opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

The Literary Saloon Archive

11 - 20 March 2024

11 March: Aya translation | Until August review
12 March: International Booker Prize longlist
13 March: FAF Translation Prize finalists | OCM Bocas Prize longlists | Posthumous publishing | What You are Looking For is in the Library review
14 March: BookTok in ... China | Unpatriotic Mo Yan ? | The Writers' Prize | Wingate Literary Prize | Salome in Graz at Amazon
15 March: 'The Great American Novels'-list | Nero Gold Prize | On the (unambitious) contemporary novel | Prix Orange shortlist | National Book Awards judges | Salome in Graz reading sample
16 March: AI and translation | Simenon exhibit | The Club of True Creators review
17 March: AI and literary translation (cont'd) | Prix Jean d'Ormesson longlist
18 March: American Academy Awards in Literature | Vladivostok Circus review
19 March: Premio Formentor | Hallucinated City review
20 March: Österreichischer Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur | EBRD Literature Prize shortlist | Republic of Consciousness Prize/US and Canada | Prix Joseph Kessel longlist

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       Österreichischer Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur

       They've announced the winner of this year's Austrian State Prize for European Literature -- a leading author-prize for European authors -- and it is Joanna Bator.
       This prize has an excellent list of winners -- Marie NDiaye got it last year, Krasznahorkai László in 2021, etc. -- but Bator is probably one of the least recognizable names to win the award. None of her books appear to be available in English yet; for more information about her, see the Culture.pl profile.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       EBRD Literature Prize shortlist

       The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has announced the shortlist for this year's EBRD Literature Prize (though given that they will name three 'finalists' next month, before announcing the winner, this ten-title-strong list is what traditionally would be called a longlist).
       This is a prize: "awarded to the year’s best work of literary fiction translated into English, originally written in any language of the regions in which the Bank currently invests and published for the first time by a European (including UK) or North American publisher". (The eligible countries are apparently: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Türkiye, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.)
       Two of the longshortlisted titles are under review at the complete review: Exiled Shadow, by Norman Manea, and Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, by Andrey Kurkov.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Republic of Consciousness Prize/US and Canada

       They've announced the winner of the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for the US and Canada, with City Lights winning the prize with Lojman, by Ebru Ojen; see also the City Lights publicity page.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Prix Joseph Kessel longlist

       The Société civile des auteurs multimédia -- the unfortunately acronymed Scam -- has announced the longlist for this year's prix Joseph Kessel, awarded to a book 'in the spirit of Joseph Kessel's writing'.
       With books by Nathacha Appanah, Pierre Assouline, Jonathan Littell, and Boualem Sansal, among others, on the longlist, this sounds like a promising prize.

       The only Joseph Kessel-title under review at the complete review is his Belle de Jour.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Premio Formentor

       They've announced the winer of this year's premio Formentor de las Letras -- the revived prix Formentor -- and it is Krasznahorkai László -- certainly a worthy choice.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Hallucinated City review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Mário de Andrade's Hallucinated City, a translation recently re-issued by Sublunary Editions.

       This is a bilingual edition -- adding to quite a few bilingual editions under review at the complete review.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       American Academy Awards in Literature

       The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced its 2024 Awards in Literature, including its biennial Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award, which recognizes: "a writer who has made a significant contribution to American literature", which went to Darryl Pinckney.
       They also awarded two Thornton Wilder Prizes for Translation, to Charlotte Mandell and Michael F. Moore.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Vladivostok Circus review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Elisa Shua Dusapin's Vladivostok Circus, already out in the UK, from Daunt Books, and coming out soon in the US from Open Letter.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       AI and literary translation (cont'd)

       With yesterday's posts on AI and translation and the posting of The Club of True Creators-review, I really should have put two and two together, since the latter more than touches upon the subject of the London Book Fair panel on AI and Literary Translation and the two articles I linked to, as the publisher of The Club of True Creators, the new Rossum Press, have explicitly embraced a publishing- and translation-model based on Artificial Intelligence.
       As they explain/maintain:

Using a system of AI-assisted team translation, our skilled editors are able to create high quality literary translations with a fraction of the resources which traditional methods require.

Every word of the AI-generated draft translation is carefully weighed by a professional stylist of the target language, and we work closely with our authors at every step along the way.

       Like it or not -- and many people (not just, but especially translators) really, really don't like it --, this is (at least a significant part of) the future, especially for popular and genre fiction (and, for example, manga), and, if nothing else, props to Rossum Press for making it very clear that this is how they operate. (Well, they might have mentioned it in the translator-creditless book itself as well .....)
       The 'machine translation + (human) editing' model seems likely to become the dominant one -- with the amount of editing varying widely (as it does already: one should never overlook that a lot of entirely human translations are terrible, not least because they are often published without much editorial oversight or involvement)).
       One of the reasons given for so little being published in translation is the cost involved. The use of machine-translation -- to whatever extent -- can reduce those costs drastically -- but will the final product justify those (reduced) costs, or are we possibly losing too much ?
       (I do note -- and I do think this isn't acknowledged nearly enough -- that, both historically and currently, a lot of (human) translation of literary work, both popular and 'literary', is really bad. (Admittedly, the main reason for this -- (many) publishers simply don't care about the (end-)product-- applies to any form of translation, i.e. won't be rectified by greater reliance on machine-aided translation.))

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Prix Jean d'Ormesson longlist

       They've announced the ten finalists for this year's prix Jean d'Ormesson -- one of my favorite prizes, because it's an anything-goes prize, with the judges selecting the books, old or new, that are in the running; this year's batch includes, for example, Réjean Ducharme's 1973 novel L'hiver de force and Fritz Zorn's Mars; see, for example, the Livres Hebdo report.
       The winner will be announced on 29 May.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       AI and translation

       At the London Book Fair they had a panel on AI and Literary Translation, and at Publishers Weekly John Maher reports on it, in How Will AI Change Life for Literary Translators ? -- and in The Guardian Anna Aslanyan looks at AI translation: how to train ‘the horses of enlightenment’

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Simenon exhibit

       At the Jan Michalski Foundation a Simenon exhibit opens today and runs through 29 September -- it looks promising.

       Quite a few works by Simenon are under review at the complete review, from When I was Old to quite a few Maigrets (e.g. Maigret and the Saturday Caller).

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       The Club of True Creators review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Milan Tripković's The Club of True Creators, recently out in English from the new Rossum Press.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       'The Great American Novels'-list

       Of literary list-making there can apparently never be enough, and among the bigger recent entries we find now The Atlantic's of The Great American Novels -- limited to those published in the last century for some reason, but at least not limiting titles to one-per-author (several authors rate two mentions; Toni Morrison has three), and not forcing some round number but rather listing ... 136 titles.
       If you click on the titles you get a brief bit about each book, too, so you can entertain yourself with this for a while.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Nero Gold Prize

       The Costa-substitute Nero Gold Prize has announced its 2023 Book of the Year winner, and it is The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       On the (unambitious) contemporary novel

       In the Winter issue of the Athenaeum Review James Elkins has Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel -- well worth a read.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Prix Orange shortlist

       They've announced the five finalists for this year's prix Orange du livre en Afrique -- notable for being for a book not only written by a (Francophone) African author, but also published by an Africa-based publisher; see, for example, the Livres Hebdo report.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       National Book Awards judges

       The (American) National Book Foundation has revealed the twenty-five judges for this year's National Book Awards.
       The translation prize panel consists of: Aron Aji, Jennifer Croft, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gary Lovely, and Julia Sanches.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Salome in Graz reading sample

       The page for Salome in Graz at the various Amazons now includes the "Read sample" possibility -- see, here, for example -- so you can get a bit better of an idea of the text proper.
       The sample on offer actually only presents a very small part of the narrative part of the novel: it includes the not really representative (but still essential to the novel ...) opening pages, while the bulk of the preview consists of the (extensive) Notes- and Bibliography-sections.
       I suppose you could actually piece together quite a bit of the text from the Notes, but that seems more trouble than it's worth (i.e. actually reading the book itself is a whole lot easier (and, I would think, more entertaining)), but they and the Bibliography are quite informative, as to what went into the novel ..... (The Bibliography, especially the last part, is, I think, also fun, for those who like book-lists; it's arguably more intriguing than that The Atlantic-list .....)

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       BookTok in ... China

       'BookTok' -- TikTok videos about books -- is all the rage and apparently helps to sell lots of books. A truly international phenomenon, it apparently also works in China -- even if it isn't called BookTok there, since TikTok isn't TikTok there, but rather Douyin.
       As Fang Aiqing reports at China Daily, in Nobel literature laureate finds connection with Chinese readers:

After about one hour and a half on Tuesday night, the 2021 Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah sold around 100,000 copies of his novels at a Chinese livestream show on the short video platform Douyin, generating a profit of over 4 million yuan ($570,000). The number grew to 110,000 copies later that night.

       Impressive.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Unpatriotic Mo Yan ?

       As Simina Mistreanu reports for AP, Nobel Literature laureate Mo Yan is accused in patriotism lawsuit of insulting China’s heroes.
       Yes, in China they have some nutty law that for example: "bans criticism or questioning of the folklore surrounding the 1949 formation of the People’s Republic by Communist revolutionaries, and also prohibits acts that glorify historical episodes considered unpatriotic, such as Japan’s 20th century invasion of China", and "patriotic" blogger Wu Wanzheng is trying to sue under it:

The lawsuit filed last month demands that the author apologize to all Chinese people, the country’s martyrs and Mao, and pay damages of 1.5 billion yuan ($209 million) — 1 yuan for each Chinese person. He also requested that Mo’s books be removed from circulation.

       Sounds perfectly reasonable and sensible, right ?
       See also Yuanyue Dang's report in the South China Morning Post, China’s Nobel winning novelist Mo Yan targeted by growing band of online nationalists -- quoting also, for example, from a post that argues abot Mo Yan:

The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded because his work is in line with Western ‘political correctness’. His China is so in line with what the West thinks and expects of us

       Of course .....

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       The Writers' Prize

       They've announced the winner of this year's The Writers' Prize Book of the Year, and it is the novel in verse The Home Child, by Liz Berry.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Wingate Literary Prize

       They've announced the winner of this year's Wingate Literary Prize, "given to the best book, fiction or non-fiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader", and it is The Hero of this Book, by Elizabeth McCracken.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Salome in Graz at Amazon

       My new novel, Salome in Graz, is making its way into the book distribution system, and is now Amazon-available. (Say what you will about the juggernaut and how it treats and flogs books, but they are efficient -- first on the block to list the book, with all the other retailers lagging.)
       So you can now also order it at:

• Amazon.com - US
• Amazon.co.uk - UK
• Amazon.ca - Canada
• Amazon.fr - France
• Amazon.de - Germany
• Amazon.it - Italy
• Amazon.es - Spain
• Amazon.com.au - Australia

       It should be available at the other international Amazons soon (if not already).

       Meanwhile, you can also continue to purchase it here -- where the current promotional code (through 15 March) PUBLISHED10 at checkout gets you 10% off.

       Salome in Graz should be available at other retailers soon (and your local bookstore should be able to order it for you soon as well, though they may not be able to just yet).

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       FAF Translation Prize finalists

       The French-American Foundation has announced the finalists for its Translation Prize in the two categories, fiction and non.
       Only one of the titles is under review at the complete review -- Daniel Levin Becker's translation of The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       OCM Bocas Prize longlists

       They've announced the longlists for this year's OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in its three categories, fiction, non, and poetry.
       The category winners will be announced 7 April, and the overall winner on 27 April.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Posthumous publishing

       Occasioned by the publication of Gabriel García Márquez's Until August Alex Belth goes: 'Inside the ethically thorny world of posthumous publishing', in Is It A Betrayal To Publish Dead Writers' Books ? at Esquire.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       What You are Looking For is in the Library review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Aoyama Michiko's popular What You are Looking For is in the Library.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       International Booker Prize longlist

       They've announced the longlist for this year's International Booker Prize -- thirteen books originally written in ten languages (all but one European -- though: "A quarter of the list is written by South American authors,"), selected from 149 (unfortunately not revealed ...) entries.
       Interesting to see the break-down of the languages with the most-submitted titles:

• 1. French (26 books)
• 2. Spanish (21)
• 3. Japanese (15)
• 4. German (12)
• 5. Arabic (8)
• -. Italian (8)

       Somewhat embarrassingly and certainly disappointingly, I've only seen four of the longlisted titles -- and haven't (fully) read or reviewed a one. (Last year I had reviewed four of the titles when the list was announced.)
       The shortlist will be announced 9 April, and the winner on 21 May.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Aya translation

       At The Africa Report Olivia Snaije profiles Edwige-Renée Dro, in Ivorian literary activist, translator lends her skills to beloved graphic novel, ‘Aya de Yopougon’.
       Dro translated Aya: Claws Come Out (Drawn & Quarterly).

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Until August review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Gabriel García Márquez's just-published (in many, many languages) Until August.

       Much of the coverage of this 'event' -- and many of the reviews -- have focused on this being yet another posthumous work being published against an author's express wishes. (In their Preface, his two sons even admit that their father explicitly said: "This book doesn't work. It must be destroyed".)
       While, very strictly speaking, García Márquez's assessment is correct, I'd point out that the same ('This book doesn't work') can be said about a significant proportion of the novels I look at/read -- and that Until August is more satisfying than most of those.
       This case also differs from many authors' wishes to see one or all of their works destroyed after their deaths in that García Márquez was suffering from dementia at the time -- the 'memory loss', as his sons term it, that apparently hindered him from shaping it into the work he wanted it to be. As such -- because he was no longer in his right mind, as it were --, it seems to me a (morally) more difficult call than e.g. Brod's betrayal of Kafka

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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