Good news: Raymond Carver’s work is available again in Dutch translation. It appeared under the title A small blessing a beautiful edition of all his stories, excellently translated by Sjaak Commandeur. He previously translated a large number of Carver’s stories and has now added another 200 pages.
It is a courageous act by Van Oorschot publishers, because Carver’s work has never been very popular in the Netherlands. Nor do the stories of American contemporaries such as John Cheever and John Updike. The reviewers were generally positive, but the readership, which simply prefers the novel to the short story, remained reserved.
It is no coincidence that Carver has become a grandmaster on the short course. In a few essays at the back of this collection he explains that as a struggling head of the family (“those murderous parenting years”) he was too busy to tackle a novel. The short story and the poetry – that just worked.
Carver describes decisive events in the lives of ordinary people in a rare concise style. “It is possible,” he writes in the essay ‘Writership’, “to write in a poem or story about everyday things and objects in everyday but precise language and to give those things (…) an immense, even poignant charge. to give.” His most important means are “threat or awareness of trouble” and suggestion “by what is omitted.”
Mainly thanks to its special style – think Bint van Bordewijk – Carver already became a famous writer through his first two collections. The eternal question that will remain hanging over this oeuvre: to what extent did he owe that style to his editor, Gordon Lish? In the first bundle, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Lish already had the necessary influence. In the second bundle, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, things got out of hand. Lish shortened like crazy, left out characters, changed the ending.
Carver allowed it all. In Collected Storiesthe American edition on which the Dutch edition is based, contains a desperate letter from Carver in which he begs Lish to reverse the interventions. “Please hear me. I’ve been up all night thinking about this, and nothing but this, so help me.” He admits that Lish’s versions are sometimes better, but he now finds the changes too drastic, he can no longer justify it to his friends.
But Lish stands his ground and Carver capitulates. This is in contrast to Vladimir Nabokov, who scornfully rejected Lish’s interference in one of his novels: “Who is that guy and what does he do?” Carver also goes his own, more detailed way in his later work, but that does not alter the fact that he became famous with two collections that were strongly influenced by Lish. The original Carver versions of the stories What We Talk About are, with a few exceptions, not included in this volume. They already appeared in 2010 under the title Beginners at De Bezige Bij, also in the translation of Commandeur. I carefully compared the Carver originals to the Lish versions at the time. My mixed conclusion: sometimes Lish made them better, sometimes worse.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 20, 2023 newspaper.