Gerbrand Bakker and David Colmer’s The Twin

I have just finished reading The Twin, Australian translator David Colmer’s rendition of Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker’s Boven is het stil. It won the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which, at 100,000 euros (shared between author and translator), is the richest individual literary award in the world. (The Portrait is Colmer’s other translation for Scribe.)

The Twin is a quietly affecting book, the beauty of which is in its measured pacing and tendency towards understatement. It opens with the narrator, fifty-something-year-old Helmer, moving his elderly, immobile father upstairs. With that we are introduced to the rhythms of farm life in northern Netherlands: the seasonal rhythms, the daily ones; and also to the tragedy and dissatisfaction that is Helmer’s life.

Helmer’s voice is direct, his sphere of reference appropriate; this is him describing his father:

he sat there like a calf that’s just a couple of minutes old, before it’s been licked clean: with a directionless, wobbly head and eyes that drift over things.

There is much restraint, here, much going through the motions of getting jobs done, and little reflection on Helmer’s behalf. Helmer’s treatment of his father is cold, even cruel. It becomes clear that there are older reasons for this cruelty — that Helmer has been the recipient of similarly poor treatment at the hands of his father — but this does not lessen the shock of it, or its barbarity: Helmer neglects him, keeps him isolated by telling visitors he’s not receiving any, refuses to fetch a doctor, won’t offer anything more than basic, necessary interaction. There are occasional small actions that translate into thoughtfulness: Helmer puts the bed up on blocks, for example, so that his father can see more than ‘just sky’ out the window. His inability to express any direct affection, however, is disturbing, which makes for a complex protagonist.

Helmer’s reserved, guarded personality and his situation are revealed gradually in perfect, subtle moments. The repetition of ‘Where’s your father?’ in different contexts on page 22 is so telling, as is this, on page 30: ‘I put my coffee down and try to rub the warmth out of my forehead with my left hand. Left—to get my hand between Ada and me.’ Or this on page 31: ‘Teun and Ronald try to outdo each other shouting “Oh” and “Ah” because they think I’ll like it. They’re right. I also like sitting here in the kitchen while people are walking around and talking in the living room.’ Observations like this are peppered throughout the text, and whenever I came across one I found myself lingering over it.

It’s not until page 56 that the reason for Helmer’s resentment and sadness is revealed in a passage about a past incident prompted by the arrival of a letter from someone called Riet. I had a sense of let down when starting to read this passage; I wanted to tell the author, I don’t want to know, at least not like this, in a flashback; the small moments of revelation were more than enough for me. But I guess it had to come. This is it: Helmer had a twin brother, Henk, who was killed in a car accident while his fiancée, Riet, was driving when they were young adults. Henk was his father’s favourite — he was set to take over the farm — while Helmer had just started studying Dutch literature. After Henk’s death, not only did Helmer have the loss of his twin brother to deal with, but he also had to stop his studies and take on his brother’s responsibilities.

And so we see that the life Helmer has spent his time living is an inherited life; it should have been his brother’s. Yet at the same time, as we delve further into the book, we realise that Helmer has in fact chosen it. He could have told his father, No. It’s almost as if Helmer’s living this life as a kind of monument to his twin brother. This is the life that Henk should have led; this is, simultaneously, the only part of him that Helmer can keep alive.

It gradually becomes clear that what Helmer is waiting for, as all the while he holds his loss close, is acknowledgement of that loss, acknowledgement that to lose a twin is to lose half of one’s self. It’s Riet’s boy — sent to work on the farm with Helmer because he’s difficult — who surprises Helmer by, in the midst of all the hormones and self-centredness of adolescence, seeing outside himself enough to give Helmer that. It becomes clear that this, more than his saving Helmer’s life (the boy does so by pulling a sheep off Helmer when he is stuck beneath it in mud), is what releases Helmer from his need to be stuck. The boy pulls Helmer out of the mud, but also pulls him out of the same by acknowledging the gravity of his loss. This acknowledgement of the pointedness and individuality of his loss sets Helmer free until, finally, by the end, he feels at peace in his own company: alone, he is not lonely, but a whole man rather than half of one.

Many say that one of the attractions of reading is the capacity to travel outside the self, to experience something of the inner life of another (something that is especially possible if that someone is fictional). If this is true, then reading translation must surely be one of the best ways to experience some sense of what it is to be socialised within another culture. It makes me wonder why publishers are so hesitant to give translations a chance. I find that reading in translation can mean encountering a sense of strangeness, of not quite grasping the intricacies of what is going on, and can also mean having our expectations of the form we are reading upturned.

I think that while there are no differences in form here, the sense of strangeness, of travelling into a different cultural mindset, is certainly possible through this book. Helmer’s relationship with one character could lead the (Anglo-Saxon) reader to surmise that he is homosexual, yet I wonder if this is a reading that comes out of our particular milieu. A German friend once lamented to me that in the Anglo world, it is impossible to separate nudity and sexuality. It’s sad, he sighed, that you can’t be naked with family and friends. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t read into Helmer and the ex-farmhand Jaap’s relationship as being about sexuality; it may be that as well, but I think it’s beside the point; I think it was included as a comment on something else. Jaap when he was farmhand was, all those years ago, the only person who acknowledged and tried to soothe Helmer’s difficulties at being separated from his brother after Henk became involved with Riet. I felt that the relationship was Helmer’s attempt to feel as physically close to another human being as he had been with his twin. Thus, Jaap serves to highlight Helmer’s loss in physical terms: the loss is a sudden, brutal absence of physical closeness as much as it’s a loss on an emotional level.

Colmer’s translation is excellent. He handles beautifully the difficult task of conveying the voice of a farmer without making it so colloquial as to re-situate it in a geography other than the setting of the book: sentences are short, words are contracted, more informal choices are made. To get a sense of what I mean, in the quote above about the father as a calf, replace ‘sat’ with ‘was seated’, ‘couple of’ with ‘few’, or ‘it’s’ with ‘it has’, for example; see, in reverse, how Colmer’s choices have made this voice the voice of a male, of a middle-aged male, of a farmer? How he doesn’t lock him into any particular nationality? How he controls the rhythm beautifully?

Colmer’s dialogue also rings true, whether the person speaking is an eight-year-old boy, a gruff old man or a middle-aged mother. The one moment where I wished for a more creative translation was in the following exchange:

‘I’m named after one of my father’s uncles, but a generation back.’

‘A great-uncle.’

‘Is that a great-uncle?’

‘Yes.’

This is a case where the languages don’t match up. It seems to me that the word for ‘great-uncle’ is a little-used one in Dutch, or one with which not everyone is familiar, but of course the same is not the case in English. The aspect of the great-uncle being discussed here that is most important is the fact that it’s a more distanced relationship than you would expect of someone your parents name you after. I think that here a better strategy would have been to make the word for the relationship as technical in English as it must have been (I imagine) in Dutch — something like ‘one of my father’s cousins’ and the reply, ‘a first cousin once removed’. Still, I guess it’s nice that the language difference is highlighted here.

The Twin could have offered a neat resolution with regards to Helmer’s and his father’s relationship, but doesn’t; it offers something altogether more nuanced. On page 211, we are offered another of the kernels of truth of which Bakker seems so fond: people just don’t change.

This is a perfectly paced, insightful novel whose rhythms lull you into something like wonder. I found it compulsive reading, despite the fact that it is mostly about a grumpy old fella.

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Posted by plumeofwords on March 22, 2011

http://plumeofwords.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/gerbrand-bakker-and-david-colmers-the-twin/