New Issue of Bookslut

The new issue of everyone’s favorite provocatively named webmag/blog is now available and includes a few translation-related items.

First off, there’s a review of To Hell with Cronje by Ingrid Winterbach and translated from the Afrikaans by Elsa Silke. The review is solid, and starts with a nice bit that references BTBA longlist title Agaat.:

2010 might be called a banner year for Afrikaans women in English, if a few fat books can be said to make a banner. Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat won a blurb from Toni Morrison and a review from The New York Times, while a reprint of Begging to be Black by Antjie Krog flew disappointingly under the radar. Somewhere in the middle was Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell With Cronjé, published by Open Letter Books back in September in an adroit translation by Elsa Silke. Not to be outdone by the extravagant praise heaped on Agaat, Open Letter brought out the big guns: Winterbach has produced no less than “a South African Heart of Darkness,” we’re told, “an eerie reflection of the futility of war.”

Heart of Darkness, of course, was published in 1902, the same year in which To Hell With Cronjé takes place. And to be sure, there are other similarities as well: Winterbach’s novel explores the familiar “dark side” of English colonial expansion, and it does it in a chilly, not-quite-accessible way that recalls Marlow’s uncanny journey upriver. But there is a pointed irony to the fact that a book about the Anglo-Boer war should be compared to this most famous “Khaki” exploration narrative. Winterbach’s is a tale told from the other side, of a people formatively stuck between colonizer and colonized. (She is not alone in this effort: André Brink, for example, has made numerous recent forays into white South African vigilantism at the turn of the twentieth century.) While Conrad anticipated the glorious twilight of an empire, Winterbach rests on the tip of an iceberg that’s only begun to form.

There’s also a review of Javier Marias’s While the Women Are Sleeping, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa:

Given Javier Marías’s clear love for dark motivations and ghost stories — not magical realism, thanks, but the kind of creepy Poe-tasting that confounds literalists and raises kids’ hackles ‘round the campfire — While the Women Are Sleeping is initially a confusing prospect. The collection’s ten stories span thirty years, from 1968 on, but his narrators all feel like different flesh on the same skeleton, a parade of bourgeoisie vacationing with wives or visiting New York or taking sinecures in Spain; they exist as non-entities, mere witnesses with interchangeable values. Characters encounter specters both literal (“The Resignation Letter of Senor de Santiesteban”) and dubious (“One Night of Love”), but with resignment: where rabbit-hole fate draws, say, thematic predecessors like Juan Preciado (from Juan Rulfo’s classic spookfest Pedro Páramo) or Felipe Montero (Carlos Fuentes’s Aura) deep into the uncanny, Marías’s narrators operate in helpless acquiescence to the macabre. When the nameless chronicler of Sleeping’s title story discovers an acquaintance’s plan to murder his lover Inés, he’s not provoked or frightened so much as discomfited — while the prospect of another’s death gives him pause, it’s the newly discovered proximity to the dark side that makes him paranoid and neurotic.

Of course, that’s Marías’s milieu: for all his promised heebie-jeebies, his real hobbyhorse is everyday solipsism.

There’s a lot of interesting non-translation related stuff as well, including an article on the lifespan of the literary magazine, and interviews with Bradford Morrow (whose new book seems to be getting a lot of praise), Emma Straub (interviewed by super-bookseller Michele Filgate), and Evan Lavender-Smith.