Nadine Gordimer’s new novel, “Get a Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pages, $21), about adultery, about vitality in vicissitude, is badly written. Ms. Gordimer’s status in world letters makes her a dispenser of wisdom, a listened-to Cassandra stammering with profundity: “It turned out to be real that the inconceivable can become routine. At least so far as contact is decreed. Relationships.Their new nature, frequency, and limits.”

This notational style does the fictional work of mental mimesis, but it is not the character’s mind that is mimicked. It is the author’s. Indeed, Ms. Gordimer writes as if people conducted their lives by theme. Paul, the ecologist whose profession provides the greatest fund of analogy for Ms. Gordimer’s circle-of-life themes, is made to thematize for a living.

Forever.

How long is forever. How old is the delta that is part of the cosmos visible from Outer Space? Astronauts report it. Will ten dams be visible, the scale of ponds like all manmade scratchings and gougings in comparison with the planet’s own design.

Why confuse an earthbound waterway with a “cosmos,” in a sentence already dealing with Outer Space itself? Are all man-made “scratchings and gougings” the size of ponds? Ms. Gordimer reaches for meaning and finds oratory; she serves up sentences that beg to be diagrammed.

“She met the man at a conference through the advancement in her career he, Adrian, had made, in practicality, possible.”

“He could not avoid her holding his presence as if keeping a statue in vision while he strapped on his watch, went about the business of dressing.”

What does it mean to keep a statue in vision? Difficulty in prose can electrify the reader and raise his sensibility, but Ms.Gordimer’s style merely emphasizes itself. As a novel, “Get a Life” transposes existential crises onto conventional plot points: hospital, affair, adoption. What is naturally traumatic is abstracted into literary trauma; meaningfulness precedes the story, rather than the other way around.

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Translating a literary work that would otherwise be forgotten is more than an intervention – it is a curatorial action that brings the work into existence as a kind of relic. Such is the new fate of “Massacre River” (New Directions, 160 pages, $22.95) by Haitian writer Rene Philoctete, who passed away in 1995.

According to the translation’s introduction, Philoctete was a mentor to Haiti’s more famous writers.But Ti Rene – Little Rene – as he was called, had no flair for international publishing. Reading “Massacre River,” his first work to be translated from the French to English, is like eavesdropping on a private lesson – private because of the immodest vigor of the language, the parade of homegrown symbols, the bursting, highly chromatic speeches, all fearlessly translated by Linda Coverdale.

The plot is historical: General Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, consolidated his power via racist dogma. He attacked the black Haitians who worked the sugar plantations on the Dominican side of Massacre River, which bisects the island of Hispaniola. On October 7, 1937, Trujillo ordered the killing of these guest workers – and between 15,000 and 30,000 were murdered.

“A frank and royal early morning sky spans the two lands,” Philoctete writes of October 7’s dawn. Pedro Brito, a Dominican, sets out for work, leaving his young Haitian wife, Adele Benjamin, behind. Pedro is stunned with anticipation – he has heard rumors of the slaughter, and goes to organize a resistance with his labor union:

Pedro quickens his pace. The plain stretches away into a green distance dazzled from time to time by a scarlet flight of ortolans. Frightened, dawn has sought refuge beneath the pinions of birds. The madness will not be unleashed today, of course, but everything is ready. … That’s why Adele was shaking when she watched me uneasily enter the dawn.

Dawn is palpable, fluttering in the reader’s stomach. Philoctete’s writing has the impersonal, always optical imagery – that is, of the world seen by the character – of Octavio Paz or Edouard Glissant. As with Paz, colors and shapes leave little room for the speaker’s ego.

Philoctete’s jewel-encrusted prose style is political. He contradicts “the grand design of a national government,” which he believes is fiat: “the power to kill people through the power of a word.” His hope lies in naturalist enumeration, as practiced by Noah, the zoological anthologist: The refugees of Trujillo’s slaughter “cannot tell how long they will remain distressed and helpless. But they clearly know that the land they see before their eyes is real enough to bear the weight of trees.” Philoctete demonstrates the realism in magical realism, pitting fauna and flora against laws and speeches.

blytal@nysun.com