by Isaac Babel ; translated by Val Vinokur ; edited by Val Vinokur ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2017
Readers familiar with Babel won't find anything radically different here, but Vinokur's new translation reminds us that when...
Does the world need another translation of Isaac Babel?
The Russian short story writer, executed in 1940 during one of Stalin’s purges, is correctly regarded as one of the masters of the form, but English versions of his writing are not hard to find. As translator and editor Vinokur points out in his introduction to this new collection, Babel’s Red Cavalry was available in the United States as early as 1929, in a translation by Nadia Helstein—which, in turn, formed the basis of perhaps the best-known English-language edition of his fiction: Walter Morison’s Collected Stories, published in 1955. Nearly half a century later, Peter Constantine updated and expanded on Morison’s efforts in The Complete Works, edited by Nathalie Babel Brown, one of Babel’s daughters. And yet, as Vinokur also argues, to read all these translations in isolation is to miss the point. “Translations, according to one school of thought,” he writes, “are supposed to be mortal, because immortal originals deserve frequent and thus provisional retranslations.” Language, in other words, is living, which makes translation, first and foremost, not only a matter of engagement, but also an act of animation. Vinokur illustrates this by his selections and his renderings. Gathering 73 of Babel’s stories, his book essentially mirrors Morison’s with some exceptions, making the lineage explicit in content and design. As for the work itself, it’s deft and pointed: funny, dark, and often caustic, unsentimental at the core. In “Shabbos Nahamu,” a poor Jew tricks first a wife and then her innkeeper husband to provide for his own family. The narrator of “Guy de Maupassant”—one of Babel’s best-known stories—regards language as seduction: “A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time,” he tells us. “The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You must turn it once, but not twice.” And yet, as ever in Babel's writing, fable yields to something sharper, the indifference or unattainability of everything. “From his window,” Babel closes “Dante Street,” one of his later stories, “he could see the Conciergerie, the bridges cast lightly across the Seine, an assortment of blind hovels pressed close against the river, the same breath wafting up to him. Rusted rafters and tavern signed, creaking in the wind.”
Readers familiar with Babel won't find anything radically different here, but Vinokur's new translation reminds us that when it comes to Babel, too much is never enough.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3595-6
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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by Isaac Babel ; translated by Boris Dralyuk
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by Isaac Babel & edited by Nathalie Babel & translated by Peter Constantine
by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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by Tim O’Brien
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by Tim O’Brien
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by Tim O’Brien
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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