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The Translator's Bride door João…
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The Translator's Bride (editie 2019)

door João Reis (Auteur), Sónia Oliveira (Vertaler)

LedenBesprekingenPopulariteitGemiddelde beoordelingAanhalingen
384646,023 (4.29)2
At the start ofThe Translator's Bride, the Translator's bride has left him. But if he can only find a way to buy a small house, maybe he can win her back . . . These are the obsessive thoughts that pervade the Translator's mind as he walks around an unnamed city in 1920, trying to figure out how to put his life back together. His employers aren't paying him, he's trying to survive a woman's unwanted advances, and he's trying to make the best of his desperate living conditions. All while he struggles with his own mind and angry and psychotic ideas, filled with longing and melancholy. Darkly funny, filled with acidic observations and told with a frenetic pace,The Translator's Bride is an incredible ride--whether you're a translator or not!… (meer)
Lid:lriley
Titel:The Translator's Bride
Auteurs:João Reis (Auteur)
Andere auteurs:Sónia Oliveira (Vertaler)
Info:Open Letter (2019), 150 pages
Verzamelingen:Jouw bibliotheek
Waardering:****1/2
Trefwoorden:Portugese fiction.

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The Translator's Bride door João Reis

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Toon 4 van 4

Since conventional reviews are a thing of the past. Let us begin with an interpretation. This reviewer’s take on a set of events that will capture the reader’s attention:

Relentless rain falls. I wet my face. Is it obscene to wet one’s face in front of others, especially if a lady is present? A lady who has a very tempting little nose I would like to nibble. A nose with a striking resemblance to a radish, or so I think as my mouth fills with too much saliva. A toothless fidgety ginger boy laughs nearby with a face that generates a desire for violence. A respectable lady’s bag suddenly breaks open, scattering rolling heads on garlic on the floor. I find myself on a streetcar, public transport, a den of bestiality, with a driver who is a vile destroyer of umbrellas. I do not focus on them, just her, I think only about her, the departure, a waveless sorrowful farewell.

And just as the true review begins, we encounter the protagonist, soaked and miserable, trying to pull himself together from a pitiful state, a state of mental obscenity, broken down and unfulfilled, wanting only the return of his Helena.

A tortured soul, born at the wrong time, for he could have been a figure from Greek mythology, a god fallen into disgrace, a condemned eternal sufferer facing the absurd.

Instead, he is a feeble bronchitis-sufferer of the present age who translates the scribbles of others for a living if it could be called that. Working tirelessly in a room without heat. A dark and cold room with just a bed, a chair, a closet, a desk covered with papers and books, a basin filled with water and the complete absence of natural light. He works by candlelight. Candles he has to beg his landlady for, a shrewd woman with sinister facial contractions every observer of human nature would love to study.

He navigates a city, a den of rubbish, a sewer with an everlasting reek while worrying about contraction of double pneumonia and the meaning of the mysterious word that keeps popping into his head: Kartofler. All the while longing for her, for his Helena. Helena with her dark eyes and dark hair, a dimple that appears on her left cheek when she smiles. But she is aboard a disembarked ship heading elsewhere, and far, far away from him.

He is alone. Without her, his immediate environment resembles a freak show, a circus. He cannot help but to stare askance. He encounters warted women, misers, stingy publishers, rogues with goatees and twisted mouths, aberrations-batting eyelashes, scoundrels, diabolic entities with mummified reptile hands who don’t know the meaning of a proper handshake.

They all inhabit a city, his city, his country. The country that has gone to the dogs. To the way of general coarseness. What remains is the pestilent stench of urine, tar and filth, the stench of concentrated humanity. Is the protagonist the only normal person left, the only one able to smell the burning sulfurous smell as he walks through the cobblestoned streets of a country still stuck in the Stone Age?

And all he wants is Helena. His solution to life. To gain redemption through her. She who can absolve him by locking away his pain. Close the doors to the antechamber to hell and retrieve his lost outer conscience.

Root for him, dear readers, this trembling match flame of a human on a cold, windy, wintry night. To get his Helena, to purchase that little pink house of his dreams. He demands his money. Demands his respect. Wants to seize visiting one den of ignominy after another. He wants to stop being a wretched man, with a greasy tie, a tramp presenting himself in disarray, dirty, hatless, eating peas and mushy rice for the rest of his miserable existence.

For he is wittiness personified. A one-man show. A Bernhardian character fighting the good fight against the bootlickers and the sellouts, those disgraceful parasites inhabiting a rotten, dismal land. The gruesome comedy of life. But a life worth living. For there is always redemption to be had, joy to be found, love waiting for its cue and curtain reveal.

João Reis has undeniable talent. This book is undoubtedly a great success. You feel the pain, you will laugh uproariously, you will be awestruck by the mesmeric prose, you might put this book down after completing it, but I guarantee that much time won’t lapse before you will reach for the Dublin Literary Award nominated Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow from corona/samizdat.

- Nick Voro ( )
  Nick.V | Feb 19, 2023 |
Quite a remarkable feat of writing! It brings to mind "La Nausée" by Jean Paul Sartre. The reader dwells inside the protagonist's mind after his wife has left him. The protagonist, a translator by trade, proceeds to have what appears to be a psychotic episode of depression. His mind is a painful, despairing place for the reader, yet the remarkable writing of João Reis makes the experience more than worthwhile. I laughed out loud, cringed, and ached for the translator as he experiences trust existential angst. You will have to learn the outcome by reading this marvelous novella! ( )
1 stem hemlokgang | Nov 27, 2019 |
‘The world is a dunghill in flames, all this water before my eyes couldn’t put out the fire, we shall burn till the end of our days, I want to burn with Helena, there’s nothing for me but her, she has only left yesterday but I’m devastated…’

At just over 100 pages this novella from Portuguese writer Jaoa Reis gets its first English translation. An unnamed man returns on a streetcar to his lodgings, having just seen off his bride on a ship to an undisclosed destination. It is raining. He feels abandoned and alone. Over the next two days our hero’s life unravels as he veers from one bizarre catastrophe to another, roaming across the city in search of answers to the questions that circle round and round in his head.

He loses his hat on the streetcar and gets soaked in the rain, thereafter convincing himself he will catch a fever or the flu which will kill him. His landlady feeds him watery stew and refuses to light or heat the house properly. He is convinced that the publisher who has received work from him is actually screwing him over. His ‘friends’, whom he is convinced are worse than second-rate poets, receive a book contract from another publisher who in turn will not guarantee him any work. The translator is a world-weary pessimist who views everyone around him with such contempt that you wonder how he managed to find a wife in the first place!

The present-tense, first-person narrative gives the novel a sense of immediacy and a sense of urgency, the paragraph-length sentences revealing the tumbling thoughts and emotions of our tortured translator. There is a sense of Kafka, of Beckett, in the writing and in the bizarre view of life that we get. At times the reader is simultaneously perplexed and annoyed by the narrator, at other times sympathetic. He finds himself in situations and places where he smells, or imagines that he smells, burning and other aromas. He has the word ‘kartofler’ niggling away in his head, and he cannot remember what it means or what language it is in.

There are genuine moments of humour and the ending, when it comes, is suitably appropriate for what has come before. This is an engaging yet thought-provoking quick read, but well worth it. I hope we get more of this promising Portuguese writer’s work in the future. ( )
1 stem Alan.M | Aug 11, 2019 |
Top-notch Portuguese novel. Reis’s novel spoke to me on several disparate levels. And what a joy it was to read something worthwhile in Portuguese again...So many modernist crap being published in Portuguese lately...

I think today's junk food literature wrings the "human" out of humanity. We evolved the latest theories say because of a complex brain that allowed us to remember "state" information about our social relationships and hold ourselves and each other responsible for what we have done. Now we have thousands of things to remember in our worlds, and there is no time to think deeply on anything unless one is exposed to and guided through models of how to be a human being and read novels. Those models are not coming from ads and the noise of TV engineered to grab our eyeballs and prey on our minds. You do not end up with full deep human beings in a world like we are rushing towards. When the full import of this reveals itself to you it will turn your stomach - and it kind of explains the "after the apocalypse" movie where the human people in your life are in a perpetual war against the zombie hordes. This is exactly what we do not need at this stage in human history. God help up ..

The best thing I ever read about the love of books is Walter Benjamin's 'Unpacking My Library', how the colour, shape and smell of them meant so much to him and fed his imagination, without even reading them. I think we have a very black and white view of what joy is when it exists on a bit of a spectrum and is no less joyful or meaningful for being quiet. I have a lot of quietly joyful moments in my life and few hugely joyful ones. If I was to take away the elements that make up my quiet joys I would have a miserable existence. João Reis' novel is all about quiet joy and gratitude. It's not grandiose. The process is symbolic. We each can reach into a deeper part of ourselves and latch onto the small things that make us happy at any time. João Reis is showing us that sorting socks might also also a path to that joyful part.

The author is in love with his novel. I can see that. I saw the whole story as a kind of landscape that I walked through going along with the translator. I never saw the whole landscape at once, but how I wandered through it wasn't of paramount importance; I just enjoyed his (and my) walk. There was a sense of puzzle pieces dropping into place as I went, and by hook or by crook eventually I did see the whole picture. I suppose what I'm saying is that it didn't strike me as the sort of book that requires a linear approach to stream-of-consciousness. This is not Saramago, this is not Tabucchi. This is my first João Reis' novel and it won't my last. "A Noiva do Tradutor" (it's also available as an English edition: "The Translator's Bride", which I intend to read as well. Why? I inhabit the translations differently, even if I feel I know the book inside out which in this case I don’t. I'm sure I'll really love them both independently and differently.)

"A Noiva do Tradutor" is a lesson in idiocy, and in how language evolves with us. Stream-of-consciousness may be a bit of a loaded word to use for the phenomenon of static content being increasingly replaced by dynamic content generation in this day and age of fats food novels but you get the point. Books like these give me great hope, hope that one day we might actually learn something or enough to stop collectively being so stupid, and so easily manipulated by politicians and marketeers ;-0) I’ve got books everywhere - on shelves, floors, tables, chairs (in fact, on every surface and in every room imaginable) in my home. Many of the books have been read and I either hoped to read them again or cherish them for what they are. Many are non-fiction and represent my interests. Some are just beautiful to look through and give me joy. As a child I grew to cherish the written word and there is nothing more satisfying than surrendering myself to a compelling story and a book I am unable to put down even to eat or sleep."A Noiva do Tradutor” belongs to that category. ( )
1 stem antao | Jun 23, 2019 |
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At the start ofThe Translator's Bride, the Translator's bride has left him. But if he can only find a way to buy a small house, maybe he can win her back . . . These are the obsessive thoughts that pervade the Translator's mind as he walks around an unnamed city in 1920, trying to figure out how to put his life back together. His employers aren't paying him, he's trying to survive a woman's unwanted advances, and he's trying to make the best of his desperate living conditions. All while he struggles with his own mind and angry and psychotic ideas, filled with longing and melancholy. Darkly funny, filled with acidic observations and told with a frenetic pace,The Translator's Bride is an incredible ride--whether you're a translator or not!

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