http://conversationalreading.com/translation-panel-write-up/ Since 2004. The blog of the critic, writer, and editor, Scott Esposito Wed, 23 May 2012 13:19:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 http://conversationalreading.com/translation-panel-write-up/#comment-8048 Finn Harvor Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:07:01 +0000 http://conversationalreading.com/wordpress/2009/10/translation-panel-write-up.html#comment-8048 "Many French readers have a passion for short, self-serious, faux-philosophical novels that stupefy American sensibilities. Many German and Northern European contemporary novels zestfully catalogue bleak, pessimistic realities that strike an American audience as profoundly depressing. Middle Eastern fiction at the current moment lacks a Jane Austen who could win over an American female readership." Whole lotta unsubstantiated generalizin' goin' on here. (Note, too, the weird slippage when Middle Eastern lit is described; would a Norwegian/Cambodian/Balinese "Jane Austen" suddenly win over US readers to Nordic or Asian writing?) “Many French readers have a passion for short, self-serious, faux-philosophical novels that stupefy American sensibilities. Many German and Northern European contemporary novels zestfully catalogue bleak, pessimistic realities that strike an American audience as profoundly depressing. Middle Eastern fiction at the current moment lacks a Jane Austen who could win over an American female readership.”
Whole lotta unsubstantiated generalizin’ goin’ on here. (Note, too, the weird slippage when Middle Eastern lit is described; would a Norwegian/Cambodian/Balinese “Jane Austen” suddenly win over US readers to Nordic or Asian writing?)

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