The Language Barrier

The Bridge over the Drina by Ivan "Ivo" Andrić (Cyrillic: Иво Андрић) is the reading filling in the time between getting up, going back to bed, the few chores and the time I'm allowed out into society in between. It comes from talking to a Serbian person whose enthusiasm for some of my enthusiasms led me to look up the Nobel Prize winner they mentioned. I'm not convinced Ivo Andrić is the one they meant, whether he counts as Serbian, Bosnian or Yugoslavian or which side one should properly be on but I was glad to get it right when I said President Tito did well in the circumstances.

The bridge is naturally the main character in The Bridge over the Drina in the long time span of the narrative with the many characters, empires, conflicts and ordinary lives that take place on or around it. It's easy to see it as the representative of that which remains, impassive and enduring, while humanity wars and flounders in between the intervals of peace and prosperity and that's what life's like, isn't it. There is much to like in the characters he captures, whether as portraits of unforgiving despotism, victims of it or those who somehow get by but they come and go and are minor compared to the bridge which is an obvious symbol for lots of things to do with connection.

But it's a translation and one is only ever being given one angle of what it's like in the original. It might seem much more so in poetry that is allegedly 'heightened' language but I don't see why prose should be accorded second class status only because poetry regards itself as something a class apart

It would be insular and unforgiveably narrow-minded to only read books in one's own language but it's not possible to appreciate work properly in translation however much the translator brings to it. I suspect The Bridge over the Drina is better than what I'm making of it but there's no way I can tell.

Still, next up will be Dead-End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto. It's hard to believe the title in Japanese is any better than it is in English. What I'm going to do is try to find the title in Japanese, send it to my friend there and see how they translate it.