Tomorrow evening, the winner of the Goldsmiths prize will be announced at their central-London awards ceremony, and I’m pretty excited to be representing And Other Stories for the night. This is only the second year of the prize, which rewards the most creatively daring and innovative in fiction. Last year, they chose Eimear McBride as their winner, a prescient decision that gave A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing its first major endorsement in the literary world.
This year, the shortlist is just as full of exciting potential reading (I’m currently racing through Ali Smith’s How to be Both), its selection giving us perhaps a better idea of what the prize means when it claims to celebrate ‘fiction at its most novel’. There is a book whose order depends on which edition you read, and a collection of disjointed conversation snippets; there is a tale told in a new version of old English and another in which the central protagonist is absent but created in her interlocutors’ speech. They all serve to remind us that the novel is not a static form – that its structures, grammar, ideas of character and of speech, are all open and up for re-interpretation.
But this type of innovation isn’t new, nor is it confined to the English language. The idea of experimentation in novel-writing is as old as the genre itself, and extends far beyond Tristram Shandy’s linguistic borders: Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (1796) includes proliferating narrative digressions, and knowingly borrows a love story straight from Sterne. A few centuries later, the French group of writers, Oulipo, make it their business to create literature within specific constraints. Member Georges Perec’s book La Disparition (1969 – in English, A Void) was written without once using the letter ‘e’, while another member, Anne Garréta’s novel Sphinx (1986) never specifies either lover’s gender in the story (having read this on a recommendation years ago, I’m very excited to see that it’s finally being published in English by Deep Vellum in 2015). Outside of France we’ve got Italo Calvino’s (another Oulipo member) meta-fictional masterpiece, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), and Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (1963), a novel – or rather ‘counter-novel’ as the author himself called it – whose chapters can be read in any order. Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing is a Puerto Rican Spanglish dramatic dialogue of a book, while Greek Dimitris Lyacos’s Z213: Exit loses articles and conjunctions to create a fragmented journal of competing voices. I could go on, but you get the idea: innovation, it’s everywhere.
One thing about these books though, is that they represent another kind of challenge to their foreign readers and translators, namely the question of how to convey the author’s intentions – which are often bound up even more intimately than usual with their mother tongue – into another language. Translators find all sorts of solutions to this conundrum: for example, the Spanish translator of Perec’s novel removed the letter ‘a’ from his translation instead of ‘e’, seeing Perec’s choice as based on the most common vowel in that language. Garréta’s translator will have to do some skilled acrobatics to avoid any of the gendered possessives that English demands. Translators then take pretty big risks as they struggle to honour the original in a new form.
At And Other Stories, it’s this kind of innovation that excites us – the new and the foreign, the linguistically challenging and conceptually inventive. So go on – give us some more. What are the most exciting, risk-taking, experimental books you’ve read in translation recently? What are the so-called ‘untranslatable’s that you’ve discovered in another language, or your own, and loved? If the Goldsmiths Prize was international and multi-lingual, what would be on its list?
Louisa Dunnigan
Editorial Assistant