I have a memory of the first short story that made an impression on me that is so vivid, so visceral that the hair on the back of my neck still prickles thirty years later. I would have been fourteen, perhaps fifteen, when I read it, sitting in Miss Collins’ French class, in Sligo Grammar School. She had told us to read “En mer” by Guy de Maupassant, a brief story, no more than five pages long, whose sparse, plain language was just within the grasp of our rudimentary French. It is the simple story of an accident aboard a fishing trawler manned by two brothers. On their return to port, the net is almost lost in a heavy squall and the younger brother’s arm is trapped between the ropes and the gunwale. To save the arm would mean cutting the rope and losing the valuable net. The elder brother instead drops anchor and, eventually, the fishermen manage to free the arm, now shattered and horribly mangled. Gangrene quickly sets in. I can still remember sitting at my desk, reading the sentence where the younger brother “… began to cut his own arm. He cut carefully, painstakingly, slicing through the last tendons with a blade as sharp as a razor; soon there was nothing but a stump.” I apologise for this spoiler, but an even greater emotional shock awaits the reader in the final sentences.
This was the story that first offered me a glimpse of the unique power of the short story. Maupassant’s tone is detached and unemotional, something that makes the horror all the more devastating. I began to devour short stories wherever I could find them – I remember the profoundly unsettling feeling of reading Ian McEwan’s stories in First Love, Last Rites, and my first encounters with John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor. Long before I was fortunate enough to stumble into a career as a translator – or had an inkling of what such a peculiar shapeshifter might be – translators introduced me to other masters of the genre: to Chekhov and Pushkin, Borges and Calvino. I discovered that a short story has the matchless ability to capture a mood or a moment, to halt time, to suspend the commonplace and imbue everyday objects with startling power. A short story can conjure a whole world in a handful of pages, it can be poignant, tragic, funny or surreal, it can leave a reader tearful, terrified or inexplicably serene, it can be as fleeting and unfinished as lives glimpsed from a moving train or as forensically precise as an autopsy report. In the words of the great American writer, Walter Mosley: “A good short story asks a question that can’t be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.”
Although every language, as it emerges, develops an oral tradition of storytelling intended to entertain or edify – countless anecdotes, parables and fables that range from the Book of Job to the folk tales told by Scheherazade to Sultan Shahriyar – the short story as we know today is the most recent literary genre. It begins to flourish in the nineteenth century – almost three hundred years after the novel – spurred by the rise of literacy in industrialised countries and the appearance of magazines and periodicals eager to publish shorter fictions. As William Boyd succinctly puts it: “The short story arrived fully fledged in the middle of the 19th century and by its end, in the shape of Anton Chekhov, had reached its apotheosis.”
Even taking this narrow definition of a short story, the task of selecting one hundred from the countless stories translated from any language, from any country is – to say the least – a daunting task. So, when I was asked to edit this anthology I was both preposterously excited and utterly terrified. Obviously, it is impossible to read every story; how then do you decide when you have read enough? Since an introduction is usually the last part of a book to be written, I now know the answer: you will never have read enough.
From the outset, I decided that I wanted to cast my net as widely as possible, to offer a glimpse of as many countries and cultures, as many languages as would fit between these covers and simultaneously to try to chart a course from the seventeenth century to short masterpieces of the twenty-first century. The usual suspects are here – the Russians, the French and the Germans who (with the British and the Americans) dominated the short story form for almost a century – but there are also stories from countries as varied as Guinea and Vietnam, and stories translated from Azerbaijani and Gikuyu. There are a dozen writers in these pages who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature and others who are all but unknown outside their homelands.
These, then, are the writers. But with the exception of those few authors who have translated their own work (Isak Dinesen, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), the words you are reading are those of translators. If, as Susan Sontag says, translation is “the circulatory system of the world’s literatures”, then translators are the beating heart that makes it possible for stories to flow beyond borders and across oceans. Their task is as simple as it may seem impossible: to quote Günter Grass, “Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.” It is not a matter of finding equivalent words (since there is never an exact equivalence), but of weighing the weight and heft of words while striving to preserve the cadence and the rhythm of a sentence, to reinvent a pun, to produce a voice that lives on the page. Like a pianist transforming a written score into a performance of the Goldberg Variations, or an actor taking a play and becoming Hedda Gabler, a translator must interpret and perform, while hewing as closely as possible to the shape of the original. It is a process that is thrilling and frustrating, often challenging and always rewarding. The debt we owe to translators often goes unacknowledged; we talk about having read Tolstoy or Proust when actually we have read Constance Garnett or C.K. Scott Moncrieff. We talk about the style of García Marquez or Murakami, but the style we so admire owes much to Edith Grossman or Jay Rubin. All literature is a continuum, an intertwining of voices and languages, of dialects, and it is impossible to imagine the evolution of the English novel without the availability of translations. As Milan Kundera says: “… it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew constant inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself, it was Flaubert’s tradition living on in Joyce, it was through his reflection on Joyce that Hermann Broch developed his own poetics of the novel, and it was Kafka who showed García Marquez the possibility of departing from tradition to ‘write another way’.”1
Some years ago, the British novelist David Mitchell co-translated The Reason I Jump with his wife Keiko Yoshida. Interviewed about the experience, he said: “The exercise has confirmed my long-held suspicion that my translators are three times cleverer than me, with a better command of English as well as the ‘into-language,’ plus a knowledge of the mysterious art and science that is translation itself. As a writer I can be bad, but I can’t be wrong. A translator can be good, but can never be right. Translators are jugglers, diplomats, nuance-ticklers, magistrates, word-nerds, self-testing lie detectors, and poets. Translators rock.”
Every anthology, by its nature, is subjective, yet none is truly the work of a single editor. Instead, it is the result of countless conversations and squabbles with friends who champion a particular story or author, with readers who passionately insist that X is the finest short story writer who ever lived and others equally adamant that X is meretricious and wildly overrated. It is impossible to overstate the debt I owe to the editors, readers, writers, and especially to the fellow translators who have guided me. In reading the stories recommended to me, I rediscovered the thrill of finding voices that are new to me, and the ineffable pleasure of rediscovering authors (often in new translations). Editing an anthology, I have discovered, is a microcosm of a reading life; it is a journey filled with startling finds and occasional disappointments. An anthology is a miniature library of stories that one particular editor feels everyone needs to read. But just as space on bookshelves is limited, so too are the pages of any collection. The final choice presented is inescapably personal and, like the lists of 100 Greatest Novels of All Time beloved of Sunday supplements that immediately trigger family feuds, Facebook rants and disbelieving wails, every anthology is bound to frustrate and infuriate by some of its choices.
I have never much liked the word “anthology”; to my ear, it has a textbook ring of authority at odds with the curious cabinet of wonders that make up any collection. But I have always loved the old English term “rattle-bag” (famously a title used by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes); it has the clank and clatter of things found, scavenged, unearthed and retrieved, all jostling between the covers, clamouring for attention. But however modest its intentions, every collection aspires to the ideal described by Robert Graves:
A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.
FRANK WYNNE, 2018
1 From The Curtain translated by Linda Asher