fwriction

A wonderful piece on translation from Michael Cunningham.

fsgbooks:

“As the author of Las Horas, Die Stunden and De Uren — ostensibly the Spanish, German and Dutch translations of my book The Hours, but actually unique works in their own right — I’ve come to understand that all literature is a product of translation…

(Source: The New York Times)

Laura Brown, fwriction : review’s Poetry Editor, also serves as an intern for New Directions, one the most wonderful publishers around. In this week’s The Book Bench, get a glimpse of just how splendid they are, care of an interview with Barbara Epler, regarding Roberto Bolaño, whose fiction “Labyrinth” is featured in the current issue of The New Yorker.

New Directions has published Roberto Bolaño since “By Night in Chile,” which came out in 2003. How did you come to publish him?

Over drinks, my friend Francisco Goldman started chewing my ear off about Roberto Bolaño, and, oddly, just a few days after our date, a pal at another, larger publishing house asked me which new authors I might be stalking, and I mentioned Bolaño, along with a few other writers from abroad. And that friend said, “Oh, I saw a Harvill galley of a novel by Roberto Bolaño floating around our office.” So I called Christopher MacLehose, the great English editor, and asked for a galley. (As a small publisher with not very deep pockets, we are often not first in line.) I read “By Night in Chile” the night it arrived, and told my boss Peggy Fox we had to buy it: I was bowled over, Bolaño was a genius, and I explained that other houses had the galley, too, so we had to move fast, and she said: “O.K.” I realized a few days later that I’d once read a Bolaño story in Grand Street, and I looked it up (“Telephone Calls”) and read it again, and it was very different from “By Night in Chile,” and that was very intriguing. When Harvill asked that we commit to three books (to also buy “Distant Star” and “Last Evenings on Earth”), we said, “Yes.”

fwrictionreview:

fortuna labilis

MEMENTO:
”Pure literature is nothing but non-literature or the death itself” —Jacques Derrida

under the convergent sign
of lightning
in shortage of serotonin
the Word could have been my friend
but We answer

to different names and fates

we always get
through…

Brought to my attention by Dave Smith, a multi-talented ass-kicker of brilliance (both as a writer and as a distiller), this piece by The Hours author Michael Cunningham furthers my interest in current obsession, translation:

“Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.” 

I’ve been immersed in translation lately, and Lydia Davis, so this is a wonderful combination. This will be a continuing series over the next two weeks, leading to Davis speaking at the 92nd Street Y on October 4.

“It happened several time while I was doing the translation that I would open a newly discovered previous translation of Madame Bovary and my heart would sink. I would say to myself: Well, this is quite good! The work I’m doing may be pointless, after all! Then I would look more closely, and compare it to the original, and it would begin to seem less good. I would get to know it really well, and then it would seem completely inadequate.”

The Brooklyn Book Festival was simply wonderful. It was my Disney World, really, despite the rain and long lines. One event that stuck with me in particular was the panel on Franz Kafka; writers Joshua Cohen, Francine Prose, and Matthew Sharpe discussed the influence of “Kafka-esque” on modern writing, as well as delved into some biographical history of the Prague-born writer.

However, it was the discussion of language, of word choice, that stuck with me. In translation, ultimately those decisions are changed, altered. Kafka, in my estimation, was a master of word choice, and I felt that should be explored, using his original German text. So, enjoy today’s Story of the Day, Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”:

“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt. Er lag auf seinem panzerartig harten Rücken und sah, wenn er den Kopf ein wenig hob, seinen gewölbten, braunen, von bogenförmigen Versteifungen geteilten Bauch, auf dessen Höhe sich die Bettdecke, zum gänzlichen Niedergleiten bereit, kaum noch erhalten konnte. Seine vielen, im Vergleich zu seinem sonstigen Umfang kläglich dünnen Beine flimmerten ihm hilflos vor den Augen.”