Multiples: 12 Stories in 18 Languages by 61 Authors, edited by Adam Thirlwell – review

This collection of retranslated translations amounts to a patchy literary version of Chinese whispers
Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti: ‘a twangy, Bellovian translation of Søren Kierkegaard’. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Multiples, a new book edited by the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell, seeks to undermine the idea of the original in literary translation. As Thirlwell states in the introduction, he wants to "politely frazzle" the "whole category of the original". This echoes his previous views on translation. In his 2007 book Miss Herbert, he sketched out a ludic novelistic tradition including Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot and Vladimir Nabokov. His study concluded that, in novelistic terms, style transcended language and that therefore "it is possible to translate a story whose language the translator does not speak".

First published in McSweeney's in 2012, Multiples tests the elasticity of that principle. Thirlwell has selected 12 stories whose originals (which are not printed) are variously written in Danish, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Arabic, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Italian, Hungarian, English and Italian again. Ten stories are first translated into English, the other two into German and Spanish. The first translation is translated, and then the subsequent translation is translated again. The translators only see the preceding version of the story. The longest chains contain six translations, though every other version is in English. Thirlwell has corralled an illustrious international group of 60 novelist-translators into taking part and we end up with an intriguing literary version of Chinese whispers.

Multiples occasionally risks reading like a vanity project but the quality of several initial translations justifies the enterprise. Zadie Smith's English translation of Giuseppe Pontiggia's "Incontrarsi", a shimmering narrative of wasted life, is wonderfully supple. David Mitchell's rendering of Kenji Miyazawa's fabulist love triangle between a jealous Earth god, a seductive birch tree and a mendacious fox is similarly exquisite.

But the real test of the project is how intelligently subsequent translations can riff off their antecedents. Sheila Heti furnishes us with a twangy, Bellovian translation of Søren Kierkegaard's "Writing Sampler" from a conservative French conversion by Jean-Christophe Valtat. She undermines her predecessors by turning "je peux reprendre mon souffle" (literally: "I can catch my breath") into "I must slip away to reprimand my souffle", whipping up Kierkegaard's ironic assault on literary culture with satirical levity.

Conversely, Heidi Julavits's slapdash version of Yannick Haenel's second-string French translation of AL Snijders's Dutch story about two lovers shows up the venture's limitations. Julavits insouciantly writes that if you have no idea "what a word means… suddenly it can mean anything", but her mistranslation of "sous les combles" ("under the rafters") as "under a grape arbour" only muddies the tale's concise clarity.

The distortions of Rawi Hage's English translation of Youssef Habchi el-Achkar's muted Arabic tale set during the 1975 Lebanese civil war highlight the contradictions of Multiples. After Hage, Tristan Garcia faithfully translates the story into French before Joe Dunthorne, trusting his "own instincts as a writer" over his wafer-thin French, ditches Beirut for the 2011 London riots. Dunthorne's fiction is sharp, yet only El-Achkar's final image of a woman whose "nails are all broken" remains. We're left with inspired impromptu rather than translation, literal or otherwise, and El-Achkar's historical resonances are lost.

Thirlwell describes Multiples as "some throwback to the modernist days" of multilingual games, and these modernist pretentions are revealing. In his 1931 essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett, a pre-eminent modernist novelist-translator, quoted and translated a remark from Proust's Le temps retrouvé, adding his own comments in parentheses: "The duty and the task of a writer (not an artist, a writer) are those of a translator." Beckett's brackets assert that translation is a demanding craft rather than an art form that one can invent freestyle. Multiples shows us that the most innovative translations are still crafted rather than invented from scratch.