The latest addition to our “Review Section”: is a piece by Phillip Witte on Javier Marias’s While the Women Are Sleeping, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and available from New Directions.

Phil is one of our regular reviewers, and one of our former interns. As mentioned in the review, he also interned at New Directions, and is currently working for the Plutzik Foundation, where he’s running their poetry blog, A Fistful of Words. (Definitely check out the blog—Phil’s a great writer and great person and this deserves more attention.)

I believe Marias has a new book coming out in the not-too-distant future, but some unnnamable agent (as in, his name should never be spoken out loud for fear of repercussions sinister and royalty related), sold the rights to this (and some of the ND backlist) to a Big Six publisher. So forget that book and read While the Women Are Sleeping and Your Face Tomorrow. And trade ND editions of his earlier works (Dark Back of Time is a personal favorite) on the black market.

Here’s the opening of Phil’s review:

Javier Marias’s greatness in the world of world literature seems pretty much unquestioned. And I’ve always thought of him as a pretty cool guy—for boycotting the United States for as long as Bush was president, for example, which was one of the first things I learned about him. This was while I was interning at New Directions in the summer of 2009, and everyone at N.D. was abuzz because Marias would soon be making his first visit to the U.S. in nine years. Right about that time, they were getting ready to release the concluding volume of his monolithic trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, which, in light of recent reading, has risen significantly through the amorphous mass that is my to-read pile.

Yet despite all the excitement, somehow I got through my three months at N.D. without reading a single one of Marias’s many books. It was my summer of Bolano, I suppose—my infatuation with 2666 would give no place whatsoever to another international titan anytime soon. So here I am, two years later, finally reading Marias’s latest collection to appear in English, While the Women are Sleeping, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published over a year ago. (I admit, I’m generally behind the times.) But if I happen to feel a bit anxious about so belatedly joining the Marias conversation on the basis of a single little collection, there’s a line from Marias’s introductory remarks to the last story in the book, “What the Butler Said,” that knowingly sets my anxieties at ease: “The books we don’t read are full of warnings; we will either never read them or they will arrive too late.” The word “warnings” here doesn’t quite work out of its proper context, but I’ll take it here to mean “things we desperately want and need to know before we die . . .” It might seem to be a remark that should make me more, not less, anxious. But this is a book that probes the dusty corners of whatever we imagine death might be and makes it a symphony of enticing enigmas, where ghosts go on writing love letters, or pursue an education, or persevere in their desire to resign—from friendship, employment, or the weird project of being alive—which, in the worlds that Marias sketches in these stories, is at times quite indistinguishable from being dead.

Click here to read the full review.

In this week’s podcast, Tom and I talk about the ABA’s Winter Institute, which just took place in New Orleans. We also go on about World Book Night, which you should volunteer for by clicking here.

We also talked about my daughter and her “letter of hate” to the awful Dan Borislow, who, “ruined our summer of fun.”



(And in my defense for encouraging her to write this, there’s no amount of 8-year-old crazy that can approximate Borislow’s 50-year-old detached from all reality crazy. Just read the emails in the link above, and keep in mind that this jag ruined women’s soccer for tens of thousands of young girls in the most egotistical, asinine fashion ever. Chloë is 100% in the right on this.)

To honor the song that conquered soccer, this week’s music is Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking here. To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s Listen, copy the following link.

Enjoy!

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brian Libgober on Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows, which is coming out this month from Seagull Books in Chris Turner’s translation from the French.

Brian Ligboer is a new reviewer for us. (Jeff Waxman made the introduction.) In his own words, he “is the author of a novel, Memories from Beyond the States, which is currently under consideration by a few agents. Previous reviews of mine have appeared in Pank, The Hypocrite Reader, and The Midway Review. I currently live in Chicago where I am working as a polling analyst for Obama’s reelection campaign.”

Quignard’s book sounds really interesting. Just check out the Seagull Books jacket copy:

The first book in Quignard’s Last Kingdom series, The Roving Shadows can be read as a long meditation on reading and writing that strives to situate these otherwise innocuous activities in a profound relationship to sex and death. Writing and reading can in fact be linked to our animal natures and artistic strivings, to primal forces and culturally persistent fascinations. With dexterity and inventiveness, Quignard weaves together historical anecdotes, folktales from the East and West, fragments of myth, and speculative historical reconstructions. The whole, written in a musical style not far removed from that of Couperin, whose piano composition Les Ombres errantes lends the book its title, coheres into a work of literature that reverberates in the psyche long after one has laid it down.

And here’s the opening of Brian’s review:

In 2002, Les Ombres Errantes won the Prix Goncourt—possibly the most prestigious award a French literary work can receive—despite the fact that it is not a novel. Before considering The Roving Shadows in its own right, it is worth pausing to reflect on the significance of that and its subsequent publication in English. Almost one half of the winners of the Prix Goncourt have yet to appear in English translation and in that sense, this translation by Chris Turner is truly an event.

The Roving Shadows is a remarkable work, primarily because it straddles the line between contemporary French literature, which is vastly under-read in the United States, and French critical theory, which is probably more popular outside of France than it is inside. Indeed, it is difficult to say which genre of writing it actually fits. On the one hand the book contains many examples of sensuous description and personal memoir—you know, the type of thing one expects to find in a literary work. On the other hand it also is full of thought-provoking aphorisms and historical anecdotes, favored modes of expression by the critical theorists. Quignard’s book straddles the divide between critical essay and narrative in a way that is highly idiosyncratic. Instead of segregating the work into discrete, genre-specific parts, as Nabokov did in Pale Fire or The Gift, Quignard treads freely over the border between styles, often alternating within a single paragraph.

Click here to read the entire piece.

From this PW piece on BookExpo America and changes to the show:

Reed is already looking to bigger changes in 2013. In a blog post yesterday Rosato discussed a move to B2C, enabling publishers to connect directly with consumers. The show would move to Thursday to Saturday with the general public invited to attend author events and go on the show floor on the final day. “Nothing is baked,” he wrote, “and we have a ton of due diligence to conduct to insure that a BEA that includes consumers, is an event that serves the industry.”

Better late than never. And just wait for the Simon & Schuster rant about how “readers don’t belong at our day of books!” I’m sure their reaction will be priceless and as confused as all get out.

Just received this call for papers for the 2013 Nordic Translation Conference taking place at the University of East Anglia next April and thought I’d share it, since a) some of you might be interested in attending, and b) because this is a quinquennial event, and that sounds awesome.

Deadline is in August, so you have plenty of time, but here’s all the info:

The second Nordic Translation Conference will take place on 4, 5, and 6 April 2013 at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.

This quinquennial event is solely dedicated to the particular challenges and pleasures of translating between and among the Nordic countries, which are often closely related culturally, if not always linguistically. It is open to academics, students, translators, publishers, and others who work with the Nordic languages. The first such conference took place in London at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in 2008 and it resulted in the book Northern Lights: Translation in the Nordic Countries (Peter Lang, 2009).

The keynote speakers in 2013 will include Andrew Chesterman, Riitta Oittinen, and Anna Mauranen. As in 2008, there will be workshops, talks, panels, and dual-language readings. Both academics and practising translators are encouraged to attend and present at the conference.

The conference will look at literary and non-literary translation of all kinds, including interpreting and subtitling, both between various Nordic languages and also between English and the Nordic languages. Nordic here includes Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Norwegian, any of the Sámi dialects, and Swedish. Topics can include, but are not limited to, specific linguistic issues involved in translation/interpretation between two or more languages, analysis of particular texts/genres, professional issues, translating texts by or about minority groups, the translator/interpreter’s role, and the effect of cultural similarities/differences among Nordic countries.

In addition, the conference will include several workshops on relevant topics, such as working with specific languages or kinds of texts, using computer tools, finding reference materials, and so on. Those interested in running workshops are also invited to submit proposals.

Please send proposals (250-400 words) for workshops by 1 June 2012 and for conference papers by 15 August 2012 to B.J. Epstein and Gudrun Rawoens by e-mail at conference@nordictranslation.net or by regular mail to B.J. Epstein at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, England, NR4 7TJ. Along with the proposal, please include a brief biographical note.

Conference details are available online.. For ease of communication, English should be the primary conference language.

We mentioned the Festival Neue Literatur a few days back, and to add to that post, here’s a promotional video the German Book Office put together:

Although this op-ed piece is primarily about San Francisco performing arts orgs, it really applies to any and all arts nonprofits:

In general, arts organizations have done all they can to reduce costs. They’ve reached out to audiences, luring them with promotions, free stuff, and advertising they can barely afford. So let’s talk about the elephant in the room: government funding for the arts. If we want to truthfully tell our donors that we’ve done everything in our power to raise money, we can’t ignore the government.

Right now, the various U.S. governments give to the arts at pitifully small levels, if they do so at all. The state of California has been extremely parsimonious to the California Arts Council for years since the 2003–2004 budget crisis, and has to be thankful that Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas decided to defund its state arts agency last year: At last, a partner in miserliness! (Brownback, it is rumored, may restore a part of that funding in his new budget.) At the federal level, all three cultural grant-making agencies took significant hits in the budget passed in 2011, but those programs have never been very large in dollar terms. Last year, they were 0.066 percent of the total federal budget, all in. And the bulk of federal arts expenditure goes to the Smithsonian Institution and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Nevertheless, the $155 million in discretionary grants that the National Endowment for the Arts passes out this year will be critical to a wide range of nonprofit organizations. Every little bit helps. But the organizations that benefit from these grants tend to outsource advocacy to state art councils instead of delivering the message themselves. [. . .]

The current private-debt crisis has hit arts organizations where they live. The aging of the audience (at least in many classical venues) has become more marked as major donors become scarcer and begin to suffer “fatigue.” We owe it to those donors who have gotten us this far to knock on government doors the way we knocked on theirs. And we owe it to the next generation to ensure that art doesn’t become truly elitist.

When we make the argument, whether in Washington or in a state capitol, or even at the local level, our greatest argument and weapon will be the very people we have collected money from for all these years. We have proven, for decades, that there is significant support for the arts in the U.S. And since we can’t have an argument over whether or not to be taxed, only about where our tax money will be directed, those arts patrons have a right to be heard and recognized.

I’m not a big ebook fan for myriad reasons—including my dislike of John Locke and his $.99 empire and the fact that my memory is shit when it comes to reading on a screen—but I don’t think any of my concerns overlap with those of Jonathan Franzen:

The acclaimed and bestselling novelist, who denies himself access to the internet when writing, was talking at the Hay festival in Cartagena, Colombia. “Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring,” said Franzen, according to the Telegraph.

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

OK, sure. Permanence. Thanks, J-Franz for once again conveying the fact to the world that you are a Victorian. (Both in terms of writing and thinking.) Even the title of this piece is strangely pre-1900 sounding: “Jonathan Franzen warns ebooks are corroding values.”

This reminds me of my favorite moment from this year’s MLA conference, when David Shields was teeing off on contemporary American writers in general (and Franzen in particular) who seemed unaware of aesthetic advancements from the past hundred years. As Shields said, it’s totally fine to write a novel like Freedom, but what’s the point of doing something so blatantly outdated?

Apparently, Putin wants to create a 100-title Russian Literary Canon- that every schoolchild would be required to read as a form of “subtle cultural therapy.”

At the same time, everyone outside of Russia will freak out and quote 1984 at each other.

But seriously, this is totally stupid:

Putin’s suggestion came in an essay of several thousand words long, one that is but a single brick in his campaign to reclaim a third term as Russia’s president in all-but-decided elections that will take place on March 4. He has said and written many other terrifying things; he routinely threatens, mocks and curses those whom he does not like or understand. But his cultural-unity-through-literature proposal is most chilling of all. For it is a rule of history that only tyrants are interested in what their subjects read.

Most of the tediously long essay, called “Russia: The Ethnicity Issue,” is shamelessly borrowed from the demagogue’s playbook, positing a confused West (“the melting pot of assimilation is highly volatile”) against a Russia that was almost destroyed not by communism, but the Soviet Union’s eventual downfall (“Russia did not vanish, even when the state as an institution was critically weakened.”).

What has allowed the nation to persevere through such cataclysmic change? Putin’s answer: “The Russian people and Russian culture are the linchpin, the glue that binds together this unique civilization.” His advice for all those Armenians and Tajiks who live in his country is to become more Russian, for “this kind of civilizational identity is based on preserving the dominance of Russian culture.” [. . .]

And now, Putin want to preserve “the dominance of Russian culture” with a reading list.

Social engineering through state mandated literature: Nothing else that Putin has done has been quite so nakedly Soviet in its desire to manipulate the human intellect into docility.

“Let us take a survey of our most influential cultural figures and compile a 100-book canon that every Russian school leaver will be required to read,” he writes.

“[Students] would be asked to write an essay on one of them in their final exams. Or at least let us give young Russians a chance to demonstrate their knowledge and world outlook in various student competitions. State policy with regard to culture must provide appropriate guidelines.”

If this sounds like it might be a literary canon mandated by the Kremlin, Putin wants to assure you that there will not be censorship of any kind. His goal is only “subtle cultural therapy.”

As noted on the Dalkey Archive website, Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken took his own life this past Tuesday.

Sæterbakken was the author of the novels Incubus, The New Testament, Siamese, Self-Control, and Sauermugg (the latter three constituting the “S-trilogy”), and two collections of essays, Aesthetic Bliss and The Evil Eye.

Siamese was published by Dalkey a couple years back in Stokes Schwartz’s translation. It was reviewed in the New York Times by fellow Dalkey author Jim Krusoe (whose Iceland is most hysterical), who had this to say:

First published in 1997, “Siamese” is Saeterbakken’s third novel and the first of his “S” trilogy (because they all start with the letter S), and while the level of barrenness here is fairly stupendous, it seems also to be earned. Edwin, the co-narrator and the former director of an old-age home, has himself come to the end of his life. He is blind, paralyzed, incontinent, self-centered and stuffed with unpleasant opinions that he’s only too happy to share with us and with his wife, Sweetie, the other narrator.

Seated in a chair in a dark room of his apartment on an island of Orbit gum wrappers and dried gum (chewing Orbit is the one pleasure he has left other than torturing his wife), Edwin fulminates and decays. Sweetie comes and goes. There is rumored to be a servant. The building’s superintendent arrives at the start of the book to replace a fluorescent bulb (he also fixes the light in the fridge, gratis, and adjusts the freezer setting). He will return at the end to become a lodger. In between is the struggle between Edwin, fixed like a stone in his chair, and the fluid, ridiculously accommodating Sweetie. Each defines the other.

In other words, we are traveling here though the bleakest territory of Beckett, the haunted compulsions of Thomas Bernhard, the desperation of Saeterbakken’s countryman Knut Hamsun. But missing are Beckett’s closely reasoned wit, Bernhard’s rigor, even Hamsun’s frantic grasping. Instead, Saeterbakken holds up for our edification a nasty and petulant individual who never was all that much fun in the first place.

As it turns out, Kerri Pierce, a recent Rochester transplant and fellow Plübian who has translated five books for Dalkey, including Assisted Living by Nikanor Teratologen, which contains an afterword by Sæterbakken. Since Kerri was a friend of his, I asked her to write something up for us about his passing:

When I got the news that Stig Sæterbakken had committeed suicide, my first thought was—the world is a less interesting place. Although I never met Stig personally, I worked with him on a number of projects. He wrote the Foreword and Afterword to two works I had the joy of translating, Tor Ulvens Replacement and Nikanor Teratologen’s Assisted Living respectively. He was always ready to help if I had a question about a word or phrase and I, in turn, had occasion to help him when he needed someone to proofread a text in English. Over time, I came to consider him a colleague and a friend, as well as a brilliant writer in his own right. It’s strange to think that his last e-mail to me will be left unreturned.

For more information about Sæterbakken, check out this essay he wrote for Eurozone, this profile in Transcript, and this press release about his last book.