Pen World Voices Festival: Taking Crime Fiction Seriously
by Sarah Weinman on April 29, 2006
by Sarah Weinman
Boris Akunin is, as he put it to me on the elevator down to the lobby of his midtown hotel, “an accuracy freak.” The kind that tends to arrive at functions earlier than almost anyone else for fear of being late. It was a telling detail that proved especially so because a mix-up had pushed back the interview I’d just concluded with the internationally bestselling crime writer by fifteen minutes—enough time that he’d assumed I wouldn’t be showing up. (The results of the interview will appear on my main blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, at a later date.)
But because of the rush, the kind folks from PEN manning the hospitality booth let me hitch a ride with Akunin and Swedish novelist Henning Mankell on the way to their panel at the Italian Cultural Center. And as it turned out, being a fly on the wall - in the form of sitting in the front seat of the SUV and keeping my mouth shut and my ears open - as the two writers talked about the biz, politics and their previous meeting in Iceland proved more entertaining than much of the actual panel.
Things began rather inauspiciously because of various snafus that required emergency phone calls, email confirmations and much running up and down the steps of the Cultural Center, at the same time that a capacity crowd formed in the lobby of the 68th and Park building to jostle for whatever seats remained for the lecture. But eventually, photographer Mary Reagan and I found our seats and waited for the panel - which also included Temple University professor Lawrence Venuti, here in his capacity as the translator for Massimo Carlotto (the author wasn’t able to make it as scheduled) - to begin.
My heart sank when the moderator (whose name I regrettably didn’t catch) began by telling the panelists that they would be “exploring the nitty-gritty” of the crime fiction world. Then he said that what all their current books had in common was that they started off with a bang. And then, amazingly, the man took out a whistle and blew on it. Loudly. After that, I resigned myself to what I knew would be coming.
The good news was that the readings, conducted by yet someone else, were lively, if a bit overdone. The section from Carlotto’s THE GOODBYE KISS was especially overwrought but the reader relaxed more considerably with portions of Akunin’s and Mankell’s work. The bad news was that the moderator couldn’t come up with questions more scintillating than “where do you get your ideas?” and “how do you do your research?” That said, Akunin & Mankell handled the moderator’s vapid line of questioning (and his penchant for going on about stories relating to himself instead of addressing the panelists) reasonably well. When asked about how his fiction related to real life, Mankell revealed that his books had been used as investigation tools by Ecuadorean police detectives. Akunin, however, was always quick to decline any such requests. “Don’t take me for a detective,” he said, “For I deal in fairy tales.”
Mankell and Akunin’s earlier camaraderie showed through in a brief exchange brought on by a question about the nature of evil. Mankell said flatly that he’d never met anyone inherently evil, no matter how bad their misdeeds were. And if he should ever meet someone who was patently evil, he said, he’d shut himself in a room. “What kind of room?” Akunin asked. “One with all the books I have time to read!” And when the question of audience came up - specifically, how do the writers relate to their readers - the authors had fun regaling people with tales of mistake-spotting. Akunin visits an unofficial fan site devoted to his work every day where the message board topics focus predominantly on finding errors in the books. Some have been embarrassing - like giving one character three arms - but many times, the author was right. Mankell agreed, then revealed that in every book he’s written he always puts in one wrong detail. A detail that to date, not a single reader has ever spotted, even as they call him on other perceived mistakes…
Though the authors answered most of the questions, whether from the moderator or from the audience, Venuti had his say too, talking about his experience translating Carlotto’s work and giving a brief introduction of the kind of books the Italian author writes (specifically, ultra-noir books like THE GOODBYE KISS and a series featuring the ex-fugitive ‘Alligator’ who with his delightful team of criminally minded friends solves brutal crimes without any help from the police whatsoever. Alas, the books are only published in the UK.) Venuti also added that “internationally based crime novels address how writers deal with social issues in other cultures” and opens a window onto worlds North Americans are simply unused to seeing.
But it was only when an audience member asked about the author-translator relationship that the panel really got going. Though they didn’t exactly fight, the debate was spirited enough that it could have lasted for at least another hour. Essentially, Mankell voiced the opinion that a translator has to capture the author’s voice ("must convey a language that is mine,” in his words.) He’s rejected translations that, while letter-perfect, simply didn’t do that. Akunin agreed, saying that there were several candidates to translate his work into English but he chose Andrew Bromfield based on the sample he provided, not to mention his pedigree - fluent in Russian with a Russian wife. But Venuti, surprisingly, disagreed with the writers, essentially stating that a translation can only be one possible interpretation of the work in question and that there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” translation. When Mankell challenged him on this, saying that he could detect a bad translation, Venuti basically asked how this could be so - take the case of Mankell’s own translator, Stephen Murray, who had been contracted by the UK publisher Harvill and inserted Britishisms in the text. When Vintage bought the plates to publish the book in the US, they kept the Britishisms- and Murray couldn’t get work from US publishers, confining himself to British ones. Considering that Venuti wrote a book called THE TRANSLATOR’S INVISIBILITY, it almost seems like he was arguing against himself, which was rather odd.
I couldn’t help but wonder if, had the setup been different, the panel would have been more entertaining. But then I remembered something Akunin said in the earlier interview, that ultimately, a writer is an individualist, and one can’t ask them to sing in a chorus together. Ultimately, this may or may not be true, but this particular chorus - in the form of Friday evening’s panel - ended up somewhat out of tune.
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