Translated literature - books, websites

[Eric]

You have to know where to look, in order to find translated literature in English. Here are various suggestions (websites wholly, or partly, in English):

Books
Useful printed guides to fiction in English translation can be found at:

http://tiny.cc/k8Ol3

This is a list of the various guides in book form: Dutch & Flemish; French; German; Italian; Jewish; Portugal & Brazil & Africa; Scandinavian; Welsh; Brazilian [again]; and Hungarian.

Websites
These websites focus on fiction and sometimes poetry written principally in one country or language.


French:

http://www.frenchbooknews.com/index.php

German (general cultural website):

http://www.signandsight.com/

Swedish (introduction to their periodical)

http://www.swedishbookreview.com/

Estonian

http://www.estlit.ee/?id=2

Catalan

http://www.llull.cat/llull/index.jsp?idioma=en

Dutch

http://www.nlpvf.nl/

Norwegian

http://www.norla.no/en/information

Polish

http://www.bookinstitute.pl/

South Africa (books in English, plus translations from Zulu, Afrikaans, Sotho, etc.)

http://tiny.cc/r1qKa

Finland

http://www.finlit.fi/fili/en/



*

There are many other ones for other nations and languages. This merely represents the handful I've consulted over recent years. But these websites will give you an idea that there are many authors writing and publishing right now, anno 2008, all over Europe (and, of course, beyond). The Wikipedia is helpful, but on some of these websites you can sometimes also find information about new books, prices, bookshops, and so on. I will continue to add websites as I find them.

[elcalifornio]

I like to read Eurozine every now and again; it compiles a number of articles in English (primarily) as well as the original language and other European languages into which the article has been translated. Also check out their sections on Journals and Literary Perspectives:

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/200...inerev-en.html

http://www.eurozine.com/comp/literaryperspectives.html

[Eric]

Eurozine is a good source of information and links up, as I see, with Sign & Sight, the German website. Many perspectives are opened there.

However, as someone who has translated five books from the Estonian, three of which are novels, I did find it a trifle strange that the Eurozine article on Estonian literature, seemed to suggest that Estonian was still waiting for the "great Estonian novel". If smaller countries wait, by undefined criteria, for the greatest novel ever written, they will be waiting till the cows come home.

Estonia, though a "potty little country" of only one million native-speakers of their language, has done rather well internationally by getting their literature translated into all the major European languages (e.g. English, French, German, Russian, Spanish) plus a number of smaller ones. Their author Jaan Kross nearly won the Nobel Prize, but now that he has died, he never will, as the prize is never awarded posthumously. Their exile author Karl Ristikivi wrote a novel resembling "Steppenwolf" by Herman Hesse, which is highly regarded. Novels by Anton Hansen Tammsaare are being translated into French, English, Finnish and other languages. Tammsaare wrote in the 1930s.

What I am saying is that Eurozine is a good eye-opener, but always check the names and reputations there with other sources. It's like the Wikipedia, which is great, but not to be relied upon 100% of the time. You have to form your own canon. You have always to be careful to distinguish between genuinely great authors, and those that may be trendy now, but will be forgotten in a decade's time.

[Stewart]

author Jaan Kross nearly won the Nobel Prize, but now that he has died, he never will, as the prize is never awarded posthumously.

And, as I understand it, the nominations for the Nobel Prize are locked up for fifty years, before eventually being disclosed. So unless Jaan Kross was in the running more than fifty years ago, how could you know he "nearly won"?

[Eric]

Yes, the Swedes like to keep us all guessing. In fifty years it will hardly matter who was the rival of Pinter or Montale, but I'd love to know who were snubbed when the committee elected their own duo, Johnson and Martinson. I do believe these two are genuinely good authors (I've not read much of either), but it was a bit much giving the prize to people sitting on the very committee, if I've got my facts straight.

However, in Estonian circles a persistent rumour circulates that in 1991, when Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel, her two rivals for the prize were the Fleming Hugo Claus and Jaan Kross. This would tie in perfectly with the fact that The Harvill Press, as it then was, started looking for translators for two Kross books in about 1992. Kross was still estimated to be in the running for the prize. Why otherwise would some totally unknown author from a forgotten Soviet republic have attracted the attention of a London publishing house? Nobel winners mean increased sales.

The main catch for a translator would have been "Between Three Plagues", a tetralogy of novels, set in the Tallinn of the Middle Ages. I received the consolation prize to translate: "The Conspiracy and Other Stories". Ironically, "Between Three Plagues" has not yet appeared in English, although an American translation is being prepared.

Two other novels by Kross had been translated via the Finnish version by an American friend of the Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg, i.e. Anselm Hollo, himself of Finnish birth. My translation of the six stories was the third Kross book to appear in Britain. The two novels were Kross' most famous ones internationally, "The Czar's Madman" and "Professor Martens' Departure". [I'll start a separate thread about Kross in due course with more details.]

But I genuinely believe, given the signs and tokens, that Kross was being considered for the Nobel in about 1990 (at the time that the Soviet Union was disintegrating), and that someone in the know leaked the information. Because the number of people that knew Estonian in the West were very few, and anyone asked to support Kross' candidature could well have blabbed, as there is a sizeable exile community of well-connected Estonians in Stockholm, dating back all the way to the main exodus in 1944. And the entries for the Nobel for literature are contemplated and ruminated upon by a band of eighteen Swedes, housed in the Nobel Library in Stockholm, in Gamla Stan [the old town], not a million miles away from what used to be the Estonian bookshop in that city (now a lamp shop...).

So, I am the first to admit that I have no proof whatsoever that this rumour is true, but its plausibility makes me believe it.

*

One inaccuracy in my last posting. I may have given the mistaken impression that Karl Ristikivi exists in translation. He almost doesn't. This is another weird Swedish story. Ristikivi fled to Sweden in 1944 and lived near Stockholm until his death in 1977. Yet not one of his fifteen or so novels has ever been translated into Swedish, his country of residence, let alone any other language - until one appeared recently in French. Why this is remains a mystery. This is a stylistically sophisticated author, whose 1953 novel "Night of Souls" would be well worth publishing. (Strangely enough, not the one the French translator chose.)

[elcalifornio]

Eric,

Aside from Kross, can you recommend any other Estonian writers (including what you've translated)? Aside from the "big" names like Kaplinski, those mentioned in the article are virtually non-existent in English (at least from a cursory Amazon search). I like Kaplinski and would like to see some other Estonian work.

[Eric]

El Californio:

Yes, I can go on and on about Estonian literature. The problem is access to it, as there are few translations into English.

Anyway, I've already sneakily been plugging my latest book-length translation from Estonian. This is in the Library of Babel - European Literature section on this website, if you read what I've written about Friedebert Tuglas:

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...read.php?t=104

Also here, in the same section, you can find my review of the novel "The Beauty of History" by Viivi Luik, this time translated by Hildi Hawkins:

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...hread.php?t=97

Going to have a post-prandial nap. When I return, I'll give you a few more URLs. If you know French, German or a Scandinavian language, you can read several other books that have not appeared in English yet.

[Bjorn]

I'd love to know who were snubbed when the committee elected their own duo, Johnson and Martinson. I do believe these two are genuinely good authors (I've not read much of either), but it was a bit much giving the prize to people sitting on the very committee, if I've got my facts straight.

Apart from calling the Academy a committee (sorry, pet peeve) you're spot on, AFAIK. And that's the reason it will probably be a good long while before any other Scandinavians get it. (Not that we haven't had our share already.) Not to mention that the debate that followed the award was most likely a contributing factor to Martinsson's suicide.

Thanks for all the info on Estonian authors! I don't think I've ever read anything from the Baltic states (though I've had a couple of Latvian novels in my to-be-read pile since... forever). Looks like I've got some exploring to do.

[Eva]

One inaccuracy in my last posting. I may have given the mistaken impression that Karl Ristikivi exists in translation. He almost doesn't. This is another weird Swedish story. Ristikivi fled to Sweden in 1944 and lived near Stockholm until his death in 1977. Yet not one of his fifteen or so novels has ever been translated into Swedish, his country of residence, let alone any other language - until one appeared recently in French. Why this is remains a mystery. This is a stylistically sophisticated author, whose 1953 novel "Night of Souls" would be well worth publishing. (Strangely enough, not the one the French translator chose.)

I?d explain the choice of the French translator Jean Pascal Ollivry with his musical tasteMonsieur Ollivry used to sing in the Gregorian chant group Vox Clamantis (they are good!) and the opening novel of Ristikivi?s great historical cycle might have captured him with its medieval material and setting (via dolorosa of the last Hohenstaufen Conradin through Germany and Italy in the second half of the 13th century) but also with its chronicle style which has some resemblance to the Gregorian chant. If you can read French, try to find L'?tendard en flammes (Paris, Alvik 2005) and read it. You won?t regret it. Don?t be disheartened by the thought that this is a part of a cycle ? every novel is readable independently.

[Eric]

I'm going to read Ristikivi in Estonian. I wonder whether Eva's reading Umberto Eco is co?ncidental with the fact that Eco has just received an honorary doctorate at the University of Tartu. Eco is, of course, a semioticist and Tartu is famous for Yuri Lotman and the Moscow Tartu School of Semiotics.

[Eric]

Looking at the Index website, which I am doing now after a couple of years, it strikes me as how unnavigable it is. Here's the URL:

http://www.unesco.org/xtrans/bsstatexp.aspx


One daft thing I found was this, when I keyed in "Estonia":

Statistics on Index Translationum database for "Country = EST"

"TOP 10" AuthorCartland Barbara120Christie Agatha88Lindgren Astrid80Bô Yin Râ76Brown Sandra65Nurk Enn65Porgasaar Kristina64Roberts Nora63Doncova Dar'ja Arkad'evna58Gardner Erle Stanley51

This mysterious list does not explain what the numbers mean (number of book?) and even the non-Estonian scholar will notice that names such as Barbara Cartland and Enn Nurk and Kristina Porgasaar are mentioned. If this is translations into Estonian, what are Estonian names doing there? If it is for books out of Estonian why the names of the famous foreign authors? And I have never heard of the two Estonians, either as writers or translators. One has written a mathematics book that has been translated.

What are these UNESCO people being paid to do?

[Eric]

I was in fact reminded of Johnson-Martinson business by a posting (maybe by Beer Good) about Martinson's nasty bayonet suicide. I only heard about that relatively recently, although I've known the Swedish language for some 35 years, and lived in Sweden for six of them.

I've even been in the building where the "committee" sit, because the Swedish PEN Club, whose meetings I used to attend in the 1980s, once had a meeting where the former prisoner of Castro, Armando Valledares told graphic tales about what "fun" it was to be in a Cuban prison. What I remember from that evening was mainly that one Swedish armchair communist was busy trying to pick holes in Valledares' story, as if the latter were the wickedest lackey to the Yanks alive. Twenty-two years is rather a long prison sentence, methinks. It was meant to be thirty, but the PEN Club got him out. If you can stomach the rubric "Capitalism Magazine", please read the following text, which is from about the time I went to that evening:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=625

[Stewart]

Here's a site that offers a database of translated Hungarian titles into a variety of languages. Given the recent rise/interest in Hungarian titles (enhanced perhaps by Kert?sz Imre winning the Nobel Prize in Literature) in names like Szerb Antal, Szabo Magda, Karinthy Frigyes and Karinthy Ferenc, Esterh?zy P?ter, M?rai S?ndor, and Kr?dy Gyula, it could prove an interesting site to refer to.

[nnyhav]

For (or from) Hungarian to English, I've found George Szirtes translations(downscroll) good (Anna ?des by Dezs? Kosztol?nyi) to excellent (War and War by L?szl? Krasznahorkai -- I eagerly await his rendering of S?t?ntang?), and he blogs as well ... (btw I'm currently reading Liquidation)

[Stewart]

I eagerly await his rendering of S?t?ntang?)

Ooh. I'd heard of the Hungarian film by that name and had been tempted to buy it (seven hours though!) but I wasn't aware, presuming it is, that it was based on a book. That's good to know, as I like to read books before I see films except where I can help it, like Polanski's The Tenant, which I'd seen twice and only found out was based on a book recently.

On the subject of links, though, I was just checking the forum stats, to see where visitors had come in from, what search terms were being used, etc. and I noticed we had one visitor from this Brazilian site (looks film based, if the images are anything to go by - perhaps Heteronym can fill us in here) which has a links page called 2.500 LINKS LITER?RIOS and it pretty much does what it says on the tin. What a fantastic resource, listing book clubs, publishers, national libraries, publisher blogs, author blogs, book reviews, festivals, awards, and much more. Excellent! I can see this being a valuable resource. (And we're the only forum listed on forums which makes me - dare I say it? - astonished and smug at the same time.

[nnyhav]

Complete-Review organizes their offerings by nationality/language as well:
http://www.complete-review.com/maindex/maindex.html#nat

[Purple Peacock Books]

We have been translating French literature (modern classics and contemporary) into Bengali for the past 5 years now and have done Genet, Duras, Gavalda and now Atiq Rahimi. We are looking to spread our wings and find more world literature. Any ideas where to find details on this?