Found in Translation-- The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed... And then afterward, when you go tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed."(71)
After reading a work as complex and brilliant as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the thought of even trying to analyse it is a daunting one. The multi-layered subtleties, the gripping moments of brutality, the shifting in and out of a sense of realness-- all these elements, among others more difficult to pin down, made this book one of the most compelling I have ever encountered. In his narrative, O'Brien simultaneously challenged the reader to question the accuracy of his account of the Vietnam War, while insisting that facts and names and detailed correctness didn't really matter. What matters in a war story, according to O'Brien, is its ability to "make[] the stomach believe."(78)
I don't know if a word of this book ever 'really' happened. What I do know is that I feel in my gut now the horror, the unspeakable filth and pain and emptiness of the war experience. And I don't even know what it's like or whether I could ever survive it. All I know is that my stomach believes it.
In another English class this semster, I and my fellow students got into a heated discussion about whether poetry could be translated "accurately". We debated how much license poets who are appointed as translators should have when interpreting the language, tone and feel of the original poem, especially if the original was not written in a language familiar to the translator. My teacher felt strongly that poets should have unlimited license when translating another's work, since the soul of a poem would be essentially lost if each word was merely defined. I tend to agree, and feel that O'Brien's work serves to enforce the argument. As far as I know, no detail in O'Brien's war stories is technically accurate, and probably could not be found in any official record. But that does not detract from the validity or importance of his work. The messages in The Things They Carried are strong enough to stand apart from factual reliability-- the power in his writing may be merely the result of a "translation" of his experience, but that doesn't lessen the impact, and doesn't make it less true.