Excessive Candour
Hey, Salome!

Like Salome before she began to strip, there is a book somewhere in here. But before we attempt to pierce the veil of language, and the veil of many cultures, and the veil of achronology, which is three veils, we must attempt to pierce the Veil of Obfusc, which adds up to a lot of veils.

We must try to pierce through to what the Morrows have actually edited, because the SFWA European Hall of Fame seems to claim by its title to carry on in the tradition of the shambolic SFWA Hall of Fame anthologies from the '70s and '80s, which mainly (but not necessarily) assembled Nebula Award-winning stories that had been previously honored but not anthologized under the SFWA rubric.

The talmudic relationship between the SFWA Hall of Fame and the concurrent annual series of SFWA-sponsored Nebula Award anthologies (it is now called the Nebula Awards Showcase) is beyond the scope of this review (or of most mortals) to decipher, but anyone who glances at the Morrow volume might assume that, like the Showcase volumes, it is meant to record a community consensus about European SF, and that the Morrows, in fronting that consensus, have served here basically as hosts (the Showcase editors do have some leeway, as they are allowed to slip a few non-Nebula winners into their individual volumes, but they are basically emcees). Hunh-uh.

Except for some seed money, which the Morrows acknowledge in their introduction, the SFWA European Hall of Fame has nothing to do with the SFWA, and the Hall of Fame part of the title is pure chutzpah. What we have here is an assemblage of stories from all over Europe (Veil of Many Cultures), almost all of them published here for the first time in English, though they originally appeared between 1987 to 2005, which was a very long two decades for Europe (Veil of Achronology, Veil of Aesop, Veil of Perestroika, Veil, Veil, Veil). But it is the Veil of Language which is the real killer.

Three of the stories here assembled (the Romanian, one of the two Spanish, and the Polish) had already appeared in English, or were available to the Morrows in draft translation, and James Morrow, who wrote the introduction, says he is an easy reader of French. He says nothing about his wife Kathryn's competence in other languages, and given the importance of language skills in an anthology of this sort, one must assume that she's as monolingual as most of us English speakers.

So we come to a simple question about how this anthology was put together, a question Morrow does not address: Given the fact that the Morrows seem to have been able to understand (or had prior translations of) only four of the 16 stories in 13 languages represented in SFWA European Hall of Fame, how were they able to select the other 12 best stories published over a course of two decades in nine languages they couldn't read?

Other worlds still await

The most obvious answer, which would have not been at all confessional had it been articulated at the get-go, is that the Morrows did not so much select stories as select translators, who in turn selected what they thought were good stories to translate, and who was to say them nay? Some of these translators, like Michael Kandel, are highly eminent; others are not widely known. The Morrows' main ascertainable intervention is of interest: Once they had draft translations to hand, they collaborated with the translators in a generally pretty successful attempt to iron out most evidences of translatorese in the final product (I don't think they touched Kandel's pre-existing translation, somehow). So, in the end, this anthology does in fact record a community consensus about the stories selected—but not exactly the community implied. It would all have been clearer had the Morrows called their anthology the European Translators' Hall of Fame.

(It's really time to let the Morrows off the hook, and to hint briefly at the pleasures to be found here, but it's hard to resist mentioning just one more little thing. It's a strange autonomic alliterative afflatus tic that James Morrow seems to have succumbed to, late in life, as he wrote his 12-page introduction. Whenever his thought soars, it tends to hold hands with itself: "harnesses alchemy and hubris," "muster a modicum," "diagnose their defects," "sweeten the soiree," "cringes when critics," "domain of the digestible," "tongue to target," "fecund frontier," "conundrum of consciousness," "riders on a revolving," "citizens of circumscribed," "gigantic generalities," "vital versimilitude," "fleas who informed his infamous," etc. Fortunately, he does seem to have leashed his lubricity in his work on the actual translations.)

Given the huge range of work available for translation, it is no surprise that the Hall of Fame is a very hithering and thithering kind of book. Tendencies of the European fantastyka—alienation so deep it reads as solipsism; surrealisms so heavily loaded that we think of New Worlds and shed a tear; a mature though sometimes depressive sense that transcendence and death are pretty similar and both are gray; a near total refusal to pump the future for fixes; a tropism (in the weaker stories) toward symbolic meanings (one could almost claim that no story of the fantastic is in fact a genuine story of the fantastic unless it is meant literally)—all these tendencies, as mediated through a dozen cultural colorations, and savaged by our times, surface variously here.

The downside of the Morrows' disinclination to define European SF/fantastyka as anything in particular is more than countered by the upside: that they convey very clearly their obvious pleasure in giving us what they did not know they were going to find. The sense of discovery is almost palpable. They have not been able to excise a mild European tropism toward poshlost, like Jean-Claude Dunyach's "Separations" (2005), which pumps its decadent and/or life-weary protagonists all too hard for weltschmerz; but others—like Joao Barreiros's hugely funny "A Night on the Edge of the Empire" (1996), or W.J. Maryson's "Verstummte Musik" (2005), which only seems to galumph toward its satirical goals—are so variously full of their countries and their times and their tellers that any sane reviewer would stop here.

The very varied stories here published may not fully open us to the lay of the world of Europe, because this is only one book. But there was not an author here I did not hope to know better someday. I'm afraid—in the absence of any procrustean rationale I could work out for the selection of this particular set of stories—there seems to be no reason to think the tales assembled as SFWA European Hall of Fame are any more exceptional, any more Hall-of-Famey, than a dozen other potential trawls might bring into the only light that most of us can see by, which is English. But this could be put another way: that the Morrows have put together a superior anthology, and that they have given us absolutely no reason to think they have exhausted the queue. To open this book is to inject worlds.