Like most readers new to Olga Tokarczuk, I was won over by Jennifer Croft’s recent translation of the novel Flights. This week, for Splice, I’ve taken a look at how Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ more recent translation of Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead compares to the dizzying heights of Flights:
No doubt, by this point, readers who discovered Tokarczuk with Flights will suspect that Drive Your Plow sounds like something rather different. It certainly is, and there’s no escaping the feeling that it’s a comparatively minor work. That’s not necessarily to fault the novel on its own terms. Like Flights, it does something exciting, something structurally daring, in casting onto the page a handful of dissociated topics and striving to foreground the spirit that unites them. Unlike Flights, however, it doesn’t leave much to the reader’s imagination, as the whodunit narrative and the consistent first-person narration work together to funnel everything through Janina’s consciousness. The connections between events are explicated and streamlined, closing down the spaces for speculation that Tokarczuk meticulously carved into Flights. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a simpler book, more of a closed circuit, so carefully and holistically constructed as to seal off the access points that would invite readers to participate in making it meaningful. To put this in terms that William Blake would appreciate, it’s a beautiful book that arrives in the wake of a sublime one; it is thoughtful and suspenseful, cinematic and gripping, but its beauty is easier to regard and admire than to immerse oneself in.
Infinite Patience 