Speaking in Tongues: Novels in Translation From Around the World
By Carlos Rojas
A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2022, Page 22 of the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times.
March 8, 2022
THE OLD WOMAN WITH THE KNIFE
By Gu Byeong-mo
Translated by Chi-Young Kim
280 pp. Hanover Square. $19.99.
The original Korean title of Gu’s “The Old Woman With the Knife” — her third book, and her first to be translated into English — is “Pagwa,” which means “bruised fruit,” and it’s arguably an even better description of the protagonist, Hornclaw, than the English title. An assassin for hire (or “disease control specialist,” as the novel euphemistically puts it), Hornclaw killed her first victim at the age of 15, in self-defense, by stabbing him in the mouth with a hooked skewer. She is now 65, and the sort of older woman known affectionately in Korean as an ajumma. The novel opens on the subway, where, as a “model senior citizen, wholesome and refined,” Hornclaw “skates under the radar, sitting with her head bowed, reading the enlarged words” of her pocket-size Bible. But when her mark, a man in his 50s, gets off the train, she strikes with lethal efficiency, stealthily stabbing him in the back with a poisoned dagger. The target dies instantly, “his frozen, open pupils in his bluish face … like tunnels filled with deep, compacted darkness containing the end of the world.”
After half a century in this dangerous and physically taxing occupation, Hornclaw is beginning to feel her age (like, say, a bruised fruit) and is contemplating retirement. She lives alone with her aging rescue dog, Deadweight, whom she occasionally forgets to feed. But she makes a point of never missing her annual physical (with a doctor who knows not to ask questions about her numerous work-related injuries), on the logic that “the moment you accept your changing, sagging body, you’ll fail at your next job or, if you’re lucky, the one after that, and failure in this line of work often results in the disease control specialist’s death.”
However, an unfortunate series of mishaps draws her inexorably back into the action, yielding a brisk narrative that offers a thoughtful reflection on societal attitudes on the aging process in Korea and elsewhere. In Kim’s fluid translation, the novel resembles recent South Korean narratives that became popular in the United States, like Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 film “Parasite” and Hwang Dong-hyuk’s 2021 television series “Squid Game”; like these works, “The Old Woman With the Knife” uses occasionally cartoonish action and horror sequences to offer a broader social commentary.
STRANGERS I KNOW
By Claudia Durastanti
Translated by Elizabeth Harris
294 pp. Riverhead. $27.
Like Durastanti herself, her protagonist, also named Claudia, is a CODA — a child of deaf adults. Although her painter mother and inveterate gambler father divorced when Claudia was young, they remain very present in her and her brother’s lives. Communication within the family is a constant challenge, however, and not only because her childhood is split between Brooklyn and southern Italy. Claudia’s parents never teach her sign language, and are often disinclined to use it at all — they don’t want to be perceived as disabled. As a result, Claudia becomes highly attuned to the sorts of miscues, gaps and silences that arise in all human relationships.
But, also like Durastanti — who has translated Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” as well as “The Great Gatsby” into Italian — Claudia is fascinated by words generally, their etymologies and evocations. She traces the roots of her favorite word in English, marshes, to the Old English mor and the Proto-Indo-European mer, “meaning ‘to hurt,’ ‘to die’ or even ‘sea.’” She then amusingly adds that “mor also reminds me of Mordor, the dark, evil wasteland in ‘The Lord of the Rings,’” and then connects her memory of reading Tolkien in high school to her impression of London, where she lives as an adult: “Those living in the city always feel the influence of a dark, distant tower, an unease carried in the air.”
“Strangers I Know” is Durastanti’s fourth novel, and her second to be translated into English. In all her work, the author draws on her autobiography: She has said she calls the book “a novel from life, because I was aware that if I went to a publisher and presented my parents’ story as fiction, they would say it’s highly unrealistic.”
And though the novel was written in Italian, portions of Harris’s lively translation read as though this were the original, containing references to English books, movies and songs, as well as detailed discussions of the language itself. Claudia notes that her grandmother, who “didn’t understand Italian very well anymore” after having lived in New York for years, “spoke in a dialect that was deliberately strange: She said ‘Bruklì’ instead of Brooklyn, ‘aranò’ rather than I don’t know.” She knows how to pronounce these words, the narrator says, but their distortions are “her means of staking out a personality.”
PYRE
By Perumal Murugan
Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan
202 pp. Black Cat. Paper, $17.
Murugan’s “Pyre” is haunted by its title (“Pookuzhi,” in Tamil) — a word that appears nowhere in the novel, but contributes to the growing sense of dread and desperation that shadows it. The narrative begins in an unassuming manner, with the newlyweds Kumaresan and Saroja getting off a bus in the groom’s home village for the first time. They are arriving from the town of Tholur, where they met, and where Kumaresan works at a soda bottling shop; and he now instructs Saroja to speak as little as possible when interacting with his family and neighbors. It quickly becomes clear that Kumaresan fears his village will reject Saroja if they learn that she belongs to a different caste, and he has yet to come up with a way of allaying their suspicions. As these suspicions mount, the walls begin to close in on the young couple, still working to build intimacy with each other.
A professor of Tamil literature in southern India, Murugan is a prolific author of nonfiction, story collections and novels, including the 2010 novel “One Part Woman,” which sparked protests from fundamentalists in India who felt the plotline (a couple struggling with infertility) brought dishonor upon Hindu women. (The protests led Murugan to declare his own death on Facebook in 2015.)
This very readable English version by Vasudevan, the American anthropologist and writer who also translated “One Part Woman” in 2018, includes a sprinkling of transliterated terms, some (samba, a small-grained rice; and dey!, an informal way of addressing a man) defined in a short glossary at the end. In addition to drawing the reader into Murugan’s Tamil-language environment, Vasudevan also signals the subtle differences in dialect, distinguishing Saroja’s speech from Kumaresan’s. The translation succeeds in reminding the reader of the work’s non-Western, multilingual setting, without compromising the fluency of the narrative.
Carlos Rojas is a translator and professor of Chinese literature at Duke University.
A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2022, Page 22 of the Sunday Book Review