THE GREATEST EUROPEAN NOVELS

JAYMER VEERS – 'Poppies, Book One'

It’s that time of the year again. Or is it? The lazy season, once associated with the depths of the summer and winter, has since spread its slothful mass over all our poor months. Sluggish journalism pokes a sleepy mole-like snout out of the ground every day or so now. The sprawling slough of indolence has lost its diary and seeps duly beyond much-needed precincts. Still, that’s not to say that the end of the year doesn’t bring with it a slew of waste with a quality all of its own. And it isn't all bad. At the very least, this sort of cheap journalism has the ability to get us talking again; to unite the intelligentsia against a common enemy. What is more, it must be admitted that that much-discussed and often-derided convention – the list – has an uncanny knack, when used properly, for raising intriguing questions.

    Here’s one I prepared earlier: one of those lists (or party games) which commits the crime of being, shock horror, passably interesting. Here goes: name ten great novels that have been written by translators. I refer not to writers who have translated one or two works as a side project (although the question would work equally well in reverse, i.e: which novelists have completed great translations?) but full-blown translators, who turned to fiction later in life, thinking that, having served the best apprenticeship ever, they ought to be able to make a pretty good stab of it themselves. More often than not, of course, they don’t. They stab wildly in the dark - and boy does it show. I’ve seen shredded paper in better shape.

    Not that I wish to castigate the entire profession. Carlos Geyeu, perhaps, deserves credit for having a writing style so unlike his master (the admirably long-winded Pablo de Hidislaglio). Luis Funnel might also get a look in; though the matter is complicated by the fact that his novel was also his translation (best file him under the list of unfileable things). And what about the self-styled ‘Queen of Hungarian Translation’ – Miss Katalina Liszt? I retain reservations over The Penultimate Cadence, it is true, but there may yet be space on our list for Liszt.

    Otherwise the mountain of failure looms large on the horizon. We row into the shadows, chock-a-block with trepidation; as hopeful as the lonely sparrow tapping on the miser’s window. And with us in this little row boat of ours is a Dutchman who goes by the name of Mr Jaymer Veers.

    As one of the best translators of modern times, Veers is of course well used to rowing into, or standing in, shadows. For that is the job of the translator; to be indispensable without due credit; essential and essentially ignored. The translator is a medium through which greatness passes: the drinking straw between the novelist’s juice and the reader’s mouth. As for those translators who try and raise their profiles, well, they face the fate of those novelty straws - the ones with all the rollercoaster twists and loops - which appeal at first, but soon lose their novelty (usually after some thick juice gets clogged in a loop and moulds). Yes, the art of translation is a thankless task. And yet, who can deny the services to literature that someone like Jaymer Veers has provided? Not only did he give us the peerless translation of C P Pedrik’s brilliant Ignoble Trilogy (recently described by Lucien Ropes as ‘the first inanimate object I made love to’) but he also translated all twenty seven books in Piet der Hoötch’s ‘Sea Series’ - from The Tears of the Whale (1976) to The Glistening Pebble (1997).[1] This, alone, is some achievement. Add to this another twenty great Dutch novels and you will have some idea of the stature of Mr Veers. A truly wonderful translator, no doubt about it. Make a statue of the man. Go on. Make a statue.

    Oh, but they won’t. Or at least they wouldn’t – as Veers well knew. No, the sculptor's hand will never touch a bust of the translator’s head, not until he creates something of his own accord. A silly thing to say perhaps (for aren’t all writers, in some senses, merely the translators of countless other writers, life experiences and art-forms?) but true enough, in its own ambiguous way. And so, as the old century passed the baton onto the new (a rather clumsy changeover, I seem to recall) Veers began to move from the role of translator of novels, to pure novelist.

    How did he do it?  This question cannot be fully answered, for to a certain extent, Veers’ transition is ongoing. As is obvious from its title, his first work of fiction - Poppies, Book One - is not complete. Or is it? That question may be answered in the fullness of time. Meanwhile, let’s go back the first one instead. How did he do it? Well, you might say (and I do say) that he did it by pretending not to do it.

    It took time, however, to get to this point in the first place. For in the beginning, he did what every translator hoping to become a novelist has done: he attempted to ‘strike out boldly’; to ‘enter un-chartered waters, unequipped with a snorkel’. Well, really. What did he think was going to happen? Things soon arranged themselves, as they say, into the pattern and shape of a pear. Bravery is all very well, but to say that it rarely pays off is to vastly overestimate the state of affairs. Though perfectly, if not fabulously familiar with fiction, it was foolish of Veers to think that the world of words was his for the taking. Fortunately, it did not take too much time for him to realise this; to understand that the best way for a translator to write a novel would be to pretend that he or she was not in fact writing a novel at all.

    To this end, Veers decided to go back to translating; but rather than transpose words written by another author into another language (i.e. Dutch into English, as was his wont) he determined to translate words of no known language, written by himself, into another language – i.e. English. That is, to translate his own novel, but translate in the sense of creating through the pretence of translation.

    And this is how he went about it. First he wrote several hundred pages of what he thought was nonsense; simply spilling letters out upon the page, in what he supposed was a random fashion. To give you a taste of this, I present you with the following:

dfjso soehs ji ajakskk risud snutq opopo akaj bg!

 

    This is, as you will have gathered, an excerpt of the un-translated text of Poppies. It has no meaning in itself - at least not in its initial form - but awaits it, upon its transposition into a second form. It is, you might say, another medium; a transparent placebo, created to openly fool its own creator; to ease his passage into new but familiar lands. A carriage, providing, in the beginning, the means of travel, but gradually becoming the destination in itself.

    Embarking at last upon his first work of fiction, which he had already decided to call Poppies, Jaymer Veers paused before those foreboding words ‘Chapter One’. The pause was a long one, at the end of which he realised that the moment had not yet come to pen those particular words. The translator in him rose to the fore. What we need here, he silently surmised, is an introduction. Or, better still, that equally well–practised forte of his: the oft-skipped ‘Note on the translation’, which has for many years provided a forum for translators to remind uncaring readers of the countless difficulties they have had (or failed) to overcome over the course of their work. And so this is where Jaymer Veers – and Poppies – started, in the form of notes on the translation of what was essentially nonsense (but which was to become, eventually, hopefully, in due course, a novel).

    And, for now, this remains all that Poppies consists of. Poppies, Book One contains no more than a ‘note on the translation’ – a very long one admittedly -  but no more than that. The rest is set to follow (in how many volumes, Veers has never stated) but remains as yet unknown. Some say it will never come; that no reader will ever have a copy of Poppies, Book Two under their hands. We will examine the ramifications of that viewpoint in a minute. Before then, we must expend a word or two on that which we do have.

    Much (or quite a lot at any rate) has been made of the ‘postmodern’ character of Poppies, Book One: a novel that is, or is at present only contained within the introduction to a novel that may or may not exist in itself. Aha! say the critics. We've seen this before. Words like Nabokovian, Borgesian or Fringermeyeresque are thrown across the table. A truculent Veers pushes them away. He claims to dislike postmodern devices. If he is the architect of one, it was by mistake. Or does he mean by necessity? In any case, I will now map out the precise contours of his comments in the shape of a quotation: ‘My hand works in association with a section of my brain I can’t quite control’ he said:  ‘The most of me has no hold whatsoever’.

    What he is or isn’t quite saying here is that, in failing to suppress the translator within, he has been canny enough to let it out, managing at the same time to release the creator within. But I promised to talk of content. With words such as ‘postmodern’ flying about, you may be wondering (or more likely worrying) about that other popular word: ‘narrative’. The full narrative, so to speak, of Poppies may well be on its way - but it isn’t here yet. As things stand, therefore, we must ask whether it is possible to assuage one’s oh-so-very-desperate thirst for narrative within the pages of Poppies, Book One.

    Yes – as a matter of fact, it is. It isn’t easy, but it is certainly possible. The loose threads of the story, in so far as we can know something we haven’t yet seen in its entirety, are subtlety weaved into these notes. Characters are introduced by way of a discussion on the difficulties of translating names, places and also themes (the ambiguity of which is the most pronounced). For instance:

 

 

    Furthermore:

 

 

    And so on:

 

    Cunningly, Veers is able to bring his original creation to the reader, without ever quite leaving the safety net of the device through which he operates. You could say that his use of this device reveals a lack of bravery. However, you could also say that he is merely being practical; wisely playing to his own strengths. That is, if you call them strengths. After all, not everybody wants a story served up in this manner. Doesn’t this prove, such people might say, that Veers is simply not a novelist? Clearly he can’t move out of his comfort zone. Oh, they’re perfectly well done, these ‘notes’ of his – and interesting, in their own special way – but that doesn’t mean that Poppies, Book One deserves a place amongst the greatest novels of the age, does it? It isn’t even a proper novel, surely?

    This brings us to the proverbial insect in the liniment: the supremely knotty question of Poppies, Book Two. Is Veers writing it? And more importantly, does he need to? To start off with, he was always keen to stress that Book One was only the beginning. The ‘notes to the translation’ ran on longer than he’d imagined they would, but it didn’t mean that the full text of a novel would not follow them. And yet, where is it? Poppies, Book One was published more than five years ago now, since when Veers has kept an ominous silence. Some have taken this to mean that he has been busy writing; others that he is busy failing to write. Still others claim that all talk of a Poppies, Book Two was no more than a hoax; that this is all we were ever going to get: an introduction to a book that doesn’t exist, either because Veers realised early on that he would be able to create it, or because he never intended to create it in the first place.

    I don’t agree with this viewpoint. On the other hand, I’m not waiting up for Poppies, Book Two either.  In all honestly, if it never appeared I would not be overly bothered. Book One, with its tantalising glimpses of what is or isn’t to come, is enough in itself. And whilst I don’t for a minute think that this is what the author wanted, I’ve the very good sense not to worry myself about his wishes. Book One may only be the means of transportation, but as is so often the case, I find myself much more interested in the journey than the destination. Perhaps it is the academic in me speaking, but I have always been as fascinated in introductions, reviews, articles, notes and footnotes on fiction as I have in fiction itself. Veers is by no means the first person to tap into this fascination, not at all - and yet it remains the approach of an outsider: a gimmick or ‘device’, rather than an out-and-out genre. In spite of this, I can say with confidence that Poppies, Book One, consciously or otherwise, offers everything I could expect from a novel of a more ordinary sort. Perhaps it’s a novel that could only have been written by a translator - and yet, unlike all those other novels written by translators, it has avoided crashing into the mountain of failure, not by steering in the opposite direction, but by mysteriously fading into the very rocks on which so many others have crashed (so to speak). In this sense, then, it is a typical translator's novel, unlike any other translator's novel. Maybe even the best ever novel by a translator. But then, was there ever serious competition?

 Jinpes Terenk

The Greatest European Novels

Underneath the Bunker Homepage