Finnegan's List 2012

The European Society of Authors is proud to present the second Finnegan's List - a selection of under-translated works, chosen and recommended by ten polyglot authors from ten different countries. Our lists propose works from both classical and contemporary literature, encompassing all the languages that are currently spoken in Europe, even those not officially recognized by the European Union.

The Finnegan project tries to point out the current gaps in literary translation, yet it also focuses on works which have already been translated but are out of print or simply forgotten by a book market always eager to pounce on the latest novelties. In struggling against the uniformity and the spirit of immediate consumption that are increasingly defining the publishing world, the Finnegan project aims to be a long-term elaboration, proposing over the years a veritable archive for translators and publishers alike.

This year we are once again very thankful to all the writers who have accepted to be part of the project and have passed onto us the titles of books that have been important to them.

In the face of recent and most worrying political evolutions - such as the resurgence of an excessive nationalism throughout Europe - it is once again crucial to affirm the importance of remaining open-minded towards other languages and cultures. Through its multilingual polyphony, Finnegan's List is striving to be a vivid expression of the essential truth that "a culture is, after all, the sum of the external influences it acquires", to quote one of the List 2012 committee's members - Juan Goytisolo.

2012 Finnegan’s List committee:

• Hoda Barakat

  Lebanese-born Hoda Barakat is one of the most original voices in modern Arabic literature. Born in 1952, she graduated from Beirut University in 1975 with a degree in French literature. In 1975-76 she went to Paris to start a PhD but because of the civil war she decided to return to her country to work as a teacher, journalist and translator. In 1985 her first collection of short stories, entitled Za'irat, was published. She now lives as a writer in Paris. She also works for an Arabic-language radio station.

  HODA BARAKAT recommended:

  Ibn Hazm (994-1064), طوق الحمامة (The Ring of the Dove). Translated into Dutch, English, French, German, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish and Turkish.

  Bassam Hajjar, مِهَن القسوة, (Cruel Professions), Beirut-Lebanon: Dar al-Faraby, 1993. No translation.

  Sargon Boulus,  أزمة أخرى لكلب القبيلة, (Another Bone for the Tribe’s Dog), Köln, Baghdad, Beirut: Al-Kamel Verlag, 2008. No translation.

  • Read more about "Ibn Hazm - The Ring of the Dove"

    The Ring of the Dove or "The Signs of Love," written by the 10th century polymath Ibn Hazm (born in Córdoba in 994), elegantly embodies the genius of the golden age of Al-Andulus. The treatise, unique in its form, is one of the author’s few writings not burned by his opponents.

    Complex, subtle, and surprisingly modern due to its fantastic non-conformism, the book describes the different aspects of love: from everyday life to Sufi ideals, from signs, words and gestures to a humanistic and cultural body of thought that connects people.

    Love means choosing, which is to be free… exiled in our time.

  • Read more about "Bassam Hajjar - Cruel Professions"

    Cruel Professions, a collection of poetry by the Lebanese writer Bassam Hajjar is the most poetic (Arabic?) expression of the extreme human loneliness and neediness in the face of oblivion.

    Hajjar’s voice is almost inaudible in his room, only accompanied by a canary and useless things – a window towards the absentee’s cypress. His voice evokes the vanity of things and describes the loss of meaning. The vapidity of things merely expresses their absence, the transience becomes a lament about interrupted desire.

    Small injuries are praised, the largest is merely the prophecy of death; we are all prisoners of our bodies…

    These are our “professions.”

  • Read more about "Sargon Boulus - Another Bone for the Tribe's Dog"

    Another Bone for the Tribe’s Dog is a poetry collection by the Iraqi Sargon Boulus, who died far from his home country in 2007. This book is exile poetry par excellence in its most direct and strongest form of expression.

    Far removed from the romantic “magic” of memory, idealized by the yearning for the original home, Sargon Boulus uses memories as an unprocessed raw resource of gaps, a material that moves forward and explodes in an instinctive primitive primal scream… however, a scream that reaches cosmic and existential dimensions…

    The song of a free expatriate…

• György Dragomán

  György Dragomán is a Hungarian author and literary translator. His best-known work, The White King (2005), has been translated into at least 28 languages. He was born in Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely), in Transylvania, Romania. In 1988 his family moved to Hungary. He went to school in the western Hungarian city of Szombathely, then to university in Budapest, where he obtained a degree in English and Philosophy. He has received various literary awards for his writing, such as the Sándor Bródy Prize. György Dragomán lives in Budapest.

  György Dragomán recommended:

  János Székely, A nyugati hadtest (The Western Corps), Budapest: Magvetö, 1982. Translated into Romanian.

  Péter Lengyel, Macskakő (Cobblestone), Budapest: Jelenkor, 1988/ Európa Könyvkiadó, 1994. Translated into English.

  István Szilágyi, Agancsbozót (Antleshrub), Kolozsvár: Kriterion, 1990. No translation.

  • Read more about "János Székely - A nyugati hadtest (The Western Corps)"
    A slim volume of seven linked short stories about the experiences of a young cadet during the Second World War. János Székely's book is a relentless examination of the workings of the war machine and its reflection on the individual. From the portrait of a tortured cadet bullied by his entire company, through the tale of a teacher forced to execute his student turned deserter, to the story of the German soldier and his dog who methodically kill the weak prisoners left behind by the retreating army, each of these stories is a detached analysis into the ethics of defeat, full of intense unforgettable images, showing how war molds everything and everyone to its purpose, how honour, fear and cruelty are all merged into one terrible and unstoppable monstrosity. 
  • Read more about "Péter Lengyel - Macskakő (Cobblestone)"
    On the surface a historical detective novel about a jewellery heist taking place in Budapest on the eve of the twentieth century, the book is an encyclopaedic recreation of a Budapest that does not exist anymore, where the city itself becomes a living and breathing place, one of the most important protagonist of the book. Set against the background of the city rendered in meticulous details, is a group of master thieves and a detective, locked into an epic battle that will eventually take them to the far corners of Europe.
    
    
  • Read more about "István Szilágyi - Agancsbozót (Antleshrub)"
    After a hiking accident a man wakes up near an isolated cave in the mountains. The cave is a mysterious place, a sort of prison where a community of blacksmiths are hammering out swords attempting to recreate ancient swordsmith technologies. There is no escape; he is forced to become blacksmith, slowly embracing the goal of creating the ultimate blade, a copy of a Japanese katana. In the process he loses and reclaims his humanity while slowly understanding the mechanics and ethics of a prison society.
    
    

• Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt

  Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt is a French writer and translator of German origin. In 1938 he was forced to leave Germany. He first escaped to Italy, then to France. In 1949 he obtained the French nationality. He worked as a German teacher until 1992. An author and essayist, he writes and expresses himself in French. He has translated, among others, works of Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Kafka and Peter Handke. One of his most famous books is called Quand Freud voit la mer, an essay about Sigmund Freud and the German language.

  Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt recommended:

  
  Klaus Nonnenmann, Die sieben Briefe des Doktor Wambach (The Seven Letters of Doctor Wambach), Olten: Walter Verlag, 1959/ Tübingen: Klöpfer & Meyer Verlag, 2007. No translation.

  Roger Martin du Gard, Le Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort(Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort), Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Translated into Dutch and English.

  Louis Calaferte, Requiem des innocents (Requiem of the Innocent), Paris: Éditions Julliard, 1952. No translation.

  • Read more about "Klaus Nonnenmann - Die sieben Briefe des Doktor Wambach"

    A seemingly playful story of trivialities, but that simultaneously cheerful and nostalgic, it searches the twists and turns of the German language as perhaps only Jean-Paul did.

  • Read more about "Roger Martin du Gard - Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort"

    A great “novel of initiation” about the erotic discoveries and confusions of adolescents at the mercy of their emotions and at the brink of their first great experiences in life. It is simultaneously a great unfinished novel about French history from 1914 until liberation in 1944.

  • Read more about "Louis Calaferte - Reqiuem des innocents"

    A childhood in poverty and misery, exposed to cynicism, searching for friendship and trust that is always broken, while the powerlessness of children left to themselves and exposed to the brutality of adults is shown in a series of events.

• Vassili Golovanov

  Vassili Golovanov is a Russian writer. He holds a degree in Journalism from the Moscow State University and has written for numerous magazines and publications. He is the author of several geo-poetic essays, which were inspired by expeditions to the polar islands of Kolguyev and the New Land, Asia and the Volga delta. Ostrov, ili opravdanie bessmislennikh puteshestvi (The Island or Justification of Senseless Journeys, 2002) is one of his poetic visions of territory, in this case of the polar island of Kolguyev. He has published Tachanki s Yuga (Tachankas of the South, 1997), an investigation into the Makhnovist movement which the newspaper Nezavisimaia gazeta rated best historical book of the year at the time of its publication.

  Vassili Golovanov recommended:

  Vladislav Otroshenko, Персона вне достоверности (A Non-Credible Person), Moscow: Kolibri, 2010. Translated into English and Italian.

  Andrei Baldin, Протяжение точки (The Extension of the Full Stop), Moscow: Publisher 1 September, 2009. Translated into French.

  Vasily Nalimov, Спонтанность сознания. Вероятностная теория смыслов и смысловая архитектоника личности(Spontaneity of Consciousness: Probabilistic Theory of Meanings and Semantic Architectonics of Personality), Moscow: Prometheï, 1989. Translated into English (not published) and German.

  • Read more about "Andrei Baldin - The Extension of the Full Stop"

    Andrei Baldin, The Extension of the Full Stop
    

    For someone who is not a professional critic, it is difficult to explain exactly why one likes one book or another. The Extension of the Full Stop is a line. A route. A journey. Andrei Baldin has written the journey of the Russian word, a journey that began with Karamzin (who brought the new Russian word out of Europe) and which Pushkin continued. Pushkin travelled the whole of the Russia of his day, visiting the North and the South and the East, getting as far as Orenburg. He planned to visit Kamchatka, he even planned to visit China—but his plans remained unfulfilled. In that case, what was achieved? An astonishing thing: Russia now exists as far as Orenburg, this place that was brought to the public by Pushkin’s word. What is more, to the east of Orenburg there is no Russia—there is only Siberia, even taking into account the subsequent vast developments there, the appearance of different types of people with different gifts, up to and including writers. We recall a heroic effort of Chekhov’s: to travel the whole length of the country from the west to the east and to write something about it. The failure of this attempt is both surprising and indicative. Siberia could be nothing apart from ‘Siberia’. Tolstoy packaged together the unbelievable confrontation between Europe (represented by Napoleon) and the world (Russia-as-the-world) and showed how this world demanded a foreign invasion. In particular, the Moscow that was ‘burnt in the fire’: an extremely domestic world, in those years very comfortable, provincial… A nest that was burnt up and destroyed. A place where normal people, menials, simple folk lived; nobody could imagine any opposition to Napoleon coming from here—but even so this ruined town became Napoleon’s ultimate downfall. Why? This question involves extremely subtle twists and turns, movements as the point (the full stop) is stretched into a line. No one has ever written about Russian history and the Russian landscape like Baldin, so accurately, with such attention, from a vantage point that previously would have been unthinkable, unimaginable. Where is this vantage point? Right there, in the paper landscape of the text: all you need is to be an extremely gifted reader and not be too lazy to compare your ‘literary’ discoveries with the actual map. Then expanses of space appear (or do not appear) alongside the individual languages that describe them; fateful ‘holes’ are revealed in this dumb, yawning expanse that is Russia and Russian history, but which has never become a landscape of the word. No one has looked at Russian history in the way Andrei Baldin has.

    
    

    translation : James Womack
    

     

    
    
     
  • Read more about "Vladislav Otroshenko, A Non-Credible Person"
    Vladislav Otroshenko, A Non-Credible Person
    If Russian classical literature has its inheritors, then Vlad Otroshenko must be named first among them: say he takes infinite pains with his work, and you haven’t said the half of it. The word is there, sunny, joyful, overflowing, fresher than ever, heady, cheerful: he himself is a Don Cossack, one of those Venetians or Genoese who set up their outposts on that river, the Tanais, right on the boundary between Europe and Asia. At first sight, it seems that he doesn’t think about how he writes. This is an illusion (or a mishearing?—it all depends how one experiences a text). Otroshenko is a deep writer, a wise writer (more than once reviewers have compared him to García Márquez, and maybe this comparison is correct as far as the ‘taste’ of his work is concerned—the way in which he plunges himself and the reader into the story—as well as for that organic ‘life wisdom’ which people take from his texts). But this wisdom is nowhere insisted upon. It is as if the writer is enjoying his writing and his joy is transmitted to us, the readers. He enjoys the old Cossack world in which he grew up (see the cycles Greatgrandfather Grisha’s Courtyard and Notes on a Photograph Album); he enjoys the possibilities that arise when one takes as one’s subjects certain disagreements about Gogol’s fate (Gogoliad); finally, he is openly intoxicated by the possibility of imagining how the few lines of Catullus that we have came down to us… Russian literature has counted many little-known and even fully obscure names among those who aspire to be its prophets. But not since the days of the happy nineteenth century has it seen a writer who is so wise, so direct, so filled with the primordial joy of creation, that the massive obelisks surmounting his fellow writers (oh, all those bearded profiles!) have no effect on him whatsoever…
    translation : James Womack
    
  • Read more about "Vasily Nalimov, Spontaneity of Consciousness: Probabilistic Theory of Meanings and Semantic Architectonics of Personality"
    Vasily Nalimov, Spontaneity of Consciousness: Probabilistic Theory of Meanings and Semantic Architectonics of Personality

     

    It seems improbable that in Soviet Russia a philosopher could survive without being in the least shaken by Marxist ideas, especially one who also tried to synthesise within himself the whole of Western academic thought. One would imagine that for this he would have to pass through a very different ‘school’ from that of the zealous Soviet philosophers: participation in mystico-anarchist circles, for example, followed by in-depth study of mathematical and evangelical texts, arrest, prison, Kolyma. Then, I don’t know, work on the mathematical theory of experimentation, a study of the psychology of schizophrenia, experimental meditation with artists… Yes, such a life is surely impossible! And yet, it took place! I am talking about Vasily Vasilievich Nalimov. Now that two of his books have already appeared in Europe—I was thinking only of Les Mathématiques de l’Inconscient (Paris, Ed. Du Rocher 1996), but now one has also to add The Spontaneity of Consciousness, translated by Manfred Bonitz and published by Trafo Wissenschaftsverlag as Spontaneität des Bewusstseins (2010) — it is finally possible to talk about this man’s immense gifts. It is the case, almost, that he gave Russia modern philosophical thought, after all her philosophical libraries and institutes were destroyed… Did the country understand this? I doubt it. I knew V.V. personally, spent a year preparing his website, and I suggest that Nalimov’s true achievements (for the intellectual life of both Russia and of Europe) will lie in the future. The basis of his thought was the conceptual field (which has always existed, like mathematical constants), that each individual, each generation, even each culture, has to ‘unpack’, revealing these concepts once again, looking at them through the filters of perception, the demands of the age, traditions, conditions… From this derived his ideas about the lies that are described as ‘eternal truths’, about traditional religions, about the incapacity of science to solve the problems of everyday life, about the crisis of contemporary mechanized and capitalist society. Nalimov considered his own favourite work to be The Spontaneity of Consciousness. This is a book about the different scales on which a personality exists, which display themselves and realize themselves in the conceptual field, all of which make the field’s subject (the individual) fluid and changeable. It is a book about the secret of creation—its inexplicable, essential, elemental, spontaneous nature. What is more, it is a book about the mysterious capacities of the individual, such as widening one’s consciousness via meditation or under the influence of psychoactive  substances, or else out-of-body experiences, connection with the Cosmos… But notwithstanding the fact that V.V. Nalimov’s foundational work has now been translated into German and therefore is available to Europe, I cannot confirm his preference on my own account and will remain as before a supporter of Nalimov’s book of philosophical essays The Reality of the Unreal (published in French as Les Mathématiques de l’Inconscient) in which the author’s position is set out in a brief, focused and multifaceted shape. Trust me, reader, that summarizing in a sentence the contents of even one ever-so-slightly serious book is not a simple task. But this probabilistic understanding of the world that V.V. Nalimov has given to me is truly the thing that helps me to live here (in Russia) and now. Therefore, if in writing about V.V. Nalimov I have managed to touch you even slightly, please include The Reality of the Unreal in your list. Although I would suggest that it has already included itself.
    
    trans : James Womack
    

• Juan Goytisolo

  Juan Goytisolo is a Spanish poet, essayist, and novelist. After studying law, he published his first novel, The Young Assassins, in 1954. One of his most famous works – Marks of Identity – was, like all his other books, banned in Spain. His opposition to the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco led him into exile in Paris in 1956, where he worked as a reader for the publisher Gallimard. He currently lives in a voluntary self-exile in Marrakech. He received numerous literary awards for his work, including the Nelly Sachs Award as well as the Octavio Paz Price.

  Juan Goytisolo recommended:

  Juan Francesco Ferré, Providence (Providence), Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009. Translated into French.

  Javier Pastor, Mate Jaque (Mate Check), Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2009. Translated into French.

  José María Pérez Álvarez, La soledad de las vocales (The Solitude of Vowels), Barcelona: Bruguera/ International Editors’ Co., 2008. No translation.

  • Read more about "Juan Francesco Ferré - Providence"
    PROVIDENCE BY JUAN FRANCISCO FERRÉ
    
        For those who see reading as a voyage into the unknown akin to that of writing, Providence, the latest novel by Juan Francisco Ferré, is a real treat: the reader is led from surprise to surprise, retraces his steps to make sure he has not got lost, then renews his enthralling journey: everything is at one and the same time real and improbable in a trip that imperceptibly draws him towards a nightmarish ritual universe.
         To summarise this novel would be to betray it. Starting from an everyday situation - a Spanish film director, Alex Franco, who is given a script entitled Providence by a French producer called Delphine to turn into a film- the plot bifurcates, travels on different levels, sets off in new and daring directions. Franco’s stay in the North American city that inspired Alain Resnais’s admirable film develops in ways that are both contrasting and complementary. His wretched university courses, the film project that keeps vanishing in front of him like a mirage, the unexpected encounters with characters from a variety of literary codes: from the Gothic novel, with its mysterious personages and cryptic plots; from the erotic novel, typified by women hungry for sex in the most unusual circumstances... all these gradually transform the university and film worlds (always seen through an ironic prism) into the illusory universe created by the media where terror has become a money-making opportunity.     
        Well aware of the literary modernism of the twentieth century, Juan Francisco Ferré adds to the ample baggage of Cervantes and Joyce his knowledge of the ubiquity of the cyberspace in which we now live. Whereas cinema and television changed the direction of the novel in the past century (either to debase it by adopting their rules and conventions as in the case of lazy or mediocre novelists, or by creating an unprecedented literary context that is not trivialised as it is in TV soap operas or historical melodramas) the Internet and computer games are influencing its current evolution because they are modifying our perception of the real and the virtual, blurring their differences, and altering the comprehension of our everyday environment. With corrosive humour, the author of Providence parades before us a gallery of characters from the different tiers that the book offers: terrorists,  conspirators  and their sects, ridiculous, self-important university professors, Hollywood vamps from the past century. If in his masterpiece our greatest writer brought in the conventions of novels of chivalry- Moorish, Byzantine, bucolic elements and so on- in order to parody them and build his own work on their ruins, Juan Francisco Ferré, who is a close reader of Cervantes, epitomizes in Providence the contemporary artistic expressions: cinema, TV, the omnivorous Internet, the myths and fallacies of the North American cultural utopia, chopping them up and mixing them in his blender. Iconic figures of pop art and hip hop, apocalyptic and visionary bloggers share the same space as literary reference points from yesteryear. High and low, long-lasting and ephemeral, are mixed into the same dense paste by the whirling blades of his implacable grinder. There is room for everything thanks to his subversive egalitarian will, that puts Beethoven on the same level as a rocker from Los Angeles or Jamaica.
        The fearless if eternally confused Alex Franco stumbles along, like Don Quijote, from one narrative layer to another, from the Dulcinea who happily strips off for him to the delays and ultimate failure of his elusive film project. The reader, while never ceasing to be one, becomes both a spectator and an internet user. Navigating through cyberspace, he discovers all the traps in what we are treacherously being sold as real. The North American utopia, displayed in the new technologies of the last fifteen years, leads to the world of terror that followed 9/11: a phantom enemy with no armies but with a devastating destructive will that knows no boundaries and whose weapons are reality and nightmare at one and the same time.
        Thanks to the synthesis of different levels – literary, cinematic, televisual, musical, cyberspatial - Providence recreates its genealogy of multiple, hybrid roots. It is a twenty-first century novel aimed at female and male readers capable of imagining entering the space of literature as a dizzying incursion into extraordinary landscapes, where the creator of this work provides them with frequent moments of surprise and laughter. As with a handful of young novelists whom I admire, the author of Providence has boldly chosen a literary text rather than one that meets the editorial demand for easy success and media presence: a choice that does him credit and deserves the applause of all those of us who defend a modernity that has lasted through the centuries in the vast, complex domain of Spanish literature.    
    
    Translated by Nick Caistor 
  • Read more about "Javier Pastor - Mate jaque"
    MATE CHECK by Javier Pastor
    
        We are in a seaside resort where the state of decay and abandonment only increases throughout the 100 pages of this novel. We are listening to the monologue of an anonymous narrator (not a single name is given) who reflects on the failure of his life and career. He attributes this failure to his catastrophic relationship with his partner, the former head of a private clinic who wants above all to be a mother, to have a child by him. The humiliation he feels in what he sees as a genetic test of whether he is suffering from the male menopause makes him even bitterer: “nothing in life can compare with the suffering two lovers are capable of inflicting on each other,” “to be a father is an aberrant vulgarity”, and so on. Sleeping in separate beds, and pounding on his typewriter like a machine-gun to annoy his partner (he is a writer by profession) are part of his aggressive strategy when faced with their mutual lack of communication: “I can’t say anything without her feeling attacked, she can’t say anything without me immediately organizing my counter-attack; we hate each other for most of the day (and night)”. He considers that to live as a couple (and he has had the experience of being married twice before this latest disastrous union) not only destroys the individuality of the two people in the couple, but contaminates them with a mixture of loathing and frustration.
        This guest in the resort, or more exactly in an old people’s home in the resort, drinks too much and smokes dope on the sly. One day he is visited by a beautiful red-headed young woman who treats him like an old friend, inquires about his health, and gives him a jolt when she calls him ‘father’.
        In order to alleviate his solitude and self-absorption, the maitre of the home invites him to play a game of chess. When the check mate is reached, the maitre tells him that the game has reproduced move by move the one played by Madame de Remusat and Napoleon in 1802. By now we are on page 50 of the novel, at the pivotal point of the book.
     We then move imperceptibly to another game of chess, where the director plays the part of Napo or De Leon and she (not he) is Madame de Remusat: first there is “Allow me, Madame,” from the maitre, then “I have no problem calling you Napo, I reply, fanning myself energetically.” Like a conjurer performing a sleight of hand, the novelist has turned the story on its head: from now on we will hear the voice or read the thoughts of a woman.
        But who is she? Her interior monologue or grudging confession turn out to be symmetrical to those of the male narrator we have already met. A former director of a luxury spa, from which she was sacked due to her addiction to drink, she haltingly evokes the dismay her wish to be a mother caused in her partner, her frequenting of bars, the degradation and ruin of the resort where she feels irredeemably trapped. The unexpected appearance of a red-haired young man, who greets her warmly with kisses and friendly words, and who smiles at her like someone in love, leads her to believe it is love at first sight. But as she instinctively seeks out his lips, she hears his scandalized voice say: “What are you doing, mother?” and this brings her illusion crashing to the ground. From this scene on (the exact equivalent of her ex-partner with the red-headed young woman) fleeting moments of lucidity lead her to ask herself if she isn’t on a downward spiral, going mad, if she is a patient surrounding by other patients suffering from the same delusion.
        The ruin of the resort that has become nothing more than an old people’s home, the rough grey bathrobe she wears (the same one that the administration of the home says everyone must wear) only serve to increase her pessimism about herself and the world around her. As she wanders through the garden, she (the Madame de Remusat of the chess game) meets an old, stooped Napoleon. “Do not stop the enemy when he makes a mistake”, he whispers to her. To which she adds: “Continue to believe in the destruction of the other.” The co-existence in mutual hatred of this couple suffering from senile dementia (never openly stated by the author, but clear to the reader) comes to an end when they both leave the asylum at the same time. Their two families - the red-haired man and woman (who thanks to the novelist’s skill have now merged into one) have come to take care of them: “When she kissed me, she whispered ‘Hello father’. When he kissed me, he whispered ‘Hello mother’”. The two parts of the book, separated by the hinge moment in the middle, now close on each other. End of story.
        Mate Check skilfully avoids making this plot outline too obvious. The author does not describe the characters: they float like drowning men and women on the currents of their soliloquies. It is for the reader - or more precisely, the re-reader- to rescue them. Javier Pastor’s literary aim is like that of a goldsmith, hiding his art and skills for those who conceive reading as an incursion into a new world: not that of the novel of adventures, but of the adventures of the novel.
        The hatred He and She distil (the true substance of the novel) reminds me of an ingenious phrase a friend of mine once came up with: “The couple is the first terrorist cell in the world.” Mate Check turns this pessimistic assertion into a stimulating artistic creation. 
    
    Translated by Nick Caistor
  • Read more about "José María Pérez Álvarez - La soledad de las vocales"
    THE SOLITUDE OF VOWELS by José María Pérez Alvarez.
    
        Five years ago, when a poet friend of mine recommended I read Nembrot (DVD Ediciones) by José María Pérez Alvarez (O Barco de Valedoras, Ourense, 1952), I was impressed. The book did not have any of the usual ingredients one finds in run-of-the-mill novels: no easily drawn characters, no obvious plot, no attempt to keep the suspense going to the end. Instead, I found myself confronted by an original, dense and complex text about the relation between love and the difficulties of communication as experienced by two men, a book that had nothing to do with the clichéd themes of the gay genre. The hypochondriacal failure that is Horacio Oureiro and the mythomaniac scribbler, trickster and plagiarist Bralt live the slow slipping away of time in a sad boarding-house in Pleamar. Everything there is grey, misty, rainy; this atmosphere returns in his subsequent novels: Cape Horn (also published by DVD Ediciones) and the current one. Failure, bitterness, and the characters’ impossible love seem to merge to compose the inscription on a gravestone in this inhospitable land’s end: “Death is the only legacy human beings inherit and pass on.” The beauty is born of this desolation.
        Brought out by a discerning but small publisher, and written by a provincial author with no links to the centres of literary and media power, Nemrot came and went almost unnoticed, except by a handful of demanding readers, or more properly, re-readers. Nor did the critics pay the book any attention, following their habitual anti-Gide dictum: whatever cannot be understood in the blinking of an eye does not interest me. Perhaps the award of the recent Bruguera Prize for the Novel (given by Esther Tusquets as the only judge) will attract some attention to the latest and beautifully accomplished novel by Pérez Alvarez, The Solitude of Vowels.
        Pessimism, alcohol, encroaching old age and the secret awareness that they have been victims of “adverse biographies” typify the guests in the decrepit Lausanne boarding-house where the book is set. The neon letters of the sign outside go out one by one, but the weary owner does nothing to replace them: the last remaining vowels and consonants shine in the night in desolate solitude. This solitude is shared by the guests in a dozen filthy, abandoned rooms: in Number 2, the former female Olympic swimmer, lost in the false evocation of old loves and medals won; Number 7, the Serbian upholsterer who has fled the killings and ethnic cleansings committed by his fellow countrymen; Number 8, permanently closed, under whose door the winds howls like the ghost of a kidnapped woman; number 4, the Parisian painter tortured by the collapse of his ambitious career; Number 6, a writer who reads Joyce, Selby, and Kafka, and wants to become rich and famous, to win the Nobel so that he can rescue his family from the poverty that is dragging them down; and finally, Number 9, where the anonymous occupant is the one spinning out the monologue that comprises the book.
        Just as there is an ear for music, so there is one for literature. José María Pérez Alvarez has both. The sentences of his monologue are threaded together in a prosody of calculated, harmonious symphonic variations which create a chorus of obsessive voices and rhythms that are so overwhelming they envelop and entrap the reader-listener.
        The literary-musical motifs run right through the book: evocations by a befuddled mind that is full of holes: of Claudia Chauchat in Thomas Mann’s Swiss sanatorium; Joyce’s cane; Milena and Brel; the hat thrown onto a hatstand by Humphrey Bogart; Franz Dertod in Cape Horn, killed by the Nazis; the woman who committed suicide in the same room in 1980; Baltasar the black giant, who one day will become the chauffeur of the miraculously enriched writer in Number 6. The fantasies of the alcoholic narrator, who is falling apart, rotting bit by bit in a filthy bedroom as he struggles with his ridiculous memories that revolve around an impossible love for slender Olympic swimmers, women he caught a fleeting glimpse of in a railway train compartment, the abused prostitute who came up to his room one day, the recollection of the pair of knickers that a nurse who took pity on him gave him to sniff and feel less alone in the hospital where he was convalescing after being poisoned by adulterated brandy.
        The narrative alternates between deserted railway stations, public benches with drunks and beggars, and images of Paris, lost illusions, dreamt-of journeys, all of this doused in round after round of beer and alcohol. Cheap boarding-houses, brothels, rubbish trucks, sets of false teeth, bars and churches with their dead, livid Christs, are interwoven with the voice of the loser who proclaims his right “not to belong to any country, not to fight under any banner, or to stand up to sing any national anthem”: the voice of someone without a country, a cause, without control over his drinking: the three Withouts of his condition as unrecyclable, nihilistic and self-destructive waste.
        The Solitude of Vowels is shot through with the lucid pessimism of someone who knows that “death is the only legacy human beings inherit and pass on”, of an inhabitant of a world inexorably condemned to extinction. Its melodies pierce our hearing. José María Pérez Alvarez conveys this by means of beautiful, exact words, with the hard-won mastery of a true writer.    
    
    Translated by Nick Caistor

• Yannis Kiourtsakis

  Yannis Kiourtsakis, essayist, novelist and translator, was born in1941 in Athens. He studied law in Paris, where he lived for over ten years. Σαν μυθιστόρημα (Like a Novel), published in 1995 in Greece, is his best-known work for which he also won a prize. The book was translated into Italian under the title Come un romanzo, an exact translation of its Greek title, as well as into French in 2011 under the title Le Dicôlon. It is the first volume of a trilogy. The other two volumes are We, the Others and The Book of Work and Time. Yannis Kiourtsakis’ work can be seen as a never-ending quest for Greece and Europe, dealing with the boundaries of identity and otherness.

  Yannis Kiourtsakis recommended:

  Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857), H γυναίκα της Ζάκυνθος (The Woman of Zakynthos). Translated into English, French, German, Hungarian and Italian. Ο Κρητικός (The Cretan), Οι Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι (The Free Besieged) & Ο Πόρφυρας (Porfyras – The Shark). Translated into English and German.

  Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911), Ο Έρωτας στα χιόνια (Love in the Snow). Translated into English, French and German. Ολόγυρα στη λίμνη (Around the Lagoon). Translated into English and French.

  Yannis Beratis, Το πλατύ ποτάμι (The Broad River, 1946-47), Athens: Publisher Ermis, 1973/2002. No translation.

  • Read more about "Dionysios Solomos"
    My choices, drawn mostly from the past, were governed by a desire to re-introduce to European cultural memory what is arguably one of its least known aspects, one that nevertheless seems to me fundamental: the literary traditions of modern Greece, viewed as an attempt – inevitably incomplete – at bringing together the genius of her ancestral language, her ancient heritage, the Orthodox Christianity of the East, her popular oral culture, and the essential contribution of our modern Europe. My aim: to share a particular collective, existential experience, one that is distinct from and yet close to that of the West, and, thereby, able to shed new light on the common experience of the peoples of Europe.
    
    Dionysios Solomos:
    
    Originator of the poetic movement of liberated Greece, Dionysios Solomos followed a paradoxical path: educated in Italian (all his studies were in Italy) and continuing to speak Italian thereafter, he only belatedly adopted his native tongue, enriching it by drawing from popular Greek songs and from the literature of the Cretan Renaissance (16th-17th centuries). Born in Zante, to die in Corfu (Ionian Islands), he never set foot on continental Greece, whose sublimated image stalks through his whole oeuvre. Steeped in German idealism (Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller), he conceived poems as the expression of a ‘fundamental rhythm: the Idea’, whose ‘tangible form […] gradually widens its circles’.
    
    Practically unknown in contemporary Europe, while recognised as a major figure in Greece – although mainly for his early works, such as the Hymn to Liberty, of which the first two stanzas have become the country’s national anthem – Solomos remains a unique figure who, in his maturity, attained the apotheosis of a demanding poetic art in which patriotism and a deep appreciation of Nature grow to meet horizon of the Universal. Hence the sublime beauty of a great number of his lines and stanzas in which this vision that is both aesthetic and ethical reaches its perfection. Hence too the muddled and fragmentary nature of his major works, which he was unable – or unwilling – to complete.
    
    I propose that the following works be translated:
    
    H γυναίκα της Ζάκυνθος (Zante’s Wife): a poetic prose work with prophetic tones remeniscent of Revelation. There is a French translation by Gilles Ortlieb, published by Editions Le Bruit du Temps, Paris 2009.
    
    Ο Κρητικός (The Cretan): a narrative and dramatic poem filled with the ecstasy of one cradled by Nature.
    
    Οι Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι (The Free Beseiged): a tragic evocation of the siege of Missolonghi. This is his major work, which took up twenty years of his life and of which three great drafts exist, all incoplete, as well as fragments and disconnected lines.
    
    Ο Πόρφυρας (Porphyras): a poetic sketch inspired by a real event (a young English soldier being torn apart by a shark while swimming in the port of Corfu) that reaffirms the ethical supremacy of man over the blindly all-powerful universe that crushes him.
    
    Translated by Sophie Lewis
    
    
  • Read more about "Alexandros Papadiamantis"
    Born on Skiathos, a small island in the Northern Aegean Sea, and deeply attached to the Greek Orthodox tradition (he was the son of a priest), Alexandros Papadiamantis nevertheless criss-crossed literary Europe as a translator working for the Athens newspapers, in order to make his living. The author of four novels and 160 short stories, he lived at a distance from literary circles (during his lifetime his works were only published in magazines), was tormented by an incurable nostalgia for his native island. He takes great care not to idealise this island – depicting with startling clarity its everyday miseries – which forms both the setting and the hero of the majority of his stories. Yet it is far from being a study of local sentiments. This vibrant, striking microcosm, with the ineffable beauty of its landscapes (Papadiamantis’s writing yields wonderful descriptions of nature, marked by a pagan, almost pantheist jubilance), its humble chapels scattered through the countryside and above all its highly-coloured people – shepherds, sailors, priests, girls, old women, shopkeepers, innkeepers – come to appear to us a representation of the Greek macrocosm and – why not? – of the entire human world.
    
    Considered by the majority of Greek critics the ‘saint of Hellenic literature’, thanks to his unrivalled narrative skill, Papadiamantis equals the stature of a great European writer, his particular qualities as a novelist having been highlighted by Lakis Proguidis in his essay La Conquête du roman, (Conquering the Novel) Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1997.
    I propose that a selection of Papadiamantis’ short stories be translated, chosen from among those that feature in volumes 2-4 of his Complete Works (Άπαντα), published by Dόμος press, in Athens, 5 vols. (See, for example, the selection made in René Bouchet’s two French translations, L'amour dans la neige (Love in the Snow), Hatier 1993 [OP] and Autour de la lagune (Around the Lagoon), Zoé, Geneva, 2005).
    
    Translated by Sophie Lewis
  • Read more about "Yannis Beratis - The Broad River"
    Yannis Beratis volunteered to fight during the Second World War when Greece was invaded by Mussolini’s troops in October 1940. In this book he unfolds an epic tale, sober and unadorned, of the conflict in the Albanian mountains as he experienced it. Free of any nationalist agenda and in perfectly simple style – the fruit of obstinate toil and consummate art – he brings a profound humanity to his description of the facts and acts of simple people in the midst of combat. The book creates a startling tableau showing the stance of the Greek people, through its highs and lows, in the course of this defensive war which marked a moment of great collective passion in the history of modern Greece. But its merits go even further. Through his skill in showing us in a few lines all he has observed and in outlining a character in just a few words; through his acute sense of the detail from which a whole atmosphere may spring; finally through his gift of revealing the outside world to us by means of an individual’s particular psyche (notably thanks to frequent recourse to free indirect speech), he illuminates the condition of men plunged into war in spite of themselves.
    
    The account is followed by thirty pages of the author’s notes regarding his literary workshop.
    
    Translated by Sophie Lewis
    
    

• Terézia Mora

  Terézia Mora was born in 1971 in Sopron, Hungary. In 1990 she moved to Berlin and read Hungarian Studies as well as drama at the Humboldt University. She also took courses in screenwriting at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin and worked for a short time as a screenwriter. Since 1998 Mora has devoted herself full-time to her writing. She also works as a translator from Hungarian into German. She received numerous prizes (Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1999) for her work. Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (The Last Man on the Continent) is the title of her last novel.

  Terézia Mora recommended:

  Tibor Déry, Szerelem (Love, Short Story), Hungarian National Heritage Holding presented by Budapest: HoFra, 1956. Translated into Bulgarian, Czech, English, French (to come), German, Hebrew, Polish, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish (under reservation).

  Géza Csáth (1887-1919), Mesék, amelyek rosszul végzödnek (Tales That End Unhappily, Complete Short Stories). Various stories translated into Bulgarian, English, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Vietnamese.

  Dieter Forte, Tetralogie der Erinnerung: Das Muster, Tagundnachtgleiche, In der Erinnerung (Trilogie: Das Haus auf meinen Schultern) & Auf der anderen Seite der Welt,(Tetralogy of Memory: “The Pattern“, “Equinox“, “In Memory” (Trilogy “The House on My Shoulders“ & “On the Other Side of the World“), Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2010. “Das Muster” translated into Polish, “Tagundnachtgleiche” into French, Trilogy “Das Haus auf meinen Schultern” into Turkish.

  • Read more about "Tibor Déry - Szerelem (Love)"
    Following the discovery of many of the “premium second class” Hungarian writers by the German readers, I would be pleased by the discovery of “premium first class” writers.
    Although there are already German translations of Tibor Déry and Géza Csáth, they appeared almost exclusively in the GDR and can only be acquired second hand.
    
    Hungary, in the 1960s. B., a political prisoner, is released without explanation after seven years, one and a half of those on death row. He returns to his wife and small son, who by now are living in misery, but at least his wife’s love has not been extinguished.
    In general, Déry should be rediscovered: his debut novel, “The Unfinished Sentence,” which was published in Hungary in 1957, offers a view of Hungary between the World Wars through a search for orientation in life by Lörinc Parcen-Nagy, the son of a corrupt director.
    
    
  • Read more about "Géza Csáth - Mesék, amelyek rosszul végzödnek (Tales That End Unhappily, Complete Short Stories)"
    Just one example: Two boys lose their father early on, start to abuse animals and finally kill their mother while attempting to steal her jewelry, which they need as payment for erotic adventures with a young girl (Matricide).
    Csáth’s prose is touched by mania, eroticism, aggression – his views are disturbing and occasionally provoke resistance, but his observations usually have to be confirmed with a “That’s the way we are.”
    
  • Read more about "Dieter Forte - Tetralogie der Erinnerung"
    An Italian-French silk weaver family and a Polish mining family meet in the Ruhr region in the 1920s. The Nazi era, the World War, and finally the era of the so-called economic miracle in the 50s, told from the perspective of a young man, not a victim but rather a survivor. The trilogy, “The House on My Shoulders,” supplemented by the book, “On the Other Side of the World,” is a great epic novel.
    

• Sofi Oksanen

  Sofi Oksanen is a contemporary Finnish writer, born in 1977. Her father is Finnish and her mother Estonian. So far Oksanen has published three novels and a collection of essays. One of her novels, originally conceived as a theatre play, is an international bestseller – Purge. Most of her work is or will be translated into different European languages. She has received several awards for her literary work, including the prestigious Finlandia Prize.

  Sofi Oksanen recommended:

  
  Asko Sahlberg, Höyhen (The Feather), Helsinki: WSOY, 2002. Translated into Czech.

  Arto Salminen, Lahti (The Slaughter), Helsinki: WSOY, 2004. No translation.

  Mirkka Rekola, Kuka lukee kanssasi? (Who Reads With You?), Helsinki: WSOY, 1990. Translated into English and Swedish.

  • Read more about "Arto Salminen - Lahti (The Slaughter)"
    Arto Salminen (1959-2005) was one of the much too early dead authors of Finnish contemporary fiction at the turn of the century. His novel Lahti (The Slaughter, 2005) sadly became his last one, exactly at the point when he was starting to gain interest abroad. This cruelly poetic novel tells about two separate worlds where slaughtering is taken to its extreme. On the one hand we can read about soldiers who train shooting och male sized pigs, then taking them to hospital care and examining the costs of this operation - the army wants to learn about real costs and super logistics in case of war or terrorism. On the other hand we read about an old-fashioned salesman whose little business is slaughtered by the power of the hypermarkets. Salminen is crude in his choice of topics and stories but tender when it comes to describing the victims of an ongoing slaughter.
    
    
  • Read more about "Asko Sahlberg - Höyhen (The Feather)"
    Asko Sahlberg (born in 1964) writes in favor of short sentences, opening the fictional world through strong sensual experiences by the protagonists. Taken to a kind of extreme, the short novel Höyhen (The Feather) dives into the mind of a mentally retarded young man, living in an institution. Light, movements, things are registered by his senses, described in a plain but still poetic tone. Flashbacks to his childhood, to memories of his family let the reader reflect on why he was separated from his near and dear ones and what emotions he bears in his soul, even though nor he, nor the reader have the words for them. And what can we think about the cruelty that is carried out on him in the institution? Does he feel the cruelty the same way the reader does?
  • Read more about "Mirkka Rekola - Kuka lukee kanssasi? (Who Reads With You?)"
    Mirkka Rekola (born in 1931) is one of the greatest ladies of Finnish post war poetry, a true landmark for those who seek for clarity, grace and linguistic mastery. On the surface her poems are simple, but when it comes to understand their most inner agenda the reader can feel a slight vertigo. As she puts it herself: She does not describe the world, she creates it, in every word, in every syllable.
    The poetry collection Kuka lukee kanssasi? (Who reads with you?) is a twisted version of the question Who walks with you? But in Mirkka Rekola's poetic universe these two cannot be separated: you walk alongside, you read alongside, you create the world together.
    
    

• Roman Simić

  Roman Simić was born in 1972 in Zadar, Croatia. He is the artistic director of the Festival of the European Short Story and the editor of the series Anthologies of European Short Story.His own short fiction has been included in various selections and anthologies of contemporary Croatian prose and translated into several European languages. U što se zaljubljujemo (What Are We Falling in Love With, short stories, 2005) won the Jutarnji-List Prize for the best Croatian prose book of the year. Roman Simić lives in Croatia and works as an editor for Profil.

  Roman Simić recommended:

  Mirko Kovač, Kristalne rešetke (Crystal Grids), Zagreb: Fraktura, 1995/2004. Translated into Polish, Serbian, Slovenian and Swedish.

  Olja Savičević Ivančević, Adio kauboju (Farewell Cowboys), Zagreb: Algoritam, 2010. Translated into German and Serbian, rights sold for the Spanish and Macedonian language.

  Senko Karuza, Teško mi je reći (It’s Hard For Me To Say, Collected Stories), Zagreb: Profil, 2007. Various stories translated into English, German and Italian.

• Adam Thirlwell

  Adam Thirlwell was born in 1978 and grew up in North London. He read English at New College, Oxford, and was then a prize fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, from 2000 to 2007. His first novel, Politics, was published in 2003. A book on the international art of the novel, Miss Herbert, was published in 2007 and won the 2008 Somerset Maugham Award. His second novel is The Escape (2009). In 2003 Adam Thirlwell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British novelists'. He lives in London.

  Adam Thirlwell recommended:

  Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, New York: Random House, 1945. Translated into French, German, Italian and Spanish.

  Elizabeth Bishop, Letters, New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994. Translated into Portuguese (Brazil).

  Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), The Complete Works. Varied works translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Swedish.

  • Read more about "Gertrude Stein – Wars I Have Known"
       Wars I Have Seen was one of Gertrude Stein’s last books. It was published in 1945 – a memoir of the Second World War. But since it is by Gertrude Stein, it is not a conventional memoir. Stein spent the war living in relative protection in Vichy France with her lover Alice B Toklas: a situation that was particularly strange, given that they were American, and lesbian, and Jewish. And so this memoir is a record of evasiveness: since it doesn’t explain, no never, why it was that they had managed to live out the war in Vichy France. But the evasiveness represents this book’s value. This memoir is an examination of how far a style can be a form of repression. It is haunted, from its beginning, by the fact of death: ‘I remember being very worried in reading, if anybody in the book dies and did not have children because then nobody in that family could be living yet, and if they were not living yet how could they hear what was happening.’ Or, in other words: it is haunted by a child-like refusal to take these facts seriously. And while this can create a devastated flippancy, like the moment where Stein wonders about the options left to the men going away, deported – ‘they might amuse themselves by learning and reading German and they might amuse themselves by saying that they are going travelling as students…’ – it allows Stein to approach a subject that no one else would dare to treat: the complications of collaboration. ‘And now in June 1943 something very strange is happening, every day the feeling is strengthening that one or another has been or will be a traitor to something…’ This is why, I think, it represents one of the great works of modernism – a moment where modernism addressed its own commitment to style as an amoral value. For after all, she writes: ‘Anybody can understand that there is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter.’
    
    
  • Read more about "Elizabeth Bishop – Letters"
    Elizabeth Bishop was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. This, dear reader, is inarguable. But she looks so unlike the usual image of the great poet: it is a pure product of self-containment. But this oddity is precisely why she is so great: in the fact that such sadnesses and delights are presented through a surface of such delicacy: like the beauty of, I don’t know, her poem ‘Questions of Travel’, where an entire life-sadness is figured through the dense electricity of her descriptions: like ‘the fat brown bird / who sings above the broken gasoline pump / in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque’. Her poetry is a miracle of privacy. And so the avid reader also needs the intrusion onto her privacy represented by her selected letters, edited by her former editor Robert Giroux, and published under the title One Art. For these letters allow the reader to see a slightly more ragged version of Bishop’s paradoxical art: where the more a sentence records with minute accuracy the surface of the everyday, the more it reveals an unbearable loss: a loss that is all the more poignant for being untouched by the sentimental. 
  • Read more about "Sir Thomas Browne - The Complete Works"
    In the first volume of her essays, The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf described ‘that growing consciousness of one’s self, that brooding in solitude over the mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expression and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists, autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men with men to their lonely life within.’ Sir Thomas Browne was a physician and antiquarian. He was hardly a writer at all. He was born in 1605, and published his first book, Religio Medici, in 1642, when the English Civil War broke out. He died forty years later, in 1682. His life was spent in the pursuit of medicine and learning. And he was one of the most original writers in English literature. One of his greatest texts is now known as Urn-Burial, but its full title is Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial, or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk. It looks, in other words, like the most provincial antiquarianism, but really it is a way of showing how antique everything is: even our most modern forms. This is one form of his originality. The other is his prose. It is the closest English prose to Latin that I know: ‘But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?’ Dominique Aury made a French translation of this text, as Les Urnes funéraires. But Browne deserves more. He is such a strange and precise writer that his complete works deserve to exist in many languages: to encompass his letters on ostrich keeping, or his text The Garden of Cyrus, which contains dark wisdom like this: ‘Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living. All things fall under this name. The sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God.’