{"id":295886,"date":"2013-12-17T15:29:28","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T15:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/12\/17\/daniel-medins-btba-favorites-autumn-reading\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:27","slug":"daniel-medins-btba-favorites-autumn-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/12\/17\/daniel-medins-btba-favorites-autumn-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Medin\u2019s BTBA favorites: Autumn reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators, is an editor of The Cahiers Series ,and co-hosts the podcast entitled That Other Word. He has authored a study of Franz Kafka in the work of three international writers (Northwestern University Press, 2010) and curated the second volume of<\/em> Music and Literature magazine (Krasznanorkai\/Tarr\/Neumann). He advises several journals on literature in translation.<\/em><\/p>\n

This seems a timely moment to announce the forthcoming appearance of a translation issue I\u2019ve edited for The White Review.<\/em> For those unfamiliar, TWR<\/span><\/em> is a London-based journal of art and literature that publishes print (quarterly) and online (monthly) editions. In addition to supporting new writers, the editors make it a point to highlight literature in translation. Recent numbers have included contributions by Dubravka Ugre\u0161i\u0107, Vladimir Sorokin, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Javiar Mar\u00edas, to name but a few.<\/p>\n

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I spent this past autumn selecting material for the issue, which is slated to go live early next month. Not surprisingly, there was significant overlap with my readings for the BTBA<\/span>. Here are a few examples:<\/p>\n

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One\u2019s by the late great Hella S. Haasse, whose gem, The Black Lake<\/em>, I cited in a previous post.<\/a> I\u2019ve found the lack of attention devoted to this novel baffling. It is a beautiful little book, conceived and executed with intelligence and grace. The translator, Ina Rilke, ranks among the very best working from Dutch today. You\u2019ve probably come across her work at one point or another by now: Rilke was behind the classic Eline Vere<\/em> by Louis Couperus, which Archipelago brought out back in 2010; she\u2019s translated multiple titles by W.F. Hermans and Cees Noteboom; and she\u2019s currently at work on Max Havelaar<\/em> by Multatuli for NYRB<\/span> Classics. (There\u2019s a full overview of her activity, along with a lovely snapshot of Rilke with Haasse, here.<\/a>) We\u2019ll print the striking first pages of The Black Lake<\/em> in The White Review<\/em>. If your experience of them in any way resembles mine, then you\u2019ll find yourself unable to stop. <\/p>\n

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I\u2019m delighted that we can include an excerpt from the third volume of Faris al-Shidyaq\u2019s Leg over Leg.<\/em> The publication of volumes 1 and 2<\/a> earlier this year by NYU<\/span> Press\u2019s Library of Arabic Literature was a moment of glory for literature in translation. Expect plenty of hot sauce in this excerpt\u2014that, and no shortage of ingenious linguistic dexterity on the part of translator Humphrey Davies. For an in-depth take on volume 1, have a look at this review<\/a> by Michael Orthofer. I share his excitement entirely, and am certain that others will as well once given a taste of al-Shidyaq\u2019s writing.<\/p>\n

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Occasionally, a work of brilliance will make it possible for a virtuosic translator to outdo, line for line, a great deal of what\u2019s recently appeared in her target language. In 2012, the English of George Szirtes for Satantango<\/i>\u2019s Hungarian struck me as superior to the sentences of most novels written that year in English. The same\u2019s true of John Keene\u2019s version of Letters from a Seducer<\/i> by Hilda Hilst. Scheduled to appear this month, it was perhaps my most unforgettable reading experience of 2013. I\u2019m terribly eager to read more Hilst now\u2014and impatient to get my hands on Keene\u2019s Annotations<\/em><\/a> too.<\/p>\n

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I was glad I could include an excerpt from Orly Castel-Bloom\u2019s acutely funny\u2014and correspondingly painful\u2014Textile.<\/i> Castel-Bloom writes uncanny narratives that depict, with sensitivity but very little mercy, contemporary Israeli society. First published in 2006, this unpredictable and frequently grotesque novel is unlike most other Israeli fiction that I’ve encountered; it’s as close to Gogol as Hebrew can get. Translated by the eminent recipient of 2010\u2019s BTBA<\/span>, Dalya Bilu. <\/p>\n

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I\u2019d like to devote a bit more space to two titles that have survived months of BTBA<\/span> reading on my own personal shortlist. The first is Stig S\u00e6terbakken\u2019s Through the Night<\/em>, whose emotional resonance brought me to tears. I found it the bravest, perhaps even riskiest of the novels in competition. (I was also surprised to discover, in its weaknesses as in its strengths, unlikely affinities with The Devil\u2019s Workshop<\/em> by J\u00e1chym Topol.) Here\u2019s the beginning of a review by Taylor Davis-Van Atta that will appear soon at Asymptote<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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In an essay completed not long before his death last year, Stig S\u00e6terbakken wrote: \u201cHow strong would our passions be, separated from our fear of dying? We want to live, sure. But we want to die as well. We want to be torn apart. We want to drown in the wonders of ecstasy.\u201d Both the craft of this passage\u2014a single rhetorical question opens a rich vein of content\u2014as well as its sentiment seem to me to epitomize something of both S\u00e6terbakken\u2019s personal philosophy and his artistic ambition. As with all of his writing, the question posed by the S\u00e6terbakken is simple, but deceptively so, situated as it is at an existential crux. And, as with all of his writing, it cannot be ignored nor easily grappled with. S\u00e6terbakken seemingly holds no fear himself when examining the heart of his own experience, swiftly identifying a terrible and unavoidable paradox, an impossibility that nonetheless must be negotiated and further explored. His prose, which so often conveys the mandatory ugliness and pain of existence, yet which is always charged with beauty and great tenderness, is itself infused with paradox. The author of endlessly interesting novels and essays, S\u00e6terbakken is an indispensable artist, one who must be reckoned with and one whose day in the Anglophone world is, I believe, shortly at hand.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Through the Night<\/em>, S\u00e6terbakken\u2019s last published novel, centers around Karl Meyer, a middle-aged man who, prompted by the sudden suicide of his teenage son, Ole-Jakob, is forced to confront his past disgraces and contemplate his complicity in Ole-Jakob\u2019s death, all while enduring overwhelming feelings of grief. The novel, which almost reads as two separate works, opens in the immediate aftermath of Ole-Jakob\u2019s suicide, with Karl\u2019s wife, Eva, having just lodged an ax in the screen of the family television set. The act is a statement of protest (Karl has been binge-watching since their son\u2019s funeral), but it could almost be interpreted as a telegraphed message from S\u00e6terbakken to his reader regarding what is to come: there will be no further distraction from the situation at hand, however terrifying and all-consuming it becomes. Indeed, the novel quickly delves into Karl\u2019s past through a series of short vignettes in which Karl sets about tracing the history of his life\u2019s two defining love affairs\u2014with Eva and with another woman, Mona, for whom he had recently, if temporarily, left his family.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Issue 5 of Taylor\u2019s Music & Literature<\/em>, which will publish in spring 2015, will be devoted to S\u00e6terbakken, Chinese novelist Can Xue, and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. You can order your subscription, and explore numerous reviews and features, here.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Stig S\u00e6terbakken makes a brief appearance in the introduction to the below interview of Mircea C\u0103rt\u0103rescu. As director of the Lillehammer Festival, S\u00e6terbakken was instrumental in bringing the Romanian novelist to Norway. There, C\u0103rt\u0103rescu spoke with Audun Lindholm, the editor-in-chief of Vagant<\/em>, Norway\u2019s most prestigious literary magazine. (Before he embarked upon My Struggle<\/em>, Karl Ove Knausg\u00e5rd directed the same journal.) The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation<\/em> includes a long conversation between Lindholm and C\u0103rt\u0103rescu about the Blinding<\/em> trilogy. Below, a few questions and answers concerning the volume that has just appeared in English\u2014The Left Wing<\/i>\u2014 thanks to Archipelago Books.<\/p>\n

AL: You call the child a bricoleur<\/i>\u2014could the same be said of the novel\u2019s author?<\/p>\n

MC: Yes. Generally, I begin with something ordinary and realistic, something I know well, and then, step by step, the logic of the text takes over. I never know what I\u2019m about to write on the next page, I have no plan, I don\u2019t know where I\u2019m headed. I take advantage of the fact that I write quite slowly: because I write by hand, I have plenty of time to think at the same time. The most important thing is the texture of the individual page\u2014it takes precedence over the story or the characters or the larger structure. Writing by hand creates an intimate relationship with the white sheet of paper, almost functioning like a mirror. When the writing turns out really well, it is as if I saw the final text in front of me, I simply erased the white of the paper that hides it. I have the impression that most prose writers start with a strong impression or a clear image in mind, gradually expanding on it and constructing a whole. I, on the other hand, aim at a writing process that consists of a series of such impressions. And I must admit that when I read other novels, even the most realistic among them, my attention is drawn to these very moments, to certain pages and specific formulations.<\/p>\n

AL: \u201cYou do not describe the past by writing about old things, but by writing about the haze that exists between yourself and the past,\u201d we read early on in Blinding: The Left Wing.<\/em> And later: \u201cI was always afraid to go to sleep. Where would my being go to during all those hours?\u201d<\/p>\n

MC: Yes, I think that the best pages of Blinding<\/em> are not those that are realistic but those that are phantasmal, oneiric. The earliest memories we have, from the age of two, three, or four, mainly resemble dreams. We may recall buildings, landscapes, and people, and we have the feeling that they must have been real\u2014otherwise we could not have seen them in such vivid detail. The same is true of some of our dreams. I have strong memories of particular dreams I\u2019ve had, outrageous and disturbing dreams. I envision dreams, memories, and reality like a M\u00f6bius strip whose sides are indistinguishable from one another. I try to avoid changing historical facts and instead fill the gaps in my memory with fantasies. When information is hard to come by, I let my pen do the work.<\/p>\n

To read the interview in its entirety\u2014or a review of the novel published in the same issue\u2014visit the Winter 2014 number of The Quarterly Conversation.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators, is an editor of The Cahiers Series ,and co-hosts the podcast entitled That Other Word. He has authored a study of Franz Kafka in the work of three international writers (Northwestern University Press, 2010) and curated […]<\/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":[67476],"tags":[54336,54356,35996,32616,52766,54096,1646,54346],"class_list":["post-295886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-black-lake","tag-blinding","tag-btba","tag-daniel-medin","tag-leg-over-leg","tag-letters-from-a-seducer","tag-review","tag-textile"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295886","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=295886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317886,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295886\/revisions\/317886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}