As other Romanians my age, I first encountered
Attack in the Library when I was a kid.
One of the advantages of growing up in Romania in the 1980s was that, from a
certain point, there was nothing much on TV with the exception of propaganda
and hymns to The Comrade and the Comradess (Tovarășul și Tovarășa) Ceaușescu.
We had some old French and Italian films, old Hollywood musicals (all cut to
fit the short emission times), and some TV series from the Eastern Bloc:
Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Polish (historical adventure Czarne Chmury – Black
Clouds, Karina – story of a horse) or Czech (medical drama Sanitka – The Ambulance, kids’ films
Arabela and Rumburak).
In the 1970s-1980s Romanians were buying books like mad, they were the only
source of culture and entertainment which could be free of propaganda. My folks
had, and still have, an extensive library in their flat which contains
everything from the French, English and Russian classics to Romanian poetry and
novels of the 1980s. A special place was given to crime novels: Agatha
Christie, Raymond Chandler, Georges Simenon, and also Romanian authors Rodica
Ojog-Brasoveanu, Haralamb Zinca, and George Arion. Of course, I was not allowed
to read these at the time – they were “books for grown-ups”. In any case, I
remember the rather neutral covers selected for the crime genre, probably to make them look not too exciting. At some point at the beginning of the
1990s, I went through these previously forbidden books and had much fun reading
them, then – as things are with youngters with fund and age-related issues in their minds – I forgot about them.
I forgot until I got on board this intriguing project of translating Romanian crime fiction into English, as member of a three-person team. And this is how I read Attack in the Library again, close to 30 years since the original publication date and some 18 years since I first read it. This was the moment I discovered a truly amazing book, funny and dead serious in the same time, which was speaking to me in a language I knew only too well, the language of allusion and double entendre that characterised almost any communication back in the bad old days (“you never know who’s listening”).
Paying homage to the French, American and English Noir tradition, but setting characters and story in very Romanian scenes and conditions, George Arion produced an intriguing novel, a “whodunnit” overshadowed by danger throughout but illuminated by sparkling, unstoppable humour.
Working on the draft translation, I was tempted (and, to some point, gave in to that temptation) to translate the situations too much, which is to say that I tried to imagine the situations in English-American settings. And the characters started to sound artificially Anglo-Saxon, some sort of mockneys, like Dick van Dyke playing the cheerful chimney sweep in Mary Poppins. Here, I was lucky that the co-translators, Ramona Mitrica and Mike Phillips, intervened and pointed out that I was beginning to localise the narration, like a Hollywood version of a non-American film (many of these don’t even bear comparison to the original).
It is not for me to blow my own trumpet and sing the praises of the translation, but I believe we made justice to the book, and produced an English translation which is as close to the spirit and language of George Arion’s original. As Mike Phillips observed in the introduction to the book, “Reading Attack in this translation is about listening to Arion himself, speaking in his own voice, telling the reader just who he is”.
I won’t say anything about the book’s plot here, you can read about it on Profusion’s site, and can even read a sample chapter. A preview can also be downloaded for your Kindle.
I forgot until I got on board this intriguing project of translating Romanian crime fiction into English, as member of a three-person team. And this is how I read Attack in the Library again, close to 30 years since the original publication date and some 18 years since I first read it. This was the moment I discovered a truly amazing book, funny and dead serious in the same time, which was speaking to me in a language I knew only too well, the language of allusion and double entendre that characterised almost any communication back in the bad old days (“you never know who’s listening”).
Paying homage to the French, American and English Noir tradition, but setting characters and story in very Romanian scenes and conditions, George Arion produced an intriguing novel, a “whodunnit” overshadowed by danger throughout but illuminated by sparkling, unstoppable humour.
Working on the draft translation, I was tempted (and, to some point, gave in to that temptation) to translate the situations too much, which is to say that I tried to imagine the situations in English-American settings. And the characters started to sound artificially Anglo-Saxon, some sort of mockneys, like Dick van Dyke playing the cheerful chimney sweep in Mary Poppins. Here, I was lucky that the co-translators, Ramona Mitrica and Mike Phillips, intervened and pointed out that I was beginning to localise the narration, like a Hollywood version of a non-American film (many of these don’t even bear comparison to the original).
It is not for me to blow my own trumpet and sing the praises of the translation, but I believe we made justice to the book, and produced an English translation which is as close to the spirit and language of George Arion’s original. As Mike Phillips observed in the introduction to the book, “Reading Attack in this translation is about listening to Arion himself, speaking in his own voice, telling the reader just who he is”.
I won’t say anything about the book’s plot here, you can read about it on Profusion’s site, and can even read a sample chapter. A preview can also be downloaded for your Kindle.
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