Dear Sarashina, I must confess that I have read your diary – and I did it twice. In my defense, I guess I could say that it is not exactly a diary, as we nowadays conceive of it; that it is highly imaginative rather than objective; and that it was meant to be a public…
Tag: Books in translation
The secrets inside her mind are like flowers in a garden at nighttime
Dear Fumiko, Your novel Masks, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (女面, Onnamen, 1958) reminded me of an intricate structure one is made to peel off, layer by layer, only to find out later that the layers only made more visible the core that they were to be hiding – they were, after all, the very things…
I don’t know what my limits are anymore
Dear Irmgard, The eponymous heroine of your novel Gilgi (2013, tr. Geoff Wilkes. Original title: Gilgi, eine von uns, 1931) is a twenty-one-year-old German middle-class girl who lives in Cologne, during the rise of fascism, in the 1930s. Gilgi, short for Gisela, is independent, matter-of-fact, and ambitious: she is determined to climb the social ladder and…
but thousands of bells clanged inside me
Dear Clarice, Rereading your stories after so long makes me feel as if I were looking through colour-stained glass: each story comes with the shadow of my previous reading of it. The shadow of how it felt like at the time; the stain of what I had not understood properly then, and do now; or…
Everyone was fleeing and everything was temporary
Dear Anna, Do you know this feeling we have when something terrible happens in a dream and we must scream or run, but we find ourselves suddenly unable to do it? We have no voice, or our legs are suddenly unbearably heavy. This feeling of being trapped: that’s the stuff your novel Transit (tr. Margot…
They didn’t dare before; now they do, that’s all
Dear Anna, I was halfway through Manja (tr. Kate Phillips, 2003. Manja: Ein Roman um 5 Kinder, 1938) this past week, when your book acquired a new poignancy for me. Do you know that eerie feeling, when we overhear a stranger on the bus or out passing by us in the street, and, by accident,…
His writing was so extraordinarily beautiful that her eyes misted over
Dear Murasaki, This is just a quick note to let you know my experience so far with your Tale of Genji. Similar to the form as you yourself may have written the book, I am reading it in installments, chapter by chapter – mostly after work, at night, in between all sorts of modern and…
how irrational, how unpredictable is the attraction between people, how fatal its current
Dear Magda, Your novel The Door (1987, tr. Len Rix) not only begins and ends with a nightmare, but it also reads like one. The recurrent bad dream from which the narrator is suffering is also a long and sometimes desperate confession of guilt – one which also conveys a sharp critique of class differences…
There you go again, narrating through a prism of pain
Dear Tatiana, Your novel The House in Smyrna (tr. Alison Entrekin, 2015; originally published in Portuguese in 2007) was a puzzling read for me. And not a confortable one – which, I may add, I generally take as a good reading experience, like a cup of strong coffee, served without sugar and very hot, and drunk…
wade/ through black jade/of the crow-blue mussel-shells
Dear Adriana, As in your previous books, Crow Blue (2013, tr. Alison Entrekin, originally published in Portuguese in 2010) also depicts a journey, through which the protagonists – unable to move beyond painful events in the past – are led to undertake some kind of personal rite of passage. After losing her mother at the age…
Let us learn about not knowing
Querida Juana, The recent edition of your Selected Works (tr. Edith Grossman) has kept me company this month. As I found myself immersed in your ballads, redondillas, epigrams, décimas, sonnets, and letters, I was greatly surprised by your sharp portray of female resistance, your rebellious defiance against undeserved authority and your fierce defense of gender…
Who can live with a volcano?
Dear Esther, How can one read a volcano? Your semi-autobiographical novel Deborah (Der Shaidim Tantz, 1936, tr. Maurice Carr) can be subtly misleading: behind its veil of domesticity, we can hear your raging voice against the thwarted dreams of intelligent women forced to consign their lives to housework and motherhood. Deborah, the protagonist, is a…
