5.0 out of 5 stars
Interpretations
Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2021
I have a second cousin fluent in 7 languages by the time she was 19. I was so. jealous. My perception was that, for each language you speak, you feel closer to that country. But what if a paradox is the truth? Speaking the language of a country unlocks the words, and the speech may no longer be impenetrable, but people still are. There’s often a divide between what we say and what we mean, in any country. The unnamed female translator in Kitamura’s stunning new novel (she’s vaguely an Asian and English phenotype whose mother is Japanese) accepts a one-year contract for The Hague ICC (International Criminal Court), as a translator. Typically, in that work, you are expected to interpret without judging, and only facilitate a personal emotional kick to their words if it came from the person you are translating. You must do it at a remove from yourself.
Of the narrator’s newest assignment, translating a ruthless West African leader accused of war crimes and atrocities--she sussed out that he was an observant man, and that he deliberately kept an expression of impersonal interest. “…a man who conceded nothing and had nothing to conceal.”
As a translator, if you don’t stay neutral, there’s a risk you will come across like a witness. Kitamura knows when to use granular specificity and when to get murky. Translation is symbolic of the ubiquitous interpreting of everyday life and relationships. “The fact that our daily activity hinged on the repeated description…of matters that were, outside, generally subject to euphemism and elision.” The narrator did not consistently feel in control to pieces/parts of her own life, however, or the things that happen to her and others. For one thing, she is highly nomadic, moved around as a child, never settling on a country. A woman without a country.
Unnamed narrators emerge with some of the readers’ literary biases upheld, and are part of this translator’s nature. Elusive, evasive, enigmatic. Check, check. A SEPARATION was also written with an unnamed narrator, and it shares themes with INTIMACIES. But INTIMACIES has a different plot and setting entirely. Although both emanated ongoing themes of isolation, gauging life with a chronic identity crisis point of view, this story felt new, fresh, alive, but with recurrent disorientation. There’s a bit of indecision, irresoluteness, in the narrator. Over the course of two months (I think this takes place around 2011), does she evolve? You tell me, as it surely bears discussion! “I’d begun looking for something, but I didn’t know exactly what.”
Her path to getting to The Hague seemed borne out of the need to get away from NYC rather than going towards something. It’s not that she loved The Hague, but it felt familiar, like other European cities she had lived in. And yet, “I’d begun to think the docile surface of the city concealed a more complex and contradictory nature.” In everything, its paradox, and in everyone, too, including our translator, with her sense of vague longing.
Some authors hide behind ambiguity and decreased punctuation, then not live up to it or get in front of it. Not Kitamura. She knows the rules before breaking them, so that her protagonist becomes three-dimensional, even when she is a cipher to herself. I just finished Jonathan Lee’s new THE GREAT MISTAKE, another protagonist who is alien to himself. Perhaps we all are to a degree, but this woman is perhaps the archetype of a well-traveled person who is rootless, possessing gauzy identity, with telegenic looks (although she’s not in front of cameras), urbane. She lived in NYC long enough to know that everyone’s from everywhere, and that distinction flattens out after a while. (Just a side note that I aim to look at 2022 novels and see if, out of the pandemic, writers turned often to themes of alienation and loneliness).(This is not a pandemic book, btw, and nothing about it is pandemic).
Only French and English are spoken at The Hague, so sometimes there are additional translators in order to translate someone’s Arabic, or Hungarian, or any other language into French or English first. There could be several translators in the room. As a tidbit, The Hague is the only ICC that is not in the United States.
The aim at The Hague is to speak as neutrally as possible, but with the exactitude of the person you are speaking for. Like an actor, you set aside your personal inflections, and then you precisely mimic those you interpret. The Court language is arcane and specific, in order to make less errors. It’s necessary to understand idioms and colloquy so that you don’t misstep, too. Imagine how a translator’s mistaken translation could move borders, or remove them. This isn’t traffic court, this is war crimes, crimes against humanity. Maybe, like to my cousin, translators can learn languages easily and lucidly. Some people were made to translate, at least in their work.
The protagonist’s personal life is the pits, far from the unflappable persona she must be for her job. Father just died (same in A SEPARATION, as with Kitamura’s vivid memories of her own life), and other discontents lead her to leave NYC for The Hague. She picked up Dutch by living there, and soon enough has a Dutch boyfriend, Adriaan, who is attentive and attractive but not unzipped-from-the-ex (who abandoned him for Lisbon and sent for their two boys later). So Adriaan is not what you would call great boyfriend material at this juncture.
Our interpreter often seems (to me) to do various things and make frequent decisions with almost banal intent. She has not organized her priorities; therefore, her life frequently avails itself with dissonance. When her passions do flare up, I’m rapt--it isn’t where you’d expect it to be. Moreover, the translator doesn’t know and couldn’t accurately identify why she desires to be with Adriaan, in my estimation. She also gets caught up, intrigued, by a mugging that happened near her friend, Jana’s, street. All these small intimacies that are not the kind you’d want. A thousand little intimacies can overwhelm you.
I was hooked almost immediately to this book. The protagonist is seductively vulnerable and fascinating, the bad guy is really bad, and you won’t have to wonder about that, but yet the author, in portraying this evil man, did it with nuance! That’s what held all the malice to his character, Kitamura’s subtlety. Well-placed cinematic scenes play out, favorably, and organically. We follow the translator through her personal and professional life, we note the contradictions, and it brought me closer to my own incongruities, alienations, and how I may shape my memories. There isn’t one false note in this novel. As always, Kitamura delivers.
“It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed…in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.”
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