The Rider, and a funny translation?
I just finished reading Tim Krabbe's The Rider. In the first person, it tells the minute-by-minute story of riding in a 150 kilometer bike race. It's intense, well-written, and has a good ending. It reminded me of Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, in a way, in the way the entire book is focused on a fairly short (in this case, about 4 hour), period of time. It's in the first person, and narrator has the same name and background of the author, but the book pretty much ignores every part of the narrator's life outside his bike riding (other than his chess playing). Recommended.
There was one strange paragraph containing a sentence that I don't know how to interpret. The race takes them through a town, and on the side of the road are some spectators. A woman calls out, "Allez, les sportifs. Un deux un deaux." That triggers a wave of contempt on the narrator's part; for some reason he hates her (he says so), the reason for which is not entirely made clear, maybe it's just because he's grouchy during a hard race, but he launches on a several paragraph tirade, which ends with this paragraph:
She belongs to the generation of emblems. She thinks I got my bicycle out of that cement mixer, that it's an emblem I use to identify myself as a proponent of the 'fitness' rage, like her, with her sweatshirt with the TRAINING decal on it. OK, she's not wearing it right now, but I'm sure it's hanging in her closet. If she has a bicycle, it's definitely a 'ten-speed'; if she ever rides it, then it's in the lowest gear possible, hands down on the bottom of the bars. And if she has a milkman, then he wears a sweater saying UNIVERSITY OF OHIO. I hate her.
Dang, but that's a strange paragraph. On the narrator's part, he's criticizing this woman for things he doesn't actually know about her, for a sweatshirt that he doesn't even know she has. He's making up something about her, and hating her for what he's making up.
But strangest of all is that UNIVERSITY OF OHIO business. Of course, there is no such thing. I got to thinking about this, and the number of ways you could interpret it:
- The narrator is making fun of the milkman (!) for wearing a sweater (not sweatshirt) from a nonexistent university. The milkman (who may not exist) is, after all, Dutch, and may not know there is no such place.
- The narrator (and/or the author) doesn't know there isn't a UNIVERSITY OF OHIO. He is, after all, Dutch, and shouldn't really be expected to know this.
- The translator made a mistake, or at least didn't clean up Krabbe's (the author's) mistake.
So it's funny. Without seeing the Dutch text, and maybe even then, there's a strange, and powerful section in the book, and because it's in translation, it throws into doubt my interpretation of the book, it's character, its author, and its translator. It makes me wonder, if there's something this simple that can go so wrong, how many other things there are like that throught?
10:51:54 AM Permalink
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