March 21, 2008
Washington, DC

Lately, politicians and pundits agree that America seems reluctant to talk about racism in any but the most sensationalistic terms. They’re not wrong, either. Quietly though, one city and town at a time, a nationwide program called The Big Read is starting to help Americans kick around subjects like race — and class, and free speech, and immigration, and any number of other topics that good neighbors usually make a habit of avoiding.

Nobody expected this civic side benefit when my colleagues at the National Endowment for the Arts and I went about hatching The Big Read. All we wanted was to arrest the mortifying erosion in American pleasure reading that, like a rush-hour mudslide, can narrow the road toward a humane, prosperous society down to one elite lane.

Cynthia Ozick. Photo © Nancy Crampton

But sometimes, instead of working against us, the law of unintended consequences is actually on our side. In the course of helping cities do successful one-city one-book programs, I’m discovering a nationwide hunger to talk about the very subjects that tend to make us nervous. Traveling around the country watching The Big Read work, I’ve noticed a real impatience with “polite conversation,” with having to choose one’s words so carefully that any hope of a natural give-and-take gets lost.

Take Wallowa County, Oregon, where a literary center called Fishtrap won a modest grant to do a Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been easy to treat the book like a period piece, showing the movie, hosting book discussions, having teenagers record oral histories of senior citizens who remember the Depression firsthand — all of which Fishtrap did, and did well. But they also devised a “hard-luck dinner,” where ticket-buyers didn’t know ahead of time whether they’d get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. That led to the kind of frank discussion that might be awkward in a checkout line, but somehow crops up spontaneously whenever a great book comes to hand.

Then there’s Lewiston, Maine, where the nationally ranked Bates debating team took up the question “Should communities have the right to ban books from school libraries?” in a public forum on Fahrenheit 451. Or Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird and racial equality moved the city editor of the local paper to face up to her family’s slave-owning past. Or consider Waukee, Iowa, which chose arguably the most challenging book on our list, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl , and has turned it into a citywide consideration of the Holocaust.

In Los Angeles, the County Library will celebrate Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima with — among dozens of other events this spring — “A Bulldozed Barrio: Recalling Chavez Ravine.” It’s a presentation by those inquisitive, award-winning mavens of The Baseball Reliquary, so don’t expect any checked swings about how the Dodgers wound up on land once promised for affordable housing.

Don’t get me wrong. The Big Read won’t solve America’s reading woes single-handedly, and a few candid discussions with our neighbors about issues we usually duck isn’t going to turn any American city into Periclean Athens overnight. (Even Athens lied to itself about slavery.) But anything that helps not only defrost the usual glacial pace of racial reconciliation around America, but also defuse artist-rancher misunderstanding in Marfa, Texas, and Russian immigrant tensions among the Mennonites in Ephrata, Pennsylvania — where they’re reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – is at least worth the candle.

How does the simple act of reading a good book and hashing it out with the person next to you break the ice for more and, just as important, less serious conversations? The NEA could conduct ten times as many surveys and evaluations as we’re already doing of The Big Read, and still never get to the bottom of that one.

My best guess is that reading is, sappy as it sounds, like falling in love: It works us over when we’re not looking. It unlocks us. We forget ourselves, and wake to find we’re talking more freely, laughing louder. We’re quicker to cry, and we blush brighter than we ever used to. To paraphrase the last line of the book that first hooked me –Jim Bouton’s Ball Four – you spend your time cracking open a book, and “in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

Translation is both the most parasitic form of writing and the purest. It’s writing without storytelling, without plot, or character, or any of the other gifts that only a few lucky fictioneers have it in them to deploy. No, translation is writing at its most elemental linguistic level, with the kit provided and only the words missing. It belongs alongside singing or acting or symphony conducting — an interpretive art, but no less an art for all that. Translation is what painting by numbers would be, if only the painter had as many colors handy as there are words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Is it Tolstoy… or Tolstoy?

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I just finished up a translating project from the Spanish, but also because we only recently got our Tolstoy materials back from the printer and the CD presser. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich marks our first novel in translation — chosen for a reciprocal Read with the Russian cities of Saratov and Ivanovo, who’ve been reading To Kill a Mockingbird this fall while five American cities and towns prepare to tackle Tolstoy next spring.

Because we had to agree on a common translation just for consistency’s sake, we went with Lynn Solotaroff’s Bantam edition, but no preference or endorsement should be inferred. So long as folks are on roughly the same page, I kind of like the idea of multiple readers around the country getting together over different translations, comparing notes and discovering anew how even the tiniest decisions of diction and syntax can make all the difference.

Just look at the last line of Solotaroff’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. (Spoiler alert here, by the way, for anybody who expects Ivan to live happily ever after.) Solotaroff translates Ivan Ilyich’s end as, “He drew in a breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched himself out and died.” It seems a fairly straightforward sentence, one whose original Russian couldn’t possibly allow for that many variations.Now look at Louise and Aylmer Maude’s once-standard translation of the same sentence: “He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.” At first blush, they seem more or less the same sentence twice. Each starts with the same five words, and each ends with the same two.

In between, though, discrepancies creep in. Per Solotaroff, Ivan dies in the middle of his last breath. But according the Maudes, Ivan completes the breath, and only dies while sighing afterward. I tend to prefer the first version, since that one doesn’t oblige poor Ivan to breathe and then sigh, two operations that seem a little too similar to be readily separable. Points to Solotaroff here.

But now look at the other divergence. The Maudes have Ivan simply stretching out, whereas Solotaroff’s Ivan stretches himself out — as if there were anyone else Ivan might conceivably be stretching. Points to the Maudes here, and so a split decision overall.

Which one is closer to Tolstoy’s original? Which the more literal? And are they the same thing? You’d have to ask a Russian speaker for those answers, but the translators are presumably fluent, and it didn’t keep them from preparing subtly different interpretations. Still, each retains the indispensable idea of a life interrupted.

My translation work so far hews toward the irreverent, making free with a lot of colloquialism, anachronism, and general puckishness. My Spanish isn’t the greatest, either, so I probably couldn’t be slavishly faithful to the original if I tried.

Maybe most important, I’m translating a comic short story and novella by Cervantes and Cervantine comedy lends itself to a more timeless, postmodern tone than Tolstoyan solemnity. I’m hoping that readers can hear a Spanish magistrate say “I’m hauling you in” without thinking, “Hmmm. Would a 17th-century Englishman even say that?” By contrast, though, nobody wants to read The Plotzing of Ivan Ilyich.

Nobody besides me, anyway…

“After dinner, if there were no visitors, Ivan Ilych sometimes read some book of which people were talking, and in the evening sat down to work, that is, read official papers, compared them with the laws, sorted depositions, and put them under the laws. This he found neither tiresome nor entertaining. It was tiresome when he might have been playing bridge; but if there were no bridge going on, it was at any rate better than sitting alone or with his wife.” — The Death of Ivan Ilych

“I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me…” — A Farewell to Arms

Having recently joined the Big Read team, I had some catching up to do — re-reading old favorites like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Death of Ivan Ilych; cracking open known but hitherto unread classics like The Age of Innocence and A Farewell to Arms; and diving into titles unfamiliar to me, Bless Me, Ultima and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Reading this material in rapid succession, your mind makes connections that it might not otherwise. One that sticks out to me is the proliferation of the card game bridge. In addition to the two quotes above, there was reference to bridge in another Big Read book that escapes me now (The Shawl? A Lesson Before Dying?).

I’ve never played bridge. None of my friends play bridge. My parents don’t play bridge. Maybe my Aunt Rosemarie plays bridge? If so, she’s my only connection to the game. What struck me was the casual way bridge is talked about in these books, woven into the background fabric of life. So much so that it is supposed to be the simplifying half of the metaphor for Catherine and Henry’s complex love affair. Bridge is assumed to be universal. Maybe today a writer would reference Sudoku or video games or another soon-to-be anachronistic entertainment.

[Disclaimer: I realize that bridge remains popular in some circle so, bridge players of America, please don’t flood David’s inbox with letters of protest, it’s merely that bridge has escaped my sphere.]

The prevalence of bridge in these great books begs question of how people spend their leisure time. As Reading at Risk showed, they’re not reading, and in my experience, they’re not playing bridge. It has been suggested that they are watching television, consuming digital media, and/or otherwise technologically occupied. This might be the case, but there are other considerations as well. Ivan is an aristocrat, Henry a wounded solider — they had plenty of time on their hands.

The thing about leisure time is that it’s a finite resource. We work most of the day, get home, have dinner, and then spend our 3 to 4 unclaimed waking hours decompressing with TV or with friends, going to the gym, or for some of us, reading. How can we persuade people they should spend more of their precious leisure time reading? It seems there are two modes of thinking on this. First, the Eat Your Vegetables school — reading is good for you — and second, the Reading is Rad school — My Ántonia is totally as much fun as Grand Theft Auto, dude. The trick, and what the Big Read is attempting to do, is to combine these two methods and take it a step further. Not only is reading good for you and fun, it goes beyond just you the reader. Reading can be a community event.

Bridge, unlike Solitaire, is a social game. It takes at least four people to play. Reading is more flexible. It’s for players 1 - 1 million. However you spend your leisure time, there are few activities that span millennia as popular choices. Reading is one; perhaps the only one that is timeless, good for you, good for others, and, in every sense, radical.

August 28, 2007
Washington, DC

Did you see that piece in the New York Times last week about JT Leroy, the abused-kid-turned-truck-stop-hooker who transformed himself into an acclaimed writer of literary fiction — until he turned out to be a female freelance writer who’d transformed herself into the totally fictitious JT Leroy? It’s a bottomlessly interesting story, one I may return to for the ideas it shakes loose about the pernicious practice of reviewing author’s bios instead of their books.

For now, though, I’m curious to look at literary fame and its possible effects on productivity and talent. The 21 Big Read authors describe a pretty broad spread on the spectrum of literary celebrity, from Harper Lee at one end — so retiring that she effectively retired at 35 — to Leo Tolstoy at the other, of whom it was once said that Russia had two tsars, and that Tolstoy was the more illustrious of the two.

Somewhere in between is Ernest J. Gaines, who scribbled in obscurity until Tracy Keenan Wynn adapted The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman for CBS, maybe even until Oprah Winfrey anointed A Lesson Before Dying with the gilded halo of her first initial. In a recent conference call with our inhouse NEA book group, Gaines sounded like a remarkably modest man, unimpressed by his accolades and — maybe for that reason — one of very few writers whose later books surpass their precursors.

Then there’s Marilynne Robinson, who takes her sweet time. In 1980 she published Housekeeping (which also recently joined the Big Read list) to rapturous reviews. She didn’t come out with another novel till 2004’s Gilead, which won her the wide readership that had previously eluded her — and the attention that she in turn had eluded.

Four famous writers, four different reactions to fame. Harper Lee ignores it and falls silent. Tolstoy revels in it as a younger man, then walks away. Gaines works hard, succeeds, then works even harder. And Marilynne Robinson gets it right the first time, raises a family, teaches, and then comes back as if she’d never been away.

Why does success paralyze some writers, help others by giving them time to write more carefully, and leave others almost unscathed? When all else fails, look at the books:

1) At the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, the sheriff argues that “taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an’ draggin’ him with his shy ways into the limelight — to me that’s a sin.” Should we be entirely surprised that Harper Lee shares Boo Radley’s aversion to the limelight?

2) In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the title character enjoys the trappings of bourgeois success until he finds himself entrapped. Is it any wonder that Tolstoy reveled in his own fame until at midlife, like Ivan, he finally heard the soft, crunching tread of the one reader nobody ever snows?
3) Or look at Gaines. The protagonist of A Lesson Before Dying works at a thankless job until he finds a way to love it. Is that so different from his creator, who plugged away at fiction for years until success, when it came, was almost beside the point?

4) One more and I’ll stop: Marilynne Robinson, whose Gilead consists of letters from an elderly, ailing father to the young son he won’t see grow up. You don’t have to be obsessed with the lineaments of literary reputation (in other words, you don’t have to be me) to read that novel as a meditation on what it’s like to write a book as wonderful as Housekeeping and then wait, in vain, for the childlike gratitude such an achievement deserves.

Okay, I’ll stop. There’s an entire branch of voguish pseudo-French criticism waiting to be christened that would read each new book as a writer’s further rumination on his or her own flickering renown — careerisme? — but I’ll not christen it today. Just know that good writing, whether pseudonymous, anonymous or just unsung, is always synonymous with hard, selfish, lonely work…