John Crowley - The Translator

A novel of tremendous scope and beauty, The Translator tells of the relationship between an exiled Russian poet and his American translator during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when a writer's words -- especially forbidden ones -- could be powerful enough to change the course of history.

Comment: I added this book to my reading list back in 2016 but I can't tell anymore exactly why I thought this would be a book I'd like to read. It probably had something to do with the main character being a translator, which I am too, and that it implied a romance of sorts, which tends to be my preferable choice of reading.

In this book, which I'd label fiction and literature, we have the story of Christa Malone, an impressionable young woman who is telling us how she used to know and loved the Russian poet Falin at a time America was under the soviet threat and was dealing with crises with the Cuban missiles.

Christa is studying at the college where exiled Falin is teaching and in the midst of having long conversations about translation and literature, they start to care for each other and later on, when Christa is no longer his student, they see to embark on a discreet love affair. The problem is that politics is everywhere and the idea of the soviets spying and helping the Cubans doesn't settle well into American authorities which also have their own spies...

Well, this wasn't certainly what I expected. I imagined this would go more along the lines of a classical romance type of story with the historical and political aspects in the background. I also imagined the translation side of things would be much more obvious and important for the overall plot. The title, after all, seemed to stress that out a lot but after finishing the book maybe that wasn't the best title.

What this book turned out to be was a story that was heavier on the literature details (both in prose and vagueness) than in the fiction department (too many real life historical facts to let your mind wander). This wasn't a bad book for me, though - I actually liked several parts of it and was positively surprised by the imagination to create the fictional poetry included and the beauty of some passages captivated me too.

I just think I was led to believe this would go a certain way and then it was not. I can't explain why this happens so much to me, to think wrongly about what the books are about. Can it be that I am that picky so often?

I've studied translation at the university and although that isn't my full time job I still work in it as a freelance. I like this world and the ideas behind any translation process. Therefore, and with that title, I did imagine this would be more important to the story but sadly, it was not because although it was a convenient tool to approach the main characters and make them spend more time together not only falling in love bus debating poetry and feelings too, it just didn't add much to the action or the character's personalities.

I felt this book was more focused on Christa, the main character. She is a translator yes but that's not what the book is centered in.

Christa seems to be the driving force behind everything, she is an older woman when she story starts and she thinks about her life when she was younger when she met professor Falin and she thinks about the time they were together until he disappeared. On one hand, this is intriguing because it offers the reader the chance to follow different moments in time and the story gets richer but ti can also be confusing as I didn't notice any obvious change between times except the information we were given regarding each specific time but only when characters were interacting.

The political content is interesting because one can place it in time and there is documentation on it but because it "stole" so much attention from the fictional plot, I felt the book as a whole wasn't as consistent and there were often some boring parts to go through.

The prose the author used is often beautiful and evocative. The poetry, like I said, is as well. But everything together isn't always easy to read, there are too many things to read between the lines and yes, that can be the challenge at the same time as the goal of the book but with the amount of vagueness in the air, I don't think there was any conclusion nor closure to be had. The end is obviously artistically done for a literary work but after investing in the characters and their feelings, I kind of expected to be privy to some more information instead of just assumptions.

All things considered, this was good but not as good as I imagined when I started. It was still a good way to get to know a bit about a new author to me, even if I hesitate to read something by him again.

Grade: 6/10