Sometimes you come across a book with a typo or a mistake or a translation error that is so delicious, it endears you to the text instead of distracting you. It happened to me with "On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe," by Andrzej Stasiuk (translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel). The book turned up in the mailroom on the sixth floor this month, two years after it was published; apparently someone had been hoarding it.
"On the Road to Babadag" describes a series of trips through Eastern Europe, beginning in the 1980s. It's very impressionistic, beautifully so, but it's hard to tell where one trip ends and another begins. At some point, Stasiuk goes to a restaurant in the isolated Romanian Black Sea village of Sulina. See if you spot the mistake:
You entered from the street, into a room with four small tables. Upstairs was a small hotel. Behind the counter stood a willowy young woman with short hair, her face delicate and sad. She did the cooking herself, wiped the glasses, served the food, a moving shadow. Men came in stinking of fish and diesel fuel. … The young woman cleaned the ashtrays and bottles and went back to the counter to insert a tape cassette, a medley of stuff in English: Elton John, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Carpenters, the Seventies, the Eighties. A bony black horse outside the window was hitched to a cart on rubber tires behind a blackened wood house.
See the mistake? The horse was actually brown. No, that's a joke. "Gilbert and Sullivan" is surely supposed to be "Gilbert O'Sullivan," the Irish singer (born Raymond Edward O'Sullivan), who had hits in the early 1970s like "Get Down." Someone or something — author, translator, copy editor, spell-checking software — was more familiar with "The Pirates of Penzance" than "Alone Again, Naturally."
Otherwise, "On the Road to Babadag" is a marvel, a nonfiction update of the lost lands described in Gregor von Rezzori's novels of the interwar years, including "An Ermine in Czernopol," which appeared in its first English translation last year.
But I can't get the image out of my head of that young woman with the delicate and sad face, listening to 19th-century British light opera as she wipes off the four tables in the restaurant.
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