Short Story: What Happened to Us by Dan Chaon

What Happened to Us by Dan Chaon

The Spring 2014 edition of Ploughshares Literary Magazine contains this gem: A story about Rusty Bickers and the family that takes him in as a foster child. Joseph is the narrator and is eight years old. Rusty is fourteen. We know little of what happened to Rusty before he arrived into Joseph’s home except a few hushed conversations between Joseph’s parents, where we hear that ‘unspeakable things… happened to Rusty in his family home,' and Joseph’s mother's comment, ‘How long does it take to get over something like that?’

Rusty does talk to Joseph about his past at one stage:

‘Do you know what would happen if a kid like you got sent to a foster home?’

‘No.’ And Joseph breathed as Rusty’s eyes held him, without blinking.

‘They do really nasty things to the little kids. And if you try to scream, they put your own dirty underwear in your mouth, to gag you.’

Although Rusty's past was disturbing, we follow his summer in Joseph's home with a little optimism. We are lulled into the meandering narrative, peppered with humour, especially when Joseph’s father dances with his prosthetic arm.

‘After he got drunk, Joseph’s father would go around touching the ladies on the back of the neck with his hook, surprising them, making them scream. Sometimes he would take off his arm and dance with it.'

But this humour is followed by raw understated emotion:

'Sometimes he would cry about Billy Merritt.’

The story contains some great descriptive passages.

‘Rusty…watching Joseph’s family as they ate their breakfast, his shaggy hair hanging lank about his face, his long arms dangling from slumped shoulders, his eyes like someone who had been marched a long way to a place where they were going to shoot him.’

The story gets progressively more disturbing as the summer passes and we sense that Rusty is a deeply troubled teenager.

‘You could kill the little kids first, while they were sleeping. It wouldn’t hurt them, you know. It wouldn’t mattter. And then, with the gunshots, your mom and dad would come running in, and you could shoot them when they came through the door…’

An excellent and enjoyable story.

Dan Chaon is the author of the short-story collection Stay Awake, the novel Await Your Reply and other works of fiction. He lives in Cleveland.

Words with JAM Runner-up

Words with JAM, the ezine for writers and publishers, announced the results of its Bigger Short Story Competition this week. I was delighted that my story 'Trumpet Dreams' was a runner-up in the Shortest Story Category (max 250 words) judged by Susan Jane Gilman.

A prize of £10 and inclusion in the anthology is a welcome result. Thank you to the judges and to Words with JAM for running this competition again this year.

This ezine contains numerous articles, reviews, interviews and practical information for writers. Check out the writers' toolbox here.

Spontaneity




The first issue of Spontaneity is a visual and creative delight. The mix of art, prose and poetry is enthralling, intoxicating.

Here's what Spontaneity has set out to do: 'Our theme of Age and Beauty has been explored in many ways and through different genres. We hope that each piece speaks to its companion on the page, sometimes overtly, sometimes in a more abstract connection. We have only just begun; now  – it’s up to you. If you are inspired by something you read or see here, consider submitting to our next edition – which will evolve from this first little acorn... Spontaneity is all about a creative chain reaction – so it’s crucial you tell us which piece inspired yours.'

I love the video 'Danielle' by Anthony Cerniello that appears on the same page as my piece 'Effie's great-great-great-great Granny.'

The concept reminds me of a website that I love and I thought I'd share here: http://artistsinspireartists.com/



Literature in translation

When I ordered the summer edition of The Stinging Fly I discovered it was dedicated to literature in translation and included fiction from Belgium, Italy, China, Poland, Rwanda, Ukraine, Morocco, Greece, Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Brazil and Finland.

The translators of these stories were interviewed for the journal. They were asked: Why is literature in translation important? What is your reaction to the term untranslatable? How would you describe your relationship with the author after you get involved with the translation? Responses were fascinating. I hadn't considered the relationship between the translator and the author, or how the author can lose a little of their own book when it's been translated into a language they can't read.

Having studied Applied Languages (French and German), I was oriented towards employment as a translator. After graduation, I managed three months in a tiny translation agency, where the work was mind-numbingly boring and the working environment was less than attractive. (My boss used to kick holes in the walls in childish tantrum when things weren't going his way. Not a nurturing environment!) I translated German accident reports for insurance companies. Every report started with 'I was driving on the left when...'

Technical translation and localisation were not for me, however I did and do remain in awe of literary translation. You can learn so much about language by trying to render an expression written in another language into English, or from English into another language. Metaphors, similes, regional dialects--they require the translator to stop, reflect, choose. We mull over the connotations of one word over another. Even simple vocabulary is not straightforward. A castle is a château in French, but the mental images we create when we hear those words are very different.

Haruki Murakami spent many years translating some of the great novels into Japanese. He wrote, about his translation of The Great Gatsby: “Although numerous literary works might properly be called ‘ageless', no translation belongs in that category. Translation, after all, is a matter of  linguistic technique, which naturally ages as the particulars of a language change. Thus, while there are undying works, on principle there can be no undying translations.”

In Claire Kilroy's essay, in the translation issue of The Stinging Fly, she tells a great story about one of her pieces that was translated into German. She discovered that the sentence 'The men were padding around the boardroom' had been translated as 'the men were walking about in bare feet like animals'. This is a worrying thought for any author whose books are translated into languages they don't speak and can't check.