Inspiring Older Readers
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
What good is a label if pretty much everyone disagrees about how you use it? This is a question that I’ve had to ponder over in respect of Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel, Solaris. The reason for my concern over worthless labels in respect of Lem’s book is the use of the words ‘cult novel’ that regularly get applied to it. Science fiction seems to have more than its fair share of ‘cult’ books but I really don’t know quite what characteristics they share, if any, that makes them cultish. I suppose I’ve always assumed that a cult book has to be one which doesn’t have mass appeal or isn’t widely discussed but has a particular appeal to an audience that considers itself to be ‘in the know’. I would guess that as soon as a book becomes the cultural property of a wider readership, its cult appeal diminishes proportionately.
If cult novels retain that status by continuing to fly beneath the popular radar, Lem’s novel, first published in 1961 in Polish and not translated into English until 1970, certainly fulfils that criterion despite being made into several movie versions (which also gets referred to as cultish). It’s frequently described as a novel of ideas rather than of action and the science fiction element seems to be one that was chosen to showcase those often difficult philosophical questions rather than to offer extra-terrestrial thrills. I suspect this lack of stereotypical science fiction dressing has limited the book’s wider appeal.
I recently picked up a 1973 Science Fiction Book Club hardback of Solaris translated by Jonanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox which was for a good number of years the standard, indeed the only, English language translation but which was based on an earlier mid-sixties French translation from the Polish. It seems that Lem (who spoke good English) was not at all impressed by the quality of the translation, with Kilmartin and Cox compounding errors that had first appeared in the French and it was not until 2011 that a more authoritative version was done by Bill Johnson but which hasn’t appeared in print form yet because of legal reasons. It is, however, available in audiobook and Kindle formats – neither of which I have or intend to get. I wasn’t aware of the dispute over translation until after I’d read the book and I’m not sure that reading the Kilmartin and Cox version adversely affected my reading experience because I found it a genuinely fascinating and quite compelling two hundred or so pages.
Writing on the Wired website, Gary Wolf offers this short but pithy summary of the plot:
"The story's hero - an overly objective psychologist named Kris Kelvin - is dispatched to a station orbiting the planet (Solaris). When he arrives, he discovers that a scientist has committed suicide and the others are in a state of nervous collapse. The planet appears to be reading their minds, and the station is populated with apparitions that correspond to aspects of the researchers' fantasies. Soon after his arrival, Kelvin finds himself face-to-face with his dead wife, who seems human in most ways. With this encounter, the challenge of evaluating the nonhuman intelligence of the ocean suddenly becomes, for Kelvin, emotionally tangled."
What Lem is most interested in exploring are ideas of what it is that makes us human and how we construct identity. He deliberately chose to make the alien lifeform non-humanoid to avoid the problems of anthropomorphism that are usually associated with extra-terrestrial life forms.
There are limits, Lem maintains, to human knowledge. What we are determines whether we can ever understand what we’re not. As he puts it himself:
"The peculiarity of those phenomena seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings".
This really is a strange, claustrophobic novel that we experience through the eyes of Kelvin, the psychologist, who spends the whole of the book - from the very beginning to the very end – in disoriented bewilderment and internal conflict. He is forced to confront not only his own residual notions of what is real and what is not but come to terms with how his emotions are affected by simulacrums of his dead wife who appear to him as physically perfect but with a mind which is an emotional tabula rasa.
Having said that I didn’t find the translation issue got in the way ( I had no reason to think there were any issues), it’s only fair to say that Alison Flood writing in The Guardian in 2011 hailed the new translation by Johnson as a major step up in terms of how the key issues Lem is concerned with come through the text and quotes the new translator as saying that in the older version:
“…the text is not being translated but rewritten, a wholly different matter….
All in all, the Kilmartin/Cox translation, though it tells the story of Solaris, frequently fails to convey Lem's style, his humour, his attention to detail. Above all, it is not a careful and accurate translation of the text that he wrote. The new translation will finally allow English-language readers to experience Lem's extraordinary, prescient, ever-relevant novel in all its fullness."
So it’s irritating that unless you want an audio or electronic experience, legal barriers prevent us from having a solid paper version to appreciate. Until these are overcome, I’m happy to stick with the imperfections of the 1970 translation because it was a rich enough experience for me. But you of course will have to make up your own mind which version to go for.
Terry Potter
October 2019