Marketing the Bolano
Graphs, Maps, Trees
MJC: The long sentence that is so characteristic of Javier’s style first occurs in The Man of Feeling. The sentences and the novels have grown longer and longer since then, mainly, I suspect, because his novels have moved away from plot (although there always is a plot) towards the dissection of ideas, feelings, words, motivations. His sentences have the shape of a thought, full of buts and perhapses and then agains. The style in Your Face Tomorrow is the latest stage in that development–less plot and more thought. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
The End of Oulipo? My book (co-authored with Lauren Elkin), published by Zero Books. Available everywhere. Order it from Amazon, or find it in bookstores nationwide.
Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series,
 called “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future. Read an excerpt.Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site: Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating
 read" by The New Yorker, Translate This Book! brings together over 40 of the top translators, publishers, and authors to tell us what books need to be published in English. Get it on Kindle.
 The Quarterly Convers- |
A group read of the book that either "engenders awe and despair" or "[goads] the reader with obscenity and bigotry," or both. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
|
Fascinating conversation between Adam Kirsch and Ilya Kaminsky on what translation can and can’t do. I’ll grant that Kirsch is well-informed, and his concerns are fair enough, but this response of Kaminsky’s really gets at the inherent error in focusing to exclusivity on the source text w/r/t translation:
This winter we'll be seeing two European lit anthologies from two of the best publishers of lit-in-translation. First there's The Wall In My Head, covering Eastern European fiction and nonfiction and published by Open Letter in conjunction with Words Without Borders. From Open Letter's catalog:
Over at Three Percent, Chad has just posted a list of recommended lit-in-translation that have thus far come out of the evaluation process for this year's Best Translated Book Award. It's a rather robust list, and looking of it I'm struck by the amount of books we've managed to cover so far. Basically, between the great enthusiasm of the judges and the low number of translations published each year in the U.S., I think by the time we're done with this year's award we'll have accounted for virtually every work of literature in translation published this year. I . . . continue reading, and add your comments As part of the new issue of Words Without Borders, translator Michael Emmerich has a very interesting essay on translation. His essay is concerned with the difficulty of defining the word translation, and how this complicates the work of the translator: unlike some words (Emmerich uses the example dog), translation is fraught with differences in contexts and values that complicate a translator's job. Emmerich puts it like this:
Opening the PEN World Voices Festival, Salman Rushdie has declared that the example of Roberto Bolano proves that there are tons of great writers still unknown in English. So American publishers, get going: El autor anglo-indio Salman Rushdie destacó hoy el reconocimiento en EU del fallecido escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño y animó al mercado editorial estadounidense a tomar nota e impulsar más traducciones al inglés de obras de éxito. "El éxito tardío de Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) con 2666 es una muestra de lo poco que se traduce en Estados Unidos", dijo el célebre autor de Los versos . . . continue reading, and add your comments Chad reviews a book whose premise is that Africa is as rich as the U.S., and the U.S. is as rich as Africa: In the opening pages we’re introduced to Yacuba, a “flea-ridden Germanic or Alemanic carpenter” who has fled AIDS-ridden, poverty-stricken Europe in hopes of a better life in the much wealthier and cleaner United States of Africa. Through Yacuba we’re introduced to a world where Quebec is at war with the American Midwest, where the “white trash” of Europe speak an undecipherable “white pidgin dialect,” and where the African media fans the flames . . . continue reading, and add your comments Translator Edith Grossman recently discussed Don Quixote’s singular place in the Spanish canon:
Aviya Kushner’s essay on translated literature in the U.S. is an interesting mix of provocation, insight, and misrepresentation. Her main argument is more or less that:
Translator Charlotte Mandell will see her translation of French giga-novel The Kindly Ones published here in March (and already garnering review attention); her translation of 500-page, single-sentence French novel Zone is forthcoming from Open Letter. Quarterly Conversation contributor Lauren Elkin provides an interview with Mandell on her blog, wherein we learn:
|
|
|||
|
Copyright © 2013 Conversational Reading - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
You Say