{"id":430472,"date":"2020-04-20T09:15:19","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T13:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=430472"},"modified":"2020-04-20T09:15:19","modified_gmt":"2020-04-20T13:15:19","slug":"drive-your-plow-over-the-bones-of-the-dead-by-olga-tokarczuk-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/04\/20\/drive-your-plow-over-the-bones-of-the-dead-by-olga-tokarczuk-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Louisa Ermelino<\/strong>\u00a0is the author of three novels; <\/em>Joey Dee Gets Wise; <\/em>The Black Madonna\u00a0(Simon and Schuster); <\/em>The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin\u2019s Press) and a story collection, <\/em>Malafemmina (Sarabande). She\u00a0writes a column, Open Book, for <\/em>Publishers Weekly, about noteworthy forthcoming books, interviewing authors, editors, and agents<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead<\/em><\/a> by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by <\/strong>Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I love a long shot, and underdog, but clearly Olga Tokarczuk is no underdog.<\/p>\n

Her novel Flights <\/em>won the International Man Booker International Prize and was a finalist for the National Book award in translation. She\u2019s published in the US by Riverhead\/Penguin Random House. You might even call her a literary darling although she\u2019s been a serious, international award-winning, controversial feminist writer in her native Poland and Flights <\/em>was her tenth book.<\/p>\n

But enough about Olga Tokarczuk the celebrity. I want to tell you why her novel, 2019\u2019s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead<\/em> should win the Best Translated Book Award. To start with, it\u2019s pure poetry. I didn\u2019t want to mark up the hardback copy I was reading (Catholic schoolgirl that I am . . . I can make a perfect book jacket from a paper bag) so I decided to mark passages with Post-its. I ran out of Post-its by page 50.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s winter in the isolated Polish village where people from Warsaw summer and Janina is the cranky woman who watches their houses, studies astrology, and translates Blake with her former student Dizzy. She also has an affinity for animals and the first murder that takes place is that of Janina\u2019s neighbor, Big Foot, who mistreats his dog and sets cruel snares to trap the deer, hares, badgers and such who live in the forest surrounding the town.<\/p>\n

Listen to the opening sentence: \u201cI am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do you not want to know this woman? You will not be disappointed. Every declaration sets you thinking. Janina is called upon by her neighbor, Oddball\u2014(she doesn\u2019t believe in given names and hates her own so she gives people names that suit them, hence, Big Foot and OddBall\u2014to deal with Big Foot\u2019s corpse. In response, she says: \u201cIt made me feel sad, horrified, for even someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on earth does?\u201d<\/p>\n

The murders continue; Janina is both dismissed and suspected by the local police and the wonderful mystery plot unfolds but it\u2019s Janina who steals the show with her observations. Of one of the houses she watches over she says: \u201cThe house itself was old, in bad shape, and looked as if it wanted to be left in peace to carry on decomposing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lloyd-Jones\u2019 translation is pitch perfect, creative and touching. Janina sits in the doctor\u2019s office: \u201cLast year the sun had burned me again.\u201d<\/p>\n

And at the police station: \u201cIn law-abiding fashion, we presented ourselves for questioning\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Tokarczuk\u2019s book is original and wise and beautifully written and beautifully translated. It is a quiet wonder. I end with Janina\u2019s comment on The Writer, whose house she watches over: \u201cIn a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind\u2014that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that\u2019s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality\u2014its inexpressibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Louisa Ermelino\u00a0is the author of three novels; Joey Dee Gets Wise; The Black Madonna\u00a0(Simon and Schuster); The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin\u2019s Press) and a story collection, Malafemmina (Sarabande). She\u00a0writes a column, Open […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":423572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[23356,69822,18106,70412,37876],"class_list":["post-430472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-antonia-lloyd-jones","tag-louisa-ermelino","tag-olga-tokarczuk","tag-riverhead","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":430502,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430472\/revisions\/430502"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}