The Jakov Lind Renaissance

Starting last March–and continuing through January of next year–readers will receive no less than three new translations of books from the major Austro-Hungarian modernist writer Jakov Lind.

I'm definitely excited, and not just because Lind wrote a story about "a mad cannibal and his prospective victim-meal" trapped together in a train compartment. In our newest article at TQC, Jeff Waxman runs down the three new Lind translations:

Lind is not only a major post-Holocaust writer; he is also a modernist of extraordinary talent and vision. His writing shows an intriguing, Beckettian dissolution of reason, and it owes a clear debt to the absurdists, whose themes of obsession and the perversion of reality closely resemble Lind’s work. Born in Vienna a decade before the Anschluss, Lind also owes something also to the Austro-Jewish literary tradition exemplified by Stefan Zweig—there’s a humanist regard that colors his work and tinges his cynicism with a smirking regret. This sort of weeping giddiness characterizes all of Lind’s writing, from his excellent dramatic efforts like The Silver Foxes Are Dead to his short stories and his extraordinary dark novels.

For the record, the three books are:

• Landscape in Concrete (trans. Ralph Manheim). Open Letter. $12.95. 190 pp. (March 2009)
• Soul of Wood, (trans. Ralph Manheim). NYRB Classics. $14.95. 208 pp. (November 2009)
• Ergo, (trans. Ralph Manheim). Open Letter. $13.95. 150 pp. (January 2010)

More from Conversational Reading:

1. Landscape in Concrete By Jakov Lind Review In Open Letters Monthly, Karen Vanuska reviews Landscape in Concrete, which is a WWII-novel that opens with the line “There is a plague called...
2. Is It 3% or 0.4%? Three Percent: So, there are approximately 3,500 new titles of adult fiction published every month. For January through March, I’ve counted 31 titles so far....
3. Gay Renaissance Mark points to this article by Edmund White about the renaissance as gay fictino as literature. I completely agree. Over the past year I’ve read...
4. Vollmann in Harper's Of course, not available on the web. Harper’s Magazine for January 2007 Letter from a Freight Train                     ...
5. Translation’s Long Tail Is Getting Shorter Difficult times to publish translations: According to my Translation Database, in 2008 the main corporate publishers and their subsidiaries accounted for 21% of all the...

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