Our Next Author: Pramoedya Ananta Toer and "This Earth of Mankind"

“This narrow path has been trod many a time already, it’s only that this time the journey is one to mark the way.” P.A.T.

So I have not been deterred after the slight Russian setback. I am plunging right into our next author: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who is not only known for his novels but also for being an Indonesian political prisoner who orally recited this book and the following three installments of the Buru Quarter to his fellow cellmates (those political prisoners know how to be productive in jail). I'm also starting to sense a trend in my choice of literature, notably a gravitation towards authors/main characters who fit the "men-who-are-unfairly-jailed-and-write-in-prison" profile.  These men are taking over my "favorites" list (take a peek if you care to under my profile), but I think I'm okay with that....

Regardless, here's a little background on the main character of the series, Minke: He is based in part on an Indonesian journalist active in the nationalist movement, Tirto Adhi Surjo, and the tensions and contradictions that arise when the power of the colonial state meets capitalism and technology are quite present. Toer himself was born on the island of Java in 1925, imprisoned by the Dutch from 1947-1949 for having participated in the Indonesian revolution, and then became a political prisoner of the Indonesian government. He created and recited the Buru Quartet to prisoners during his imprisonment on Buru Island from 1969-1970. He remained under house arrest from 1979-1992 in Jakarta while continuing to criticize the Indonesian government.... that's 13 years folks.

Unfortunately Toer died in 2006. I believe his books are still banned and selling them a punishable crime in Indonesia- hard to believe, considering we are almost in the second decade of the 21st century. Regardless, his novels have been translated into twenty languages, and he received the PEN Freedom-to-write Award in 1988 and numerous other prestigious literature awards during his lifetime.

The Power of Translation

Here's an excerpt from a NY Times Article from today that shows the power that even new translations of older texts has.........

Dispatches From the Other
By FRANCINE du PLESSIX GRAY
May 20, 2010

In 1946, when Simone de Beauvoir began to write her landmark study of women, “The Second Sex,” legislation allowing French women to vote was little more than a year old. Birth control would be legally denied them until 1967. Next door, in Switzerland, women would not be enfranchised until 1971. Such repressive circumstances account for both the fierce, often wrathful urgency of Beauvoir’s book and the vehement controversies this founding text of feminism aroused when it was first published in France in 1949 and in the United States in 1953. The Vatican placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books. Albert Camus complained that Beauvoir made Frenchmen look ridiculous. On these shores, the novelist Philip Wylie eulogized it as “one of the few great books of our era,” the psychiatrist Karl Menninger found it “pretentious” and “tiresome,” and a reviewer in The Atlantic Monthly faulted it for being “bespattered with the repulsive lingo of existentialism.”

THE SECOND SEX
By Simone de Beauvoir
Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier
800 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40
Related

In her splendid introduction to this new edition, Judith Thurman notes that Blanche Knopf, wife of Beauvoir’s American publisher, heard about the book on a scouting trip to France and was under the impression that it was a highbrow sex manual. Knopf asked for a reader’s report from a retired zoologist, Howard M. Parshley, who was then commissioned to do the translation. Knopf’s husband urged Parshley to condense it significantly, noting that Beauvoir seemed to suffer from “verbal diarrhea.” Parshley complied, providing the necessary Imodium by cutting 15 percent of the original 972 pages. And so it was this truncated text, translated by a scientist with a college undergraduate’s knowledge of French, that ushered two generations of women into the universe of feminist thought, inspiring pivotal later books like Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique” and Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics.”

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier’s new translation of “The Second Sex” is the first English-language edition in almost 60 years, and the first to restore the material Parshley excised. In this passionate, awesomely erudite work, Beauvoir examines the reasons women have been forced to accept a place in society secondary to that of men, despite the fact that women constitute half the human race. Supporting her arguments with data from biology, physiology, ethnology, anthropology, mythology, folklore, philosophy and economics, she documents the status of women throughout history, from the age of hunter-gatherers to the mid-20th century. In one of her most interesting chapters, “The Married Woman” (a chapter Parshley particularly savaged), she offers numerous quotations from the novels and diaries of Virginia Woolf, Colette, Edith Wharton, Sophia Tolstoy and others. She also scrutinizes the manner in which various male authors, from Montaigne to Stendhal to D. H. Lawrence, have represented women (and, in many cases, how they treated their wives). Urging women to persevere in their efforts at emancipation, she emphasizes that they must also do so for the sake of men: “It is when the slavery of half of humanity is abolished and with it the whole hypocritical system it implies that the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its authentic meaning and the human couple will discover its true form.”

How does Beauvoir’s book stand up more than a half-century later? And how does this new translation compare with the previous one? I’m sorry to report that “The Second Sex,” which I read with euphoric enthusiasm in my post-college years, now strikes me as being in many ways dated. Written in an era in which a minority of women were employed, its arguments for female participation in the work force seem particularly outmoded. And Beauvoir’s truly paranoid hostility toward the institutions of marriage and motherhood — another characteristic of early feminism — is so extreme as to be occasionally hilarious. Every aspect of the female reproductive system, from puberty to menopause, is approached with the same ferocious disdain. Females of all living species are “first violated . . . then alienated” by the process of fertilization. Derogatory phrases like “the servitude of maternity,” “woman’s absurd fertility,” the “exhausting servitude” of breast-feeding, abound. (How could they not, since the author sees heterosexual love in general as “a mortal danger?”) According to Beauvoir, a girl’s first menstruation, which many of us welcomed with excitement and pride, is met instead with “disgust and fear. ” It “ inspires horror” and “signifies illness, suffering and death.” Beauvoir doesn’t appear to have spent much time with children or teenagers: a first menses, in her view, leads the girl to be “disgusted by her too-carnal body, by menstrual blood, by adults’ sexual practices, by the male she is destined for.”

Slight Sense of Defeat

Alright, so I have a confession to make. I’m exactly 30 pages into Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Medea and Her Children, and I absolutely cannot go on. I went in with a lot of hope and quite the open mind (considering this is the very first book that I’m reading for this blog!), but alas, to no avail. Although I knew going in that the novel followed a large Russian family in the Crimea-(definitely took away a geography lesson there- didn’t know that there is some major Greek influence in this coastal region of Russia)-I didn’t expect it to read like a historical fiction novel gone terribly wrong in the third person and trying to follow an entire family tree. I’m sorry, but the third person does not allow for any emotion whatsoever, and the premise of the story is that “the languor of love will permeate the Crimean air, hearts will be broken, and old memories will float to consciousness….” Yeah. Not happening for this reader. Although there is the occasional line of dry humor from Ulitskaya- “Well, how would he be? Half the time he’s drunk and the rest he’s ill. He really knows how to live”- overall the tone of the novel is just so flat-lined. Now, I’ve done Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment, etc. and enjoyed them both, but there at least Tolstoy and Dostoevsky really worked on character development (sorry, I’m a huge fan) amidst penetrating some rather daunting themes and aspects of the human condition.

However, I don’t want to scare you away from Ms. Ulitskaya’s work. She is a critically acclaimed novelist and has won numerous awards, and her work has been published worldwide. This was only her second novel to be published in the U.S. If you’re still tempted to read her, try The Funeral Party or Sincerely Yours, Shurik.

Another look at Voices' mission

Before I start diving right into the book list that I created a couple weeks ago, I decided to check out a world literature anthology published by Words Without Borders, who I talked about in my very first post and from whom I got the alarming 6% statistic. I am really excited about this anthology, aptly entitled Words Without Borders: The World Through The Eyes of Writers, because it is going to give me more ideas of fantastic world authors to introduce to you all here in this blog.

However, I wanted to take a moment to recap why I am undertaking this project. In the Introduction of this anthology, Andre Dubus III (author of the novel House of Sand and Fog) writes that

"... Whether we know it or not, these are the notes in the world symphony in which we all play a part. The writers and translators have done their work here. It is up to us now to listen to the expression of our fellow human beings with whom we share this planet. This is our duty, yes, but it is also a deeply moving pleasure, one that will also allow us, ultimately, to become more gracefully and truly ourselves."

Foreign Literature in the Digital Age: Part Two

I’m a little on the fence about Google Editions, Google’s venture into the marketplace of bookselling and distribution, ready to play with the other kids on the block this June or July. On the one hand, it is has humongous potential to fundamentally change the way we search for, shop for and buy books online: all book retailers, even independent shops, will be able to sell Google Editions on their own website. Customers also have the choice of buying the electronic or hard copy of the book, which shows Google's nod to the fact that we do live in a digital world where 1.8 billion people are connected to the internet. The implications of Google Editions are also pretty huge for this blog, in that you, as an online consumer, will have a new level of access to literature. Apparently the number of publishers and authors on board is over 25,000, and the number of books set to be available is around two million (not to mention all those in the public domain: see below).

Of course, this is where I stop and ask how many of those authors and publishers are foreign, and what Google Edition’s plans are in terms of opening up access to world, and not just American, literature. Google also faces rather daunting competition from three companies you may have heard of: Amazon (with their Kindle), Apple (let’s not forget the iPad), and finally Barnes and Noble. I mean, take a look to the left of this post, and you’ll see an Amazon search box that I put there to make it easier for readers of this blog to purchase the books that we will be reading. It seems late in the game for Google Editions to make a real impact on the digital book market, but I certainly hope that their competition will try to remain just that-competitive- in opening up the world of literature to their consumers.

Foreign Literature in the Digital Age: Part One

Although Google Books has recently been slapped with a hefty $125 million fine during a civil suit for having scanned snippets of thousands of copyrighted texts into its database without permission, its concept is causing tension especially amidst the European author and publishing community. The settlement doesn’t currently apply to Europe, but European publishers such as those affiliated with the U.K. Publishers’ Association and the European Booksellers Federation have been working on agreements with Google Books. The settlement could potentially have huge implications for the significant number of foreign authors and publishers that own U.S. copyrights and would therefore be subject to it, but could also be the source of further complications because of a lack of knowledge of U.S. copyright and class-action law (class-action law doesn’t even exist in Europe). The talks also involve including a non-U.S. representative on the board of the Book Rights Registry (yay!) as well as clearing up the definition of “commercially available” books from outside the U.S. This last part seems particularly troubling to me. In October of 2009, Google Books said that they had digitized over ten million books, but we haven’t yet decided what is “commercially available,” nor do we have a grasp on what is and is not in the American and European public domains?

Not to mention that more European uneasiness is coming to the surface about Google Books because of European hearings set to start in September of this year. The concept of the (American) digitization of books still poses some problems for Europeans. In 2005, French National Librarian Jean-Noel Jeanneney wrote a Le Monde editorial warning Europeans that Google Books presented “a risk of crushing domination by America in defining the idea that future generations have of the world.” Yikes. Many EU officials and European library associates don’t believe that Google needs to be involved in the digitization of European texts, but European copyright laws are in need of a modern face-lift to facilitate book searching. In the Publisher’s Weekly article that I based this post off of, one British publisher noted that 90% of books in Europe’s national libraries are either out of print or are orphan works. I’m sorry, what? 90%? You must be joking. Although I’m definitely not advocating Google Books as being the premier source of American knowledge of European texts, I think it can definitely offer some global solutions for making sure that foreign texts are not lost in the translation of moving from the print age to the digital age, as well as guaranteeing that foreign authors see some $$ in the piggy bank for their works. In the meantime though, there is going to have to be some serious dialogue and negotiations between American and European digitation initiatives so that we focus on the goal in mind and don’t get caught up in settlement agreements.

Movie Adaptations of Foreign Literature

I was just informed that Girl With a Dragon Tattoo is now a movie.... apparently I live in a box. I am excited to hear that it was in fact produced in Sweden, and not adapted by Americans. It has been receiving quite good reviews by all the biggie newspapers.... Washington Post, Boston Globe and Herald, NY Times, L.A. Times.

Movie adaptations of foreign literature can only help our cause here! It is interesting that the average American is much more likely to pay the exorbitant movie ticket prices these days rather than pick up a good read (this being social commentary with absolutely no basis other than my own observations, but it seems plausible enough).