Multiples: An Anthology of Stories in an Assortment of Languages and Literary Styles by Adam Thirlwell (review)

This amazing experiment would never have gotten funding from a research council, and its result is maybe not quite as astounding as CERN’s, but thank goodness there still are writers and thinkers with time on their hands to play such crazy and enlightening games. Eleven short stories translated into English from Danish, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Arabic, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Italian, and Hungarian, as well as one originally written in English, are here retranslated from English into a variety of languages—including the above, with the addition of Swedish, Hebrew, Chinese, Icelandic, Urdu, and Portuguese, then back-translated into English from one of these translations, and then taken around another language loop, and then again. The sixty-one participants in this game of global Chinese whispers are not for the most part professional translators. Some of them are writers with outstanding language skills (Kehlmann, Noteboom, Valtat, Binet, Marías…), but others barely understand the text in front of them. There cannot be many people on this planet with the ability to read the whole book, and I am not one of them (nor is Thirlwell himself). But if all you have is English, then you have around forty versions of twelve tales, only one of which (by Richard Middleton) is an authentic original, but some of which are quite wonderful despite or because of their differences from other versions in the same sequence. The misprisions, mistakes, omissions, elaborations, transpositions, and decorations make these texts not at all representative of what literary translators now do or would admit to be doing even under enhanced interrogation techniques, but they remind us what it is that Roman writers did to Greek poets and what English writers of the eighteenth century did to French novels. The question Thirlwell sets in his charming preface is this: what is literature, such that it survives such a rough and ready merry-go-round? I am not sure that Multiples actually provides an answer or, at least, an answer that can be accessed by a reader of merely human linguistic capacity. Nor do I think the translator’s own notes on their work are particularly illuminating: remarks on what they did not notice would be more valuable, I guess. All the same, this beautifully produced and gracefully illustrated volume should be a resource for years to come for students of literature, whether in translation or not, since it contains examples of pretty much every kind of rewriting ever invented: oral memorization (by the son of an Icelandic bard, no less), lexical lookup, self-insertion, re-encoding (a bland statement in an undisclosed Spanish original, “I am forty-one years of age,” becomes an allusion to a famous poem by József Attila once it has been translated into Hungarian by way of German and English), geographical relocation (an Italian story transported to China, by Ma Jian), strategic supplementation (Kehl-mann slips in a reference to Vila-Matas’s weakness for pompousness and fancy prose—because he does not share it, presumably), and, above all, random variation based on ignorance, knowingness, overshooting, undershooting, a desire to simplify, a wish to elaborate … and so on. Well, perhaps that is what literature is. At any rate, Multiples shows that it is no simple thing.