Yes, Happily-Ever-After Is Okay In Serious Literature
Pamela Paul -- the former editor of The New York Times Book Review -- is now an opinion-columnist at the paper, and her piece this week argues we should Stop Pretending All Books Are Written in English, taking up the case for translators getting proper credit, which is certainly a worthy cause
I would suggest that if you're going to point out: "Remember The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the runaway Nordic best seller ? No translator on the cover" you might want to also address and acknowledge other translator issues -- like the fact that the translator, Steven T. Murray, insisted on a pseudonym (Reg Keeland) because of ... editorial differences with the publisher; the published English version appears to be a perversion of the original (see, for example, Kajsa Paludan's thesis, Lisbeth Salander Lost In Translation (warning ! dreaded pdf format !)).(Meanwhile, what the hell is up with finding P-Paul's replacement ? The position at the NYTBR appears to still be open. I guess it's harder finding "someone uninterested in puffery and cliché" than expected.)
Geoff Dyer Q & A
At The Guardian Anthony Cummins has a Q & A with Geoff Dyer: ‘I’m convinced Roger Federer and I could become great friends’.
The most interesting response:
This is your eighth book since you last published a novel. Have you given up writing fiction ?
Pretty much. I’ve written all these books with an incredibly wide range of subject matter, but my novels can be summarised in a couple of sentences: guy goes to a party, meets girl with a group of friends, falls in love. That’s all I had. What I like the idea of doing next is an English version of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, to record some aspects of my very ordinary 1960s childhood in the working-class, semi-rural world that formed me, and which seems to have disappeared.
I've enjoyed Dyer's novels, but I appreciate when an author doesn't force the issue; far too many don't and keep churning out all too similar novels, to no good end. (That said, he's certainly setting the bar high in hoping to emulate Ernaux .....)
Shaun Whiteside Q & A
At New Books in German Helen Nurse has an Interview with translator Shaun Whiteside.
Among his observations:
This is part of the problem of being a translator. You’re not necessarily the kind of personality that wants the limelight all the time. And maybe that’s why, speaking personally to some extent, you got into translation rather than something else in the first place. However, on behalf of all other translators, I think it’s probably one of those things that you have to take on board. You have to say, I’m not just doing this for me, I’m doing it for my colleagues as well.
Tomb of Sand review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand.
This came out from Tilted Axis Press last year -- and, recently, from Penguin India -- and is on the shortlist for the to-be-announced-next-week International Booker Prize, the first translation from the Hindi to make the shortlist.
Its long- and short-listing got a decent amount of attention, and with the Indian edition there have been more newspaper reviews, but I am a bit surprised to see that it hasn't been covered or reviewed more widely in the British (much less American) press.
A decade ago Tim Parks wondered [$] in The New York Review of Books why works available in English translation, including Geetanjali Shree's Mai, don't: "have the same international success as works by Anglo-Indian authors like Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy", and it continues to be an issue. Much of it still has to do with availability: a great deal of literature in Indian languages has been translated -- locally -- into English, but little has seeped beyond India's (and Pakistan's and Bangladesh's) borders. (I haven't seen Mai, but have reviewed another Shree title, The Empty Space, published by one of the few India-based publishers with some international distribution, Seagull Books.)
The problem seems to be two-fold: publishers aren't picking up US/UK rights for these often already-translated titles -- and the media isn't covering the few that do (like Tomb of Sand) very well ......
In a recent interview, the translator of Tomb of Sand, Daisy Rockwell addresses some of this:
(T)he fact is that international publishers have just had no interest at all in Indian translations. So everyone I know has tried. We've all tried different ways with agents, directly networking, but hardly anything has been published outside of India. So there's this huge amount going on inside of India, and in Pakistan and Bangladesh to a lesser degree. And it's not getting out at all and nobody wants it.
As she notes, with some frustration, it would be so easy:
(T)here's just so much available. They don't even have to do anything. They can just call Penguin Random House or HarperCollins and say, ‘send me your list and I'll pick what I want.’ It's already been translated and edited.
I really don't know what the answer is here. Certainly, an International Booker Prize win might help raise the profile of Indian-language fiction -- but I don't know that it's enough. Brief previous enthusiasms about translations from South and South-East Asia seem to have flamed out stunningly speedily, and given the mainstream press' reluctance to engage with this work so far .....
Jhumpa Lahiri Q & A
Jhumpa Lahiri Q & A
Jhumpa Lahiri's Translating Myself and Others recently came out, and at npr Mary Louise Kelly has a Q & A with her, Jhumpa Lahiri on how she fell in love with translating and how it shapes her writing.
Yes, Professors ‘Groom’ Their Students Chronicle of Higher Education