Recent content by Bubba

My list will look a lot like other peoples', except I've changed the headings a bit: 5 Authors You Don't Want To Read For the First Time Karl Ove (God no) László Krasznahorkai (praised by too many people whose taste and discernment I'm slightly skeptical of) John Williams (no explanation...

By Night in Chile is highly unlikely to make you change your mind.

I haven't actually ever finished a novel by Machado de Assis; I started a couple in English when I was a good deal younger, maybe still an adolescent, but could never get into them. Now that I read Portuguese, I'd like to try again, but it's hard to find his novels in Portuguese where I live, or...

On some blog or another I read that the only contemporary writer Spaniard Andrés Trapiello had a good word for in his diary was Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro. The blogger was exaggerating, but when I was in a bookstore in town (and conveniently armed with 50 euros in gift certificates) and...

I have nothing particular to say about Cather, other perhaps than that for years now I have enjoyed her books more than those of just about any other American writer. At the office today, I also read and was moved by an online version of "Neighbour Rosicky," a long story from Obscure Destinies...

Excellent, Settembrini. I think I like that "dinosaur" microfiction better now than I did when it was an enigma.

WLF has been pestering me lately every time I log in about how I haven't posted in a while and why don't I post about something I've recently read. Since I can make WLF happy and promote some of my work at the same time, I figure I might as well. By which I mean that I've recently published (and...

I'd like to read some Dutch literature, as I've found, from my study of German, that I can halfway read Dutch. In preparation, I bought myself a big Dutch-English dictionary. The problem is finding something to read. Here in France, I can find bilingual collections of short stories meant for...

I've noticed in many of Eric's posts about translation the apparent conviction that publishers in the U.S. are more receptive to translations than are publishers in the U.K. I'm not entirely sure this conviction is well founded. I myself haven't ever published a translation in the U.K. (things...

Well, here, then is a link to videos of the sessions dealing with translation at the 2012 London Book Fair. I watched (or rather listened to) a few them. Most of the advice given struck me as either wrong-headed (translators shouldn't try to buy rights themselves) or disheartening and perhaps...

All right, I recently spent three days in the British Public Records Office in Kew, flipping desperately through stacks of yellowing papers in search of particular information, dating from the Second World War, that I didn't find. But I did come across some interesting stuff in my researches...

A man in a piece I'm translating is addressed, in the third person, as "Your Lordship" (I translate). The speaker says to him: "I'll let Your Lordship know if the police ask about (you?)." Or about him? It's the third-person pronoun in French, but what is done in English? Perhaps the subject of...

I realize this is an old post, responded to (upthread) by a "former member," but, from my slight familiarity with her work, I think Kaschnitz deserves better than Mirabell's slightly condescending response. It's in no way Kaschnitz's fault that teachers assign their students her stories...

The Iowa Review has started a forum on literature and translation. I post a link to it here, as my own response--perhaps a bit immoderate--to the single article in the forum, by one L. Venuti, is looking a bit lonely.

The Matter of Reading (or La materia di Reading) is a book of sorts, written in English by Luigi Meneghello and later translated by Meneghello himself into his native Italian. I transcribe a bit from it below: "It was in England, and through the experience of English, that I learnt a number of...