surface appearances rather than deep feelings. And as being too damn long. All of this is partly true of course - as Pope loved to point out :)) It first went out of fashion in the Gothic & Romantic periods (what young lady of sensitive disposition could be doing with Dryden or Addison when thy could have faded violets, the laudanum bottle, and a signed engraving of Lord Byron?)

22 May 2009 at 18:35
ken said...

The Gothic and Romantic turns things on their head again. You get a few genuine working-class blokes (almost always men) who attract attention partly because they are supposedly triumphing over their background. Dogs on their hind legs. Burns (who was astonishingly famous in his lifetime) Blake (who wasn't) Keats (who sort of was) and others. And you get some seriously posh types like Byron and Shelley taking over and leading the revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey weren't either aristocrats or artisans. But they certainly didn't write as if they thought being an aristocrat was better than being an artisan. And Wordsworth (and to a lesser extent Tennyson later) got yelled at very loudly for accepting their gongs.

In the early 19th century (and most of the 20th) the Done Thing was for poets was to stand outside the Establishment and shout at it. Poets ought not to be the acknowledged legislators of the world (though there have been a few & the UK must be one of the very few countries there have ever been in the entire world that has sent actors unelected to Parliament just for being actors)

18th century poetry came back in a little in the late 19th century, just about held on into the early twentieth, then got utterly blown away by modernism. The mid-twentieth century rediscovered the 16th and 17th and fashion fell in love with the "metaphysicals" who were a sort of bridge between Shakespeare and TS Eliot, passing right over the 18th & most of the 19th century with a nod to Blake and Shelley (but not Wordsworth or Chatterton) on the way. The Victorians were right out. They were supposed to be boring and sentimental and in thrall to fossilised poetic forms. For the last 20 years or so that has been being rectified and you can like Tennyson again. So maybe it is time to rediscover the 18th century.

NB We except Gray's "Elegy" from the 18th century because it is a 19th-century poem before its time. Actually maybe it isn't - it is very "reasonable" it argues its point. Lots 19th century poetry isn't reasonable at all. Some of it is one long scream, even when it looks sensible and measured, like "Dover Beach" or "In Memoriam" both of which basically say "OH FUCK!!!!!!!!" at great and poetic length. As do some much later poems like "City of Dreadful Night" (great, under-rated, so harsh I can hardly bear to re-read it) or "Ballad of Reading Gaol" (ditto, except not so under-rated) Nobody wrote like that for most of the 18th century. Not until the opium addicts took over.

22 May 2009 at 18:35

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