{"id":262456,"date":"2008-06-03T14:11:53","date_gmt":"2008-06-03T14:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2008\/06\/03\/nicholas-spice-on-jelinek\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:32:09","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:32:09","slug":"nicholas-spice-on-jelinek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2008\/06\/03\/nicholas-spice-on-jelinek\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicholas Spice on Jelinek"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nicholas Spice reviews<\/a> Elfride Jelinek’s Greed<\/em> in the LRB:<\/p>\n

\n

In Greed<\/em>, Jelinek finds a way to deal with depth (with the abyss inside the human) without either reverting to the analgesic of realism or exhausting the reader with flood-lit ugliness. For all its derangement, Greed is not ugly. Indeed, once one has got used to it, it yields strange and memorable pleasures. But only if read in German. With its constant shifts of tone and register, the slippery sideways movement of thought through wordplay and punning, the frequent allusions to other German texts, the idiom of Greed<\/em> poses almost insuperable obstacles to good translation. Jelinek herself took years to translate Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em> and it would take a comparable labour of love to translate Gier<\/em> adequately. As it is, doubtless under tight economic constraints, the publishers have paid for a hit-and-miss, standard, \u2018by the page\u2019 translation and the result is a disaster. It\u2019s hard to imagine that Jelinek\u2019s reputation in the English-speaking world will ever recover. It would have been better to have left the novel untranslated.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nicholas Spice reviews Elfride Jelinek’s Greed in the LRB: In Greed, Jelinek finds a way to deal with depth (with the abyss inside the human) without either reverting to the analgesic of realism or exhausting the reader with flood-lit ugliness. For all its derangement, Greed is not ugly. Indeed, once one has got used to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[2136,12526,12536,1646],"class_list":["post-262456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-ejvl","tag-elfride-jelinek","tag-nicholas-spice","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":326376,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262456\/revisions\/326376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}