The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Te... Book

It's great to see someone addressing themselves at this kind of length to literary theory – although this is not really a book of ‘Theory’, but rather a long working-out of the author's feelings about style, what it is, and how well it can be translated. Thirlwell's survey takes in a fairly standard timeline of the European canon, tracing innovations in narrative voice more or less from Sterne to Nabokov, taking in Joyce and Kafka and Tolstoy and Gombrowicz on the way, and glorying in the random connections and coincidences which link them.

It's described by the author not as a long essay, but as a novel whose characters are works of literature. But it's not, it's definitely a long essay – although one of its central ideas is the notion that narrative coherence does not come from the plot, but rather by building up related themes.

Thirlwell has some good things to say about the universality of style, and he comes into his own when discussing translation – the impossibility of doing it perfectly, and yet the undeniable, perhaps troubling, fact that an author's style can come through even the most inept translation. A central thesis is this conviction that ‘an author's style is not identical to the language in which it takes form’, and the implications of this on the question of where, exactly this thing called ‘style’ resides, are fully explored.

In my view he's bang on in his dismantling of Nabokov's famously strict views on how translation should be done, and he's also sensitive to the dangers involved with modern translations of older works.

It is the problem that, oddly, many translations begin to sound like each other, consistently awkward, poised between the contemporary and the old-fashioned. And this creates the strange dialect in which many translations are written – a hybrid, impossible language.

And yet there is an irony here which got in the way of my enjoyment of the book. Simply, Thirlwell's own style resembles nothing more than the ‘translationese’ he mocks here. His prose can be admirably clear and lucid at its best – but at its worst, the careful explanations can start to seem a bit condescending. He has a habit of hopping to a new paragraph for each new thought explained in short, conjunction-led sentences:

But I am not so sure about this.

And I like this story.

But I am not so sure that Mallarmé was quite as clever as Joyce.

And so on. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't – personally I began to find it a bit grating.

But that is probably just griping. It's great to see someone prepared to write a work of such personal enthusiasm, and even better, perhaps, to see that publishers are prepared to put it out. It's full of great literary anecdotes and thoughtful reflections on what makes a great writer great, on a sentence-by-sentence level.