{"id":291526,"date":"2012-08-20T21:11:35","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T21:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/08\/20\/george-carroll-on-translations\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:04:22","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:04:22","slug":"george-carroll-on-translations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/08\/20\/george-carroll-on-translations\/","title":{"rendered":"George Carroll on Translations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sales rep superstar and international literature enthusiast George Carroll just posted a “destination guide” at NW Book Lovers<\/a> that highlights a number of great presses, organizations, and books worth checking out. <\/p>\n

Many of these—like Three Percent, New Directions, the Center for the Art of Translation—you’re probably already familiar with, but it’s always fun to see someone else talking about your books and\/or the reasons for reading international literature in the first place.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s an opinion in publishing that literature in translation doesn\u2019t sell\u2014 that the books are dense and unapproachable, and that Americans won\u2019t read authors whose names we can\u2019t pronounce. Norman Manea (The Lair, Yale Margellos) says books in translation are thought to be \u201ctoo \u2018complicated,\u2019 which is another way of saying that literature should deal with simple issues in a simple way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Haruki Murakami once said, \u201cIf you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.\u201d If that\u2019s true, people who read international literature are true iconoclasts. Only about three percent of all books published in the United States are works in translation. In terms of literary fiction and poetry, that number drops below one percent. And mainstream reviewers ignore most of the books that make it through the translation process into print.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I also want to point out that his three recommendations—Satantango<\/i> by Laszlo Krashnahorkai, Maidenhair<\/em> by Mikhail Shishkin, and Almost Never<\/em> by Daniel Sada—are three of my favorite books from 2012 . . . <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sales rep superstar and international literature enthusiast George Carroll just posted a “destination guide” at NW Book Lovers that highlights a number of great presses, organizations, and books worth checking out. Many of these—like Three Percent, New Directions, the Center for the Art of Translation—you’re probably already familiar with, but it’s always fun to see […]<\/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":[42946,22886,48366,48386,41096,44836,48376,1646,47996],"class_list":["post-291526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-almost-never","tag-daniel-sada","tag-george-carroll","tag-laszlo-krashnahorkai","tag-maidenhair","tag-mikhail-shishkin","tag-nw-book-lovers","tag-review","tag-satantango"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291526","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=291526"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318976,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291526\/revisions\/318976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}