Short Reviews from A Brief, Unplanned, Foray into Translated Works

 Pereira Maintains – Antonio Tabucchi (tr: Patrick Creagh)

The last summer of peace before the Second World War. Pereira is a journalist - head of the culture section for The Lisboa, a small unimportant newspaper, with a small scrappy office of his own where it constantly smells of frying food and he suspects the housekeeper of being a police informer. Widowed and having fallen into an unhealthy lifestyle, regretting never having had a son of his own and the younger, fitter self of his youth, he decides to go to a health spa for a week and takes on an assistant – a young man who writes obituaries for him that are too infused with politics to publish.

Despite rejecting all his work Pereira goes on paying and befriending him anyway, buying him dinner and keeping in touch with his girlfriend when he’s out of town. Not quite sure why, still figuring out what his own state of mind is, and the state of Europe too. ‘Pereira maintains’ is a recurrent line in the book, and often it means Pereira maintains that he doesn’t know why he did such and such a thing, but like Pereira himself it gradually evolves from something very passive to an action in itself. That of bearing witness.

This is a book that gains something from historical knowledge – for example Pereira’s doctor is leaving for France, but the reader will know (as of course Tabucchi knew in the 90s when he wrote it) that France wasn’t, at that point in time, going to prove a safe refuge.  

It also has sprinklings of details about Italian and Portuguese literature which I rather enjoyed and may well lead down a rabbit hole of other books. It has certainly made me want to read more Tabucchi, who himself was Italian, and a translator of Fernando Pessoa as well as an author in his own right.

 

Rock Crystal – Adalbert Stifter (tr: Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore).

This is a brief Christmas tale that would probably be unpleasantly sentimental if it weren’t for the glorious descriptions of the mountain itself. There’s a real sense of place – a place not untouched by the outside world (artists and mountain climbers are frequent enough visitors, and the local shoemaker’s excellent mountain climbing shoes are a local export) but with it’s own identity and a local unity that can make someone even from the next town a foreigner.

Interesting sidelight – Christmas presents in Germany were supposedly brought by the Christ-child, not St Nicholas.

 

Glimpses of Bengal – Rabindranath Tagore (tr: Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson). 

This really was just a glimpse of glimpses, both of Bangladesh and Tagore himself as a young man, in letters written mostly to his niece. The letters themselves are not complete – there’s a focus on philosophy and the natural world, a smattering of agreeable humour, but little personal detail, and no sense of a day to day progression or who they were written to. I’d like to read the longer book and fill in the gaps.