{"id":395466,"date":"2018-04-16T19:43:04","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T19:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2018\/04\/16\/tomas-jonsson-bestseller-by-gudbergur-bergsson-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-07T14:20:44","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T14:20:44","slug":"tomas-jonsson-bestseller-by-gudbergur-bergsson-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2018\/04\/16\/tomas-jonsson-bestseller-by-gudbergur-bergsson-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller” by Gu\u00f0bergur Bergsson [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This afternoon\u2019s entry in the \u201cWhy This Book Should Win<\/a>\u201d series is from writer and Russian translator, Andrea Gregovich. She also\u00a0interviews literary translators\u00a0about their new books for the Fiction Advocate<\/a> blog.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller<\/em><\/a> by Gu\u00f0bergur Bergsson, translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Iceland, Open Letter Books)<\/b><\/p>\n

Writing why T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller<\/em> should win the Best Translated Book Award is like trying to describe a bizarre, exhausting dream that felt important but wound up buried too deep in your subconscious for words to make sense of now that you\u2019re awake. As I was reading this beautiful mess by Iceland\u2019s Gu\u00f0bergur Bergsson I kept thinking to myself, how is this even a book? And how did translator Lytton Smith not descend into madness bringing it into English? This isn\u2019t hyperbole, the book is that much. It\u2019s a monumental piece of work in a meta sort of way, and that\u2019s why it should win the BTBA<\/span>.<\/p>\n

T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller<\/em> is ostensibly a collection of fictitious notebooks written by a cranky old man with a mind full of literary brilliance and egotistical bitterness, a man with a lot of opinions who is generally ticked off about everything. Even though the book is printed in a standard typeface, it reads like journaling. It\u2019s full of errors, has a haphazard page layout, and its elderly ramblings are often barely penetrable as they weave in and out of the fragmented Iceland stories and intellectual manifestoes. Sometimes the narrative switches recklessly from one topic to another without warning\u2014I swear it switched mid-sentence at one point, but now I can\u2019t find that part to tell you about it. As I was looking for this passage I did, however, find a page on which T\u00f3mas is complaining about the cat and right in the middle of his anecdote for some reason is written, \u201c(something is wrong with the text here).\u201d I also found another funny section where he\u2019s unhappy about the kitchen habits of his tenants and says, \u201cThis is ugh and yeuch, Bubbi.\u201d A big part of reading this book is noticing these foibles, laughing and baffling over them, and usually not finding a clear explanation for them. Instead, you just accept their absurdity and recognize that they are weirdly wonderful. Your own personal collection of these odd buried treasures is, I\u2019d say, what you can look forward to taking away from your reading of this strange book.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure fictional character T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, who is very much concerned with his literary image (the title tries to claim itself a \u201cbestseller\u201d after all), would not have wanted these notebooks published in the state of shambles they\u2019re in. And that\u2019s part of the book\u2019s wild charm: it\u2019s one of Iceland\u2019s twentieth-century literary masterpieces, and yet it captures the exact opposite of, say, a poised and polished tale of Vikings or fairies (as an English-language reader might try to expect out of Iceland). Iceland is sloppy, frustrating, and grotesquely authentic in this book. It\u2019s the literary equivalent of sneaking away from the tour guide taking you past all the tidy and respectable historical monuments in Reykjavik and instead venturing into an apartment building on a side street and peeking through a keyhole into the gritty, authentic domestic life going on in there, with its chamber pots, chipped dishes, laundry messes, and smells of soup. But that metaphor doesn\u2019t go far enough\u2014you\u2019re looking not just inside an apartment, but deep into the mind of the man who owns it, which becomes a rare glimpse into the psyche of Iceland itself.<\/p>\n

In trying to describe Bergsson\u2019s book, I feel I\u2019ve written an inevitable word salad, perhaps not dissimilar to the salads of T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson himself. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve really gotten to the crux of why this book should win the BTBA<\/span>, which aims to award both the book and the translation. So on that point: imagine what a labyrinth of rabbit holes and mayhem this book was for a translator to contend with. How did he even know what was happening from one sentence to the next!? How does one faithfully translate a text that borders on impenetrable into something that can be even be read? Lytton Smith not only got the job done, he did it with humor, nuance, and beauty. He let the crazy stuff be opaque and difficult, but also depicted those scattered moments of poetic beauty and philosophical wisdom with the artful language necessary for a reader to discover them amid the textual chaos. He also made sure the silly parts about cats, chickens, and chamber pots came through with the punchy cadence they deserved. So the translation is a feat in and of itself, and the book finally finding its way into English is a triumph of Iceland\u2019s literary community, which has kept T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller<\/em>, originally published in 1966, from slipping off the radar and into obscurity all this time (as you might expect such a loose baggy monster in a relatively obscure language to do).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve not read all of the finalists, but I\u2019m confident no other translation vying for the Best Translated Book Award in 2018 simply is what it is with as much vigorous impossibility as T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller<\/em>. Not even Fever Dream<\/em>. Even if this paragraph amounts to more word salad, let that vigorous impossibility be the reason this book should win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This afternoon\u2019s entry in the \u201cWhy This Book Should Win\u201d series is from writer and Russian translator, Andrea Gregovich. She also\u00a0interviews literary translators\u00a0about their new books for the Fiction Advocate blog. T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller by Gu\u00f0bergur Bergsson, translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Iceland, Open Letter Books) Writing why T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller should win the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":398012,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[58936,66446,48766,66216,18236,28166,66136,37876],"class_list":["post-395466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-andrea-gregovich","tag-btba-2018","tag-btba-fiction","tag-gudbergur-bergsson","tag-lytton-smith","tag-open-letter-books","tag-tomas-jonsson-bestseller","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395466","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=395466"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398032,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395466\/revisions\/398032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}