An Elegant Illusion: The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon, tr. Daniel Hahn, Ollie Brock, Lisa Dillman, Thomas Bunstead and Anne McLean
Deception, or at least, elusiveness and allusive obliquity, is much of the business of this enchanted labyrinth of a book, the first work of fiction by Guatemalan author, Halfon, to be translated into English. Its form is uncertain. On the face of it, it is a collection of ten short stories, though it may be a loosely constructed novel. As one of its five translators, Ollie Brock, explains, ‘it is a new work, combining five stories from an original collection of six, a novella split into its four parts and one previously uncollected piece as a sort of coda.[1] However, the book was written by a US domiciled Guatemalan author and academic called Eduardo Halfon and features as its central protagonist a US domiciled Guatemalan author and academic called Eduardo Halfon. So is it, perhaps, a memoir?
If there is a unifying theme to The Polish Boxer, it is that of searching, for lost people, slippery ideas, a self, a personal history. In the opening story, Distant, Halfon, the professor of literature, tries to track down a promising student who has gone missing. The penultimate story, The Pirouette, which is the longest in the collection, and somehow feels like its heart (though it would be unwise to bet on this), charts Halfon’s journey to Belgrade in search of the mysterious gipsy pianist, Milan Rakic, a journey characterised by endless misunderstandings and culminating in a venture into a kind of Serbian gipsy ‘heart of darkness’, yet there is no Kurtz, nothing but tricks of the light and the imagination of things that are not there. ‘…the whole scene was shaded with a sort of forbidden tinge, a secretive tinge, the tinge of a speakeasy in 1930s Harlem. There was smoke everywhere…as though everything were made of smoke, begun in smoke.’
Halfon first meets Milan in a bar, during a music festival at which Milan is performing, (though he does not stick to his programme)and which Halfon is visiting with his girlfriend, Lia. Their conversation revolves around the meaning of the word ‘epistrophy’, which is the title of a work by Thelonius Monk and also of this story, and which may be a botanical term, a form of rhetoric…or nothing at all, a made-up word, a jazz improvisation on language.
Language, and other forms of communication, or possible miscommunication, is a recurring theme in the book. At the outset, Halfon is teaching literature ‘to a horde of college kids who were, for the most part, illiterate’. The one student who shows promise is the one who disappears, and whose fate is his fortune told by a canary. The canary picks a written fortune from a wheel. The boy reads it in silence and never tells Halfon what it contains. Lia does not talk to Halfon about their sex life, but she draws pictures of her orgasms. Though she shares the pictures with him, she never explains them. Milan sends Halfon postcards from his travels; on the backs of them he writes gipsy myths but, when Halfon finally goes in search of Milan in Belgrade, he discovers that Milan has made most of these up. What has he really been telling Halfon? Neither he nor we will ever know for certain. Tourists visiting the Mayan ruins at Tikal to watch the sun set from one of the temples there become preoccupied by collecting discarded drawings of the sunset, thrown away by the frustrated artist who cannot capture the essence of sunset. Nobody, in the end, actually looks at the setting sun.
Touched on so lightly in this welter of erotic, intellectual and often very funny miscommunications, that the reader is scarcely aware of it until the final chapter, Sunsets, is a story whose truth we cannot dispute, even though its possessor lies about it, and most of its details are never explained. This is the story of Halfon’s grandfather and the Polish Boxer who saved his life in Auschwitz, though we never find out how, except that it is by advising him of the right words to speak, not by exerting his boxing skills. We know the story is true because Halfon’s grandfather has a number tattooed on his arm. He has always told Halfon it was his telephone number, in case he forgot it, and, somehow, this persistence in pretending it is something other than what it is becomes a truth of its own. ‘I thought about the five digits…already perishing on my grandfather’s forearm,’ writes Halfon, of Halfon at his grandfather’s deathbed, listening to two old friends describe him as ‘a great Jew’. ‘I thought about Auschwitz. I thought about tattoos, about numbers, about sketches, about temples, about sunsets. I thought about telling the two old men they’d gotten it wrong, that first and foremost my grandfather had been a great whiskey drinker.’ He does not say this, but the last thing we see him doing at the end of the book is fleeing the deathbed and throwing the white paper skullcap thrust upon him by the rabbi, into the trash.
Are you aware that I have embedded my own clue here, my own small contribution to the idea that nothing about The Polish Boxer is what it seems to be? Look back to my quote from Ollie Brock, one of five translators who worked together to translate the book from Spanish into English. Despite this unprecedented collaboration, the book reads seamlessly. Meanings and interpretations have been skilfully negotiated. Or perhaps it is that the book’s fragmentary, elusive, slightly hallucinatory character suits the way it was translated. Perhaps The Polish Boxer wouldn’t exist without its translators. As Brock says, ‘we wrote a sort of fantasia for anglophone quintet – in a new key, for a different audience. Translations are derivative but they can also be new.’[2]
The Polish Boxer is a new voice of note in anglophone translation, clever, complex, perhaps a little devious, always absorbing, entertaining and thought-provoking. Most of all, it takes accepted conventions of literary form and throws them in the trash.