We’re interrupting the longest posts known to bloggers to officially announce a grant that we received from Amazon.com to support The Wall in My Head. Here’s the official press release:

Open Letter Books has been awarded a $20,000 grant from Amazon.com to support the publication and promotion of The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, an anthology of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry marking the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition to supporting the publication of this book, the grant supports the Wall in My Head blog, a website featuring excerpts from the book, historical images, and new essays about life in Eastern Europe before and after the collapse of Communism.

This anthology was conceived by the editors of Words Without Borders — an online magazine specializing in international literature — and the publication of Wall on November 9th will correspond with a special issue of Words Without Borders that is also dedicated to the fall of the Berlin Wall and sponsored by Amazon.com.

The Wall in My Head includes work from more than thirty contributors and almost as many translators, as well as over seventy photographs and images of historic documents. The written pieces date from both before and after the fall of the Wall, and highlights include seminal excerpts from the work of Milan Kundera, Peter Schneider, Ryszard Kapuściński, Vladimir Sorokin, and Victor Pelevin, as well as new work from Péter Esterházy, Andrzej Stasiuk, Dorota Masłowska, Uwe Tellkamp, and Dan Sociu.

“Our goal with Open Letter Books,” according to director Chad W. Post, “is to increase the access American readers have to the best works and ideas from cultures around the world, and The Wall in My Head is a perfect example of how we achieve this. It’s especially gratifying that Amazon.com is interested in helping us to achieve this goal. Their support will definitely help us strengthen our efforts and reach a larger audience than we otherwise might have.”

Founded in 2007 at the University of Rochester, Open Letter publishes between ten and twelve titles each year, all in translation. Some of its authors include Dubravka Ugresic, Jan Kjærstad, Marguerite Duras, and Jorge Volpi. In addition, it runs Three Percent, an online blog and review site dedicated to spreading the word about international literature. Open Letter also works closely with University of Rochester students, as part of the University’s programs in Literary Translation Studies.

In addition to Open Letter, Amazon.com has awarded grants over the past six months to a diverse range of not-forprofit author and publisher groups, including 826 Seattle, Children’s Book Week, Poets & Writers, Seattle Arts and Lectures, Richard Hugo House, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Copper Canyon Press, National Novel Writing Month, Clarion West, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. A number of the recipients — such as Pen America, Words Without Borders, and the Center for the Art of Translation — are, like Open Letter, dedicated to bringing
more international writers to the attention of English language readers.

The official publication date for The Wall in My Head is November 9, 2009. More information about this and other Open Letter titles can be found at the press’s website.

I know we’ve been pretty quiet on the book reviewing front (but soon—I really want to recommend the new Brandao book . . .), but at long last, we’ve added a piece on The Wall in My Head to our Review section.

I would be tempted to apologize for the self-promotional nature of posting a review of one of our own books (god knows why, that’s exactly how other publishers use their blogs), but this book came into existence thanks to Alane Mason, Rohan Kamicheril, Sal Robinson, Gemma Bentley, and the wonderful people at Words Without Borders. They deserve a ton of credit—even more than can be delivered in this glowing review.

As a sidenote, we are having a special event for this book next Tuesday at Idlewild Books in New York City. Event starts at 6pm and features Dorota Maslowska (Poland), the author of Snow White and Russian Red, and winner of the Nike prize; Dan Sociu(Romania), the author of Urbancholia; Masha Gessen (Russia), author of Ester and Ruzya: How my Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace; and Kathrin Aehnlich (Germany), author of Alle Sterben, auch Die Loeffelstoere. The event will be moderated by Eliot Borenstein, Chair of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, and the author of Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture.

But on with the review . . . This was written by Jessica LeTourneur, who is from Chicago, attended NYU’s Publishing Institute in 2005, has worked as a journalist, a librarian, an indie bookstore clerk, and once upon a time, at The Missouri Review and W. W. Norton & Company, and currently is pursuing a Master’s degree in History and Scholarly Publishing at Arizona State University.

Here’s the opening of her piece:

I was born in the final decade of communism’s flailing grasp on the Eastern Bloc, and so what I know of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism has long been relegated to what I learned from middle school textbooks, and teachers who had to explain to us why those maps we were so diligently studying were made obsolete overnight. The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain has aided in filling in that gap in my education through its poignant words and images that have left an indelible impression upon me long after I turned the last page. For me, the globe I keep on top of my bookcase from the early 1980s is a quirky relic, but for those whose contributions make up this extraordinary book, those lines and colors that have been redrawn in the past two decades were once ‘home’.

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall coming up—it takes place next week on November 9th—this tremendous, and at times wrenching compilation of stories and images is a truly revelatory experience for any reader, no matter what country or decade they were born into.

This book is also a prime example of the quality anthologies that Words Without Borders has put out into the marketplace over the past several years. (Other publications include Literature from the Axis of Evil: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Other Enemy Nations, New Press, September 2006, and Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers, Anchor Books, March 2007).

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain is an exceptional anthology that is jointly published by Words Without Borders and Open Letter Books. It contains stories written by the greats whose names are immediately recognizable—Milan Kundera, Vladimir Sorokin, Peter Esterhazy, as well as those who may be lesser-known in the United States (for now), but are nonetheless astonishingly talented writers and artists.

Click here for the full review.

I was born in the final decade of communism’s flailing grasp on the Eastern Bloc, and so what I know of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism has long been relegated to what I learned from middle school textbooks, and teachers who had to explain to us why those maps we were so diligently studying were made obsolete overnight. The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain has aided in filling in that gap in my education through its poignant words and images that have left an indelible impression upon me long after I turned the last page. For me, the globe I keep on top of my bookcase from the early 1980s is a quirky relic, but for those whose contributions make up this extraordinary book, those lines and colors that have been redrawn in the past two decades were once ‘home’.

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall coming up—it takes place next week on November 9th—this tremendous, and at times wrenching compilation of stories and images is a truly revelatory experience for any reader, no matter what country or decade they were born into.

This book is also a prime example of the quality anthologies that Words Without Borders has put out into the marketplace over the past several years. (Other publications include Literature from the Axis of Evil: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Other Enemy Nations, New Press, September 2006, and Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers, Anchor Books, March 2007).

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain is an exceptional anthology that is jointly published by Words Without Borders and Open Letter Books. It contains stories written by the greats whose names are immediately recognizable—Milan Kundera, Vladimir Sorokin, Peter Esterhazy, as well as those who may be lesser-known in the United States (for now), but are nonetheless astonishingly talented writers and artists.

The strength of the collection lies in its diversity—writers from all corners of Eastern Europe share their wide-ranging experiences in varying narrative form—from the epistolary in Mihaly Kornis’s “Petition” to Eugen Jebeleanu’s “Poems from Secret Weapon_”, _The Wall in My Head features a unique collection of fiction, nonfiction, photos, and images of historical documents that all together contribute to a distinctive book that sheds light on what life was, and has been for several generations of writers, activists, and artists who witnessed the collapse of Communism first-hand.

Wladimir Kaminer’s “Paris Lost” illustrates both the ridiculousness as well as the paranoia that gripped communist countries to such an extent that Kazakhstan found itself constructing its own fake Paris and London, only to later tear it down when the government’s fear that the people would discover the truth precipitated the need. In “Moving House” by Pawel Huelle a dining table comes between a marriage, until the day when its legs are (literally) cut down from underneath it:

My father, so handy at repairs, couldn’t fix Mr. Polaske’s table, or rather, couldn’t fix its uneven legs. After each cut, it would turn out that one of the legs was a little shorter than the others. Possessed by the fury of perfection, or maybe the German methodicalness, my father refused to admit defeat: he shortened and shortened the legs, until at last an extraordinary sight presented itself. On the floor, beside heaps of sawn-off bits of wood and a sea of sawdust, lay the top of Mr. Polaske’s table, legless, like a great brown shield. My mother’s eyes glittered with emotion, my father’s look was black as thunder, but nothing could stop him from finishing what he’d begun. The snarling saw began to rip into the tabletop. My father puffed and panted, and my mother held her breath, until at long last she cried: “Well, finally!”

The Wall wasn’t just an architectural structure separating the East from the West. Its physical presence was a catalyst for the symbolic and mental state that also divided granddaughters from grandmothers (“My Grandmother the Censor”), brothers from sisters, (“Brother and Sister”), as well as parting lovers (“Nabokov in Brasov”). While some of the writers in The Wall in My Head embrace the past and pursue their desire to peel back the layers of their history and pasts, others clearly demarcate the wall in their head as a place where they are either unable, or unwilling to remember communism’s lingering legacy. Says Dorota Maslowska in “Faraway, So Gross”:

Do I remember Communism? But I have to remember something, right? Drag some nugget of the swirling muck of memory, strip it of superfluous detail, snap a shot of the heroes’ faces and let them march across the table, funny or forlorn, in rain slickers and stupid old boots that say “Relax” on their tags, with mesh shopping bags hanging low from the greenish, budding potatoes rumbling around inside. . . . In fact, I don’t remember anything in particular from that time, barely any event at all, barely any feeling, just this sort of grayness and nausea raised to the highest degree, such that it was almost the idea of grayness. . . . Memory is shush, a muddy puddle in which the little ships of things now sink, now surface triumphantly. I remember Communism exclusively as a style and an aesthetic category.

While there certainly hasn’t been a shortage of weighty academic tomes, dissertations, and other narratives analyzing communism and its aftereffects in the two decades since the Wall came down, The Wall in My Head offers the reader a remarkably one-of-a-kind reading experience through its variety and superiority in content, writers, and prose. Words Without Borders and Open Letter Books have really hit the mark with this brilliant collection.

New issues of a bunch of my favorite magazines (online and in print) came out this week. Here’s a quick summary:

The new Bookforum is a three-month issue, so thankfully there’s a lot of great stuff. Ben Anastas on faith in fiction, a review by Matthew Shaer of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers, a “review by Tayt Harlin” of Ben Moser’s Why This World, and a review by Kate Zambreno of Christine Montalbetti’s Western. (On the non-international literature side of things, there’s a review by Paul LaFarge of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, a review by Hari Kunzru of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, and a review by John Domini of Richard Powers’s Generosity. And much more . . .)

The new World Literature Today really deserves its own post. This is a special issue edited by Larry Venuti and dedicated to Catalan Literature. There’s a piece by J. Madison Davis on “The Inventive Crime Writers of Catalonia,” a story by Quim Monzo entitled “A Day Like Any Other” (which will appear in the Guadalajara collection Open Letter is publishing next year), several poems by Miquel Bauca, Francesc Parcerisas, and Maria-Merce Marcal, Anna Montero, Andreu Vidal, Ernest Farres, and Eva Baltasar, and a story by Albert Sanchex Pinol. There’s also an extremely interesting introductory essay by Venuti that’s available online.

This month’s Believer kicks ass. A number of interesting pieces—Damion Searls on the abridged Moby-Dick, a piece by Stephen Elliott, a reconsideration of V.C. Andrews—and reviews of two Open Letter books: a review by Lara Tupper of Jan Kjaerstad’s The Discoverer and a piece by the aforementioned Kate Zambreno on Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli. (And check out the review by Laird Hunt of Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier as well.)

New Open Letters Monthly (unaffiliated—it’s just a coincidence, or example of great minds thinking alike) is also available online and features a nice range of pieces, including a special “Music Portfolio.”

Finally, the September issue of Words Without Borders is up now as well, and is focused on “Walking the World”:

This month, in collaboration with Orion magazine, we embark on “Walking the World,” the second installment of our two-month focus on international nature writing. The writers in our September issue record their walks to give us a unique ground-level perspective on our natural and urban surroundings. Whether a remembrance of a haunting episode on the streets of Paris, or an account of a trek through Milan toward a distant peak, these pieces provide a rare glimpse into the realm of the writer on foot, in his element, and speaking about the world that we all navigate. This month we present the work of Siegfried Kracauer, Troub’s, Davide Sapienza, Agur Schiff, Antonio Ungar, Alexei Ivanov, and Marjan Strojan. We hope you’ll also head over to Orion to read their fantastic selections for this co-publication.

Lots of good stuff to be reading . . .

Alane Salierno Mason, the founder of Words Without Borders, got interviewed at Big Think about literature in translation:

They have several other videos with her as well: on publishers (as they say, “A few stoic houses are carrying the torch for literature in translation.”), on the founding of Words Without Borders, and on Oprah.

via our good friend CK.

The final installment in The Guardian‘s_ Stories from a New Europe series is This Part of Town Is No Place for Old-Timers by Czech author Jachym Topol. David Short translated this piece about a Czech writer remembering life before 1989, his father’s failure as a writer and dissident, and how the post-wall society is filled with crappy chain restaurants and other ways to lure in tourists:

Now don’t start drowning in nostalgia, I tell myself. It must be better here now than it was back then. In those days, the barracks across the street with the red star on the front was where Soviet soldiers used to take their meals. The Soviets with their tanks and rockets held their Czech gubernium on a tight rein, and with it one-sixth of the world, and that was horrendous; while this globalised tat – well, it’s Freedom. The God-awful tackiness of city centres is evidence of the freedom to travel, I reassure myself. It’s the same here as in Florence, Kyoto or Lisbon. People want to be alike, since difference breeds only misunderstanding and violence. And it’s hardly overstating it to say that that year, 1989, when Eastern Europe rose in revolt, we shot straight out of Orwell into Huxley. But which is better?

In the end, this was definitely my favorite of the six stories in the series. And unlike some of the other writers featured by The Guardian, if you’re interested in reading more Topol, his novel City Sister Silver is available from Catbird Press, and Gargling with Tar is currently being translated by David Short.

Probably more than any of the five pieces, this story would fit perfectly in The Wall in My Head an anthology of stories, essays, and images that we’re publishing on November 9th, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Words Without Borders (specifically Rohan Kamicheril and Sal Robinson) put together this fantastic collection, which includes pieces by Peter Schneider, Ryszard Kapuściński, Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin and new work from Péter Esterházy, Andrzej Stasiuk, Muharem Bazdulj, Maxim Trudolubov, Dorota Masłowska, Uwe Tellkamp, Dan Sociu, David Zábranský, Christhard Läpple, and a host of others.

You can preorder the title directly from us by clicking the link above, or you can order it from The Booksmith, our store of the month, by clicking here. Or, for the biggest savings, you could just take out an Open Letter subscription and receive the next six OL books for $65. (Or the next 12 for $120—just click the image below for more details.)

I’ll highlight all of the books in here one by one over the next week, but for anyone who can’t wait, you’ll find descriptions, author and translator info, and most importantly, samples from each of the books in the pdf version of the catalog.

Obviously biased, but this is a great list, with Jakov Lind’s wondrously bizarre Ergo, Macedonio Fernandez’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), an anthology with Words Without Borders, Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, and the first complete translation of Ilf & Petrov’s The Golden Calf.

Enjoy!

Corridor of Dreams, which is the May issue of Words Without Borders, is now available online and focuses on contemporary Japanese literature. From translator and guest editor Allison Powell’s introduction:

Over the past several decades, a steady stream of fascinating writers from Japan have appeared in English, including two Nobel prize winners, Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe, as well as the now wildly popular Haruki Murakami. It may seem, however, that in recent years the stream has slowed to a trickle. Therefore, it has been my pleasure to act as guest editor for the Japan issue of Words Without Borders, and to have the opportunity to introduce new writing and new authors to WWB‘s audience.

The Japanese authors and works assembled here are not necessarily unified by any particular theme. I set out to showcase the robust variety of contemporary Japanese fiction, and I think these writers demonstrate just that, brilliantly. Most of the authors featured here have been writing for years and have well-established audiences in Japan. They have all been recognized with various literary awards and accolades, yet very little of their work has been published anywhere in English.

The point about how Japanese translations into English have “slowed to a trickle,” is absolutely true, although thanks to the Japanese Literature Publishing Project and Vertical, the situation is much better than it would be.

According to the Translation Database in 2008, 23 Japanese works made their way into English; so far in 2009, only 12. But of these 35 titles, 15 were published by Vertical—a press exclusively devoted to publishing Japanese literature, especially in the horror and thriller categories—and another 7 (at least) were funded by the JLPP—a program by which texts are selected, translated, and then offered to publishers. And if anyone publishes a JLPP book, the JLPP buys back a certain number of copies to send to libraries around the world.

Remove the JLPP influence and Vertical’s mandate, and you end up with only 13 Japanese titles coming out over the past two years. (Something similar happens to Arabic literature when you look beyond what the American University of Cairo Press is doing.)

Some of the fiction pieces included in this issue are: an excerpt from Sogil Yan’s Corridor of Dreams (translated by Linda Hoaglund), an excerpt from Kaho Nakayama’s Sentimental Education (translated by Allison Powell), and an excerpt from Hiromi Kawakami’s Manazuru (translated by Michael Emmerich).

And speaking of Michael Emmerich, he also has a short essay in this issue entitled “Beyond Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors,” which opens with an bit about the meaning of the word “translation”:

In order for “translation” to have any meaning at all, it must be translatable into other languages; but the moment it is translated, it is swept up in a system of differentiations different from the one in which it is enmeshed in English—indeed, it doesn’t even have to be translated, because the word itself implies its own connectedness to these other systems of differentiation. Translation must be viewed as a node within which all the ideas of translation in all the languages there ever have been or could ever be might potentially congregate, intersect, mingle.

On top of all this, there are also reviews of Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (winner of the 2009 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry) and Satoshi Azuchi’s Supermarket: A Novel (which is a JLPP book).

Very solid issue . . .

Lots of interesting pieces in the new issue of Words Without Borders, which focuses on Greece this month.

I have to admit that I haven’t heard of many of these writers (although the pieces by Thanassis Valtinos, Margarita Karapanou, and Ioanna Karystiani look particularly interesting), I am familiar with both Karen Emmerich, who translated a number of these pieces for this issue. Karen’s a great translator (her translation of Amanda Michalopoulou’s I’d Like was on the 2009 Best Translated Book Fiction Longlist), and in addition to translating a few pieces for this issue, she also guest edited it and wrote an introductory essay — Modern Greek Literature, Inside (and) Out:

The handful of pieces included in this issue represent only a small sample of recent Greek prose dealing with emigration and immigration, and with the challenges they pose to national, cultural, and ethnic identity. The selection is also, by design, rather eclectic, in style and form, and in the particular ways in which these works engage the issues I have been outlining. I have brought together texts about Greeks living abroad and texts about foreigners living in Greece; the selection as a whole deals with migration on a number of socio-economic levels and in a variety of historical situations. Many of the pieces included already juxtapose the figures of the emigrant and the immigrant in an attempt to make sense of the experiences of the cultural “other” by way of analogy; by presenting these writings as a group, I hope to further enable that work of empathetic comparison.

And just to put this in context—according to our translation database, four Greek books came out in the U.S. last year (in addition to the Michalopoulou, Green Integer did a collection of poetry by Nikos Engonopoulos, Etruscan Press published Alexis Stamatis’s American Fugue, and Parmenides did Pythagorean Crimes by Tefcros Michaelides) and only two titles (poetry collections by C. P. Cavafy and Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke) are on the list for 2009 . . .

This started a while ago, but Rose Mary Salum of Entre los espacios has been interviewing a number of translation journals/magazines about issues of readership, editing, etc., with pretty interesting results.

Each question is a separate post, so here are links to the four already online, along with a quote from one of the responses. (Just for the record, editors from CALQUE, Absinthe, Words Without Borders, Tameme, One Edit, No Man’s Land, and CipherJournal are being interviewed.)

Question #1 is about the perceived lack of interest in international literature among English readers.

Brandon Holmquest from CALQUE: I’m not sure if I agree with the idea that readers are disinclined to read things from other countries. There are a hell of a lot of people in this country who are not readers, and a great many who read things like genre fiction. It does the publisher of serious literature, translated or not, no good to consider these people as readers. A record label that puts out hip-hop records cares about hip-hop fans, people who hate music and rock fans can take of themselves.

Question #2: What would seem to be the essential editorial challenge when working with translations?

Tim Adkins from One Edit: Make it interesting.

Question #3: Is expression in one language completely transmittable into another language?

Dwayne Hayes from Absinthe: I’m not sure the thoughts in our own heads are completely transmittable in our own language! That said, translation stands on its own as a literary work and is definitely capable of transmitting the heart of the text.

Question #4: Should the question be more about how much of a culture we try to transmit and how much we intervene, when working with our journals?

Samantha Schnee from Words Without Borders: The mission statement of WWB sums this up nicely: Words Without Borders opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the world’s best writing. WWB publishes selected prose and poetry on the web and in print anthologies (the next one to focus on the Islamic world), stages special events that connect foreign writers to the general public and media, develops materials for high school teachers to use foreign literature in classrooms, and continues to build an unparalleled online resource center for contemporary global writing.

Not sure if there are more questions to come, but what’s available so far provides an interesting look into these diverse translation journals—all of which are worth checking out in their own right.

This time of the year the Words Without Borders staff sits around the Words Without Borders fireplace with our mugs of hot toddy, chatting about the books we’ve been reading. Into the wee hours on one such night, Joshua said, “Hey, why don’t we mention some of our favorites from the year on the blog?” And so here it is, our list along with a brief comment on each.

The new issue of Words Without Borders is now online, and is entitled “The Home Front”:

This month we’re reporting on the war at home, with international dispatches on domestic conflicts. Here homeland security is both threatened and maintained, as couples tie the knot but long to cut the cord, and double lives are singled out. From Norwegian train stations to Greek port towns, in Armenian saga and Mayan myth, households are besieged but also defended as the family turns on its nuclear power. Kjell Askildsen, Constance Delaunay, Juan Forn, Espido Freire, Lena Kitsopoulou, Hagop Oshagan, Miguel Angel Oxlaj Cúmez, Mercè Rodoreda, Astrid Roemer, and Olga Tokarczuk keep the home fires burning (or burning down the house).

As usual, there are a number of great pieces included, such as the Rodoreda stories (Summer and Happiness) and the review of Suzane Adam’s Laundry, which was translated by Becka Mara McKay and published by Autumn Hill Books.

The new issue of Words Without Borders is now available online, and this month’s theme is “Reversals”:

We’re prolonging summer with another month of flip-flops, as international writers contemplate the reversals of various fortunes. On the air in Sarajevo and under the radar in São Paulo, in chilly garrets and overheated classrooms, tables turn, lives go topsy-turvy, and the only order is “About-face!”

Some great authors featured in this issue, including Farewell to the Queue by Vladimir Sorokin (this is an afterword to The Queue, which is coming out this fall from NYRB, and which is fantastic), The Model by Danilo Kis, and Justice Unbalanced by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (I love, love, love repeating Machado de Assis’s name . . . just rolls off the tongue in a exotic, fun way).

There’s also an excerpt from Suzane Adam’s Laundry, which recently came out from Autumn Hill Books, and a review of Ana Maria Shua’s Quick Fix, from the ever interesting, White Pine Press.

There are a number of other pieces as well, all worth checking out.

Another new issue that’s now available is the August version of Words Without Borders, which is dedicated to “Writings on Psychiatry.”

Ever since Freud, analysts have decamped in August, leaving their patients to fend for themselves till September. To compensate for this absence, we prescribe a healthy dose of writing about psychiatry. On dark Japanese roads and bright Swedish sidewalks, on the couch and off their rockers, writers confront demons and vanquish neuroses. Open these case files and discover the universal language of the talking cure. Francisco Proaño Arandi, Alfred Döblin, Jocelyn Dupré, Duna Ghali, Kanji Hanawa, Klas Östergren, Ana María Shua, and Goli Taraghi diagnose a world of disorders and the doctors who treat them. We trust you’ll find this therapeutic.

In addition to the new stories, there’s also an interview with Peter Esterhazy and an essay by Judith Sollosky entitled “Esterházy Per Se: A Translator’s Ball Game with a Postmodern Author” about translating Celestial Harmonies:

In his monumental work Celestial Harmonies (Magvető Kiadó, 2000; Ecco Books, HarperCollins, 2004), Esterházy, in his impish good humor, has created ample situations to challenge his translator: Can she keep pace with him? Can she turn a cartwheel half as well as he? Can she translate the untranslatable, whether because the two languages are so different by their very nature, or because he has made up a word that suits his text, or has corrupted his text grammatically and lexically on purpose? And then I haven’t mentioned the so-called culture-specific items, often obscure, sometimes made up, and not culture-specific at all!

Finally, there’s also an interesting piece by Eric Abrahamsen about the Duanlie Movement that was started by Chinese author Zhu Wen:

The Duanlie movement began May 1, 1998, when Zhu Wen and Han Dong met up to discuss a plan: a questionnaire they would circulate among fellow writers. By May 5 they had a draft questionnaire; on May 10th they began mailing. In the first three questions, respondents are asked their opinions on literary critics and professors, and the literary giants of the second half of the twentieth century. The response was a flood of bitterness and scorn, as Zhu Wen and Han Dong had anticipated: the questionnaire was not a survey, but a call to action.

As Han himself said in a 1999 interview, Duanlie was not about any particular style of writing, and the works of its members have little in common. Zhu Wen and Wei Hui seem primarily bent on challenging the moral values of Chinese society, writing of easy sex or the emptiness of traditional family connections. Lu Yang is one of the few Chinese experimenters in metafiction, subverting the traditions of the story. Han Dong has retreated into a Zen-like calm, writing quiet stories about countryside and city.

Duanlie: “Split”; “Broken”; “Break.” Any revolutionary movement involves a break, of course, but from what, exactly? At first glance, Duanlie seems aimed at assassinating the old guard—overthrowing the ideologically hidebound, and ushering in a new age of the young bloods. Except that, in China’s political climate, such an overthrow is essentially unthinkable. Asked during a conversation this past June what it would take to effect a real changing of the guard among critics and professors, Zhu Wen answered immediately, with a smile: “The complete overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The new issue of Words Without Borders is now online:

In the spirit of Independence Day and Bastille Day, we salute freedom fighters of all stripes with writing about revolution. In the pulsing heat of Che’s Havana and the gray chill of Lenin’s Moscow, on ravaged battlefields and blasted domestic fronts, writers storm citadels and oust tyrants in campaigns for personal and political liberty.

Lot of interesting pieces already up, including Fransesc Seres’s A Tongue of Lead (Seres also has a piece in the “New Catalan Fiction” issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction worth checking out) and an excerpt of Chaabi, a graphic novel by Xavier Delaporte and Richard Marazano translated by Edward Gauvin. (Edward will be participating in a Translator’s Roundtable here at the University of Rochester on October 1st and talking about the nature and difficulties of translating graphic novels. And movie scripts.)

There’s also a piece by Michael Kleeberg translated by David Dollenmayer, this year’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize winner, and a review of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter. (We posted a review of this yesterday as well.)

We usually don’t post things like this, but this is a fantastic opportunity that I’m sure some 3P readers will be interested in:

Literary Website Editor

Words Without Borders, publisher of international modern literature in translation on the Internet, seeks a web-wise editor with managerial abilities to coordinate work of New York part-time and volunteer staff, including Development Consultant and Publicity/Events Coordinator.

Primary responsibility for web-only content (blogs, forums, reading groups, online interviews; soft-tech liaison between editors and programmers, marketing, publicity and events), general coordination, marketing, publicity and events, organizational budgets, accounting, legal, and involvement in fundraising.

Please send resume and cover letter to schnee@bard.edu.

A few weeks back, I mentioned the Reading the World/Words Without Borders Book Club featuring Robert Walser’s The Assistant. At the time the discussion was just getting underway, and all that was available online was Sam Jones’s excellent introduction and Susan Bernofsky’s translator’s afterword to the book.

Recently, the Translator’s Roundtable went live, including pieces by Tom Whalen, Mark Harman, Millay Hyatt, and Damion Searls.

This is one of the features of the new book club revamp that I really enjoy. Each of the four translators respond to the same set of questions (how did you first encounter Walser?, what are your favorite Walser pieces, etc.), making for an interesting series of vantage points. In particular, I really enjoy the responses to “Are there unique challenges that Walser presents, and how do you resolve them?”

From Tom Whalen:

Rhymes and puns, of course, are especially difficult. For her translation of “Letter to Edith” I had tried to help Susan Bernofsky with the following: “Ich wankte in eine Konditorei, und trank im Wanken sogar noch Kognak. Zwei Musiker spielten mir zuliebe Grieg, aber der Chef des Hauses erklärte mir den Krieg. . . .” What we came up with was “I swayed now into a pastry shop café and, reeling, if I may, put away some cognac. For my benefit two musicians played Grieg, but the proprietor declared war on me….” A few years later, after Masquerade and Other Stories had appeared, Susan made the following welcome improvement: “I swayed now into a pastry shop café and, reeling, if I may, put some cognac away. To please me, Grieg was played by two musicians, but the proprietor brought out his munitions . . .”

From Mark Harman:

I have translated—among other German-language authors—two novels by Franz Kafka with whom Walser has, of course, been linked. We know that Kafka read Jakob von Gunten, which he praised, and that he also read some of Walser’s short prose. While I found little trace of Walser while rendering The Castle, I could overhear certain Walserian tones in Amerika: The Missing Person (forthcoming in November from Schocken Books). Kafka himself spoke of his conscious use of “blurry” Walserian metaphors, and I could sense, especially in the first “Stoker” chapter, parallels between the attentive but naïve voice of Kafka’s young hero Karl Rossmann and that of Walser’s clerks. Having said that, though, Robert Musil was surely right to insist that Walser was an unique case and best not imitated. What is unique about Walser is that virtually all of his writing is composed in the same voice. While this observation may sound limiting, it is not, since his voice is capable of endless modulation. The chief task of the Walser translator is to capture that flux. [Ed. Note: Can’t wait to read this new translation of Amerika.]

From Millay Hyatt:

Walser’s wily neologisms, making full use of the elasticity of the German language that allows words to be strung together ad infinitum, are delicious in the original and something is always sacrificed in translation. Compounding the nouns or the adjectives in his unexpected, even startling way creates a whole slew of meanings the translator has to disentangle and, sadly, sift—there are never as many left when they’re put back together in the second language, speaking for myself anyway. I tried to spell out as many of the intimations as possible so that I had plenty to choose from when I made my choice, doing my best to preserve as many as I could.

And from Damion Searls:

I find Walser quite easy to translate: I read and re-read him until I get into his voice and then sit down and write it out in English. The specific tics of his German style—the neologisms, the Swissisms—are far less important than the overall wide-eyed battiness of his point of view (an outsider observing the world from such strange angles; intervening in society from such strange positions). And you can’t capture dialect in translation anyway. Translating other writers is a much more plodding and scrupulous process for me, but Walser invites free translations. I don’t mean “free” in the sense of distant— as with all great stylists, I’ve found, with Walser you always improve the translation in the revision stage by bringing it closer to the weirdness of the original—but in the positive sense that words like “free” and “loose” have in contexts other than translation.

All of their responses are interesting (the section on their favorite Walser pieces is a good starting point for someone interested in reading Walser), and I hope more people post responses at the Discussion Board. We need some legit readers to run people like “Emma,” with her 5000 poems and short stories (like “Prisoner of Love,” which begins “Sure I’m a prisoner, but I don’t mind / I’m the happiest jailbird you’ll ever find!”) off the message boards . . .

The newly redesigned Words Without Borders/Reading the World book clubs are now underway, and this month the book under discussion is Robert Walser’s The Assistant, which came out last year from New Directions and is translated by Susan Bernofsky.

In contrast to the old version of the book clubs—which was basically a forum for people to post comments—the new version is a huge improvement, providing readers with an extensive list of online resources, discussion questions, and interesting, in addition to an online discussion forum.

For example, the page for The Assistant has Susan Bernofsky’s afterword to the book, along with Sam Jones’s introduction to Walser, along with a list of a dozen or so articles/reviews/bios/etc. that are all available online. Coming soon are a few interesting pieces, including “The Assistant and Swiss Literature” by Peter Utz and “Composition for Robert Walser” by Tom Whalen. There are also two roundtables planned: a translators’ discussion and one on Walser and the Visual Arts.

Overall this is a great template for how to create online reading guides, using many of the advantages available to the internet to provide readers with a context to approach the book. It’ll be interesting to see if this helps spawn more discussion in the forum section . . .

A couple weeks ago we linked to Lawrence Venuti’s article on Words Without Borders about the business of publishing translations. It’s a very interesting piece that was written for a panel on the To Be Translated or Not To Be report and puts forth a somewhat provocative stance on what should be published in translation:

I am suggesting that with translations publishers must take an approach that is much more critically detached, more theoretically astute as well as aesthetically sensitive. They must publish not only translations of foreign texts and authors that conform to their own tastes, but more than one foreign text and more than one foreign author, and they must make strategic choices so as to sketch the cultural situations and traditions that enable a particular text to be significant in its own culture.

Over the weekend, WWB posted an interview between Alane Mason and Venuti that explores some of these issues in depth.

The entire conversation is pretty fascinating and quotable, but this is the section that most stood out to me:

I expect PUBLISHERS, with the help of translators, to be making the publishing decisions, yet those decisions need to be made in a much more informed way than personal taste, even if that can’t be eliminated in any literary judgment. Or why not look at the problem as a matter of a publisher developing his or her taste by learning as much as possible about foreign literary traditions before choosing a foreign work for translation? The ignorance of foreign languages among US publishers is now legendary, but what about their knowledge of foreign cultures (a knowledge that cannot really be separated from language)? If a publisher can find one novel to like in a foreign literature, why not think that same publisher can find another one or three written by different writers at different times? Publishers are currently at the mercy of a selection process that in many cases may well be based on a severely limited or superficial knowledge of foreign cultures. Translations demand that a publisher know more, and translators can help, but they too need to know more about the foreign literatures from which they translate, and that more needs to be figured into their translating.

I pretty much agree with Venuti’s sentiment, although I may be biased by the fact that I have a touch of the OCD and love to research and read about different literary cultures.

One of the most useful activities I’ve engaged in—that plays into Venuti’s general idea—is going on editorial trips to various countries to learn at least a bit about a particular culture and its literary history and to network with international editors, critics, translators, and readers who can help me make informed decisions. Before going to Reykjavik and Barcelona, I knew next to nothing about Icelandic or Catalan literature. But the days spent listening to critics give me a rundown on the literary history of their county, of compiling lists of modern and contemporary authors, of meeting translators, editors, professors and the like who are all willing to share information about literary works and how these works were received was extremely, extremely valuable. (And to be honest, it doesn’t hurt that these two cities are two of the most beautiful on earth.)

I don’t claim to be an expert in either Icelandic or Catalan literature, but after reading tons and tons of information, and talking with various contacts made during these trips, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of where the Icelandic (Bragi Olafsson) and Catalan (Merce Rodoreda and Quim Monzo) authors fit into their respective traditions, and that we’ve made pretty good choices.

On a practical side, this is just the beginning, and we need to continue to do more works from both countries, and to connect with other publishers (if there are any) doing books from these regions to help create a more well-rounded representation of Icelandic and Catalan literature. But at least we’ve taken some initial steps, both in terms of forethought and research, and making some works from these cultures available to English readers.

Anyway, these sorts of trips (we’re going to both Buenos Aires and Olso this spring on similar editorial research trips), are extremely valuable for anyone engaged in the business of publishing translations, and one example of how some of what Venuti’s calling for is actually taking place.

I can see why some people would criticize Venuti’s argument, or have a knee-jerk reaction against it. It may be both a bit utopic and a bit ivory-tower-ish all at once. On the whole though, I think that his end goal is very much in keeping with what the more admirable presses out there (by admirable, I mean ones with a mission other than to make as much money as possible) that are working together to create an audience for international literature. I only wish he left more space for readerly emotion and had more info on projects that are already going on that actually support his general theory.

In my opinion, making self-conscious, properly weighed decisions is important, but an editor’s passion about a project is equally important. I don’t think he intends it this way, but Venuti makes the acquisition project seem like a dry, boring process, when really, reading and falling in love with a particular book, culture, etc., is exciting and fun, and there’s something to be said for going ahead with a project that an editor is passionate about.

More importantly, there are a lot of publishers, cultural organizations, and translators currently doing things that relate to Venuti’s general premise—activities that deserve to be highlighted. In addition to editorial trips, there are programs like Reading the World, the intent of which is to offer a broader context for literature in translation, and there are a number of top-notch translation preses (like NYRB and New Directions and Archipelago and the like) who do collaborate instead of compete, and work together in trying to promote different literary cultures.

Both of these essays by Venuti are very thought provoking and help advance certain questions and ideas that the publishing industry (at least those devote to international literature) should be considering, debating, and discussing. These pieces are just the beginning though . . . in addition to looking at the responsibility of publishers in their editorial choices, there are issues related to marketing and promotions, how the bookstore marketplace works, etc., all of which feed into creating the appropriate context for reading, appreciating, and coming to understand works in translation.

The latest Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club is now officially underway. This month James Marcus and Cynthia Haven will be leading a discussion of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems. They have a lot of interesting things lined up for the next few weeks:

The discussion will include contributions from a wide range of poets, scholars, and translators, including Peter Dale Scott, Anna Frajlich, Andrzej Franaszek, William Martin, and Alissa Valles (who translated most of the new collection). Our hope, however, is that visitors to the site will feel free to chime in, whether they’re longtime admirers of the poet or have just been introduced to his extraordinary art.

The first post is Marcus’s introduction to Herbert and his poetic mouthpiece, Mr. Cogito:

It was during his California interlude that Herbert introduced Mr. Cogito—a musing (and frequently amusing) poetic mouthpiece. [. . .] Mr. Cogito was primarily a creature of mind. He read the paper, he studied his face in the mirror, he smoked a cigarette, but as his name suggests, his main business was cogitation. (In the end, he may have more in common with Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, whose telescopic contemplations took in everything but the self.)

What I find most interesting is that this twentieth-century Polish poet tried to keep politics out of his writing:

Yet he remained wary of mixing poetry and politics, famously clashing with a claque of younger writers at a 1972 poetry festival in Silesia. For a poet to flirt with ideology was, he insisted, a “punishable offense.” Engagement was a dead end, possibly a childish one. “The poet’s sphere of action,” he declared, “if his attitude toward his work is serious, is not the ‘contemporary’—which I take to mean the state of our current knowledge about society, politics, and science—but the real, the stubborn dialogue of man with the concrete reality surrounding him, with this table, with that neighbor, with this time of day: the cultivation of a dwindling capacity for contemplation.”

Helping get this book club off to a good start, there’s a second post available on WWB featuring an interview conducted by Cynthia Haven with poet and translator Peter Dale Scott. The conversation touches upon how Scott came to Herbert’s poetry, the relationship between Herbert and Milosz, and an interesting bit about why it took so long for Herbert to get a foothold with an American audience:

Scott: Herbert was far less known in America and partly for an accidental reason—the 1968 Penguin edition of his poetry was not for sale in America, and there was no U.S. edition until 1986. I have no knowledge why this was the case, but I suspect that the falling out between Miłosz and Herbert was not unrelated. A possible other reason might have been that Miłosz and I were also distant from each other in those years, thus unable to press together for an American edition.

These Words Without Borders book clubs are really remarkable, and work especially well when people log on and comment . . .

At House of Mirth James Marcus offers a preview of the upcoming Words Without Borders discussion of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998, which promises to be quite interesting.

Next week, Cynthia Haven and I will be overseeing a Words Without Borders book club—an online conversation, more or less—devoted to Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998. I’d love to say that Herbert needs no introduction, but this giant of postwar poetry, who died in 1998, is still woefully undervalued in the English-speaking world. He is certainly on par with his compatriots Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, even if the Swedish Academy declined to recognize that fact. And his poems, with their pained dignity and dearth of punctuation, deliver a frisson like no other. The WWB discussion will include contributions from a wide range of Herbert experts, including (so far) Peter Dale Scott, Anna Frajlich, Andrzej Franaszek, William Martin, and Alissa Valles (who translated most of the new Ecco collection).

Laila Lalami has two new posts up at Words Without Borders for the December discussion of Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King.

In the first, she discussing the literary influences in the book, in which she points to Kafka as a huge force on the novel. The most interesting part to me—but I’m a sucker for literary lore and debate—is the bit questioning the authorship of the novel:

As I mentioned in my introduction, the publication of The Radiance of the King barely a year after The Dark Child, the differences in genres between the two books, and the slightly more existential quality of the second novel, have given rise to some questions as to whether Camara really wrote that second book. These rumors appear to be based on allegations by a Belgian critic named Lilyan Kesteloot in a work that was published after Camara’s death, and against which he could no longer defend himself. These allegations were later investigated by an American academic, Adele King, who also had to rely on second-hand accounts and hearsay, and who also cast strong doubts on the authorship of the novel.

The final post focuses on Toni Morrison’s intro to the novel, and the claim that Laye turned the typical “white man venturing into Africa” idea on its head.

It might be a bit late to join this discussion, but the January edition of the Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club should be pretty interesting. Throughout the month James Marcus and Cynthia Haven will be discussing Collected Poems by Zbigniew Herbert (translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles). As soon as the first post goes up, I’ll be sure to mention it here.

The latest post in this month’s Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club is now online.

This month Laila Lalami is directing a discussion of Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King , which sounds interesting:

I want to start our discussion of The Radiance of the King by talking about the story itself. In the novel, Clarence, a white man of undefined origin and occupation, lands on the coast of Africa (which coast, you ask? We are not told) and in short order he loses all his money, in a gambling game, to a group of white men. He is evicted from his hotel, and the owner decides to keep Clarence’s trunk as collateral for the unpaid bill. Now Clarence is desperate; he wants to figure out a way to get his belongings, since his only possessions now are the clothes on his back, which are already showing signs of wear. He stumbles onto a street celebration for a local monarch, and immediately and rather arrogantly thinks that the king might hire him as an advisor, or at least vouch for him to the hotel owner, or, at any rate, know what to do to save Clarence from the misery in which he finds himself.

Now that Michael Orthofer’s discussion of Mandarins has ended, it’s time for the next Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club to start.

This month Laila Lalami will be discussing Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King (NYRB). Her first post is now online and offers an overview of Laye’s life.

A year later, in 1954, Camara published his second novel, Le Regard du roi (translated as The Radiance of the King). This book was starkly different from the first in terms of subject matter and style. Indeed, its protagonist was not a Guinean child but a white man, shipwrecked on an unnamed coast of Africa, and the writing no longer held any nostalgia but was rather sharp in its observations of colonial attitude toward indigenous people. The differences between Camara’s first two books and the very short period of time between their publications, gave rise to questions about the true authorship of The Radiance of the King. But more on this later.

Intriguing . . .

More info about the book can be found on the NYRB website, including this description:

At the beginning of this masterpiece of African literature, Clarence, a white man, has been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. Flush with self-importance, he demands to see the king, but the king has just left for the south of his realm. Traveling through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape in the company of a beggar and two roguish boys, Clarence is gradually stripped of his pretensions, until he is sold to the royal harem as a slave. But in the end Clarence’s bewildering journey is the occasion of a revelation, as he discovers the image, both shameful and beautiful, of his own humanity in the alien splendor of the king.

The new Words Without Borders “Goodbye to All That: Partings”—includes a translation of the Andres Barba short story Nocturne translated by Lisa Dillman.

Lisa’s review of Barba’s Katia’s Sister generated a good deal of interest, but unfortunately this book has yet to find an English publisher. (For anyone who’s interested, an excerpt from the novel is included in Spain: A Traveler’s Literary Companion from Whereabouts Press.)

The final two posts from the Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club discussion of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins are now online.

In the first, Michael Orthofer discusses the posthumous story “The Life of a Fool” and briefly compares the two available translations (De Wolf’s from Archipelago, Rubin’s from Penguin):

De Wolf: He read a book by Anatole France, his head propped up by a pillow of skepticism exuding a rosy fragrance; the presence in that same pillow of a centaur quite escaped his notice.

Rubin: Pillowing his head on his rose-scented skepticism, he read a book by Anatole France. That even such a pillow might hold a god half-horse, he remained unaware.

I like the De Wolf version considerably better—”pillowing” and “god half-horse” are just jarring, the second sentence-order feels off —but I’m glad to have the Rubin version too. Using it almost as a gloss I think I have a much better idea of what the Japanese original must be like.

The final post focuses on the story “Cogwheels” (or “Spinning Gears” in the Rubin translation).

In Michael Orthofer’s most recent post on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s The Mandarins, he focuses on the writer himself:

As we slowly wind up the discussion, moving towards The Life of a Fool and Cogwheels (which I figure will be the appropriate notes to end on), I’m still struck by how much a proper (?) sense of the author eludes me. Try as I might, Akutagawa remains something of a mystery-man to me. And though I’m generally not big on worrying about the author behind the texts I find myself looking for more of a hold here—in part because even after reading this collection, which comes after I’ve read quite a few different Akutagawa translations over the years, I still don’t feel I know him or his writing that well.

Part of the problem with being able to identify a “Akutagawa story,” may be the various translations made of Akutagawa’s work, and the nature and quality of these early translations. Quoting from Donald Richie, Orthofer brings to the forefront the negative effect marketing can have on the publication of translations:

“Another problem with the foreign translations, besides their sheer number, is that Akutagawa was translated early. As a result, these first translations range from the unscholarly to the appalling. One of their unwelcome qualities is that they insist upon the exotic—this being one of the few ways to sell Japanese literature in the early days. An unfortunate result is that Akutagawa is made to seem quaint and curious, a mere purveyor of the exotic.”

I’m not so sure things have changed that much when it comes to selling Japanese books, or any country’s literature for that matter. Although nowadays there seems to be two marketing trends that reflect some of the things we’ve been discussing in terms of the goal of translation: emphasize the foreignness, the oddness or make the book so smooth it doesn’t appear to be a translation at all.

Over at WWB, Michael Orthofer has a couple new posts in the month-long discussion of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins.

The first is about the title story, and, well, it’s title:

When I hear (read) Mandarins, especially in an East Asian context, I think: Chinese wise men. Something along those lines, anyway. But the mandarins that give this collection—and the opening story—its title refer to the citrus fruit. Confusing matters further, the Japanese title of the story—Mikan—refers to a fruit that, while mandarin-like, is quite different. Others have apparently translated the title of the story as The Tangerines—not quite accurate either, but at least less ambiguous.

Is it just me, or does this title—and the impression it gives—cause some confusion?

The most recent post is about “An Evening Conversation,” one of the never-before translated stories included in this collection.

Translator De Wolf says in his notes that: “it follows in a long Japanese literary tradition of rambling conversations among males concerning life, love, and art,” and with that title one presumably shouldn’t expect anything different.

It is a curious approach to story-telling Akutagawa takes here, in An Evening Conversation: not quite story-in-a-story (i.e. someone simply recounting a tale, the telling of the tale little more than a framing device), but also not quite just table-talk.

This is one of the best WWB book clubs to date. Orthofer is very complete in his readings, and great at generating conversation. I can’t recommend this highly enough.

This month’s Words Without Borders book club is just getting underway, with Michael Orthofer of Complete Review discussing Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins, which is published by Archipelago Books..

Orthofer is a book club master, so this should be a lot of fun.

The conversation about The Rebels continues today with an interview between Mark Sarvas and Arthur Philips.

MS: Perhaps I’m reading too much into your New Yorker review, but the sense that I got was that you were at some pains to say nice things about a lesser work. I’ve mentioned that I think there’s a problem for modern readers in coming to Márai in a sort of reverse order. Do you think there’s a fundamental problem coming to Márai in this order, and that readers might be better served going straight for Embers? Or is there a strong case to be made for The Rebels on its own merits?

AP: I think Rebels does just fine on its own. It’s a younger man’s book with younger characters, written at a time when Márai hadn’t seen all hell break loose in his country yet. I wasn’t trying to prop up a lesser book. And, I really don’t know what else is out there; there are a lot of Márai books still only in Hungarian. So I don’t know the direction his style took. Embers is certainly more stylistically interesting to me than Rebels, but Rebels was funny, and the language more outlandish, more under the influence, I think, of Gyula Krúdy. Embers may not be his best or most characteristic novel, so I won’t say that the way to go is to start with Embers. There are some who will get more out of starting with the memoirs, I suppose. Even Casanova in Bolzano, maybe.

It’s never too late to jump into the book group on Marai’s The Rebels that Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation is hosting over at Words Without Borders.

The most recent post is an interview with David Leavitt, novelist and editor of Subtropics about how he came to excerpt part of The Rebels in his magazine.

Next month’s WWB/RTW book club will be on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story collection Mandarins and will be hosted by the Complete Review’s Michael Orthofer.

All this month at Words Without Borders, Mark Sarvas will be leading a book discussion on Sandor Marai’s The Rebels.

The Rebels was a Reading the World 2007 title.

Mark’s introductory post should be up at the WWB Blog soon, but for now, here’s his post about the club, and his introductory paragraph:

The long and interesting literary life of Sándor Márai (or Márai Sándor, as a true Hungarian would call him) suggests that, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, even Hungarians can enjoy second acts. A prolific and respected author of the Hungarian middle class, Márai only became known to American readers when Knopf published Embers in 2001, in a translation from the German – about which more anon – by Carol Brown Janeway. Márai was suddenly enjoying the sort of posthumous success that writers, if they’re honest, hope for, not unlike the attention that’s being given today to Irene Nemirovsky’s lost corpus. Some days it seems a European writer can’t catch a break in America until he’s dead. (In Márai’s case, it’s especially galling as he made San Diego his home in his later years, dying there in 1989.)

The September Issue of Words Without Borders is now online and features Portuguese writing from Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, and Brazil, “with Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Rosa Alice Branco, Alexander Cuadros, Mia Couto, Manoel de Barros, Augusta Faro, Rubem Fonseca, Teolinda Gersao, Milton Hatoum, Conceicao Lima, Alberto Martins, Joao Melo, Ondjaki, Paulo Polzonoff, and Ana Paula Tavares, set to a soundtrack provided by DJ Spooky.”

And the Reading the World Book Club for September is underway. Along with Mark Binelli (Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!), I’m co-hosting this, and we’re going to be reading/discussing Georges Simenon’s The Engagement.

Frank Wilson’s review of Simenon’s The Engagement is pretty much just a plot summary, but it does point to the aspect of the book that I found most intriguing:

Human beings, as portrayed in this novel, range narrowly from the merely ordinary and banal to the mean-spirited, bitter, and grasping. What makes it bearable to read about them is the sense that no grand statement is being attempted: This is just one group of people behaving in a particular way under certain specific circumstances. They represent only themselves, not humanity.

Along with Mark Binelli, I’ll be co-hosting an online book club for this title starting next week. I’m really glad I finally started reading Simenon (hopefully we’ll be posting a review of Red Lights soon), and as a short (135 pages), gripping book, it’s worth picking up a copy of The Engagement and joining in on the message boards.

Yesterday there were two reviews of Bruce Watson’s new book Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders and the Judgment of Mankind (one appeared in the New York Times, the other in the New York Sun) and both neglected to mention the best book about S&V — Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! by Mark Binelli. Seriously, this book is hilarious and amazing. And much more entertaining than this Watson book . . .

And bringing this all back full-circle, Binelli and I are going to be co-hosting the Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club for Georges Simenon’s The Engagement starting after Labor Day. It’s a very interesting book, and I the online discussion should be a lot of fun, so I hope any and everyone reading this will participate.

The August issue of Words Without Borders—“Dreams of Our Russian Summer”—is now online. Material is being added to WWB more frequently these days, including an excerpt from “A Drawing Textbook” by Maxim Kantor that’s worth checking out.

Bookslut has an interview with Dedi Felman from Words Without Borders, in which she discusses their new site design and how difficult it is to pull this amazing literary resource together.

Beginning in September, Words Without Borders will launch a series of Reading the World Book Clubs. The final schedule is still being set, but I can say that in September I’ll be moderating a discussion about Georges Simenon’s The Engagement. (We should have a review of this up shortly.)

Other moderators in the WWB/RTW Book Clubs will include Michael Orthofer and James Marcus, and Mark Sarvas leading the discussion on Sandor Marai’s The Rebels, and Laila Lailami on Carmara Laye’s The Radiance of the King.

The June issue of Words Without Borders is now online and features new work from “Those Cool Scandinavians.”

Also included is an excerpt and review of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, which recently won the Dublin IMPAC award.