Lost in Translation

Scottish writer James Kelman’s latest book is titled “Translated Accounts.” The preface states that “these ‘translated accounts’ are by three, four or more individuals domiciled in an occupied territory or land where a form of martial law appears in operation.... While all are ‘first hand’ they have been transcribed and/or translated into English, not always by persons native to the tongue” and in some cases, as Kelman admits, appear to have been translated by machine. To make matters worse, the chronology and origin of the accounts, though sifted roughly into chronological order, are nearly impossible to decipher. Have these accounts been translated from the Croatian or Chinese or Hebrew or the English of Ireland or of South Africa or even of the United States?

Something has been lost in translation, a something that is identified at the end of the preface, when Kelman confirms that the identities of these anonymous individuals are not available. The 54 accounts that make up this book (this “novel,” although even this term might have been “translated” incorrectly, so little does it share with traditional novels other than the flow of printed words across its pages) have been written by victims, perpetrators (“authoritys” and “securitys” in the novel’s simple plural), observers, combatants, mostly men but occasionally women and more occasionally ambiguous--confessional monologues relieved occasionally by dialogue (and its promise of humanity).

Yet promises of humanity are to be doubted, as well, in “Translated Accounts.” In one account, a “security” forces a girl to perform a humiliating sexual act. Her father retches. Another officer insults the father. “A woman nearby whispered, and with surprise in her voice grappling with an answer, They do not think we are human beings. They do not think we are human beings. This is why, they do not think what we are.”

Though these words are hardly a novel observation on the motives of sadists--state-sponsored or otherwise--they do draw our attention to what is missing in this story. This algebraic loss of identity drains human passion from Kelman’s accounts. For historical human horror, one would do better to turn to the first pages of Philip Gourevitch’s account of Rwanda in the mid-1990s or Lawrence Weschler’s account of Argentina under the generals.

At their best, Kelman’s accounts trip upon patterns of rhythm and repetition that are reminiscent of the great dramatic poets of 20th century English literature to whom Kelman has been compared in the past, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. “She was of an age that to die is natural but she died on the road,” reads an early account. “Natural unnatural, unnatural natural. She died, it was on the road. She was an elderly woman whom I had known, had been acquainted. I spoke with her, she allowed my presence. If she did not consider me likable. Yes, I accept this and accepted this, that she did not like me. I can say it as others might. They have done. I know that they have done. Why should they not if it is the case, as so, it was the case, certainly. If she liked anyone, did she, I do not think so. I do not care. She is dead.”

Yet the greatness of Beckett and Pinter (who required, of course, heaping tubs of abstraction to feed their appetites for myth) lies in part in their willingness to give flesh to their images and their people. Perhaps that is why Kelman’s rather abstract tale of the elderly woman, with all its linguistic music, fails to land with the strength of, say, Beckett’s tale of Hackett at the opening of his first novel, “Watt.” “Mr. Hackett turned the corner and saw, in the failing light, at some little distance, his seat. It seemed to be occupied. This seat, the property very likely of the municipality, or of the public, was of course not his, but he thought of it as his. This was Mr. Hackett’s attitude towards things that pleased him. He knew they were not his, but he thought of them as his. He knew they were not his, because they pleased him.”

And perhaps that is why Kelman’s rather stationary tableau of the “security” and the girl pales next to the opening of “Ashes to Ashes,” a recent play by Pinter (who has turned much of his attention to precisely the same states that fascinate Kelman). Here Pinter describes a woman under similar circumstances. “Well ... for example ... he would stand over me and clench his fist. And then he’d put his other hand on my neck and grip it and bring my head towards him. His fist ... grazed my mouth. And he’d say, ‘Kiss my fist.”’ In Beckett and Pinter, the flashes of color and life, the specificity of Hackett’s “seat” or the dominator’s “fist,” however simple, are not only the signals of writerly genius but of human life. Search as one might in “Translated Accounts,” there is little nature left in Kelman’s language and what nature there is has been sucked clear of its color.

So, if not the horror or the poetry, what, one might ask, is Kelman after? He certainly has no need to prove himself as a master of gritty realism, having won the Booker Prize for the extraordinary “How Late It Was, How Late.” Perhaps the formal experiment that drives “Translated Accounts” is the question Kelman poses about what happens to language in the wake of the kind of genocide committed with all the literary tools of dehumanization. The denaturing of people and language, the incorrect plurals of “authoritys” and “securitys,” announce that all of us--those providing the accounts and those reading them--are in a country where the rules have been simplified, where there are no exceptions and idioms are not only untranslatable but suspicious.

If the experiment fails, it fails spectacularly. Denatured and decolored, the language of the accounts becomes white noise. The words buzz like the thousands of unidentified nameless insects that circle about the corpses in this demanding book. Ultimately, however, we want to swat those bugs away and find--no matter how horrible it may be--a human face.