The winning titles and translators for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards were announced on Friday, April 29, at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. In fiction, the award went to Thomas Teal’s translation from the Swedish of Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver.

Jeff Waxman of the BTBA fiction committee describes Jansson’s most recent English-language publication as “a slender and modern novel about the relationship of two women in a small Scandinavian fishing community: one is cold, practical, and brutally honest; the other is an older, infantile children’s book illustrator. As the story unfolds in Jansson’s simple, understated prose, Katri Kling strives to provide a home and perhaps a livelihood for her younger brother; Anna Aemelin wants only to live life with her eyes closed, insulated by her money and her art. This panel found itself engrossed as their relationship grew tense and aggressive and their fields of battle expanded from Aemelin’s household finances to Katri’s brother and her pet dog. Subtle, engaging and disquieting, The True Deceiver is a masterful study in opposition and confrontation.”

NYRB Classics also publishes Fair Play and The Summer Book by Tove Jansson and translated by Thomas Teal.

I’m nothing
Says Kabir
I’m not among the living
Or the dead

It is true, in a way—true at least that next to nothing is known about Kabir, a mysterious figure from medieval North India who is one of the world’s great religious poets. During his life, which is said to have extended for well over a hundred years, Kabir was celebrated as a poet and as a sant, or holy man, and many legends, some as unlikely as his reputed lifespan, have grown up around his name. It is generally accepted, however, that he came from a low-caste Hindu family that had recently converted to Islam and that he was a weaver—someone, in other words, very much on the outside of good society. Kabir’s songs have come down to us both through a number of written sources—none, however, that can be traced to Kabir’s hand—as well as through a lively, extensive, and very varied tradition of oral performance, and they continue to be sung in the fields and on the streets of India. Some of the songs are otherworldly, others are biting send-ups of the world and its ways, while Kabir’s God is a shapeshifter whose only true and always unseizable form is the form prepared within the heart of the true devotee. In Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s wonderful new translation, Kabir’s work takes on a startling and unforgettable new shape in the English of our time.

    From Dante to Dickinson, from Han Shan to Hopkins, religion and poetry have been close, if often uncomfortable, companions. Why? Religion, like poetry, you could say, is nothing if it is not a form of realism. (No doubt this is why both are so attractive to frauds.) Religion is preoccupied with first and last things, birth and copulation and death, as it is, too, with the ongoing war of hope and despair within the individual and in the world at large. Religion poses questions of good and evil that reason parses with difficulty, if at all. As to poetry, its realism is to pay particular attention to the difficult business that all our meanings and feelings are entangled in words. As Kabir says,

Except that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without
And impossible to live with,
Speech diminishes you….
Strike [a pot] that is full,
Says Kabir, and hear the silence.

The lines are as matter-of-fact as mystical, and they go to the heart of Kabir’s riddling genius, invoking silence the better to violate it, so transforming both speech and silence into the uncertain quantity of song.

    Paradox is central to Kabir’s vision. Mehrotra’s selection starts out with a series of so-called “upside-down poems”:

What is this untellable tale about?
The ogress and the dog make bedroom eyes;
The big cat prowls the jungle;
In my family of five, all hell breaks loose.
Led by drum-beating rabbits, a herd
Of antelopes mounts an attack….

What indeed is this about? Beginning in a state of bewilderment, Kabir’s work explodes in questions. Negatives abound:

Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qur’an
Will teach you this….

Elsewhere he says,

My home…
Is where there’s no day, no night,
And no holy book in sight

To squat on our lives.

He is no less questioning of rites and observances, whether conventional or unconventional:

If going naked
Brought liberation,
The deer of the forest
Would attain it first.

And he dismisses the powerful with withering scorn:

“Me shogun.”
“Me bigwig.”
“Me the chief’s son.
I make the rules here.”

It’s a load of crap.
Laughing, skipping,
Tumbling, they’re all
Headed for Deathville.

    There is at times something almost nihilistic about Kabir’s assault on worldly forms. Certainly he is much possessed by death. And yet he never rejects the world itself (presented with the prospect of going to paradise, he responds, “I’m okay where I am…./Spare me the trip.”), and his poems are as full of yearning as they are of savage mockery. Seeking union with the divine, Kabir’s voice attains a wry and poignant intimacy:

If we’re still strangers
To each other, who’s
 
To blame? Did I
Blunder or did you
 
Never know
What a heart desired?
 
One could go on.
Enough, my Lord.
 
Invite me over, says Kabir,
Or come over yourself.

    As I hope my quotations here suggest, Mehrotra has invited Kabir over into a vigorously individual English, bitter and salty and sweet and utterly free of the bland music of so many contemporary versions of “spiritual” texts from the Psalms to Rumi and Rilke. Mehrotra’s Kabir is never ingratiating. His poetry is as starkly convincing as that of his near contemporary, the jailbird Francois Villon. Poet and translator meet across the centuries to call in question the way we live now and to urge us to take the risk of revelation. And then we are left to our own devices. After all,

The yogi’s a solitary
 
You can’t meet him.
He’s left the country
We’re citizens of
And he’s not coming back

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

Songs of Kabir
Selected and translated from the Hindi by
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Preface by Wendy Doniger

L. J. Davis was a remarkable writer with a caustic sensibility that was very much his own. He was also a true character, scabrously funny and perfectly free of false piety. NYRB was lucky to publish his novel A Meaningful Life, one of the best books about not just New York but America in the strange decade of the 1970s, when the country lost its post-World War II optimism once and for all. I hope L.J. wrote down his wonderful and oft-told story about flooring (literally) a drunken George W. Bush. As far as I know it doesn’t make an appearance in Decision Points.—Edwin Frank, Editor, NYRB Classics

Join NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank as he moderates a conversation between Robert Walser translators Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky on Wednesday, April 6th at 1PM. $10 includes a bratwrust lunch.

The Swiss Institute
495 Broadway 3rd Floor
New York, NY

Christopher Middleton translated Walser’s Jakob von Gunten and Selected Stories. Susan Bernofsky is translating Berlin Stories, which will be published in November 2011.

The Swiss Institute is an innovative international venue for art that provides a forum for cultural dialogue between Switzerland, Europe, and the United States.

Sophia Jansson, the niece of the late Tove Jansson and the chairman of Oy Moomin Characters, Ltd, will speak about her famous aunt in conversation with Thomas Teal, translator of Jansson’s novels, and Aili Flint, the head of Columbia University’s Finnish Studies Program. Tuomas Hiltunen will moderate the panel and actors Taina Elg and Heli Sirviö will perform short, dramatic readings from the novels. Ambassador Ritva Jolkkonen, Consul General of Finland in New York, will introduce the evening.

Scandinavia House
58 Park Avenue
New York City
Free and Open to the Public
Reception Immediately Following the Program
Reservations recommended.
Call 212.847.9740 or email event_reservation@amscan.org
~ ~ ~And, in April, don’t miss translator Thomas Teal at Harvard Bookstore where he will speak about translating Tove Jansson’s works from the original Swedish.

Friday, April 8, 2011; 3 p.m.
Harvard Bookstore
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 661–1515

Tove Jansson’s novels, The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, and Fair Play, are published in the NYRB Classics series.