I remember when I first started traveling abroad, if French
people realized I was an American interested in books, they wanted to tell me
how much they admired and enjoyed the novels of Chester Himes. “Chester who?” I
would ask. Well, it may be that Chester Himes is a writer we should all know
more about—he was an African American mystery writer of the 1950s and 60s,
totally unknown to me or any of my acquaintances. In France, he was one of the
most famous American novelists. It’s true, Himes wrote about race relations at
a time when few were taking on that subject: “All that tight, crazy feeling of
race as thick in the streets as gas fumes. Every time I stepped outside I saw a
challenge I had to accept or ignore.” (from If
He Hollers Let Him Go). But even if Himes deserves a closer look, he’s no
Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston. So why was Himes so popular in France?
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| Chester Himes |
French readers also all seem to know authors of the Beat
Generation, especially Jack Kerouac. But very few are aware of most of the
terrific poets and novelists in the U.S. since the Beats.
Similarly, readers in the U.S.A. and all over the world are
fascinated with Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez is one of my favorite
novelists, too—Love in the Time of
Cholera is right near the top of my all-time list. But there are other
equally deserving classics in El Boom, the wave of magical realist writers, books
that don’t seem to attract as large a following—novels such as Mario Vargas
Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral and
Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango;
or Julio Cortázar’s stellar collection of short stories, All Fires the Fire. I believe that their reputations will equal
Márquez’s novels in the long run.
Haruki Murakami, also a big favorite of mine, has millions
of readers worldwide. But other Japanese authors such as Kenzaburo Oe, who,
unlike Murakami, has actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature; or the poet
Yosano Akiko, author of 50,000 tanka poems, are relatively unknown outside
their own countries.
Why do certain writers attract readers in other countries,
and others do not? Some of it may have to do with having a connection to a
particular country. Chester Himes, for instance, moved to France in the 1950s,
and he had the advantage of being able to publicize his books on the ground in
that country. Jack Kerouac’s ancestors came from Brittany (the name “Kerouac”
is like “Smith” in the Celtic region of Northwestern France), but I don’t think
that’s the key to his success in the land of Sartre and de Beauvoir. There is
something about Kerouac’s spirit of adventure and vitality that says “American”
with a capital “A” to people in other countries, similar to the way that
cowboys and gangsters do.
Haruki Murakami is immersed in the popular culture of the
U.S. and Western Europe, even naming one of his novels after a Beatles song,
“Norwegian Wood.” That might explain part of why readers in the West find his
work so accessible, even though his books are mostly set in Japan, and even though his novels often shades into fantasy, which only a small minority of
English-language novels do. But why is Murakami one of the ten top-selling
foreign authors in Mainland China? True, he’s a terrific writer, funny,
thought-provoking, moving, willing to take on the status quo and business as usual.
Well, O.K., I think I just explained his global popularity to my own satisfaction.
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| Haruki Murakami |
It does seem to me that certain writers just translate
better into other cultures, maybe because they play off the stereotype that we
have of those cultures in a complex way. Love
in the Time of Cholera is about a passionate, Latin lover, but Márquez
takes that stereotype and inflates it so much it explodes into thousands of
fragments, into meandering sentences that each has a life of its own. Kerouac’s
On the Road takes place in the wide-open
spaces of North America where the cowboys toted six-shooters and the buffalo
roamed, but his bebop descriptions of the West in the 1950s create a new
American myth that seems more applicable to our time. Haruki Murakami's characters refuse the image of the Japanese “salaryman” and stay-at-home woman and become instead existential heroes who buck the system, almost in spite of themselves. It’s these new turns on the old national and regional clichés that make these books accessible but still eye-opening for cultures
outside the ones that give rise to them.
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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging.
Order in the USA Order in the UK
Zack’s most recent translation:
The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
