Aleksandar Hemon on Translation

[Liam]

Aleksandar Hemon and Anthea Bell on European literature in translation

[Audio]: Aleksandar Hemon and Anthea Bell discuss European literature and translation and we look at some surprises in a chart that lists the bestselling authors across the continent

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Is there such a thing as a European literature and why don't English speakers read more of it? In this week's podcast we ask Anthea Bell, one of the UK's most successful translators, about the books we should all be reading.

We take a look at the 50 bestselling novels in Europe and discover that it's not all about American blockbusters. Hugh Laurie is in there as well, propelled to the top of the charts by his love affair with the French. We discuss why crime writing is so dominant all over the continent.

And we meet up with Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian-American author of The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man,who has taken time off from his own writing to edit an anthology of European literature for Dalkey Archive called Best European Fiction 2010.

Reading list

Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon (Dalkey Archive)

The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon (Picador)

Nowhere Man, by Aleksandar Hemon (Picador)

Austerlitz by WG Sebald (Penguin)

The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig (Pushkin Press)

Burning Secret, by Stefan Zweig (Pushkin Press)

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic (Grove)

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, The Girl Who Played with Fire, all by Stieg Larsson (MacLehose)

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann (Quercus)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery (Gallic Books)



Aleksandar Hemon and Anthea Bell on European literature in translation | Books | guardian.co.uk




L.

[Eric]

I have mixed feelings regarding the term "European literature". On the one hand it does draw the world's attention to one of the most concentrated parts of the world where quality literature is written (look how tiny Europe is on a map of the world). On the other, it blurs the distinction between all the many and quite different countries and literatures written on that continent. I'm not quite sure on what Bell and Hemon base their list and the names on it.

Personally, I think it would be nice to get away from the label "European" as it tends to lump together too many genres, countries, authors, styles, etc. under a kind of lowest common denominator. It is maybe time that critics and reviewers from the USA began to discern the differences between the literatures (plural) on our continent. What does Finnish literature have in common with Portuguese, or Albanian with Danish? They are all geographically European, but what does that actually mean in cultural and literary terms? The "United States of Europe" do not exist, so maybe "European literature" doesn't either.