{"id":415192,"date":"2019-02-19T08:00:50","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T13:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=415192"},"modified":"2019-02-18T18:38:05","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T23:38:05","slug":"415192","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/02\/19\/415192\/","title":{"rendered":"Books of the Future [BTBA 2019]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Best Translated Book Award post is from George Carroll, life-long Sounders fan, newly converted Tottenham fan..\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This is my third rodeo with The Best Translated Book Award. The first year the book that I wanted to win, Seibo There Below<\/em>, did. But then there was the next year. Not even close, but you have to be a team player, suck it up, and wait it out. Look where it\u2019s got Marcus Rashford. I don\u2019t think the book that I want to win this year, will. It\u2019s big, it\u2019s ambitious, it\u2019s complicated.<\/p>\n

Anyway, that\u2019s off the point. I don\u2019t want to write about books I\u2019m reading for the award, I want to write about books that I\u2019m not reading for the award.<\/p>\n

Twelve years of Catholic school has set me up for a boatload of guilt. Sister Mary Loretta through the Jesuits. My problem with the BTBA is not the many crazy stacks of qualifying books in my house. It\u2019s how do I not read the books I desperately want to read that don\u2019t qualify? Books that aren\u2019t coming out until later this year. Or books, already released, that are screaming at me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with Martin Solares. I read Don\u2019t Send Flowers<\/em><\/a>, a noir novel about a man hired to locate a corrupt businessman\u2019s kidnapped daughter. It\u2019s not the best translated book of the year; it probably won\u2019t even make the longlist, but, wow, Solares was a find. So I asked a friend at the publisher to run down a copy of his 2006 book The Black Minutes<\/em>. It\u2019s now on my shelf. Just sitting here. Seducing me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I just read Jean-Patrick Manchette\u2019s unfinished thriller Ivory Pearl<\/a>.<\/em> It could possibly make our longlist, although a huge chunk of the book, the ending as a matter of fact, was created from the author\u2019s notes. That he died before he could finish it totally sucks. I read Manchette\u2019s The Mad and the Bad<\/em> which has the most over-the-top shoot-out in a retail store in noir literature. But I never read Fatale<\/em>. I\u2019m in a library queue. Getting close. I\u2019m next in line.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got a PDF of the new Javier Marias novel Berta Isla<\/em><\/a>. I have some issues with the more recent Marias releases\u2014The Infatuations<\/em> and Thus Bad Begins<\/em>\u2014as in they\u2019re not good. Not everything he writes can be as good as Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me<\/em>, but crikey, close is fine. I so want the new book to be good but if I start on it, I\u2019ll have a hard time not driving through it, hoping, hoping. Also that would mean I can\u2019t read this Canadian novel that I\u2019ve been assigned to read where the young narrator\u2019s mother keeps trying to commit suicide. Gee. Hard choice.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know the new Bola\u00f1o The Spirit of Science Fiction<\/em><\/a>. But that doesn\u2019t matter. I\u2019ll read anything Bola\u00f1o wrote. I think I have.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Missed the boat on Joe Ide\u2019s Isaiah Quintabe novels. Watched my wife with much envy as she ran through all four of them in what felt like two days. She kept saying, \u201cSo, when are you going to read these? You\u2019ll going to love them.\u201d Salt. Wound.<\/p>\n

Then there are three books that are coming out later this year that will blow the next BTBA jury\u2019s collective mind:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been waiting patiently for five years for German author Reinhard Jirgl\u2019s Die Stille to be <\/em>translated. A bookseller in Paris has hand-sold hundreds of the French edition. A Berlin-based translator friend said that Jirgl is almost impossible to translate. Throws numbers in the middle of words and shit. Sounds perfect. This is the first English translation of anything he\u2019s written, except for a couple of pieces for the Seagull Books catalog. If you have one of their catalogs, check it out. If you don\u2019t, you\u2019ll want one.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the second part of The Invented Part<\/em> by Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n. Rumor, by way of my footie BFF, has it that the translation draft is being edited. Mind-bending, that Fres\u00e1n, mind-bending. Waiting. Waiting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lastly there\u2019s the knot of my guilt, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai\u2019s Baron Wenckheim\u2019s Homecoming<\/em><\/a>. Seven hundred pages of my favorite author. He claims this is his last novel. He\u2019s won the Best Translated Book Award twice. A three-peat is a serious possibility. There\u2019s an unedited manuscript. I\u2019m not saying I\u2019ve read it when I should have been reading BTBA qualifying titles, and I\u2019m not saying that I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Bart Simpson: Dad, are you licking toads?<\/p>\n

Homer Simpson: I\u2019m not not licking toads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s Best Translated Book Award post is from George Carroll, life-long Sounders fan, newly converted Tottenham fan..\u00a0 This is my third rodeo with The Best Translated Book Award. The first year the book that I wanted to win, Seibo There Below, did. But then there was the next year. Not even close, but you have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":415202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[68042,48366],"class_list":["post-415192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba-2019","tag-george-carroll"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415192","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=415192"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":415302,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415192\/revisions\/415302"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}