Yes, they just announced the fiction longlist of 25 titles for the Best Translated Book Award. Along with lots of other no doubt fabulous books translated from eleven other languages, the list features four titles translated from German:
Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)
The Blindness of the Heart by Julia Franck, translated by Anthea Bell (Grove)
Microscripts by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)
Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, translated by Joel Rotenberg (Archipelago)
The 10-title fiction shortlist is out on 24 March, as is the poetry shortlist. Winners will be announced on 29 April at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York.
I've only read the first two books, as the others are by dead people - yes, I know I'm probably missing out. And I'm rooting for Erpenbeck/Bernofsky, as I love the book a tiny bit more than I love the Franck/Bell title (which is still a great read).
To quote liberally from the press release:
“Not only is this a collection of the year’s most important and compelling books in translation, it’s a list of high quality books that deserve readers’ attention,” said fiction judge Monica Carter. “These books represent a global perspective that, due to the dedication and talent of the translators, can open up the world to readers of English. The Best Translated Book Awards serve the world literature community of writers, translators, and readers in a way that no other award can.”
Hear, hear. And I love that the award gives so much kudos to translators.
Thursday, 27 January 2011
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Pipped to the Love Virtually Post
Gah! You know when you have the most fantastic idea ever in the whole history of humankind? And then someone else does it first!
So, please go now to the blog of British publishing company Quercus, where someone else (Vivienne Nilan to be precise, of Athens Plus newspaper of all things) has done a great interview with Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch.
Who? Why, Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch are a husband and wife who have translated a book together - Daniel Glattauer's Love Virtually. What? Why, it's a super-top-mega-bestseller by an Austrian writer, about a secret email affair. A great quick read, it's actually a bit meatier than you might think and certainly incredibly gripping. I read it last weekend and could not, as they say, put it down - which I did resent slightly, but there you go. As Katharina Bielenberg points out in the interview, people do have secret email affairs, and the book does very well at capturing the combination of excitement and guilt that entails. Plus lots of cliffhangers and a sequel to come.
It's published by MacLehose Press, the people who launched Stieg Larsson on an unsuspecting English-speaking world, thus proving that translations can indeed sell in huge numbers. The brains behind the outfit, Christopher MacLehose, is known for his - let's say - very free approach to translations. Of course I'm highly prejudiced against him, as he's on record somewhere as saying you have to be old to translate well. Hmpf. He's a bit of an old-school editor who's more than happy to chop the bits he doesn't like, causing some controversy over the Larsson books. The credited translator, Reg Keeland, is a pseudonym for Steven Murray – allegedly because he didn't like what was done to his version. Joan Acocella wrote recently in a rather unfriendly piece in the New Yorker:
MacLehose stands by his work. “I did edit the translation, yes,” he wrote to me, “but it isn’t a particularly interesting fact or story and it has earned me enough abuse already from the translator and from the author’s former partner. Perhaps [it is] sufficient to say that seven or eight houses in England turned it down in its original form”—Murray’s English translation—“and seven or eight in America. In its edited form, as many Americans bid for it.”
So, please go now to the blog of British publishing company Quercus, where someone else (Vivienne Nilan to be precise, of Athens Plus newspaper of all things) has done a great interview with Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch.
Who? Why, Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch are a husband and wife who have translated a book together - Daniel Glattauer's Love Virtually. What? Why, it's a super-top-mega-bestseller by an Austrian writer, about a secret email affair. A great quick read, it's actually a bit meatier than you might think and certainly incredibly gripping. I read it last weekend and could not, as they say, put it down - which I did resent slightly, but there you go. As Katharina Bielenberg points out in the interview, people do have secret email affairs, and the book does very well at capturing the combination of excitement and guilt that entails. Plus lots of cliffhangers and a sequel to come.
It's published by MacLehose Press, the people who launched Stieg Larsson on an unsuspecting English-speaking world, thus proving that translations can indeed sell in huge numbers. The brains behind the outfit, Christopher MacLehose, is known for his - let's say - very free approach to translations. Of course I'm highly prejudiced against him, as he's on record somewhere as saying you have to be old to translate well. Hmpf. He's a bit of an old-school editor who's more than happy to chop the bits he doesn't like, causing some controversy over the Larsson books. The credited translator, Reg Keeland, is a pseudonym for Steven Murray – allegedly because he didn't like what was done to his version. Joan Acocella wrote recently in a rather unfriendly piece in the New Yorker:
MacLehose stands by his work. “I did edit the translation, yes,” he wrote to me, “but it isn’t a particularly interesting fact or story and it has earned me enough abuse already from the translator and from the author’s former partner. Perhaps [it is] sufficient to say that seven or eight houses in England turned it down in its original form”—Murray’s English translation—“and seven or eight in America. In its edited form, as many Americans bid for it.”
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
Go There
Salonica is a blog and a website with lots and lots of stuff on it, written by former bookseller and international literature fan Monica Carter. Go there when you have time on your hands. She's just added a handy feature, a monthly list of new releases in translation in the States. From-the-German titles are Ferdinand von Schirach's Crime - recommended by Bernhard Schlink and translated by his translator Carol Janeway, if you like that kind of thing - and Thomas Bernhard's Victor Halfwit, trans. Martin Chalmers. Which is that odd creature, a children's book written by Austria's greatest ever cynic.
Carter also happens to be one of the fiction judges for the Best Translated Book Awards, and points out the longlist is coming out very soon now. So that's something to make you get up in the morning.
Carter also happens to be one of the fiction judges for the Best Translated Book Awards, and points out the longlist is coming out very soon now. So that's something to make you get up in the morning.
Friday, 21 January 2011
Chamisso Prize to Jean Krier
The Adelbert von Chamisso Prize for "non-German authors writing in the German language" has been awarded to the Luxemburg-born poet Jean Krier. The emerging author prizes go to Olga Martynova and Nicol Ljubic.
I haven't read any of Krier's poetry but you can see what I thought of the other two in my overview of the last German Book Prize longlist. Which was conspicuously full of writers born elsewhere, as I've pointed out in the past. Which again makes me wonder whether we still need the Chamisso Prize, were it not for the good stuff that goes along with it such as events in schools. Which brings me to the subject of who cares where anyone's from anyway. But I'm too tired to rant today.
I haven't read any of Krier's poetry but you can see what I thought of the other two in my overview of the last German Book Prize longlist. Which was conspicuously full of writers born elsewhere, as I've pointed out in the past. Which again makes me wonder whether we still need the Chamisso Prize, were it not for the good stuff that goes along with it such as events in schools. Which brings me to the subject of who cares where anyone's from anyway. But I'm too tired to rant today.
On Not Eating Animals
600 people at an alleged €17 a pop, and a piece on the late-night news. That's what you get when you invite Jonathan Safran Foer and Karen Duve to read from their books and talk about not eating animals. I went along for free, because my friend Isabel Bogdan translated Mr Safran Foer's book along with two other lovely and talented translators, Brigitte Jakobeit and Ingo Herzke. But I was one of the small minority in the huge audience who hadn't actually read Eating Animals. I read Anständig essen (Eating Decently) instead.
Karen Duve is a top fiction writer with a sharp sense of humour. You can read her novels This Is Not A Love Song and Rain in English, trans. Anthea Bell (although that took a bit of research to work out - the publishers Bloomsbury seem loathe to mention the fact). I loved her last book, Taxi. And now she's written her first piece of non-fiction, a personal account of her ten-month attempt to eat like a decent human being. She starts off going organic, then vegetarian, then vegan, and finally only eats plant products that don't kill the plant itself when you harvest them, i.e. fruit but no potatoes, peas but no carrots, etc.
Which ties in nicely with Safran Foer's book, presumably. Except that the two of them took rather different approaches to what is essentially the big problem with trying to tell other people what they should and should not eat - the preachiness of it all.
As far as I gathered at last night's reading, JSF (I can't pronounce it so I'll just abbreviate it from now on) tried to tell people what's bad about eating animals without actually telling them what to do about it. Certainly he was very coy in person about how better to persuade people to become vegetarians. It was all about setting a good example and being a better person, not getting on anyone's nerves, doing the right thing, starting with yourself, loving your grandparents, and so forth. Which in itself has a saccharine aftertaste - to me personally - that says, "Hey, you guys just go ahead and destroy the environment and torture poor creatures, I'll be over here with my nut loaf and my clear conscience. Oh, and did I mention my son wrote a letter to David Attenborough?"
Karen Duve, on the other hand, took the more typically German approach - just to labour another cliché. She started with herself, but she's not afraid to get out that moral club and beat you over the head with it until you fall to the ground whimpering and begging for tofu. What she did to take the edge off her preaching was to use her sense of humour.
So the book opens with a device, an external conscience by the name of - wait for it - Jiminy Cricket, Duve's housemate who is a paragon of virtue. Isabel and I aren't sure the woman really exists, but she certainly makes for entertaining reading. Duve does her best to convince Jiminy/Kerstin of what she's doing at each stage, going from suggesting organic farming might be an absolute gift to animals, who get a roof over their head and three square meals a day and a nice stroll around the meadow, to not letting her mow the lawn because it hurts the blades of grass. And she thoroughly enjoys out-consciencing her conscience by eating as ethically as she can.
Or there's a fantastic scene in which Duve visits her family and preaches at them about veganism and factory farming, while her brothers and nephews and so on get bored and walk away and her mother suggests she have a nice drink of milk - it's OK, it's skimmed. She's perfectly aware she's become a food bore, but she milks it (excuse me, I couldn't resist) for all the gags it's worth. She also gently teases other ethical eaters, from the lady in the wholefood shop who lets her water expand in a jug before she drinks it to the rivalling Alpha males in the raw food movement.
In between, of course, there are shocking facts you're probably already half aware of about farming and slaughtering methods, climate change reports, a spot of live animal liberation, interesting stuff about Jainism, and a lot of ethical qualms and indecent cravings. Towards the end, when Duve was living on a diet of peas cooked in coconut milk, the theories became rather addled to my mind. I was reminded of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, forced to eat only peas for a medical experiment, and I clearly recalled an undergraduate seminar in which someone (it may have been me) pointed out with perfect 20-year-old logic that it was no wonder he killed his girlfriend if his diet was so restricted.
Karen Duve didn't kill anything but a few insects, but she does get rather vague about some kind of "creation" that meant all living beings to be equal, and I couldn't help laughing at the accidental lie-detector tests on office plants. All in all, though, the book was rescued by her admissions at the end - that it's not easy eating ethically but she's going to try her best to be as vegan as possible.
All this comes at a time when vegetarianism, we're told, is in fashion. Judging by snippets I picked up at the reading, a lot of people came because of the subject rather than the writers. There were activists in animal costumes outside, calling attention to a demonstration tomorrow. And the guy selling sandwiches in the corridor was keeping rather quiet about his salami baguettes. Add to that the latest farming scandal over contaminated eggs, and we may be witnessing a turning point. Still, it's a hell of a lot easier to be vegetarian in Britain than it is here, and has been for about twenty years.
Things may be looking up, though. The whole publishers and translators kit and caboodle went to a vegan restaurant after JSF had finished signing 3 million autographs. I'm told it was excellent, although I personally have made a vow not to do so much ligging and therefore didn't even attempt to invite myself along, even though it was very conveniently situated on my way home.
I still eat meat, so far. Isabel's given it up, more or less.
Karen Duve is a top fiction writer with a sharp sense of humour. You can read her novels This Is Not A Love Song and Rain in English, trans. Anthea Bell (although that took a bit of research to work out - the publishers Bloomsbury seem loathe to mention the fact). I loved her last book, Taxi. And now she's written her first piece of non-fiction, a personal account of her ten-month attempt to eat like a decent human being. She starts off going organic, then vegetarian, then vegan, and finally only eats plant products that don't kill the plant itself when you harvest them, i.e. fruit but no potatoes, peas but no carrots, etc.
Which ties in nicely with Safran Foer's book, presumably. Except that the two of them took rather different approaches to what is essentially the big problem with trying to tell other people what they should and should not eat - the preachiness of it all.
As far as I gathered at last night's reading, JSF (I can't pronounce it so I'll just abbreviate it from now on) tried to tell people what's bad about eating animals without actually telling them what to do about it. Certainly he was very coy in person about how better to persuade people to become vegetarians. It was all about setting a good example and being a better person, not getting on anyone's nerves, doing the right thing, starting with yourself, loving your grandparents, and so forth. Which in itself has a saccharine aftertaste - to me personally - that says, "Hey, you guys just go ahead and destroy the environment and torture poor creatures, I'll be over here with my nut loaf and my clear conscience. Oh, and did I mention my son wrote a letter to David Attenborough?"
Karen Duve, on the other hand, took the more typically German approach - just to labour another cliché. She started with herself, but she's not afraid to get out that moral club and beat you over the head with it until you fall to the ground whimpering and begging for tofu. What she did to take the edge off her preaching was to use her sense of humour.
So the book opens with a device, an external conscience by the name of - wait for it - Jiminy Cricket, Duve's housemate who is a paragon of virtue. Isabel and I aren't sure the woman really exists, but she certainly makes for entertaining reading. Duve does her best to convince Jiminy/Kerstin of what she's doing at each stage, going from suggesting organic farming might be an absolute gift to animals, who get a roof over their head and three square meals a day and a nice stroll around the meadow, to not letting her mow the lawn because it hurts the blades of grass. And she thoroughly enjoys out-consciencing her conscience by eating as ethically as she can.
Or there's a fantastic scene in which Duve visits her family and preaches at them about veganism and factory farming, while her brothers and nephews and so on get bored and walk away and her mother suggests she have a nice drink of milk - it's OK, it's skimmed. She's perfectly aware she's become a food bore, but she milks it (excuse me, I couldn't resist) for all the gags it's worth. She also gently teases other ethical eaters, from the lady in the wholefood shop who lets her water expand in a jug before she drinks it to the rivalling Alpha males in the raw food movement.
In between, of course, there are shocking facts you're probably already half aware of about farming and slaughtering methods, climate change reports, a spot of live animal liberation, interesting stuff about Jainism, and a lot of ethical qualms and indecent cravings. Towards the end, when Duve was living on a diet of peas cooked in coconut milk, the theories became rather addled to my mind. I was reminded of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, forced to eat only peas for a medical experiment, and I clearly recalled an undergraduate seminar in which someone (it may have been me) pointed out with perfect 20-year-old logic that it was no wonder he killed his girlfriend if his diet was so restricted.
Karen Duve didn't kill anything but a few insects, but she does get rather vague about some kind of "creation" that meant all living beings to be equal, and I couldn't help laughing at the accidental lie-detector tests on office plants. All in all, though, the book was rescued by her admissions at the end - that it's not easy eating ethically but she's going to try her best to be as vegan as possible.
All this comes at a time when vegetarianism, we're told, is in fashion. Judging by snippets I picked up at the reading, a lot of people came because of the subject rather than the writers. There were activists in animal costumes outside, calling attention to a demonstration tomorrow. And the guy selling sandwiches in the corridor was keeping rather quiet about his salami baguettes. Add to that the latest farming scandal over contaminated eggs, and we may be witnessing a turning point. Still, it's a hell of a lot easier to be vegetarian in Britain than it is here, and has been for about twenty years.
Things may be looking up, though. The whole publishers and translators kit and caboodle went to a vegan restaurant after JSF had finished signing 3 million autographs. I'm told it was excellent, although I personally have made a vow not to do so much ligging and therefore didn't even attempt to invite myself along, even though it was very conveniently situated on my way home.
I still eat meat, so far. Isabel's given it up, more or less.
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Festival Neue Literatur
Look! New Yorkers of any and all persuasions have a treat in store - the Festival Neue Literatur, bringing "six of the best up-and-coming German-language authors to the city, where they join well-known American writers in a series of conversations and readings." February 11-13. Enjoy.
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
German Crime Fiction Prize to Bernhard Jaumann
They announced yesterday that this year's Deutscher Krimi-Preis has gone to Namibia-based Bernhard Jaumann for his novel Die Stunde des Schakals (The Hour of the Jackal).
Namibia is a former German colony, where the colonists committed genocide against the local Herero and Nama people in 1904-1907.
The book is set in modern-day Namibia though, and features a "loveable" female detective in a thriller-type setting revisiting the last years of Apartheid. Sounds interesting, huh?
The prize is pretty cool too - there's no award ceremony and the winner gets not one cent.
Namibia is a former German colony, where the colonists committed genocide against the local Herero and Nama people in 1904-1907.
The book is set in modern-day Namibia though, and features a "loveable" female detective in a thriller-type setting revisiting the last years of Apartheid. Sounds interesting, huh?
The prize is pretty cool too - there's no award ceremony and the winner gets not one cent.
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