I recently read Négar Djavadi’s much-praised novel Disoriental (translated by Tina Kover from the French Désorientale); I can see why people like it, but it didn’t work for me in my present literary mood — it’s an awkward combination of family saga, coming-of-age story, and history lesson (Djavadi clearly wants to educate ignorant westerners about the Iran her family escaped from). As I wrote Lizok:
It reminded me somewhat of Ulitskaya’s Веселые похороны, with its stifling atmosphere of winking complicity (“we all know people like this, don’t we, and we all do these wacky things?”). And the writing is so stodgy and earnest, with long lumbering passages about what people are like (and she seems to think all Japanese are the same, all Flemish people, all Parisians, etc. etc.). I have the feeling it’s heavily autobiographical, and the author doesn’t have nearly enough distance. I’m not sorry I read it, mind you, I learned about some parts of Paris I wasn’t familiar with (and learned that Parisians still call the place Léon Blum “place Voltaire,” even though that hasn’t been its name for decades, much like New Yorkers and Sixth Avenue) and got to familiarize myself a bit with Brussels, but still, not my favorite book.
But what brings it to LH are the footnotes. (Yes, that sentence reads poorly from the standpoint of school grammar, but it sounds right and that’s how I would say it.) Back in 2008 michael farris wrote:
I dislike footnotes in fiction, the wordier, more explanatory the worse.
That said, I’m less likely to find them intrusive if it’s for a US edition of a anglophone novel (sort of like quicombo for a brazilian reader).
But in translated fiction (or English fiction set in a non-English speaking environment) they rankle. I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case, but it is for me.
I don’t feel that way about footnotes in general, but in this case I am in total agreement. Here’s the first (there are quite a few scattered through the book):
¹ To make things easier for you and save you the trouble of looking it up on Wikipedia, here are a few facts: Mazandaran is a province in northern Iran, 9,151 square miles in area. Bounded by the Caspian Sea and surrounded by the Alborz mountain range, it is the only Persian region to have resisted Arab-Muslim hegemony and was, in fact, the last to become Muslim. To imagine it, you have to picture the lush landscapes of Annecy, Switzerland, or Ireland—green, misty, rainy. Legend has it that when they first arrived in Mazandaran, the Muslims cried, “Oh! We have reached Paradise!”
I’m sorry, but that’s just lazy and (I can’t think of a better word) unprofessional. If the information is vital in context, work it into the text; if it’s not, let the interested reader look it up. That’s what Wikipedia is for!
Footnotes in fiction and other non-academic writing:
1. I generally don’t care for them.
2. Exception to the rule- Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, (Memoir) which I read in badly bound paperback, around 1968. Going from very old memory here, so take this as a paraphrase rather than a quotation. When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I wrote a novel called The Naked and the Dead*
Seeing the asterisk, and being of an undergraduate academic leaning, I glanced down to the bottom of the page. When I saw the monosyllabic footnote, I started to chortle, then guffaw so hard I nearly lost my grip on the subway strap. The other riders must have thought I was a lunatic.
*Yes
Mailer may have written something about the war while an undergraduate, but the novel drew heavily on his army experience.
From Wikipedia:
“Hoping to gain a deferment from service, Mailer argued that he was writing an “important literary work” that pertained to the war. The deferral was denied, and Mailer was forced to enter the Army. After training at Fort Bragg, he was stationed in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry.
When asked about his war experiences, he said that the army was “the worst experience of my life, and also the most important”. While in Japan and the Philippines, Mailer wrote to his wife Bea almost daily, and these approximately 400 letters became the foundation of The Naked and the Dead. He drew on his experience as a reconnaissance rifleman for the central action of the novel: a long patrol behind enemy lines.”
That’s great! Yes, I think footnotes can work beautifully in fiction if treated right, but that includes “not used simply to convey Wikipedia information.”
And you’ve just inspired me to dig out my ancient Berkley Medallion paperback of the Mailer ($1.25; 3rd printing, 1970) and finally give it a try.
Footnotes were used wonderfully as a literary device in Kiss of the Spider Woman.
(And I am not mentioning Pale Fire.)
Yeah, Pale Fire is a thing unto itself.
Hey, _Pale Fire_ doesn’t have footnotes, it has endnotes. Totally different.
I assume kayfabe footnotes, as in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, are exempt from any deprecation of footnotes in fiction.
Potentially amusing literary game: take some L2 text,, probably well known, public domain, short, and with multiple existing L1 translations. Produce a new L1 translation, but with copious footnotes from the putative translator, who is in effect the protagonist of an implicit meta fiction.
Has this been done already?
But the cited footnote cannot be a part of Wikipedia, it’s too personal. Could have been just a part of the text, maybe.
I just learned that nobody has any idea about the etymology of the word kayfabe.
But the cited footnote cannot be a part of Wikipedia, it’s too personal.
Nobody said it was literally a part of Wikipedia; it’s a reworking by the author of Wikipedia-style information, with a fillip of personal commentary. Most of the footnotes are like that. Here are a couple more:
The aim, as you can see, is simply to provide background information with a bit of flair.
Look, I haven’t read the book and what I am doing now is “debating the taste of oysters with those who eats them”. It might be a very boring book, but a good place for “background information with a bit of flair” is exactly in footnotes. The idea is that you don’t need to read them, but you can if you don’t want a serious immersion into the subject and like the author’s style. Anyway, my point wasn’t that you are wrong about poor quality of the footnotes (I do not eat oysters), but that they really not just chunks of background info.
“Mazandaran”
If also has Hyrcanian Forest not to be confused with Hercynian Forest:)
I dunno. I love footnotes. In scientific articles I sometimes (less often) can’t understand why some bit which is short and clearly belongs to the main text was expelled in a footnote, other times I feel desperate because the article contains a lot of information (but still grateful).
In fiction I just love them.
This one is somewhat Wikipedoid though (area of Mazandaran).
Can the problem be that when it is not the translator who added them (as is usually the case in Soviet editions) you Feel Obliged to read them?
If you mean are instead of is, that’s interesting because it’s how German does it.
Yeah, these definitely belong in the main text.
It’s cultural. Historical linguists seem to expect footnotes of each other. Biology journals often don’t even allow footnotes.
(I once put a whole paragraph into parentheses in a paper of mine, possibly for this reason.)
If you mean are instead of is, that’s interesting because it’s how German does it.
Yes, I do, and I’m glad to know German backs me up!
On the footnotes: I’m not surprised they work for other people (as I say, the book is popular and much-lauded); they just don’t work for me.
What about “the wages of sin is death”? Does this represent some nuance of the Greek? A Yoda-esque complement–copula–subject ordering?
What about “the wages of sin is death”? Does this represent some nuance of the Greek?
There is no “copula” in the Greek: τὰ γὰρ ὀψώνια τῆς ἁμαρτίας θάνατος. I suppose that would nowadays be called zero copulation. If there’s a nuance, it’s zero.
OED s.v. wage 2.b.ii.
So tithes too. Huh.
“Historical linguists seem to expect footnotes of each other.”
True, but sometimes it gets inserted into the main text’s flow in my head – and thus the effect of the note is disruptive.
PS Hurrah! I accidentally typed it on the keyboard into which I spilled some tea today (just a drop. It has slits (the designers are [censored]) for LEDs, instead of little windows of transparent plastic, so everything spilled on that part of the keyboard lands right on that tiny electonic board) and which was drying. And it works.
kayfabe
i’ve always assumed it was just “fake”, put through some local variation of whatever we call the category of word-manipulation games/slang – specifically one that combines the inversion i know from pig-latin (my dialect would give “akefay”), and the interpellation i know from obbie-gobbie (my dialect would give “fokabe”). but i don’t have evidence, let alone a citation.
Annecy, Switzerland, or Ireland
i don’t have issues with footnotes in fiction per se, or even with informational ones if they’re a running thread throughout the text, but i do have – probably gratuitously cranky – issues with this kind of list. annecy is a lovely town, but it is not the same kind or scale of place as switzerland or ireland (which themselves are not necessarily the same kind of place, if we take “ireland” as the island rather than the truncated present republic). if the point is illustration, i want examples that are parallel! (or interestingly skew!) i mean, what’s next, “the snowy streets of ottawa, denmark, and svalbard”, “the homey aromas of nutmegs, masalas, and flowers”?
the homey aromas of nutmegs, masalas, and flowers
That would pass for wine critic prose. In fact, all good wine simile lists should have one item startlingly out of place, like “elderberry, seville orange, cantaloupe, and formaldehyde”.
When I read “Annecy, Switzerland, or Ireland” I idly assumed that Annecy was a town in Switzerland – indeed, Google Maps shows it’s not far away – and that there might conceivably be another Annecy in Ireland (rather less likely). That is, I thought it was two places, not three. Allowing me to think that looks like bad writing, at least to my far-from-impartial eye and ear.
It would make perfect sense to write “Portland, Maine, or Oregon” or “Charleston, South Carolina, or West Virginia”, if you are referring in each case to two different cities with the same name in different states. (Whether either should have the second comma is a good question.)
“which themselves are not necessarily the same kind of place,”
I think the idea was that Mazandaran itself is diverse. It includes sea shore, plains and a mountain range (with increaced rainfall) along it, so I imagine there are all sorts of landscapes there.
It can be an intentionally clumsy parallel (where the clumsiness is meant to be an explicit reference to limatitions of parallels). I’m not sure if it is so good as a literary device, but I do such things sometimes, mechanically, simply because I don’t want to mislead anyone. Usually I do not expect listeners to realise that I’m doing it on purpose, I think they think I’m just clumsy. But I can’t be sure what they think.
WP:
“The diverse natural habitats of the province include plains, prairies, forests and rainforest[11] stretching from the sandy beaches of the Caspian Sea to the rugged and snowcapped Alborz sierra,[12] including Mount Damavand, one of the highest peaks and volcanoes in Asia.”
“Mazandaran province is geographically divided into two parts: the coastal plains, and the mountainous areas. The Alborz Mountain Range surrounds the coastal strip and the plains abutting the Caspian Sea like a huge wall. Due to the prevailing sea breeze and local winds of the southern and eastern coasts of the Caspian Sea, sandy hills are formed, causing the appearance of a low natural barrier between the sea and plain. There is often snowfall in the Alborz regions, which run parallel to the Caspian Sea’s southern coast, dividing the province into many isolated valleys. The province enjoys a moderate, subtropical climate with an average temperature of 25 °C in summer and about 8 °C in winter. Although snow may fall heavily in the mountains in winter, it rarely falls at sea level.”
“Ecoregions:
• Caspian Hyrcanian mixed forests
• Elburz Range forest steppe”
[across the mountains, I think]
“The Elburz Range forest steppe ecoregion is an arid, mountainous 1,000-kilometer arc south of the Caspian Sea, stretching across northern Iran from the Azerbaijan border to near the Turkmenistan border. ”
[between the sea and the mountains, I think]
“The Caspian Hyrcanian mixed forests ecoregion, with its lush green mountainsides and plains that receive moisture from the Caspian Sea, forms this ecoregion’s northern border.”
Actually, the story is use to disrupt the idea of the Veiled Woman of the East is that of mine freind, an engineer, who went hiking, tried to climb a palm, fell down, broke her leg, was evacuated with a helicopter and in Tehran climbed a palm again (in plaster), this time successfully.
Not that this all is terribly impressive (she did impress me) but I just hope it is not fully in line with the idea of usual pasttime of veiled women of the east.
(I think Mazandaran must be one of interesting hiking locations)
@Y:
my favorite exponent of the genre, the Olde Mouldy, has closed and no longer has its menus online for me to direct you to, alas! it was a whisk(e)y bar with a capacity of 6, in the ice-machine closet of a larger pub in somerville, MA. it prided itself on insultingly small pours of booze that you would likely never have another chance to sample, at entirely appropriate but often startling prices. the proprietors, tania and nate, wrote tasting notes for the ever-evolving menu that were perfect imagist poems as well as startlingly accurate. i can’t remember what they wrote about either of the fernets i had there one night – one from the 1960s, one from mussolini’s day, with completely different tastes from each other and from contemporary fernet – but i had a no-longer-produced haitian rum that was deliciously true to their description, which included “seawater” and “burning tires”. but those (as well as some amazing armagnacs) were definitely the side attractions, next to the whisk(e)ys on offer.
What I find interesting is that a translation won the Lambda award (for bisexual literature), which means both the author and the translator won. Which is reminiscent of the situation with Hugo and Cixin Liu.
I don’t know how Lambda positions itself with respect to the English language, Hugo does pretend to “world” status and of course for a Russian who grew up mostly reading translated books their low popularity in the English-language market is very strange. But it (this limited popularity) results in greater appreciation of the work of translators.
Also the author left Iran in the same age as her character.
Which means her knowlege of the country differs from both Europeans and Iranians.
“Dalia Sofer …. criticized the lengthy descriptions of Iranian history, arguing the passages are “weighing down” the content[1]” say WP about its ref 1.
But I suppose they have to do with how the character (and the author) feels about Iran and herself.
a translation won the Lambda award (for bisexual literature), which means both the author and the translator won
Men have won Olympic medals as cox in the women’s eights rowing.