above all Happy new year to everybody. Here below you'll find a text I have translated from Italian into English, one of my usual texst.... as some of you may know... I have tried to post it to other some translators of Freeland, but I haven't had any response on that. Being Christmas and New year..... Suggestions, opinions and corrections of the text are welcome. Native English speakers are invited to contribute and help out with their own suggestions.... Please.....
thanks in advance, Laura
Telling shameless things
In the 1974, when he was only 34 years old and made his first debut with the 2 stories of “Lands in the crepuscule”, J. M. Coetzee was not aiming at the Nobel prize. He was keeping in his mind the rules that impose to a 900 writer not to borne himself to the role of a hidden puppeteer, so dear to 800 novelists.
The boss of the first stories, (Vietnam project” ) is named Coetzee. To him the researcher Eugene Dwan presents a report on the American propaganda during the war in Vietnam. He will be rewarded with disgraces and insults.
In the other story, there are three Coetzees. The ancestor writing in Dutch the account of a bloody expedition in the Hottentots’ Land. There is also S. J. Coetzee, who reproposes in the 50’s the same text in Afrikaans and who turns out to be J. M. Coetzee’s father. The latter feigns to translate them in English. The genealogy and the overlapping of the different languages anticipate the material that will give life to other seven books by the writer born in Cape’s City. His human condition as a white South-African and colonialism come to light even in the novels referring to the champions of the European literature. Franz Kafka, for example, evoked in the title “The life and the time of Micheal K”, (dealing with the life of a harelipped mestizo, experiencing a series of state institutions such as the orphanage and the jail).
In the two volumes of the autobiography, “Infancy and Youth”, Coetzee choses an opposite way of writing. He decides to disappear, even though the kind of life he describes- at first, as a solitary and lonely lad in ’50 South Africa and then as an aspirant writer in glamourous London – and the two match perfectly with his own life.
Coetzee abrubtly turns down the political interpretations of his novels. He says he wants to tell and not take a position: it is not his business and not his job. On the other hand, the infinite complications of the world do not give any possibility to mark a definite line between innocents and guilty ones.
In order to undestand this point, just read “Shame”, published one year before “The human machine” by Philip Roth. Coetzee’s book focuses on the South African version of the disasters deriving from the “politically correct”. There is a professor, accused of sexual harrassment by a student, after a consentient relationship with the latter. After being expelled from the university, he and his daughter Lucy will find refuge in a desolate corner of the world. Lucy will be raped but will not denounce her aggressors (not sure about this term).