“The idea of collaboration in other media is expected, whereas for whatever almost superstitious reason, in the book world, it’s still considered almost a threat to name anyone other than the author,” Jennifer Croft, a translator and a key player in the effort to translate Ukrainian literature into English, told me in an interview.
There’s no good justification for this. Translating literature isn’t a mere technical exercise, subbing one word for another. It isn’t something Google Translate can do. Translation is an art that requires channeling an author’s voice, tone, intention and style. A great translator even has the power to improve upon a work of art, as Gabriel García Márquez often said of his English translator, Gregory Rabassa.
I can’t hope to capture, in the space I have here, this book’s extraordinary emotional geography, let alone its strange, inchoate beauty; the way that Bragg, in his struggle fully to explain his meaning, so often hits on something wise and even numinous (when he does, it’s as if a bell sounds). All I can say is that I loved it. Somehow – those tears again! – it brought things back to me, and by doing so, it made me remember what’s really important in life; how glad I am myself to be tethered to certain people, certain places.
Central to the book’s argument is that technology profoundly colors Gen Zers’ lives. Born into an Internet-wired world, they must straddle the real and digital spheres in order to survive, adeptly using one to reinforce the other. Yet “[a]s technology evolves, so do associated social codes and behaviors.”
In a sense, writing a book is easy. You just keep putting one interesting sentence after another, then thread them all together along a more or less fine narrative line. Only, it isn’t easy – in fact, it’s famously difficult, a daunting and arduous labour that can frequently leave you in a state of utter nervous exhaustion, reaching for the bottle or the pills. Since his creative breakthrough with The Adversary, published in 2000, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère has done something doubly amazing: he’s pioneered a unique and captivating new way of telling a true story, and he’s made it look easy. Or at least, he makes it go down easy for the reader. His fiendishly personal “nonfiction novels”, which encompass subjects such as dissident Russian literature or the story of early Christianity, unfold in a condition of perpetual climax, locked to a point of fascination from first page to last.