{"id":279906,"date":"2010-09-16T14:27:46","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T14:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/09\/16\/quarterly-conversation-issue-21\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:40","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:40","slug":"quarterly-conversation-issue-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/09\/16\/quarterly-conversation-issue-21\/","title":{"rendered":"Quarterly Conversation: Issue 21"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Running a bit behind with the news here, but the <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/issue-21\">Fall 2010 issue of the <em>Quarterly Conversation<\/em><\/a> is now available online. As always, there&#8217;s a lot of great content here, including <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/from-updike-to-baker-to-wallace-under-the-brief-shade-of-the-tuxedo-shop-awning\">an essay on Nicholson Baker<\/a> as the missing link between Updike and <span class=\"caps\">DFW<\/span>, a piece on <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/on-helene-cixous-so-close\">Helene Cixous&#8217;s <em>So Close<\/em>,<\/a> and tons of interesting book reviews. Here are a few additional highlights:<\/p>\n<p>Mexican writer Roberto Ransom is nicely featured in this issue. First up is the translation of <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/lizard-la-heart-by-roberto-ransom\">&#8216;Lizard \u00e0 la Heart,&#8217;<\/a> which is part of <em>Desparecidos, animales y artistas<\/em>, a collection that Daniel Shapiro received grants from the <span class=\"caps\">PEN<\/span> Translation Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts to translate. It&#8217;s an odd, fantastical story about a woman talking talking to her pet&#8212;a lonely crocodile locked in the bathroom. <\/p>\n<p>In addition, there&#8217;s an <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/the-roberto-ransom-interview\">interview with Ransom<\/a> conducted by John Pluecker, which includes some interesting bits about the origins of &#8220;Lizard \u00e0 la Heart&#8221; (he cites <em>V<\/em>, and the experience of buying a house only to have the ex-owner show up at all hours of the night drunk and demanding his house back), and this story about Borges and Bioy Casares:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Just last night I heard an unforgettable quip by Borges that goes more or less as follows. As an old man, master Borges turns to his lifelong friend, Bioy Casares, and says, &#8216;Do you remember that towards the end of that terrible year of &#8217;45 we considered committing suicide?&#8217; &#8216;Yes, in fact, I do,&#8217; responds Bioy. &#8216;What I don\u2019t remember,&#8217; continues Borges, &#8216;is if we did so or not.&#8217;&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One of the big essays in this issue is a <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/stefan-zweigs-world-of-yesterday\">long piece by George Prochnik on Stefan Zweig&#8217;s <em>World of Yesterday: An Autobiography.<\/em><\/a> It&#8217;s a very interesting piece that mostly focuses on Zweig&#8217;s exile and eventual suicide. Some very interesting bits in here that make it definitely worth reading:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Zweig was obsessed with the impossibility of attaining any distance on catastrophe in an age of enveloping mass media. He saw the inability to escape word of fresh disaster wherever and whenever it was happening\u2014a phenomenon he labeled the \u201corganization of simultaneity\u201d\u2014 degrading humanity\u2019s capacity to respond to suffering. \u201cPeople speak so lightly of bombardments,\u201d he wrote in one of his final letters, \u201cBut when I read of houses collapsing I collapse with them.\u201d Over time, his justifications for being in Petropolis come to sound like dutiful recitations of holistic prescriptions. \u201cMontaigne speaks with infinite sorrow of people who live the sorrows of others in imagination, and advises them to withdraw and isolate themselves,\u201d he told Friderike. The contrast between the sight of Rio\u2019s Carnival revelries (\u201c_Tr\u00e8s \u00e9rotique, tr\u00e8s \u00e9rotique!_\u201d he exclaimed to friends) and the latest news of wartime abominations gave the final prod to suicide. Zweig\u2019s defeat in exile was due, also, to an inability even briefly to sustain the psychic quarantine he sporadically craved. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Rather than staking a claim on the \u201creal\u201d beauties of the past, Zweig poses the question that haunts the experience of many a nostalgic \u00e9migr\u00e9 to this day: what do present circumstances offer by way of compensation for loss of the invariably exaggerated fantasy of sweet home? Although \u201cit was a delusion our fathers served, it was a wonderful and noble delusion,\u201d Zweig wrote, \u201cmore humane and more fruitful than our watchwords of today; and in spite of my later knowledge and disillusionment, there is still something in me which inwardly prevents me from abandoning it entirely.\u201d Zweig\u2019s paean to the aesthetic intoxication that characterized the Vienna of yesterday recalls Nietzsche\u2019s dictum, \u201cWe have art in order that we may not perish of truth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Unfortunately, the only Zweig I&#8217;ve read is <em>The Post-Office Girl<\/em>, which I really enjoyed, and which made me want to read more&#8212;a desire that&#8217;s been stoked by this piece.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p><em>Quarterly Conversation<\/em>&#8216;s review sections is one of the highlights of each issue, and the new one doesn&#8217;t disappoint. Especially pleased to see <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/a-life-on-paper-by-georges-olivier-chteaureynaud\">a piece by Matt Rowe on Georges-Olivier Ch\u00e2teaureynaud&#8217;s <em>A Life in Paper<\/em>,<\/a> which was translated by Edward Gauvin. This is one of the best books I&#8217;ve read this year, and I completely agree with Matt on the Cortazar connection:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Although the stories in <em>A Life on Paper<\/em> have many precedents and parallels in American writing, from Irving to Poe to Twain, the fantastic mode has been in eclipse for a century. In recent years Ray Bradbury\u2019s freaks and dreamers, unfairly relegated to the genre shelves, are perhaps a better match than the biting humor and socio-cultural satire of a Vonnegut, despite their surface similarities. The success of writers like Kelly Link and Aimee Mann may be sign of a renaissance, or merely the exception that proves the rule.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Other literatures don\u2019t relegate the modern fantastic to a lesser tier. Georges-Olivier Ch\u00e2teaureynaud\u2019s closest Latin American kin is not any practitioner in the overstretched category of magical realism but the inimitable Julio Cort\u00e1zar; Italian readers know not only Calvino\u2019s post-modern play but the works of his contemporaries Dino Buzzati and Tommaso Landolfi and many others. And beyond the many works of Ch\u00e2teaureynaud not yet in English, translator Gauvin says there is a whole school of the fantastic in French and especially Belgian letters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This kind of tale is foreign not in its language (thanks to Edward Gauvin) but in its mere unfamiliarity. A Life on Paper is itself a talisman for preserving an endangered world. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>Linda L\u00ea is someone I&#8217;ve been meaning to read for a while, especially <em>The Three Fates<\/em>, which is translated by Mark Polizetti and published by New Directions. Here&#8217;s a bit from <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/the-three-fates-by-linda-l\">Promita Chatterji&#8217;s review:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>From its first lines depicting an old man, \u201ctired, broken . . . sitting in his small blue house like King Lear in his hovel,\u201d the novel aligns its main characters with the most canonical of literary figures. \u201cKing Lear\u2019s\u201d daughters turn out to be the \u201cThree Fates\u201d of the title: two sisters and their cousin; three women who have left their father behind while emigrating to France from Vietnam during the early 1970\u2019s. Living a life of relative wealth and comfort, the novel\u2019s main thread revolves around their discussions as they plan to bring him out for a visit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>But it&#8217;s L\u00ea&#8216;s style that sounds most intriguing to me:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>While the majority of these stories are inherently fascinating and excruciatingly detailed, The Three Fates is by no means an easy read. Although it is relatively short, the novel\u2019s overriding feature is its forceful, difficult narration. Written without chapter or paragraph breaks\u2014and with only a few, intermittent \u201csection\u201d breaks\u2014and without any dialogue or direct discourse, the novel creates a fractured, dream-like surface that glides from one perspective to another. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The translation, by Mark Polizetti, is impressive in its ability to render the perspectival shifts and general pacing of the language. At times, the tone of sarcasm and cruelty feels a bit over the top and the nicknames can seem clunky, but overall works quite successfully to render the fragmentation and tension that characterize the novel.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>Finally, there&#8217;s also <a href=\"http:\/\/quarterlyconversation.com\/broken-glass-park-by-alina-bronsky\">a piece by Anne Posten on Alina Bronsky&#8217;s <em>Broken Glass Park<\/em>:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>In some ways, Alina Bronsky\u2019s <em>Broken Glass Park<\/em> is exactly what one might expect from a debut novel whose narrator and heroine is a seventeen-year-old girl. The book is fast-paced, engaging, and not exactly challenging in terms of form or style. What makes the book worth reading, however, is the fact that the story is a unique one, and one which is told with great simplicity, straightforwardness, and ease. Sascha Naimann is a flawed yet very lovable heroine, and it is very difficult not to be drawn in by her voice and story.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The story takes place in Frankfurt, where Sascha lives with her younger half-brother and half-sister in a housing project filled mostly with Russian immigrants like themselves. The fact that many of the characters are meant to be speaking Russian and the interactions between newly-learned German and the mother tongue provide an interesting challenge for a translator, and one that Tim Mohr dealt with smoothly. His pop-culture background is also very well suited to the diction of a teenager, and the switches between colloquialism and precocious articulateness are navigated with ease.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Yep&#8212;another book for the &#8220;to read&#8221; pile . . . <\/p>\n<div class=\"ad_banner\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/catalog.openletterbooks.org\/authors\/25-enard\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/images\/545.jpg\"  \/><\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Running a bit behind with the news here, but the Fall 2010 issue of the Quarterly Conversation is now available online. As always, there&#8217;s a lot of great content here, including an essay on Nicholson Baker as the missing link between Updike and DFW, a piece on Helene Cixous&#8217;s So Close, and tons of interesting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[35416,29546,35406,8536,1646,35426,12176],"class_list":["post-279906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-alina-bronsky","tag-georges-olivier-chateaureynaud","tag-linda-le","tag-quarterly-conversation","tag-review","tag-roberto-ransom","tag-stefan-zweig"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279906","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\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":321846,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279906\/revisions\/321846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}