French menu | Menu | Home

the twenty best novels of thailand


An anthology by Marcel Barang

 

 

CONTENTS


 

To Khun Khroo Buaphan,

who tutored my stuttering totter into Thai,

and to Mary R Haas, S Seitthabut [So Sethaputra],

Damnern–Sathianphong [Domnern–Sathienpong]

and Wit Thiangbooranatham [Thiengburanathum],

authors of the best Thai-English dictionaries,

for services rendered day after day.

 


Acknowledgments

 

This book, and the whole programme of literary rebirth it heralds, would not exist without the foresight and generosity of Sonthi Lim­thong­kun [Sondhi Lim­thong­kul], head of The M Group in Bangkok and sole sponsor of Thai Modern Classics. We both hope that this long-term under­taking will benefit not merely a group of outstanding Thai novelists but the whole nation. To Sonthi, my employer, nemesis and friend, my most heartfelt thanks for his unstinting support and complete lack of interference.

In finding my way through the maze of Thai novels, I received precious assistance from ten experts who were kind enough to hand­pick the best Thai novels for me to assess: Chaisiri Samutawa-nit, Cha­mai­phorn Saengkrajang, Chananao Waranyoo [Varanyou], Darranee Mueangma [Daranee Muangma], Khamnoon Sitthisamarn, Seiksan Prasertkun [Seksan Prasertkul], Suchart Sawatsee, Thaneit Weitpharda, Tharnthip Kaeothip [Dharntipaya Kaotipa-ya] and Treesin Bunkha­jorn. To all I feel deeply indebted. Chamaiphorn, Seiksan, Thaneit and Tree­sin, as well as Nop­phorn Suwanapharnit and Witsanu Cholit­kun, lent us rare books and deserve special thanks.

I am thankful as well to the eighteen authors or their legal benef­iciaries for allowing me to translate excerpts of their works for this anthology, as a prelude to a complete render­ing of the novels in Eng­lish. Their kind words of encour­age­ment have made me feel we are on the right track. Regrettably, however, Khuekrit Prarmoat [Kukrit Pram­oj] has forbidden us to translate his novel See Phaendin.

Throughout the writing of this book, I received invaluable advice from Phong­­deit Jiangphatthana-kit, who corrected my countless mis­takes in transla­tion, assisted in the writing of some chapters and generally acted as an able and caring interpreter of his culture. He and Montree Phoome, the project’s logistics manager and a short-story writer in his own right, were my first soun­d­ing boards.

Thomas A Wingfield and Clare L Griffiths in London gave the text its final polish, and their corrections and suggestions were priceless. Be they all thanked here and share in whatever praise this book may earn. Of course, I am the only one responsible for the book’s shortcomings.

Finally, I would like to thank my life companion, Orn-anong Sa-art­phak, and our daughter, Orramart Aurore, for putting up for so many long months with an absentee lover and dad.

 

MBg


Romanisation code

 

Thai, a language with five tones, has no generally accepted system of trans­literation. Most systems in use follow the conventions of written Thai, which leads to mis­pronunci­ation of a great many words – a most deplorable state of affairs when it comes to names of places and people. To give non-Thai readers a chance to pro­noun­ce Thai words almost correctly, Thai Modern Classics has adopted a trans­crip­tion code based solely on pronunciation, ignoring, however, the all-important tones – only an adaptation of the international phonetics system, which itself is too com­pli­cated for the average reader, would take care of tones satisfactorily.

Pali or Sanskrit words such as ‘Dharma’ or ‘Buddha’ will not be translitera­ted, unless they are part of a Thai phrase. The words ‘Siam’, ‘Bangkok’ and ‘Baht’ (the Thai monetary unit), of current use in English, will be transliterated as Sayarm, Bangkork and bart in Thai phrases.

Whenever we are aware of it, the official spelling of place names and prefer­red spelling of people’s names will follow our transcription in square brackets on first appearance: for example, Theiweit [Dheves] and Khuekrit Prarmoat [Kukrit Pramoj].

The basic elements of transcription are as follows:

• all consonants are the same as in English, except k, p and t, to which h is added to distinguish the hard sound (the standard English k, p and t sounds) from the soft sound (the standard k, p and t sounds of most other European and Romanised Asian languages); Thai has no v sound: we use w (ie, Sukhumwit);

• vowel sounds are as follows: a as in pat; ar as in far; e as in the or as in bed or as in the French word et; eu as in the French word peu; eur as in fir; ei as in grey; ae as in bear; i as in hit; ee as in heat; o as in hot or as in the French word haut; oa or o- as in own; or as in or; u as in pudding; oo as in good;

• ai as in bite or fly [short and long]; ao as in pout or now [short and long]; eui as in the French word œil; ia as in fear; oi as in boy; ua as in tour; uay as in gooey;

• the Thai sounds ue (a short, strangled ugh!), uer (same, but longer), uey and uea have no equivalent in European languages;

• to lengthen a, o and e sounds, r is added to the vowel, except when the vowel is at the end of a word: narna but sapharn;

• r is replaced by a hyphen in the case of wa- to avoid the ‘o’ sound of ‘war’ (and by h in the name Waht for the same reason); r is left out when there is a double consonant at the end of a syllable (hence, bang, not barng);

• finally, in rare cases of words ending with a short, open ‘o’ sound (hot), h is used after a vowel to distinguish it from the other ‘o’ sound (memo): for exam­ple, phroh.

 

   acknowledgments

romanisation code

contents

preface

thai titles of royalty and nobility

 

part one

books in a bind

before the novel

in the water there is fish...

the king’s three worlds

seeprart, the prince of poets

sunthorn phoo, the people’s poet

from sighs to histrionics

legacies of the past

marie who?

the birth of the novel

in the darkness before dawn...

the pioneers

the lost generation

the baby boomers

2004 update

 

part two

arkartdamkeung rapheephat

the circus of life

“seeboorapha”

behind the picture

“dorkmai sot”

noblesse oblige

“k surangkhanang”

the woman of easy virtue

thanorm maha-paoraya

an elephant named maliwan

marlai choophinit

the field of the great

“seinee saowaphong”

wanlaya’s love

ghosts

khuekrit prarmoat

four reigns

“utsana phleungtham”

the story of jan darra

bunluea theipphayasuwan

thutiyawiseit

chart korpjitti

the judgment

mad dogs & co

“nikhom raiyawa”

high banks heavy logs

wimon sainimnuan

snakes

praphatsorn seiwikun

time in a bottle

atsiri thammachoat

of time & tide

wa-nit jarungkit-anan

cobra

“sila khoamchai”

the path of the tiger

“daen-aran saengthong”

the white shadow

 

 


Preface Δ

 

To present “the twenty best novels” of any European country or even of a relatively young nation such as the United States would be preposterous. To select “the twenty best novels of Thailand” arguably is not. The novel in Thailand is a recent western import; the first truly Thai novels were written only seventy years ago. The body of available work is relatively small, a few thousand volumes, the bulk of which were scrib­bled to offer (very) light enter­tain­ment* and can be dismissed outright. Sorry to say, Thai novels of high literary octane number only in the hundreds.

I have endeavoured to select the best twenty, out of a first selection of a hundred provided to me by ten “professional readers” (professors of literature, literary critics, writers) and from my own reading, which was guided by the novels featured in various manuals of literature and literary criticism written in Thai, English or French. I also read most of the novels written by each of the eighteen authors select­ed, to check the validity of the selection and understand the evolu­tion of each writer, as well as most of the novels publish­ed since our project started in January 1993.

The choice of Thai literary experts was both deliberate and happenstance. I asked for and received the help of several recognised authorities in the field of literature – and I do apologise to those I failed to identify due to ig­noran­ce on my part at the time. A few university professors of literature attending a seminar on translation of Thai short stories organ­ised by linguistic activists from the cultural team of the French embassy were also kind enough to forward their own contri­bu­tions. The eclectic choice of these women was substantially different from that of the acknowledged experts in that it strongly favoured female romance writers of popular appeal, whose novels came to account for a good third of the hundred titles first selected.

I assessed all the novels which were recommended, as well as about another hundred novels. By assessing the novels, I mean that I read them as discriminatingly as I could, with the rule that, no matter how dull or lame they would turn out to be, I would read a minimum of one hun­dred pages. If, within one hundred pages, a novel is unable to show its mettle, capture and hold the reader’s attention, then why bother with it. And so it was that I read about two thirds of all the novels from start to finish, even though in too many cases it was merely to see how the disaster would end.

To my distress, I found it easy to discard a great many works, even among those recommended by more than one expert. The reasons, I believe, had less to do with personal talent than with the lack of a proper literary environment. Too many seasoned Thai novelists make beginner’s mis­takes. Put bluntly, from a literary-minded foreigner’s point of view, no more than fifty Thai novels of any genre or period qualify as flawless classics to be read by this and future generations for pleasure and intellectual profit, as distinct from yarns that are leafed through to kill time or perused out of academic or otherwise specialised interest.

With the aim of selecting the very best Thai novels, not merely the good ones, in order to translate them into Eng­lish over the next few years – the raison d’être of the Thai Modern Classics programme – I trimmed the list down to twenty titles. Why twenty rather than ten or thirty? Because I decided to make the selection broad but to keep it of man­ageable size – and also because I am not sure I could find an extra ten titles I would care to translate.

I have tried to choose independently of my own tastes. Among the novels selected, I have a few favourites, and a few others are not entirely to my liking. Nevertheless, the critic in me believes that all are outstanding and definitely worth trans­lating for the world to read. I am not naive or cocky enough, though, to profess that mine is the definitive choice, because, in the final analysis, there is no such thing: object­ivity, like perfection, is an aim man tries to approach but never reaches. Personal taste aside, one’s choice is valid only to the extent of one’s own knowledge and sensibilities. Discriminate reading, like literary criticism, is an exercise at once objective – observing the various elements of a tale like a mechanic takes apart a car engine – and subjective: keeping attuned to feelings, musings and undercurrents as impon­derable as the music of the spheres. To the extent that subject­ivity is involved, these are indeed “the twenty best novels of Thailand” according to Marcel Barang.

The basic literary criteria that guided my choice are fami­liar to most western readers but still appear to elude many Thai readers, writers and even critics. These criteria are strictly literary, not political or moral. Politics and morals have their own media. Propaganda and zealotry are the death of fiction. A novel may well preach social revolution or salvation of the soul (or damnation or conservatism, for that matter) but it is neither a poster nor a pulpit and should not be assessed as such. To measure literature with moral or political yardsticks is more than irrelevant – it is misguided and harmful.

The first criterion is quality of language, by which I mean not merely correct syntax and precise semantics (you’d be sur­prised, even by some of the best pens!), but more im­port­antly style, a certain way with words that enchants, tickles or stuns and creates by its very magic a world of its own, complete and unique.

A novel is a work of art crafted with words only, to which sloppy syntax or pedestrian prose are terminal diseases; prosaic language, pest; euphuism, cholera. Style is a rare gift that knows neither sex nor social origin. Some of the best stylists in the kingdom are women writers, who, alas, waste their talent in otherwise insipid yarns that tabulate heartbeats and propound lofty views about dripping fau­cets. Elegance of the pen is neither a prerogative of the aris­toc­racy (indeed the best Thai writers these days belong to the middle class) nor a matter of high-sounding phrases and big words. If the tone and context are right, there is nothing wrong with slang terms or swearwords – the froth of the language broth – and nothing wrong either with new­ly coined words that make sense, if used sparingly. In any case, good style of whatever grace – smooth or crun­chy, spicy or fragrant, earthy or ethereal, baroque or terse, jazzy, funky, racy or classic – is a sine qua non for good fiction.

With one of the most musical and subtle languages on earth, and centuries of popular and courtly juggling with words, Thai writers have an innate feel for the phrase that flows (too much or too fast sometimes), and hundreds of Thai novels would qualify in terms of style, but the trouble is, too many qualify on that count only.

The second criterion is internal coherence, the difficult balance between form and content and between the various components of the work. A novel is a story (plot) told by means of description (of things, places, people), narration and dialogue (or monologue). In mixing these elements, there is no set recipe, and creative writing consists precisely in coming up with new organic blends, in which the total is more than the sum of its parts. That “more” is the literary charge; the greater the charge, the greater the novel. If the total is equal or nearly equal to the sum of its parts, then forget it, the novel is a waste of time.

Plots provide plenty of occasions to flounder. A plot can be strong and gripping or weak and potentially boring, but it must be coherent: you cannot launch a story in one direction only to change course and start all over again (unless this keeps recurring as part of a clear pattern which eventually tells a different tale altogether); or ditch the hero or heroin way before the end (unless it happens to be a family saga in which new heroes take over as a matter of course); or build one half in a smooth blend of fictitious elements only to cram the other half with official doc­uments, newspaper clippings and the like, stalling the action and smothering the characters. Authors can get away with the most outrageous views if they manage to blend them with the narrative, but to interrupt the action with solid chapters expounding even the most cogent thoughts or with side plots of little or no relevance to the main course are sure ways to kill the balance of a novel: these adjuncts stick out like sore thumbs, and do indeed rate thumbs down.

In telling a story, the pace, whether slow or fast, must be sustained – although the slower the pace, the more likely the reader will be bored, which definitely happens every time a plot gets sluggish or stalls.

Settings and characters also must be coherent, both within the story – how consistent are they? how indispensable to the plot? – and by comparison to the real world: are they lifelike? are they believable? Only a mad character may behave in an erratic manner: it is expected of him; when a sane one does, the reader is shocked unless he is told why, or at least forewarned. That people in real life do behave erratically all the time is no excuse: verisimilitude, the stuff of fiction, is not truth, merely its appearance; happenstance is part of real life, yet artificial in fiction if unannounced. It is the author’s job to make the erratic, the fortuitous, the incon­gruous plausible. A man who does not believe in spirits yet wakes up one morning as a medium is not cred­ible without some sort of explanation or warning. Endings sometimes ruin very good yarns, when for the sake of a final fillip, the hero is made to do the opposite of what, on the evidence of the rest of the story, he must do.

A novel is an exercise in make believe which presents not the real world but a world that could be real – complex, lively, three-dimensional. Not all novels are realistic in treatment but all, even the most ethereal, must be grounded in hard fact to be at all credible. Without a realistic base, the most wonderful flight of fancy won’t take off. Ghosts need houses to haunt, and the closer they come to your bedroom, the better they scare you; so, let’s see the bedroom first, and hear the floor creak. Even magical realism, so fashionable these days, starts from a recreation of the real world before magic takes over. Stream of consciousness, automatic writing and other hip writing techniques make for exciting pyrotechnics but they become gratuitous exercises if they are not har­nessed to a realistic frame of reference – something the propo­nents of art for art’s sake never seem to grasp.

Too many Thai novels, I found, are dripping with honey and rosy beyond belief. There are cultural and ideological reasons for this. Thai culture is non-confrontational in essence and, for the sake of social harmony, the Thai will always try to see only the “good side” of things and feign to ignore prob­lems as long as they can: this works to some extent in real life, but applied to the novel, it means fatal blandness.

Countless romances fall into this credibility trap, as do most autobiographical works recalling early youth out on the farm or up on the range. Besides being usually plot-less, these recollections of days past are so full of nice souls caught up in petty dramas that they end up sounding at once rosy, drab and trite. Furthermore, politically minded writers left and right tend to create heroes that are truly out of this world. When a hundred radical students are locked up in a tiny cell for a month over two hundred pages and not one of them goes mad at his sweaty and stinking fellow inmates, we are indeed in the presence of saints or angels, not of full-blooded young men. When every ten pages or so the protagonist of a novel swears dedication to Duty and praises Nation, Religion and King, we yawn and close the book. In this type of crusading literature, angels are wont to confront devils and heroes to tackle villains – where are the real men? Novels should never be studies in black and white, but as multicol­oured as life itself. For all their good intentions and bleeding hearts, the disembodied zombies of most “literature for life” offerings are less believable than ET or Mickey Mouse, and a lot less endearing.

The same principle of coherence and verisimilitude applies to dialogue, which is a paramount device to enliven a tale, speed the action along and give depth to the characters in­vol­ved. If there is nothing more dreary than contrived conver­sa­tions, and nothing more exhilarating than spirited ones, too much of even excellent dialogue is not such a good idea, as you end up with a hamburger without beef – a play or film script rather than a novel.

As for specialised knowledge, too little is just as bad as too much. A novel involving lawyers should explain the law and court proceedings well enough to have us rooted to the bench until the trial ends, yet nobody wants to read the civil code chapter and verse. However well written, the exchange of blows between kick boxers over dozens of pages will thrill but the most dedicated fans, and all but cultured cattlemen will enjoy an offering of a thousand and one tips on how to raise buffalos.

The third criterion is vision, meaning both scope and ori­gin­ality. Scope applies not only outward as a macroscopic view of society revealing the breadth, depth and specificity of a fictional world, but also inward, as a microscopic study of the self exploring the depth and complexity of man. The world outside and the world within are both legitimate raw material for fiction, and as in life are best combined – which is why the art for life–art for art’s sake debate is so debili­tating, impov­erishing fiction by oversimplifying and setting up fences where there should be none.

The greatest works of fiction change your perception of the world and of yourself. They may not have great num­bers of characters, cover huge geographic or historical grounds, or depict outstanding events such as war or epi­demics: great literature is not a question of numbers or bulk; it is merely a matter of sharpness and originality of vision, reaching far out there for the truths and ways of the world as well as deep inside for the lies and emotions of man.

Each generation begets a few novels that seem to encap­sulate the perceptions of the times, but these works only last if they remain relevant to later generations by offering them values common to all of mankind: you do not keep reading Cervantes, Richardson, Tolstoy, Balzac and all the other greats for what they tell you of their times but for what they tell you about yourself. Too many novels, though magnificently written and expertly balanced, lack scope and intellectual seasoning. They feel hollow and flat. Once you have read them, you are none the wiser and wonder what all the fuss was about.

The last criterion, specific to this undertaking, is interna­tional compatibility. None of the novels selected is culture specific. Even though some of them have an important Thai cultural dimension, this Thai texture can be translated, with the help of the odd footnote, in such a way that foreign readers can still relate to the stories without missing a quiver of the local bamboo mouth organ (notice I didn’t write khaen).

There is, however, a small body of very good but culture-specific novels which defy translation or even transposition and which I had to reject. This is the case for example of “Bun­luea” ’s Suratnaree, published in 1971, a fantasy which tells of an island-state in which women hold power and men are relegated to women’s traditional duties save child-bearing. To readers familiar with Thai cultural mores, it is a very funny, thought-provoking satire of male-dominated society, but it would be meaningless to outsiders without a surfeit of learned footnotes which would spoil reading pleasure.

Another example is Jao Jan Phom Horm, which I would translate as “Lady Jane of the fragrant mane” to respect the spirit if not the letter of the title. Written by “Marla Kham­jan” [Mala Kamchan] and crowned by the 1991 SEA Write* award, this short but difficult novel written in sonorous prose tells the story of a northern Thai princess who makes a pilgrimage through the jungle to Burma’s Golden Rock to decide which of her two lovers she will betroth. This highly literary exercise is written in a mixture of Thai and northern Thai dialect (the text is littered with linguistic footnotes) and all along plays on central and northern Thai myths and legends. This amazing cultural maze defies transposition in another language – though I understand one learned dare­dev­il is attempting a French version of it*.

 

The twenty novels presented here are extremely varied in form, content, atmosphere and import, and by and large mir­ror the richness and ebullience of the Thai novel, which is still in its adolescence.

The first part of the anthology provides a bird’s-eye view of today’s literary environment – or rather lack thereof – as well as a brief presentation of Thai classical literature and of each of the twenty novels, from a social, political and literary perspective. Fiction is not produced in a vacuum: every novel is a result of and contribution to literary history and has its own way of reflecting both the personality of the author and socio-political realities at the time of writing.

To write a comprehensive history of the Thai novel was not my purpose. There are dozens of minor masters out there whose novels would be instructive to appraise and take apart; some writers have had an influence in the world of letters out of proportion with the quality of their works; lit­erary schools and groups have come and gone, not necessa­rily in step with historical changes – but to record all this in some detail would have meant at least another tome, which might not be of great interest outside of Thai studies.

It was only once I was done selecting and putting these novels into perspective that I was struck by two facts: one is that a whole generation of good novelists has gone missing. I did not engineer the disappearance or rather the literary mediocrity of authors born between 1921 and the end of the Second World War – a string of “paternalist” field mar­shals saw to that, so much the pity. Maybe there is a lesson here for all to ponder. The other is that, contrary to a fashionable feeling in Thai literary circles these days, the contemporary novel is neither dead nor moribund: nine major works have been born in the last fourteen years, appearing almost on a yearly basis, and there is no compelling reason to fear that the well is about to dry up.

The second part of the anthology presents each of the twenty novels, with a brief biography of the author, a sum­mary of the plot laced with short extracts to wet readers’ appetites, and a brief critical assessment of each work to show its social relevance, main strengths and shortcomings. In writing the biographies of dead novelists, I have had to depend on existing documentation, which is abundant on celebrated authors but scarce and vague on others who have long been ignored or neglected. Hence differences in treatment which are all too obvious and regrettable.

The two parts of this anthology can be read indepen­dent­ly, as can each book section in the second part. So do browse around by all means! As this is not an academic work, I have dispensed with a bibliography, but all the books I have found useful are duly mentioned in footnotes. The back issues of two defunct literary magazines, Loak Nangsue (Book world) and Thanon Nangsue (Book lane), and of one ongoing one, Writer Magazine, have been of parti­cu­lar use, including as a source of most of the photographic portraits of writers on which the sketches illustrating this book are based.

The translation of all the excerpts are my own, except one, “Nikhom Raiyawa” [Rayawa]’s High banks heavy logs (Taling Soong Sung Nak), for which I used and very slightly edited Richard Laird’s excellent version*.

This brings me to the sorry topic of translation into English – not to mention other languages I know nothing about, such as German and Japanese, which seem to have welcomed a greater body of Thai fiction than English.

 

Thai literature, and more specifically the Thai novel, has been very unlucky in terms of exposure to the outside world. Despite the massive presence of Westerners on Thai soil for the past forty years or so, few have become fluent enough in the vernacular to read Thai fiction with discerning pleasure and fewer still have felt the need to share their enthusiasm with fellow English speakers.

As a result, besides a handful of collections of short stories, less than ten novels have ever been translated into English. It is only in recent years that two good translations of excellent novels have seen the light of day*. As for the rest, either the novels that were well translated were far from outstanding** or those that were outstanding were maimed in translation***. At the time, the few thousand expatriates who were able to lay their hands on these Eng­lish versions were so grateful that they existed at all that they closed their eyes to their short­comings, but the world at large may be forgiven for thinking that there is no such thing as good Thai literature.

By publishing accurate literary translations of Thailand’s top twenty novels, Thai Modern Classics hopes to change such a perception.

Because these translations are meant to be read primarily for enjoyment by people who may not even know where Thailand is located – left of Vietnam, man, below China’s paunch – I have opted to use as few words in Thai as possible and keep footnotes to the bare minimum. These novels are rich enough in local colour without having to doll them up with allegedly untranslatable terms for cheap effect unmeant by the author. So, words used to designate people (ai, ee, yai, noo, phor, mae, phee, nong and the like), which are so much part of the way the Thai express them­selves but tell nothing to outsiders, have been and will be deleted as a matter of course (or translated in a roundabout way whenever possible), and titles of nobility will be trans­lated with rough equivalents on an ad hoc basis.

 

Thai titles of royalty and nobility Δ

 

Thai royal lineage fades out over five or four generations, from Jaofa (Crown Prince[ss], child of a king) and Phra Ong Jao (child of a king born of a minor wife or concubine; also, child of a Jao Fa, hence grand­child of a king), Morm Jao (child of a Phra Ong Jao [Mom Chao or MC]) to Morm Rarchawong (MR) and Morm Luang (ML). Future generations are allowed to add na ... (na Ayutthaya, na Songkhla...) to their sur­name to denote royal origins. All of the above titles translate as Prince or Princess. The children of a prince and a commoner (addressed as Morm) lose one rank.

Titles of nobility, which were created in the mid-15th century, were abolished in 1932. They were, by descending order of importance: Jao Phraya, Phraya, Phra, Luang, Khun, Muern, Phan and Thanai. Rough European equivalents would be Duke, Marquess, Earl or Count, Vis­count, Baron, Baronet and Knight. These titles were bestowed accord­ing to the importance of the administrative office held. Unlike European feudal titles, they were not hereditary and could be revoked at the king’s pleasure. All titles came with land, 8 000 acres for a prince, 4 000 for a Jao Phraya, down to 10 acres for a commoner. At the end of the 19th century, government officials began receiving salaries instead of land.

 

Literary translation is a difficult exercise demanding probity and modesty on top of a good command of both languages involved. Traduttore, traditore. The Italians got it right: the translator is a traitor; to translate is to betray – to betray words and phrases in one language for different phrases and words in another, in the name of the higher loyalty due to the original meaning and to the original style. Each lan­guage has its own genius, its own way of com­posing a sen­tence, its own idioms, colloquialisms, etc, and a certain amount of gram­matical and syntactic manipulation is inev­itable to achieve a fair transmutation. But there are limits to what a translator is allowed to do, as his para­mount task is to stick to the original as much as possible. Literary translation is not a mere question of rendering the meaning accurately, as for any official or commercial document: it is also a crucial ques­tion of style. Real writers are style-conscious and agon­ise over the right word and the right rhythm, and they are entitled to a faithful rendition, which seldom goes word-for-word, of course, but should not extend to the complete re­writing some translators try to pass off as “creative” translation.

The only creativity I know in translation is in sticking to the original phrasing as much as possible and yet managing to produce a text that flows like the original but does not sound translated – that does not smell of milk and butter, as the Thai say. It is a craftsman’s labour of love, not the legerdemain of a failed creator squatting over someone else’s text. And it is the only approach that allows not just the tough yet manageable performance of one translator translating one novel with one style but the damn near impos­sible exploit of one translator translating twenty different novels with twenty different styles. How success­ful I have been in such a foolhardy undertaking is for readers to judge.

 

A quarter century ago, my mentor Claude Julien, then editor of Le Monde diplomatique, a man and a professional for whom I have the greatest admiration and respect, used to teach us, cub