Review | The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas, Dmitry Chen

Studying Latin translation has given me a new appreciation for literary translation. Before this point, I didn't really think about how books are translated from one language to another, but now I'm familiar with the process of deciphering the work on a word-by-word level, producing a rough "translationese" draft, going back over it and clearing it up, working on drawing out the implications of the original text... Literary translators of this world, I salute you!

And yet there really isn't enough translation being done. I have a friend who is doing a degree in German and has to translate a contemporary German novel (which hasn't been translated into English yet) as part of her coursework. She has an enormous choice; there's tons of fantastic untranslated German literature out there, as there is for every country. What makes The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas interesting on the level of translation is that it wasn't published conventionally; it was crowdfunded by a Kickstarter campaign and published by Russian Life. The trilogy it's part of, the Silk Road Trilogy, was a massive hit in Russia, but no Anglophone publishing house has picked it up. (The same goes for the cult hit Дом, в котором... by Mariam Petrosyan which still isn't available in a language I can read!) Could this represent a new way to get translated fiction out into the world?

Musings about translation aside, this definitely deserved to be translated. It's an excellent book on an unconventional subject: the fall of the Umayyad dynasty and the rise of the Abbasids. It further subverts expectations by not taking place in the centre of the action in Syria/the Levant/Mesopotamia, but in the trading cities of Central Asia: Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv. Peripheral and yet entirely central to these pivotal events, the people of Central Asia - the conquered peoples of Sogdia and Iran - live under uneasy Arab Muslim rule and are experiencing a sea change not only in the dynasty that rules the Islamic empire, but in their own countries and cultures. More people, such as the protagonist's brother, are converting to Islam out of genuine conviction or the chance for an easier life or both. Although the Islamic conquest of Central Asia is a century old by the time this book takes place (749-50 AD), a strong miasma of loss and dislocation permeates this book.

The main character, Nanidat Maniakh, is a wealthy silk merchant from Samarkand who is caught up in murder, mystery, and intrigue when he returns from two years in China and is the victim of an attempted assassination in his own home. He then journeys from Samarkand into Iran to try to uncover the truth, and finds himself part of a great tangle of alliances, plots, and secret organisations. Nanidat did not exist, but most of the people in this book did, and are huge figures in early Islamic history: Abu Muslim, al-Mansur, al-Saffah, Marwan II, and many more. This book relies heavily on real and imagined history, and as such it can be difficult to keep track of everything that goes on. Many reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have highlighted this problem; personally, I had very little difficulty following the narrative, but I did study early Islamic history which gave me a big head start! Reading a little on the Umayyads and Abbasids, as well as some basic Central Asian history, would go a long way in enriching one's enjoyment of this book.

The style of this book is somewhat grandiose and epic, which is suitable to the story and is not particularly distracting or irritating once you get absorbed in it. Unlike some historical fiction, it doesn't try to translate an older experience to modern understandings, and there's very little slangy, casual dialogue. To come back to the translation - I haven't read the original Russian, but Liv Bliss' translation is superb. It's fluid and eloquent, and doesn't have any of the dull, stiff quality that translated prose can sometimes have (God knows most of my translations are overly stiff and unnatural...). I commend both Dmitry Chen for writing this book (if the other two books of the trilogy come out in English I will definitely be buying them!), and Liv Bliss for producing such a distinguished, readable translation.

Last of the Oxford Term

(I was trying to play off Last of the Summer Wine, but I'm not sure it worked...)

I was active with my camera the last couple of weeks, trying to capture a sense of Oxford in the cold depths of December. Tomorrow I leave for Amsterdam (and Havanah!) and I won't see Oxford again until January. So long, city! It hasn't snowed yet but you're still beautiful.

Ooh artistic ooh!!

My best friend from school came to visit! She loved our dining hall and dressed for the occasion.

You can see more of the hall here.

The next set of pictures I took one evening walking back to where I was staying (not in my college - they kicked me out and I'm currently staying at a friend's room while she's going back home to Italy). I really love the light in these; evening light in winter can make for some very stark, eerie shots.

And these last ones I just took today, my last day in Oxford. Other than the first one, which is of Hertford College, they were all taken in Radcliffe Square at night.

All photos are unedited because I'm lazy.

Ice Hockey!

On Saturday I went to my first ever ice hockey match. I went with - who else? - a couple of Canadians, my friend Jenny and her boyfriend Jackson. While I knew Oxford had an ice-skating rink, I didn't know ice hockey matches took place there. We were lucky this time, because it was the last (I think) match of the university ice hockey season, between the two best teams in the league: Oxford and London. Obviously I cheered for Oxford. ;)

And this match was, somewhat dramatically, advertised as the Battle of the Burghs.

Wait, that needs to be bigger.

The Battle of the Burghs!!!

That's better. 

Of course, I took photos, though they weren't great since the netting got in the way and my camera kept focusing on the netting rather than the hockey players! I got a few nice shots, however.

And a couple of us at the match.

Ugh, phone quality.

So I ended up enjoying it a lot! I'm not a sports fan and I don't go to matches, but this was really fun.

Oxford Christmas Lights Festival

...happened this weekend! Unfortunately I wasn't able to see a lot of it, because I went to London at midday Saturday, didn't get back until the wee hours, and today I was stuck inside writing an essay. However, Friday night I went out with my friend June and got to see the lights and such.

The light-up toys that are inevitably on sale at these things. I used to live in Canterbury which had a lot of these events and I loved these things!

The moon behind the Sheldonian. :)

A view up Broad Street.

Outside the Oxford Museum of Science.

The Cornmarket - now the Christmas lights have gone up!

The lantern and the moon. I tried so many times to take this photo!

In the Weston Library an "Impromptu Orchestra", which to my understanding means people turn up with their instruments and play, was performing Handel's Messiah.

Unfortunately it was a slightly avant-garde performance and an incredibly annoying woman made an old vinyl recording of the piece cut in and out of the actual music (it wasn't even in time! It was the kind of thing you do when you're a child and making music cut out was really clever) so in the end we left. We went to the Castle Quarter where there was supposed to be a performance involving light-up umbrellas, but we missed it. :(

Got a couple of photos with the lights, though.

June.

And me!

Oxford gets into the Christmas mood early because we have "Oxmas" on the 25th of November, which is the only reason I don't mind Christmas stuff happening before December. It's slightly ridiculous, but it gets me in the mood for Christmas so when I go home I'm really enthusiastic and all my family and friends are still in the "ugh, Christmas comes too early" stage.

Being a Tourist in My Own City

I turned 21 yesterday. As the cliché goes, I don't actually feel any different, but one thing that did happen is that my friend Elise, whom I've known since we were at sixth-form together, came to visit me! She wasn't here very long, but I took the opportunity to show her around Oxford and be a bit of a tourist myself.

Elise outside the Radcliffe Camera, the very distinctive library that mostly houses history and English books.

In Brasenose, which is not my college, but I took her to the nicest-looking ones.

Lovely view of the roof of the RadCam from Brasenose.

In Corpus Christi, that pint-sized college!

The dining hall at Christ Church. And yes, that is the Hogwarts dining hall!

Also in Christ Church: the Harry Potter stairs!

The last few days have been appalling weather in Oxford, with torrential rain, but the last couple of days have been even worse and added gale-force winds to the mix. On certain streets it was almost impossible to walk into the wind. These are the kind of days when you wonder what the point was in styling your hair...

Update

Good Lord, it's been a while. I blame univeristy. Meanwhile, here's a selection of what I've been up to:

• Saw a rowboat burned because my college did well in the boat race. There was white wine and a lot of smoke. 
• Messed around in Christ Church and took goofy photos with my friends. Christ Church is definitely the grandest Oxford college and is known colloquially as "the Harry Potter college", since a lot of HP scenes were filmed there for the series.
• Went to a 90's themed party. Since I am terrible at costumes and only had half an hour to make mine, I went as the dissolution of the USSR. I did this by making a sign that I stuck to my front with the hammer and sickle drawn on it, and "USSR" in big letter with a crossing-out. I also stuck red stars to my shoulders. Funnily enough (or maybe not so funnily, my college leans heavily left-wing) people loved my minimal-effort costume. After that I went clubbing (fun!) and after leaving at 4 a.m. we got burgers from a kebab van where the owner asked me if I was Pakistani... ???? (I mean, my grandfather is from Peshawar and that side of the family is Anglo-Indian so it's not a totally unfounded assumption, but I didn't think it really showed, at all.)
• Saw a friend who came back to Oxford for her graduation ceremony and ate delicious Lebanese food at Elham's Lebanese Deli, which I recommend for anyone ever visiting Oxford. Yummy, nice place, and you get a DIY plate for £5. 
• Watched the production of Pentecost that was running at the Oxford Playhouse. I really liked it - the cast was good and the set was fantastic - although I got severe genre whiplash when it changed from a discussion about the nature of art and history in society in the first half, to a hostage drama in the second half. Still a very enjoyable play, and OH MY GOD THE CLIMAX WHAT WHAT.
• Fallen in love with Oxford's second-hand bookshops. You can often tell what bookshops former students offload their old books to - at the Oxfam Bookshop on St Giles I found a Syriac primer in the Foreign Languages section which can only have come from a Byzantinist - but I love them so much. There's so much variety! From Oxford second-hand bookshops I have so far this term acquired: Persepolis, The Dumas Club, Mr Fox, An Instance of the Fingerpost, Select Letters of Cicero (for my course, not my own pleasure...), The Seville Communion, Penguin Lost, Turkish Gambit, Seeking Whom He May Devour. Also Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook and Virginia Woolf's Orlando from the discount store.
• Read so many books about Alexander the Great and his Successors and decided to root for Seleucus. I'm not sure why.

I would say I'll be back with regularity, but Oxford is nuts and I never have any time - and it's finals this year, which makes everything a million times worse. I do like Oxford and I'm glad I study here, but in a lot of ways I'll be glad when it is over. If nothing else, working my first 9 to 5 will be a piece of cake after this.

When Book-Hoarding Gets Out of Control

Today I packed most of the stuff I have to take to university with me. I also cleared out some of my bookshelves to make room for the books that I've bought and have been stacked on my desk for ages because there's nowhere to put them.

I have a fairly well-established arrangement for my bookshelves. They're arranged vaguely by genre, although a lot of disparate books end up next to each other because I put them there years ago and never got round to rearranging them. So I have a shelf of historical fiction... apart from The Black Magician trilogy, which is a high-fantasy series. I have a shelf of mostly urban fantasy, with some Latin-language books, Gabriel García Márquez, and a bunch of Balkan writers among them. And I have the shelf which until now was entirely filled with the contemporary YA I read in my YAhood, and is now a mix of my Scarlett Thomas collection, my few remaining YA light reads, and a bunch of disparate stuff that's been waiting for a new home (includes: Umberto Eco, the steampunk Burton & Swinburne series, José Saramago, and an Inspector Renko book). I have so many books in a stack on my floor, that's ready to be moved elsewhere: Skullduggery Pleasant, my Sarah Dessen books, the Truth Dare Kiss Promise series, Heist Society, books I got in proof copy from relatives who work in bookshops...

Most of it I haven't read in years. They're not great literature, and I probably won't miss them when they're gone. I needed more space on my bookshelves, and I needed to clear them out anyway. But there were a lot of books which even though I could probably have cleared them out - my Georgia Nicholson collection, Sara Manning's books, the children's historical fiction I devoured a decade ago - I can't bear to remove. I've already moved all my Diana Wynne Jones, the Abhorsen series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the Roman Mysteries to my sister's room (where she doesn't read them, because she's not really a reader). It's sad to search my bookshelves for them and remember that they aren't here. And in a little over a year I'll have graduated uni and be living somewhere that isn't my parents' house (nothing to do with not wanting to live with my family - there's just no jobs where I live) and there's no way I'll be able to take all these with me, and I'll probably have to do another culling.

Then there's all the books I've bought for my uni courses. A lot of them are big, and take up a lot of space, and are very specialised, and I could resell them for a decent amount of money. I probably will, bar a few books that are more readable and not specialised academic stuff (since I do have a sizeable number of nonfiction books). But as it is I can flick through them and see the progression of what I've been studying for the last four years, and I do feel strangely attached to them even though I probably will have to sell them on after I graduate.

This isn't a post with much of a point, other than that it's sad to have to get rid of the books you've owned for years but are no longer read and need to make way for new ones. I can absolutely understand why I'm doing it, but I wish I just had magically expanding bookshelves....

I've Been to London to Visit the Queen!

Well, actually I went to visit my friend. Lloyd and I have been friends since we met at sixth-form college in Exeter, but he's at UCL studying medicine and I'm at Oxford studying history so we don't see each other as often as we used to. This summer especially, since I was overseas for a lot of it, I only saw him once before I went down to visit him in London. I caught a fairly early train on the Friday and he wasn't actually in London at the time, so I went to the British Museum, because it's great and a nice way to spend an afternoon.

I saw the Assyrian palace statues, the Roman mosaics, and took photos of the building outside the museum. I also saw the Japan collection, which was fascinating - it was laid out in such a way that you got taken on a sweeping tour of Japanese history, interspersed with art and ceramics from contemporary Japanese artisans who promote traditional styles and techniques in Japan. I really loved it!

Then it was off to Lloyd's place - he lives in Camden - and after an enormous falafel wrap for dinner, it was time for the party he was hosting to mark the beginning of the year. Most people there were UCL medics whom I didn't know, but it was a fun night regardless, and we went out clubbing which was a good night.

The next day, Lloyd took me to the Natural History Museum, which was, since it was the weekend, horribly crowded and not much fun, but we walked there and it was a really nice walk through Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea via Hyde Park.

Unfortunately (or maybe not!), once Lloyd realised how flattering my camera was, we got caught up in a huge posing session throughout Hyde Park.

Lloyd!

His direction for this was, "Act like Queen Victoria!"

On our way back, we saw a strange structure near the Serpentine, and went over to investigate. It turned out to be some Fortnum & Mason promotion thing - you could take tea inside it - although originally I thought it was some sort of interactive art instalation.

It of course was a great opportunity for more photos.

I also drank tea and took photos of sunsets:

In the evening we went to another party, which I didn't enjoy so much because it was a stand-around-and-chat sort of party and I knew very few people there. But it was still an enjoyable experience. I have to say, though, the highlight of my visit was going to the Globe! I've never been, but Sunday evening we got £5 standing tickets for Richard II, which is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays!

Lloyd with Nicole, his uni friend who also came to see the play.

I look far less excited than I actually was here!

This post is ridiculously long so I won't go into too much detail about the play, but it was a good production and very enjoyable. I worried about my capacity for standing for nearly 3 hours straight, but in the end it wasn't bad at all! As I got more swept into the play I didn't notice so much how aching my feet were, and being so close to the stage made for a more immediate, almost interactive experience.

Then, on the last morning, before I caught my train home, we went to Camden Market.

We tried on hipster sunglasses, heh heh. And we also found a shop chock-full of Turkish lanterns, which are beautiful and if I had the money I would buy tons.

 So beautiful, so unobtainable...

And then it was time for me to catch the 2 o'clock train home. But this weekend away made me realise that I should really go to London more often. I have friends there, there's tons going on, and it's only a 90-minute coach ride from Oxford for a £15 period return. I'll try to do that more this year, despite it being my final year (argh!!!!).