The power of reading – the power of translation
Last night I began reading Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume I, which was shortlisted this year for the International Booker Prize. I’m only 15 pages into the novel, but I already feel as though I’m living in a world and even a time which is not my own. The power of reading, in this case, is enhanced, deepened, and complicated by the power of translation. Obviously I can’t compare Barbara J. Haveland’s English translation to the original Danish, but I feel the power of another world, a world different from mine, as I read.
This morning I learned that Balle’s novel did not win the prize. Instead, the award and recognition go to Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories by Banu Mushtag, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. I look forward to reading those stories, but I’m moved this morning by the author Max Porter’s speech announcing the award. It reminds me of why I read, and it also reminds me that I should be reading both broadly and deeply.
Translated literature is a way of communicating over a border, under a wall, beyond an algorithm’s reach. … Novels are often described as empathy machines and that may well be true but they don’t get us off the hook. They cannot be empathetic for us. … In a world of screaming arguments fiction holds its ambiguous nerve. It is waiting for its bespoke critical partner, its weird accompanist — you. The novel needs a thoughtful collaborator in order to mean anything, and to mean something completely different every time it is read, and re-read, and re-read.
Porter suggests that reading books in translation brings news of the “human elsewhere.” In today’s world — and in my country — in which so many would have us pretend that there is no elsewhere worth taking seriously, I treasure the otherness that engages me when I read almost any book, but especially, today, when I read a book translated from another world, another language, into my own. It’s a gift.
