Pobeda 1946: A Car Called Victory by Ilmar Taska

Abstract

Ilmar Taska Pobeda 1946: A Car Called Victory Trans. Christopher Moseley. London. Norvik Press (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2018. 241 pages. Estonian is a language that does not translate well to English. An approximate hybrid of Finnish and Russian, Estonian sentence structure, tone, and even vocabulary are so distant from Romance-language essentials that it is incredibly difficult to faithfully translate texts in Estonian to English in an engaging way. I experienced this in person when I lived there and struggled through labels, signs, and everyday conversations. Taken in a literary context, however, the disparity only seems to widen. The elaborate , image-dense diction and careful progress of narrative transition, so characteristic of richly written English, simply tend not to make sense in the sparse Baltic tongues, to say nothing of the differences in idioms. Whenever I go into a piece translated from Estonian, I tend to be somewhat wary of the way narrative structure will build, knowing it won’t be in the manner I’m used to. Ilmar Taska’s Pobeda 1946: A Car Called Victory sets this difference to its advantage. A powerful thriller set in Soviet-occupied Estonia, this quick read pulls you along each cold railway and into every poorly lit office the characters encounter. One of the central points of tension in the narrative is the naiveté of a young boy, the son of a man condemned for his efforts to liberate his homeland. The boy has been shielded by his parents from the reality of the horrors of the USSR and its actions, but in shielding him, his parents have made the young boy an easy convert and informer for an unnamed and unethical agent of the Stalinist elite. Taska skillfully dangles the boy over the precipice of history for all 241 pages, his mother, aunt, and country barely holding onto his ankles. Sandrine Collette Nothing But Dust Trans. Alison Anderson Europa Editions Nothing But Dust is both the winner of the Landerneau Prize for crime fiction and Parisian author Sandrine Collette’s English-language debut. Strengthened by the hybrid tonality of a tragically poignant noir western, Nothing But Dust paints a bitterly beautiful picture of an almost-mythic hero with infectious reverence for the barren majesty of the narrative’s Patagonian terrain. Carlo Coppola Urdu Poetry, 1935–1970: The Progressive Episode Oxford University Press Carlo Coppola has made groundbreaking progress in the study and translation of South Asian, and particularly Urdu, literature over the past fifty years. Such dedication comes to a head in this combination study and anthology of Urdu poetry, researched not only through academic sources but through interviews and personal experience. Full of nuanced yet accessible detail, this tome has something to offer the studied poetry lover and the eager novice alike. grapple with the loss of our childhoods but also more complexly with the loss of our former selves: How would the child-me regard the adult-me? How can our minds comprehend the irrational pattern of what has been lost and what still remains? These poems know that they are governed by a tangled logic. They also, crucially, realize that human life is not always governed by any perceptible logic and do not try to explain the inexplicable to their readers. This is one of the most gratifying aspects of Zagajewski ’s work—it does not pretend to know every secret, to have every answer. Despite the poet’s defenses of ardor, seriousness, and high art, he never lectures or condescends to us, never holds himself above our own human level. The poems in Asymmetry are among Zagajewski’s best: precise yet grand, contemporary yet timeless, suffused with emotion yet not maudlin, and never self-satisfied. If this is the poet’s late style, we can only wish there will be more. Magdalena Kay University of Victoria Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 85 Taska brilliantly brings to the forefront the contradictions inherent in idealism, secrets, and nationality, showing the imminence of disaster that accompanies every pen stroke, every train ride, when one lives under the surveillance of a dictatorship. Ultimately, however, I must give the thrust of my credit as an anglophone reader to Christopher Moseley’s masterful translation...