opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

The Literary Saloon Archive

11 - 20 May 2012

11 May: HHhH and translation issues | Andrés Neuman profile | Q & As: Peter Carey - 'Reading in Translation' | Ondaatje Prize shortlist | My First Suicide review
12 May: Orhan Pamuk Q & A | Persian poetry in the UK | Ali and Ramazan review
13 May: Writing in ... Malta | Nigeria Prize for Literature | NIBF 2012 | The Bridge event | Reading North Korea review
14 May: Translating from (and to) ... Arabic | Festival of Asian Literature | New Swedish Book Review | Zona review
15 May: Prizes: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize - Sonning Prize | Festivals: Sydney Writers' Festival - Letterature - PEN World Voices review | Vertigo review
16 May: Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) | Prizes: Georg-Büchner-Preis | The Sophie Kerr Prize - James Tait Black shortlists - Man Asian Literary Prize judges
17 May: International Writers Festival in Jerusalem | The Sound of the Kiss review
18 May: On Christa Wolf | New Asia Literary Review | The Palm House review
19 May: Writing in ... Uganda | Jeanette Winterson on teaching writing | Alain Badiou profile | Statistics: the last 100 reviews
20 May: Sam Taylor on translation | Mountain Echoes | Gratiaen Prize preview | The Lower River review

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       Sam Taylor on translation

       Sam Taylor -- whose translation of Laurent Binet's HHhH is just out in English -- writes about translation in the Financial Times, in New word order.
       With examples from his own experiences and those of a few other translators, it's pretty interesting -- but Taylor undermines his credibility in noting that: "HHhH had won a Prix Goncourt"; that's not exactly a lie, but is certainly phrased in a highly misleading way -- which is not something you want in your translator. (Most English-speakers surely are only familiar with one prix Goncourt -- the prix Goncourt, which is, indeed the only one of any consequence. What HHhH won was the 'prix Goncourt du premier roman', a first-novel prize that is taken about as seriously as any other first-novel prize (i.e. not at all), and whose others winners -- aside from perhaps Jean-Christophe Rufin's The Abyssinian -- you're unlikely to have ever heard of (much less come across in English translation).)

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       Mountain Echoes

       The Bhutan festival of Literature, Art & Culture, Mountain Echoes, runs 20 to 24 May in Thimphu, Bhutan. Sounds like a good place to be.

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       Gratiaen Prize preview

       The Gratiaen Prize -- "intended to encourage English writing by Sri Lankans" -- is to be awarded at the end of the month, and in the Sunday Times they offer profiles of the finalists, as well as excerpts from their work, in Who will wear our literary crown this year ?

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       The Lower River review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Paul Theroux's new novel, The Lower River -- most of which is set in Malawi.

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       Writing in ... Uganda

       In the Daily Monitor Dennis D. Muhumuza finds At 'sweet 16', Femrite waves Uganda's literature flag high.
       FEMRITE is, of course, the Uganda Women Writers' Association; at Foreign Policy's Transitions weblog they also report on a recent writers workshop they held, in Words move the world.

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       Jeanette Winterson on teaching writing

       Jeanette Winterson will be teaching creative writing at the Centre for New Writing in Manchester starting September 2012, and in The Guardian she writes about teaching creative writing.
       She acknowledges:

The crazy part of it is that we are breeding professional, competent, homogenised writers who will go on to teach writing that is professional, competent and homogenised. The intriguing part of it is whether this movement towards creativity and self-expression is really the start of a kind of Occupy -- that it could be dangerous and confrontational, not homogenised at all.

       Hmmm, yeah, one can wish .....
       She also notes:

One of the problems with US courses -- those ant colonies -- is that students read nothing except contemporary American writers. This produces the factory fiction so typical of writing programmes. Worse, it sets up a resistance to anything that is not immediately recognisable. What the Americans do better than us is to pay and persuade the best writers to teach on the best courses.

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       Alain Badiou profile

       In The Guardian Stuart Jeffries profiles Alain Badiou: a life in writing.

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       Statistics: the last 100 reviews

       There are now 2900 reviews at the complete review, and so we've updated our look at How international are we ?.
       There are now books originally written in 57 languages under review -- Georgian is the most recent addition; see the updated full breakdown here.
       Among the last 100 reviews (numbers 2801 through 2900) were books originally written in English and 24 other languages; interestingly at least one book in each of the 17 already most popular languages was reviewed (and one in each of 21 of the top languages 23).
       The languages the most reviewed books were originally written in were:

• English 29
• French 17
• German 6
• Japanese 6
• Spanish 6

       The countries where the most writers came from were France and the US, with 13 titles reviewed each. Only four of the American-authored titles were novels; 10 of the French ones were -- though the two longest reviews were of American novels: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, and In One Person by John Irving, both coming in at over 2000 words. (The average review was 834 words long -- 12.4% longer than for the previous hundred reviews.)
       For the first time ever, 20 per cent of the reviews were of books authored by women (19 had been the previous high for any hundred-book span); see our updated author-sex breakdown of books under review. This pushes us up to ... 14.97% of all books reviewed (434 total) being authored by women, up from 14.79%.
       The reviews were also of recent books: while we count when a book was originally published, not when the translation was first published in English, 11 reviewed titles originally appeared in 2012, another 11 in 2011, and 64 in all in the 2000s. Interestingly, more books from the 1910s and 1920s (4 each) were reviewed than books from the 1960s (1) or even 1980s (3); we also reviewed four 1950s titles.
       Fiction dominated, as always, with reviews of 75 novels and 6 story collections; only one play was reviewed, and no poetry at all.

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       On Christa Wolf

       In the new issue of The Nation -- the Spring Books issue -- Holly Case writes at some length on Blind Spot: On Christa Wolf.
       A few Wolf titles are under review at the complete review, including the forthcoming-in-English City of Angels, or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud.

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       New Asia Literary Review

       A new issue of the Asia Literary Review is up, entirely devoted to Korea; currently, all the content is freely accessible online, but apparently not for long, so check it out soon.
       Among the offerings: Charles Montgomery talks with Shin Kyung-sook (author of Please Look after Mother), Joseph Lee on Korean Literature on the World Stage, as well as reviews, fiction samples, and more.

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       The Palm House review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Tarek Eltayeb's The Palm House, just out in English from American University in Cairo Press.

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       International Writers Festival in Jerusalem

       The International Writers Festival in Jerusalem opened 13 May and runs through the 18th; it features what looks like pretty much every Israeli writer of any note, as well as foreign authors such as Arnon Grunberg, Krasznahorkai László, Jo Nesbø, Aleksandar Hemon, and Gary Shteyngart.
       I haven't heard how this worked out, but I hope it caused more than a few raised eyebrows: as Maya Sela reported in Haaretz, Israeli writers' festival to prescreen speeches in bid to ban political content -- because in 2010 an author dared be critical of Israel; apparently this is the sort of literary festival where such things aren't just frowned upon but rather simply banned. Apparently it only applied to the 'opening speeches', given by Zeruya Shalev and Krasznahorkai; given that there have been no reports of any strong reactions or actions, one way or another, it seems this wasn't much of an issue. (Meanwhile, Grunberg does note on his weblog that: "Last night, during my event at the International Writers Festival in Jeruzalem the Nakba Day was mentioned only in passing by Sayed Kashua. None of the other authors present, including myself, responded to what Kashua had to say." I'm not sure whether to hope that was out of apathy, ignorance, or intimidation.)
       Among the foreign authors in attendance is Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, author of The German Mujahid (published in the UK as An Unfinished Business) and winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade -- which, sigh, naturally also has caused a fuss: as Oren Kessler reports in The Jerusalem Post, Algerian author sparks uproar with Israel visit.
       At least he seems to be taking it in stride:

Sansal said reactions in Algeria to his Israel visit were mixed.

"On my website it was 50/50 -- half said they should do to me what they did to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. The other half said it's great, that it's wonderful and we can learn from Israel's experiences."

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       The Sound of the Kiss review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Pingali Suranna's sixteenth-century Telugu novel, The Sound of the Kiss, or The Story That Must Never Be Told (which isn't even the first Suranna title under review at the complete review).

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       Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012)

       The great Mexican author Carlos Fuentes has passed away; see, for example, obituaries by Nick Caistor (The Guardian), Marcela Valdes (The Washington Post), and Anthony DePalma (The New York Times).
       He was active until the very end -- including giving out interviews: El País just published one by Francisco Peregil, and in Publishers Weekly Robert James has A Conversation With Carlos Fuentes -- mainly about his forthcoming-in-English novel, Vlad. (I already have a copy, and should be reviewing it soon; meanwhile, see the Dalkey Archive Press publicity page, or pre-order your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.)

       Several of Fuentes' works are under review at the complete review -- though not the epic Terra Nostra, or The Death of Artemio Cruz:

• Christopher Unborn
• The Crystal Frontier
• The Eagle's Throne
• Holy Place
• This I Believe
• The Years with Laura Díaz

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       Prize: Georg-Büchner-Preis

       They've announced that Felicitas Hoppe has won the Georg-Büchner-Preis -- the most prestigious German author- (as opposed to book-) prize (and worth €50,000); see, for example, the (German) Börsenblatt report.
       None of her work appears to have been translated into English yet, but she's been in the US several times (including apparently getting an MA from the University of Oregon), most recently earlier this year as a fellow at the Villa Aurora, where she was working on 'Ilf and Petrow revisited' -- following up on Ilf and Petrov's 1935 American road trip (see the Princeton Architectural Press publicity page for their book).

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       Prize: The Sophie Kerr Prize

       The 'big American literary prizes --= the Pulitzer, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award -- pay squat or close to it (if they even bother naming a fiction winner ...), but every year a graduating senior at Washington College takes home The Sophie Kerr Prize, which, depending on how well the endowment is doing, pays out around $60,000 -- only $58,274 this year, but it's been as much as $68,814 as recently as 2009.
       It is:

awarded each year to the graduating senior who has the best ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor

       They announced this year's prize yesterday, and it went to Kathryn J. Manion:

Manion, an English major from Clarksville, Md., took the prize with her submission of four short stories she considers works in progress, and excerpts of her thesis on the role of letter writing in literature -- a study that drew from the novels of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot and Emily Bronte.

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       Prize: James Tait Black shortlists

       They've announced the James Tait Black shortlists, in fiction and biography.
       Recall that this year they will also be awarding the Best of the James Tait Black Prizewinners -- the best of the first ninety years of the prize (which, however, apparently only considers the fiction winners (which seems entirely appropriate and fine with me: fiction is all that counts, after all)).

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       Prize: Man Asian Literary Prize judges

       They've announced the judges for this year's Man Asian Literary Prize: Maya Jaggi will chair, and her fellow judges will be Monique Truong and Vikram Chandra.

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       Prize: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

       They've announced that Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld, translated by Jeffrey M. Green, has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; in The Independent Jerome Taylor writes about how 'Love can overcome brutality': foreign fiction award won by Holocaust novel.
       Blooms of Darkness isn't under review at the complete review yet, but see the publicity pages from Alma Books and Schocken, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

       Some bloggers also held a 'shadow IFFP' -- and came up with a different winner.

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       Prize: Sonning Prize

       They've announced Orhan Pamuk får Sonningprisen 2012 (though not yet at the English-language part of the official site, last I checked). This biennial prize -- which they describe as: "Denmark's largest cultural award" -- has a pretty good list of previous winners. It also comes with DKK 1 million -- about US $ 172,500, at the current exchange rate.

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       Festival: Sydney Writers' Festival

       The Sydney Writers' Festival has started -- and runs through 20 May; in The Age Matt Buchanan and Scott Ellis report on how Literary Sydney on show.

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       Festival: Letterature

       The more laid-back-sounding Letterature in Rome begins tomorrow and runs through 21 June.

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       Festival: PEN World Voices review

       At Publishing Perspectives Chad W. Post has an editorial, reviewing this year's PEN World Voices Festival -- which he found to be a bit of a dud -- and suggesting what he'd like to see in future years, in PEN World Voices: Make it New, Make it International (Dammit) !
       I have to admit I was a bit disappointed by this year's festival too -- and somehow even managed to attend more international literary events that weren't part of the official festival than actual PEN World Voices events that week ..... (On the other hand, Melville House managed to bring Mahmoud Dowlatabadi from Iran for the festival (no easy task) and getting to meet him (and having him sign a copy of The Colonel) pretty much made my month, so there was at the least that super-highlight for me.)
       I'm on board with many of Chad's suggestions -- though I don't know how realistic some of the desirable ones (a central location !) are. And I do kind of like some of the esoteric and political panels (which he'd like to see less of), especially when you get an interesting mix of foreign authors weighing in.
       (As far as the promotion of the festival goes, Chad certainly has a point: I realize I'm pretty much a nobody, but being New York City-based and covering a lot of international literature at this site (including both news about as well as reviews of works by many of the authors appearing at the festival) I'm a bit surprised that no one at PEN made any effort to sell me on any events, or indeed anything at all; they did kindly send me the printed program in advance, but if the World Voices Festival has an e-mail list (and I sure hope they do) I'm certainly not on it. Sure, it hardly matters -- I'll cover what I can, regardless -- but if they're not reaching out to me how many other more significant opportunities are they also ignoring ?)

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       Vertigo review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Boileau-Narcejac's 1954 thriller, Vertigo -- originally published as The Living and the Dead, but now taking its title from the Hitchcock film it inspired

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       Translating from (and to) ... Arabic

       At ahramonline Mary Mourad reports on a one-day workshop that considered the question Why Arabs translate a small fraction of publications relative to other languages ?
       She notes:

Translation to and from Arabic has been so low to the extent that, according to the UNESCO Index Translation, out of top 50 languages it is the 17th language being translated to other languages, and 29th target language (translations to Arabic)

       As longtime readers may recall, I don't believe the Index Translationum is completely reliable (and I assume that Arabic is one of those languages where there are more reporting issues than, say, Western European languages); still, there seems little question that there should be more translation both from and into Arabic. But the situation surely has improved in recent years, and there seems to be great potential for continued improvement.

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       Festival of Asian Literature

       The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature runs 15 to 30 May, and in The National Huma Qureshi previews/introduces it -- and finds there's a Literary focus on females, as:

Thirty out of 50 writers speaking at this year's Festival of Asian Literature are female, an impressive change from the London event's launch in 2007 when only two women were involved

       But there's more to it than that, of course -- and good to hear that:

But it's about quality writing, not quotas, as Loftus Parkins stresses. "Despite a desire to promote Asian women writers, I didn't make a conscious effort to invite mostly women to the festival. I chose the best books, and the best moderators. It just so happened that 30 are women."

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       New Swedish Book Review

       The 2012:1 issue of the Swedish Book Review is now up.
       Among the pieces on offer: satirical poems by Stig Dagerman, Eric Dickens on Lotta Lotass: Experimental Author of Fiction and Drama, and a nice batch of reviews of not-yet-translated titles.

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       Zona review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer, Zona (the film being Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker).

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       Writing in ... Malta

       The Times of Malta profiles EU prize-winning author Immanuel Mifsud, in Writer's plea: Open our market ... and our minds, as he argues: "Maltese literature urgently needs to be translated and exported".
       Easier said than done, of course .....

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       Nigeria Prize for Literature

       They've announced that the submissions are in for this year's Nigeria Prize for Literature, and there are 214 writers in race for Africa's largest prize in Literature. (Compare that to the Man Booker, where they'll barely consider half as many titles .....)
       The prize rotates through four genres from year to year; this year the prize goes to a work of prose again.

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       NIBF 2012

       The Nigeria International Book Fair ran 7 to 12 May, and in the Sunday Tribune Akintayo Abodunrin has an overview, in That the book may thrive again.

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       The Bridge event

       Tomorrow, 14 May, at 19:00, The Bridge presents a group of Dalkey Archive Translators -- Burton Pike, Damion Searls, Todd Hasak-Lowy, and Mary Ann Newman -- in a reading and discussion moderated by Joshua Cohen, at McNally Jackson Books in New York. Should be good.

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       Reading North Korea review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Sonia Ryang's Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry.

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       Orhan Pamuk Q & A

       At Qantara.de Aygül Cizmecioglu has a Q & A with Orhan Pamuk -- about his Museum of Innocence (and his novel, The Museum of Innocence ...).
       Amusing to hear that:

When my daughter was small I used to take her to school every day and we always passed by a house that stood on the corner of a street. And suddenly, one day, I had the absurd idea of telling a story in that house. So I bought it and began to write.

       Of course .....

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       Persian poetry in the UK

       There are still a couple of stops on the Persian Poets' Tour 2012 in the UK, featuring the poetry of "five acclaimed poets from three Persian-speaking countries -- Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan".
       In The Independent today Christina Patterson reports on it, in Persian poetry power: Writers are bringing the spirit of Iran's verse to Britain.

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       Ali and Ramazan review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Perihan Mağden's Ali and Ramazan, just out from AmazonCrossing.
       (Admirably, AmazonCrossing often doesn't just bring out individual titles by foreign authors, but commits to publishing several -- so, for example, another novel by Magden is due out later this year.)

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       HHhH and translation issues

       Laurent Binet's HHhH recently came out in English, to wildly differing critical opinions (see the links at my review for many of them). As it turns out, some of the problems reviewers had with it may have to do specifically with the English version and how the text was mauled in translation.
       Anthony Cummins just reviewed it in The Spectator and notes, for example:

This translation changes Simone Veil to Simone Weil, Tunis to Tunisia, and Birmingham to Stoke-on-Trent. Binet's half-brother becomes a brother-in-law. Heydrich says 36 Jews were murdered on Kristallnacht, one more than stated previously. There are cuts as well as slips. Our presumed ignorance or impatience may account for lost lines about, say, medieval Bohemia; but why does Heydrich no longer vow to shove his deputy into a mass grave ?

       Why indeed ?
       Cummins also writes:

Far better to have HHhH in English than not at all, of course, yet more could have been preserved, in terms of tone as well as detail. [...] The French expects you to know the story already; the English worries you won't keep up.

       This points to one of the major under-reported problems about literature in translation: aside from the translator there's another figure that lurks ominously -- and often interferes horribly -- in bringing a text from one language to another: an 'editor'. Whoever had that responsibility here certainly seems to have failed -- not only in catching mistakes (Weil for Veil, jeez ...), but also in reshaping the book in a way that has diminished it. (Note also that there is no editorial note, at least in the American edition, acknowledging that the text has been changed and cut for English-speaking audiences .....)
       This kind of stuff drives me nuts -- but is widespread practice; if there's any one thing I could change about how translations are published in English it would be to get 'editors' to keep their dirty mitts off the stuff. (They'll all tell you that sometimes it's 'necessary', or for the best; it's not. Never. Fidelity to the text should be the highest priority ! (Especially since aiming to 'please the reader' generally inevitably goes terribly wrong).)

       I'm sorry that I didn't read HHhH in the original, or at least have the original to compare it to, but getting one's hands on originals is even more arduous than getting the books in English in the first place (whereby in this instance -- as in so many others -- I had to resort to borrowing my copy from the library, sigh ...). It's frustrating not being able to consult the original when reviewing books in translation -- but then it is the English version that the majority of readers of the complete review are presumably interested in; too bad they (and I) can't count on that being simply a true-to-the-original English version .....

       (I do note, however, that these flaws don't really affect my biggest objections to the book and Binet's approach; possibly things aren't quite so bad in the French version, but I can't imagine that the translation and editing alone are behind the issues I have with these.)

       (Also: all things considered, I think it's now probably a pretty safe bet that HHhH will not be in the running for next year's Best Translated Book Award .....)

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       Andrés Neuman profile

       At Untitled Books Mark Reynolds profiles Andrés Neuman, whose Traveller of the Century (US title: Traveler of the Century ...) recently came out, and which I hope to get to soon.
       See also the publicity pages from Pushkin Press and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       Q & A: Peter Carey

       In the Wall Street Journal Alexandra Alter has a Q & A with Peter Carey (whose The Chemistry of Tears should be out now or soon), Writing Through Moments of Panic.
       It's amusing to hear that:

Do you read reviews of your work still ?

I try not to. It's stupid. It's only driven by ambition and vanity, insecurity.

       But he certainly seems to find it hard to ignore them entirely.

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       Q & A: 'Reading in Translation'

       At the Picador Book Room Gabrielle Gantz has a Q & A with Tom Roberge (of New Directions) and Chad Post (of Three Percent and Open Letter) about reading in translation.

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       Ondaatje Prize shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize -- "an annual award of £10,000 for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place" -- though not yet at the official site, last I checked. But Charlotte Williams has you covered in The Bookseller, in Two for Cape on Ondaatje shortlist.

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       My First Suicide review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Jerzy Pilch's My First Suicide, just out from Open Letter.

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