« COETZEE GLIMPSE | Main | BANVILLE ON SATURDAY »

May 10, 2005

GET THEE TO SCOTT'S PLACE

Over at Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito posts a nice, long interview with Chad Post of Dalkey discussing the new Reading the World program.

Q: According to the American Booksellers Association, out of 185,000 titles published in the U.S. in 2004, only 874 were adult literature in translation. What’s the loss to American readers that so few books available are works in translation? Put conversely, why is it important to read world literature?

In my opinion, there are two primary reasons why this statistic is horrifying and why readers should be interested in world literature. First of all, reading is one of the best ways to learn about another culture. This may sound cliched, but it is absolutely true. There's a lot going on in the world, and a lot of viewpoints about what's going on, and the best access to these other opinions is in literature in translation. Aside from that, I think some of the best literature is being written in countries other than the U.S. Not to discount American authors, there are a number of great American writers writing today, but as a press, the books we've been finding from other countries are absolutely brilliant. A lot of foreign authors--especially those in Eastern Europe and Latin America--are quite bold and experimental in their writing. They're attempting things that most American authors would never even try. It's as if a renaissance is going on and all of the possibilities of fiction are open to foreign writers. So, my second reason why people should read world literature is simply because so much of it is so damn good.

Posted at 12:15 AM |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed