Burma II

Smile As They Bow, Nu Nu Yi
ပြုံး၍လည်း ကန်တော့ခံတော်မူပါ၊ ရယ်၍လည်း ကန်တော့ခံတော်မူပါ, နုနုရည်

After a spree of buying world books, I'd had this one on my shelf for quite a while. I finally got the perfect opportunity to read it when my Mum mentioned that she would like to revisit Burma forty years after her first visit, just after the military junta took power. I was quite intrigued to experience the country with her in this way, as much of the country has been in a vacuum, unchanged since her visit there in 1970, but in others it has begun changing quickly. It was a fantastic mother–son trip through the temples of Bagan and the decaying colonial splendour of Rangoon. 

Smile As They Bow offers a glimpse into the little-known world of the Burmese nat tradition. Nats are the spirits of semi-historical, semi-mythical people that continue to play an important part of everyday life in the country. Smile As They Bow is set during the weeklong Taungbyon Festival when people from all across the country come to pay their respects to these spirits via natkadaws, transgender spirit mediums.

While the focus is on Daisy Bond, one of the Festival's most famous and flamboyant natkadaws, the narration switches among festival-goers, natkadaws and assistants alike, in a text that teems with detail, delightful vulgarities, colloquialisms, the sacred and the profane. It's and assault on your senses. 

Deftly translated by Alfred Birnbaum (English translator of Haruki Murakami's books) and Thi Thi Aye.

Canada, French

Le désert mauve
Nicole Brossard

As a Canadian, I was naturally curious to see what Ann Morgan chose to read for Canada. My country, naturally, has a few literary bigwigs of it own, along the lines of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Robertson Davies. I don’t know why, but I just assumed she would pick one of them. It certainly never occurred to me that she’d stray from this well-trodden path, and much less that she might read a book by a French-Canadian author in translation. It just wasn’t the done thing.

Consequently, I was more than a bit surprised to see Le désert mauve by Nicole Brossard, and translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood as Mauve Desert, under the Canada entry. Reading Ann Morgan’s post about the book made me doubly intrigued because, as a translator myself, the book deals with the act and meaning of translation.

Le désert mauve is a bit confusing to talk about, actually. It’s one book, but three books. It’s a book and its translation, but both are written in the same language. The first book is about fifteen-year-old Melanie coming of age in the Arizona desert. The second book is about Maude Laures, who finds the first book in a Quebec bookstore and becomes obsessed with it, spending two years analysing its characters, events, and emotions. The third book is Laures’ eventual translation of the first book. (An imagined English-to-French translation, as the book in its entirety is French in the original – and wholly English in Mauve Desert). 

This imagined passage from one language to another was particularly interesting to me. I found myself flipping back and forth between the two books to see how Laures had translated passages that we ambiguous. Had a certain lyrical passage become dulled? Did clarity come into any darker corners? – As a technical translator, I don’t have to philosophise about these issues much, but I do constantly wonder what gets lost and transformed along the way despite my every best intention otherwise. It was fascinating to be able to see the translation process and its results in this way.

Burma

Not Out of Hate, Ma Ma Lay
မုန်း၍မဟူ, မမလေး 

I was killing some time in a bookstore in Bangkok recently while waiting to meet up with some friends. By chance I wandered past a shelf and this art deco Veronica-Lempicka-esque cover caught my eye and I happened to pick it up. I nearly fell over when I read the back cover and discovered the book was by a Burmese author, and was the first book published in English translation from the former hermit kingdom of Burma. A country virtually shut off from the modern world for nearly fifty years, there was as little leaving Burma as there was going in, and the country remained a black hole on many world-readers' lists. 

Although one of the country's very few female authors, Ma Ma Lay is widely acknowledged to be one of Burma's greatest twentieth-century writers. Her stories are known for authentic portrayals of modern Burmese society. Not Out of Hate, originally published in Burmese in 1955, explores the impact of the West on Burmese culture and society, as told through the story of a young, small-town woman who marries a Westernised man. The well-written story was made more poignant when post-reading contemplation led me to see the book as an allegory for the country as a whole.

As a translator myself, I found it quite interesting that Not Out of Hate's translator, Margaret Aung-Thwin, made frequent recourse to the use of footnotes to explain contextual and cultural elements of the book. Footnotes are certainly one possible strategy for translators to use when they encounter a concept that's difficult to translate because it doesn't exist in the other language, or a situation the foreign readers wouldn't understand because they lack the same cultural references. The general view is, however, that they are a distraction that breaks the flow of reading the text, and, as such, are rarely used by most translators. It's interesting to see through the use of footnotes here, the details and nuances that must sometimes be left by the wayside when translating otherwise.

Lebanon

Beirut Blues, Hanan al-Shaykh
حنان الشيخ  بريد بيروت

I really had the most difficult time remembering the title of this book when I was compiling the list of countries I'd already read. I picked up this book by chance off a bookshop shelf when I was at uni, drawn by the look of the cover, with its airmail envelop chevrons and stamps. – I can confirm that it is quite difficult to find a book when all you remember is the cover!

Eventually, with a bit of applied thought, I remembered that the author was a woman, which narrowed down the field of possibilities rather considerably. Hanan al-Shaykh was born into a conservative Muslim family; this would influence her writing considerably which often focuses on the place women in Arab society.

Beirut Blues, translated into English by Catherine Cobham, is written as a series of letters – whence the cover which so captivated me – by a woman struggling to make sense of her life and the world in war-ravaged Beirut. She must choose between staying in Beirut's dangers and frustrations, or emigrating and leaving the country she loves behind.

Chile

La casa de los espíritus
Isabelle Allende

A family saga charting the Trueba family across contemporary Chilean history. Allende is the niece of former president, Salvador Allende, and this closeness to Chile's turbulent political history had a clear impact on the book and its characters. The story follows family patriarch, Esteban, from childhood at the turn of the past century through the turmoil of the country's leftist and rightist clashes and the CIA-backed coup that overthrew her real-life uncle and the president in her novel.

Her family became a target under the Pinochet regime, and Allende eventually was forced into exile for 13 years. One might imagine that this kind of experience would infuse the writing with rancour towards those that had attacked her and her family, but instead the pointlessness of ideological clashes was was of the main themes I took away from the book. 

Available in translation as The House of Spirits, and was adapted for a star-studded film of the same name in 1993 with Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Wynona Ryder, and Antonio Banderas.

Bangladesh

Brick Lane
Monica Ali

In her Year of Reading the World project, Ann Morgan had to lay some groundwork as to what constituted a book "from" a country. Does the author have to be born there? Live there? Does it have to be written about that place? Does it count if it's written about a different place? The answers, it turns out, were rarely straightforward.

A case in point is my archive entry for Bangladesh. Author Monica Ali was born in Bangladesh to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother but then grew up in England from the age of three. Brick Lane begins in Bangladesh and deals with a young woman who moves from a village to enter an arranged marriage in London with and older man. Should this book of culture clash and the immigrant experience then be considered "English" or "Bangladeshi"? Letters to England from the woman's sister in Bangladesh play an important role in the narrative as well, further blurring the line of where the book might be "from".

There isn't, of course, a clear-cut answer to this question, just my own personal choices as I swashbuckle the literary high seas and shifting sands of place as I plot my course to circumnavigate the globe.

Indonesia

Saman
Ayu Utami

My fourth stop on my journey to read the world is Indonesia. I had actually tried to buy an Indonesian author even pre-Read-the-World project, but couldn't find any on the bookstore shelves of Singapore. Given that Indonesia is Singapore's biggest neighbour, I would have though people might be interested reading a thing or two about it, but I guess not.

In contrast to The Sand Fish, Saman is indeed a work of translation from Bahasa Indonesia, with a note from the translator Pamela Allen. As a translator myself, it's always lovely to see translation – usually something invisible and unaccounted for – be given a voice and translators an opportunity to say something. Since most people know little about Indonesia or its history – and the book takes place during a chaotic period of its history – the translator must have had a tough time with it all, but did so with aplomb. The book reads seamlessly, and the translation could not be felt.

Saman caused quite a firestorm when it was first published in Indonesia, touching o­n all the country's taboos: extramarital sex, political repression, and the relationship between Christians and Muslims. It is a shifting story, moving from time, place, and protagonist. The choice of Saman as title made this shifting a bit muddled for me. As the book's title character, the story is sometimes told by Saman, and sometimes by others about Saman; but other times the story told by Saman is about another person, or is told by another person about another person. – Don't get me wrong, I don't mind this kind of storytelling, but Saman as the title led me to think of Saman as the protagonist, when that wasn't really always the case. Otherwise, an interesting glimpse into turbulent slice of Indonesian life.

United Arab Emirates

The Sand Fish
Maha Gargash

An Etihad Airways stopover on a recent flight from Asia to Europe prompted the third destination in my journey to read the world: the United Arab Emirates. Although not available in Singapore, The Sand Fish was widely available at bookstores, tourist shops, and even at some newsagents in the UAE. I picked up my copy as I exited the airport into the dusty haze of Abu Dhabi and made my way to sand dunes of the interior.

As the book was originally written in English, I had the impression that The Sand Fish was intended for outsiders looking in. In the afterword, the author states that this was indeed her intent, but not as I might have suspected, for foreigners reading about Dubai. The discovery of oil brought such monumental and rapid changes the UAE, that the 1950s world described in the book is as foreign to Emiratis today as it is to armchair readers anywhere. 

The Sand Fish proved an interesting reading experience as I found the protagonist rather unlikable. I kept waiting for Noora to save herself from herself in a classic (Western) narrative of self-discovery and emancipation. But, of course, the whole point of reading the world is to get away from the tried-and-tested structures of well-rutted literary paths and be exposed to different ways of being. Looking back on Noora's tale, I recognise that self-discovery and emancipation would have been in short supply for an uneducated woman in 1950s Arabia. Such story simply would not have rung true. With that realisation, the veil dropped – as it were – and The Sand Fish offered an beguiling insight into Noora's life and lifestyle, and why "unlikable" might have actually been "realistic" instead.

Guadeloupe

La migration des cœurs
Maryse Condé

When Ann Morgan started her A Year of Reading the World project, she came up against the tricky question of what to do about reading works in translation. She is able to read in French and German "slowly and with a very big dictionary" and felt that surely it would be better to read something in its original language. Yet she had quite the inner struggle about the actual importance of translation to her project and the unfortunately disadvantaged position of non-English writers who must both face the juggernaut of the English language's massive literary output and the disinterest of English publishers in publishing translations. 

In the end, she embraced translation, and you can read all about her process of making the decision here. As a translator myself, I certainly understand the importance of promoting work in other languages and ensuring that people are able to express themselves naturally and to the best of their abilities in their native language. I too am going embrace translation as I read the world, but I'm not going to shy away from reading books in French and Spanish when I can. It will open up more options to me, especially from further-flung places like Mauritania or Paraguay, and will help me keep up my skills in those languages.

I read Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé's book La migration des cœurs in high school and, to be honest, I don't really remember much about it. I did discover that it is now available in English translation under the title Windward Heights, an allusion to Condé's reinterpretation of Wuthering Heights in the colonial Caribbean. One thing I do remember is that the dialogue was often written in French Creole – a most disconcerting fact to high-school-French-reading me. It would be quite interesting to see how the translator approached this sticky wicket and whether he or she used analogous English West Indian Creole.

Mexico

La ley del Amor
Laura Esquivel

Softmore work from Mexican author, Laura Esquivel, which followed on the heels of Like Water for Chocolate, a wonderful book made into an equally wonderful film, which is the highest-grossing Spanish-language film of all time in the United States. Big shoes to fill indeed.

The Law of Love is quite an interesting concept for a book, a multimedia effort incorporating music and artwork, with a CD and illustrations. I felt, however, the multimedia aspect was more of a novel aside than a really integral part of the book. This story of New Age-sci-fi-magical realism and spirituality, stretching from the twenty-third century back to Montezuma's Mexico, fell a bit flat for me. The narrative was a bit forced at times and the characters hard to relate to. 

Perhaps when you start off so high, like Esquivel did with Like Water for Chocolate, it's difficult to go anywhere but down. Her latest book, Malinche, about has gotten some good press however. It's about conquistador Hernan Cortes' native Mexican interpreter and mistress, a real historical figure who is both scorned as a traitor and revered as the mother of the raza cósmica in contemporary Mexico. I'm interested in reading more about this engimatic contradiction, so Malinche might figure in the list of next Mexican book to read.

Canada, English

The Year of the Flood
Margaret Atwood

With Viet Nam and Cambodia, the first two countries I read specifically for my Read the World project, now out of the way, I'm going to take a bit of time to go through my back catalogue. I'll list the the countries I've already read, revisiting the title I've most recently read from there.

As a Canadian, it's only fitting I start with Canada, and I doubt one could get more Canadian than Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood book doesn't have anything to do with Canada necessarily, but rather a dystopian near-future city that is not explicitly identified. This second book in her MaddAddam Trilogy describes the same events as the first, Oryx and Crake, but from two at-times parallel, at-times intersecting, points of view of the female protagonists in the lower-class "pleeblands" of this future gone awry.

I'm generally a big fan of dystopian and alternate future stuff, so I enjoyed this read very much. Am certainly looking forward to the last book in the series to see how it all pans out. For being a sober reminder of a world that really isn't that far off, I loved that there were so many puns and so much humour throughout. Dark satire at its best.

Cambodia

In the Shadow of the Banyan
Vaddey Ratner

After spending a few days in Viet Nam, where I was able to purchase Dumb Luck by Vietnamese author Vũ Trọng Phụng, the second stop on my Read the World project was Cambodia. Like with Viet Nam, I was counting on local bookstores to step up to the plate when my bookstore back home fell flat.

Almost completely by chance I came across Monument Books while walking the streets of Phnom Penh. It is a wonderfully comprehensive bookstore covering the whole of Cambodia's history from Angkorean temples through Khmer Rouge hardship right up to the present day, while not skipping over specialty topics such as French colonial map-making and movie star biographies. While the shelves had a wealth of fiction written about Cambodia by foreign authors, Cambodian writers seemed focused on harrowing memoirs about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge period, with titles such as First They Killed My Father or To the End of Hell. 

Undoubtedly, now that Cambodians have the time, space, and possibility to reflect on that truly traumatic period, much needs to be said and purged, as we the case following the Great Leap Forward in China. Like Ann Morgan, I had to now decide what I would count as a "story". (Read about her choices here). Were memoirs "in"? What about plays? Poetry? Journalism?

Some books don't fit in any box, while others, such as In the Shadow of the Banyan, might straddle several. While clearly proclaiming on the title page to be "A Novel", the story is a semi-fictionalised account of the author's own personal experiences living through the Khmer Rouge. – Suits my purposed well enough.

While I'll aim to focus on prose fiction for this project, I recognise that its not native to every culture, nor necessarily accessible to foreign readers. I will need to bend the rules here and there.

Senegal

Une si longue lettre
Mariama Bâ

Another book I happened to pull off the living room bookshelf to occupy my long commutes to school while living in Paris . Une si longue lettre is written as a letter from one woman, recently widowed, to her friend now living in the United States. The women both married men who became successful and took second wives. Much of the novel centres on the different paths each woman takes in reaction to the betrayal of their husband.

The novel illustrates the challenges women faced in post-colonial Africa as it rapidly modernises. Both the protagonist letter-writer and her friend represent women of the “New Africa”, having been highly educated, yet must contend with traditional, African, and Islamic views about the roles of wives and women, views espoused by their husbands and parents, but also by the women around them. An interesting read about the importance of women's development and of unity between men and women. 

Available in English translation under the title So Long a Letter as translated by Modupé Bodé-Thomas.