Зимá

It happens with translations from the Russian, the Japanese, the Hungarian, the Danish, and probably it would happen with readings in other languages with which I am not really acquainted (the readings I mean, and the writers). One can find beautiful translations to Spanish or English from the Italian or the French -Anthony Bower's translation of Camus' The Rebel is just invigorating-, as if the works could have been written just in one or another code. The translations from Murakami, Ishiguro, Ogawa are a different concept: the river behind the story seems agitated, cold and profound, but the translated sentences are so simple and innocent that the discourse seems almost implausible. Just a pity to miss so much. A terrible lost, like drinking good wine in a glass of milk. The great Russians' translations, all of the same are, often, poor wraps of a shiny treasure, unfortunately. A doubtless shame it was, but I rushed to finish Dostoyevsky's The Gambler in Spanish, and left Notes from the Underground in English. Did not have better luck with whatever Gogol or Puskin I tried. My inability to read Chejov is quite painful. And the same with all the Greeks, Aristophanes, Euripides, just painful. Ibsen is a great under-known. Ulitskaya's powerful Women's Lies was soiled by something missing in Spanish. Translations from the German sometimes does not help at all, and that includes Kafka's The Metamorphosis or Hesse's Steppenwolf.

States of mind apart, I found the translation of Maria Szijj and Gonzalez Trevejo to Spanish of Sándor Márai's Szabadulas quite in the same terms. I mean the translation, which impoverishes the recollection of the story, blurs the focus and gets the scalpel blunt. The story is impressive, though -terrible rather than "beautiful", as some La Stampa has said of it. The final turn, dropping a heavy shadow of ambiguity about the rape of the girl by an unknown solider, who hardly speaks and is dead with a shot on his head a few instants later, is breath-taken. A wave of destruction sweeps the basements and hide-outs of Budapest for a few months with an apotheosis of inhumanity during the last days of the siege. The wave leaves the war-ground flat and a death trail; hopelessness or delusion float in the air, only to escape up presumably soon like columns of smoke.

During the scene of Erzsébet with the Russian soldier, out of madness and desperation, she does all the talk. The girl who serves as stream for the story finally turns out not to be the heroine that a conventional tale might have required. Instead, the story leaves her behind, mad and wronged. The reader is lifted away from the hopeless scenario, like a camera would move upwards as the frozen last photograph would fade out and merge into the credits and the soundtrack.

Only a few words the soldier says: "niemetsky", "poniemaio", "sibirien". And "zimá", Зимá, the vast frozen and barren land of the Russian winter. The Hungarians have a similar word for the same. K., 32, says that he last heard it when he was a kid. Makes sense: the novel was published in 2000, but written in 1945. That word, the cold, the final passages, all made an impression on me. Is there any better word to describe the current situation in Europe?

Зимá.

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