Translating the Gorilla
Posted by The New Yorker
Marija Stajic worked with David Samuels in translating a book called “Gorilla” for his piece in the magazine this week about an international Balkan crime gang called The Pink Panthers. Here, she describes her experience reading what Samuels called a “sordid, semi-incoherent novel.”
When David Samuels asked me to read “Gorilla,” a Serbian novel written by Dusan Savkovic, and narrate the story in English for his piece, I was thrilled—I’m a bookworm and former literature professor. “Gorilla” is a thinly veiled novel based loosely on the life of a Serbian thug named Stevan Markovic. I expected drama, noir, and intrigue! But as I started to read “Gorilla,” I realized: this book is going to take more time and less pleasure than I anticipated.
From page one, I was transported into the toxic world of Stefan Ratarac. He’s a former Yugoslav stunt man and a car thief, but he’s described by Savkovic as an Adonis. He immigrated to Paris in his twenties, where he lived in poverty until Alain Dupre, a famous French actor (based on Alain Delon), learns of Ratarac’s reputation. Ratarac is a fearless man, prone to violence, with a short fuse, and so physically endowed that he is very, very popular among women. Dupre hires him as his bodyguard—his Gorilla—but used him more as a weapon against his enemies, and a private rent-a-stud for his high-profile female friends.
“Gorilla” is filled with crooks, corrupt French officials, murderers, prostitutes and profanities. In fact, all the female characters in the book are portrayed as prostitutes. They will sleep with any man in a matter of seconds, out of lust if they are old, ugly and rich; for self-preservation if they are young and beautiful; or for money, regardless. There are several graphic and disgusting depictions of orgies that involve not only Dupre, but Anna Maria De Roche, a French politician’s wife; Philip Morseau, a film producer; Joseph Lagrange, an award-winning writer; and a French singer named Lilly Morgan. “The next photograph showed Lilly Morgan and Philip Morseau, the producer of most of Alain’s movies. Lilly was obviously drugged, or under the influence of the orgy, that gave a stamp of animal lust to the woman’s beautiful, angel-like face.”
The crux of the novel centers around the “blackmail of the century,” when Gorilla—along with another Balkan immigrant, a Romanian named Vasil Negresku—decides to blackmail the orgy participants. Dupre and his friends are the cream of the French society, and Gorilla demands one million dollars for his silence: “Is that any kind of money…for you?!” he asks Dupre.
“No one is going to give you a single franc,” retorts Dupre. “Rich people love the money. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be rich. And they don’t want anyone to make them feel like fools, anyone to put his hands into their pockets.” Furious, Dupre hires a Corsican Mafioso named Antonio Pierangeli, and punishes Gorilla’s betrayals with a painful, suffering death with a “lady gun,” a gun that releases a small bullet that “probably still floats through Gorilla’s brain.”
In Savkovic’s Parisian underworld, the characters are not black and white. They are all black. There are no redeeming characters nor actions. Some descriptions are cliché, story lines and sentences are repetitive. The author loves calling Dupre a “superstar” and Gorilla’s penis a “bludgeon.” But if you have a strong stomach, “Gorilla” tellingly reveals the connection between the Parisian underground and the top layers of French society in the late sixties. As Samuels concludes about the novel in his piece:
“Gorilla” channels the rage that many young Serbian men must feel for the European Union, which tantalizes them with its wealth yet forbids them legal entry. The E.U. failed to stop the carnage in the Balkans, and then it applied sanctions to the recalcitrant Serbs and curtailed immigration. The invisible wall erected by the West kept the criminal élites of Serbia rich and the rest of the defeated country poor.
Photograph by Walter Watzpatzkowski/CC-BY)
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Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/04/translating-the-gorilla.html#ixzz0l1nKSEeL
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/04/translating-the-gorilla.html
