The Translator

I really felt like the book was more about the exiled Russian professor than the translator. It's never clear what he did, why he was exiled or what ultimately happens to him which is very Russian in mood. The first half of the book is slow and and confusing - I had to push myself to get through it. The 'translator' character is naive beyond reason for the 1960s even the early 1960s. There is some interesting background on the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russian professor was believable but the American female student was not. The importance of the meaning of words and language was well done and showed the complexity of true understanding.

Told during the 1960s with the Cuban Missile Crisis as a backdrop, John Crowley has created a smart love story in The Translator. The story follows Christa, a college student who develops a relationship with one of her instructors, Falin, a Russian poet who has been exiled from his country under mysterious circumstances. Much like the translations that Christa is making for Falin of his poems, their relationship is complicated and intricate. John Crowley's prose is beautifully written and the story is well paced. An overall enjoyable book.

This is one of the most powerful and moving booksI've ever read. Couldn't put it down and then couldn'tstop thinking about it afterwards. I'm still re-readingpassages in order to relive the sensations. The act of translation and the ideas and issues surroundingit are artfully used as a trampoline for delving intomany other interesting and emotional topics...A wonderful, layered experience.

This is the kind of reading experience in which you may find that you are breathing quietly and slowly, forgetting to eat or sleep, and letting the kids watch way too much television. The dog will mourn at your feet until you, as slowly as possible, turn the last page.

John Crowley's prose, always a delight, just keeps getting better. Here it's polished like fine crystal: no flashy lyricism, no polysyllabic raids on Roget, just limpid phrases that speak freshly and place you, antennae quivering, in the center of the scene. "The Translator" presents itself as a quiet, small, well-lighted novel, a chamber piece with only four or five speaking parts. On those terms, it succeeds just about perfectly.In a sense, all of Crowley's novels, even those set in some far future, have been historical novels. Lately, he's become confident enough to choose periods his readers can remember. His ongoing tetralogy (begun in "Aegypt") has been bringing the mid seventies back to life with perfect political and cultural pitch; "The Translator" does the same for the repressed, restless, hopeful, doom-haunted Zeitgeist of the few years between Eisenhower's fifties and LBJ's sixties. Within that grey-lit zone unfolds the story of a campus romance. Its special tincture of the erotic with the Platonic - when a Russian interlocutor, many years later, asks our heroine Kit whether she and Professor Falin were "lovers", she is honestly unable to remember - would have rung false in any other epoch.But while Kit narrates her simple story, Crowley has many other fish surreptitiously sizzling in the fire. He is studying the nature of translation, the nature of personal identity, the nature of national identity; the ways in which poetry fails to be genuine poetry both when it is, and when it is not, politically "relevant." And finally the themes and the personal histories of this uncharacteristically realistic novel do not appear to be resolvable, apart from the angelic mythology explored in Falin's final poem.I rate this book at four and a half stars, but I round it up because of my strong feeling that there's much more here than has yet met my eye. Perpetually fluttering his wings at this volume's edges and crannies is the figure of Vladimir Nabokov - also a "translator", also a Russian poet in exile, like Kit a fan of Lewis Carroll's Alice, and who famously adopted a position with regard to political relevance in art seemingly diametrically opposed to the one taken by Crowley's Falin. So, I suspect that this book is even more carefully crafted than its exquisite surface would suggest. In particular, its' worth considering whether by the time the story ends it is only poems that have been "translated."