On ‘Il Polaco’ once more – Martin Beagles in TLS:

‘Like his two previous books, J. M. Coetzee’s latest work of fiction, El polaco (The Pole), has been published in Spanish first. The English edition won’t appear until 2023, first in Australia, where Coetzee lives, then in the United States and United Kingdom. This policy, which has so far attracted remarkably little comment in the Anglosphere, has been described by the author as a way of taking a stand for the neglected southern hemisphere against the “cultural gatekeepers” of the imperious north. The Nobel prize-winner’s unusual decision might be seen as irrelevant to an understanding of his work, but its conceptual repercussions and Beckettian echoes become harder to ignore with the appearance of El polaco.
Apart from the final seven pages, the new novella is laid out in short, numbered sections, many of them just a few lines long. Its six chapters run to 112 pages; the prose is economical and direct, a style that will be instantly recognizable to readers of early-to mid-period Coetzee, and there’s none of the allegorical opacity of the author’s more recent work. According to the blurb this is a modern reworking of the Dante–Beatrice love story seen through the woman’s eyes. It is certainly full of references to Dante – but the plot is more likely to remind readers of The Bridges of Madison County.’

(…)

‘The appearance of El polaco does, however, raise interesting formal questions. It is impossible not to notice, for instance, that much of the action connects with the publication history of the book itself: this is a translated version of a novella that hinges on cross-linguistic manoeuvres and the performance of multiple acts of translation and interpreting. To give three examples: Beatriz and Witold conduct their relationship via a language (English) in which neither has native proficiency, meeting on a terrain where both forego linguistic mastery in order to make the relationship easier; Witold’s innovative but unpopular interpretations of Chopin are discussed throughout; and the denouement relies on the willingness of a translator of legal documents to produce an intelligible Spanish version of the poem sequence, which is in turn interpreted by Beatriz.’

(…)

‘By handing over the text and authorial pre-eminence to his Argentine translator, Mariana Dimópulos, he has relinquished the primacy of his own work in a way that mirrors his characters’ actions in a novella in which love and desire are depicted as doomed yearnings to be translated and interpreted. In light of this, the flaws of Dimópulos’s Spanish version perhaps become less significant or censurable. (Beatriz is Catalan, but her speech and thoughts are suffused with Argentine expressions; the text often renders English terms too literally.) The story of El polaco is driven by failures in translation, and readers could choose to see Dimópulos’s shortcomings as more, deliberate evidence of that fallibility.’

Read the review here.

Mr. Beagles is slightly less enthusiastic than Colin Marshall in The New Yorker. Fair enough, the reference to ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ might even be funny.

The question whether the translation can be regarded as the original is an important question for any author that has been translated or for any translator.

The cliché has it that an author doesn’t need a home, literature, language is his home. But maybe there are authors who don’t feel at home in language either.

Estranged from most things, not in the last place language and still an author.