Translating an Exile's Experience
MY FATHER'S NOTEBOOK, by Kader Abdolah. HarperCollins. 328 pages. $24.95.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 21, 2006
My Father's Notebook is, first and foremost, a book about translation. Ishmael, the novel's Iranian narrator, is the son of a deaf-mute carpet mender named Aga Akbar. Ishmael spends his childhood as his father's shadow and mouthpiece, deciphering the older man's rudimentary gestures and translating them into words.
Now, years later, Ishmael is a political exile living in Holland. Long after his father's death, he appoints himself Akbar's translator again. His father never learned to read or write, but he did invent a cuneiform alphabet, modeled after an ancient inscription near the village where he grew up. Ishmael has his father's tattered journal, and is attempting to translate the cuneiform scrawl into Dutch, his new tongue.
Kader Abdolah, himself an Iranian-born political exile living in Holland, has published three previous novels; this is the first to be translated into English.
From Persian to cuneiform, from cuneiform to Dutch, and now from Dutch to English, the circumstances of Akbar's life and the longings in his heart are sifted through many languages before they reach us, the readers. Abdolah does a remarkable job conveying that sense of frustrating distance, that vagueness born of too many layers of telling and re-telling, of longing for something whose outlines are sketched, but whose details are barely understood.
But sometimes vagueness is just plain vague. And even after finishing the novel, I still wondered what parts of the story were translations of the notebook, what parts were Ishmael's memory, and what were stories told to Ishmael by friends and neighbors.
Feelings were beautifully conveyed, but the events of the narrative were hard to follow and not well-knit into the backdrop of Iranian history. The result is moving, dreamlike stories interspersed with overly didactic history lessons and confusing turns.
Aga Akbar grew up in a village at the base of Saffron Mountain. At the top of this mountain are two holy sites. One is the cave into which is carved the cuneiform inscription which forms the basis of Akbar's script. The other is a naturally formed well, inside which Shi'ites believe that the Messiah sits reading, waiting patiently to emerge.
My Father's Notebook is most moving each time the narrative returns to Saffron Mountain, as it does many times. These scenes are beautifully rendered and effective in describing the wider world through the simple lens of life in the village.
Unlike Ishmael's confusing palimpsest of city and university, political activism and new Dutch identity, Saffron Mountain -- Akbar's home, Ishmael's beloved homeland -- needs no translating. It speaks for itself.
