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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...

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...

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'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...

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...

The Cannes Film Festival closed a little ways down the road from me not too long ago. Exactly when I couldn't say. Lars von Trier's little outburst managed to rouse me, briefly, from my indifference. At one point, too, I was vaguely aware of the name of the movie that won the palme d'or. This...

All right, I've mentioned Ribeyro (1929-1994) before but hadn't wanted to start a thread on him. Although he is not widely known outside of his native Peru, he is, I think, the finest Spanish-language storyteller of the second half of the twentieth century (I haven't read them all, course). His...

Or maybe (ha, ha) I should say brew (yes, I know, lowest form of wit and all that), seeing as the title of the memoir in question is Three Cups of Tea. One of those "as told to" books, it has turned out to be the largely made up story (not to mention execrably written, which anyone could have...

Carmen Laforet's Nada was first published in 1945 or '46; its author was still in her early twenties. It's a good book, too: fresh, never a chore to read. Don't let its age or descriptions of the plot (such as it is) and gloomy Barcelona setting put you off. There's a fairly recent translation...

About twenty years ago I read Johnston's My Brother Jack and both admired and enjoyed it. I remember few of the details: a narrator, David, who, unlike his brother Jack, is a bit of a worldly success but not an altogether admirable fellow; a highly palpable sense of place (inter-war Melbourne)...

I don't read much poetry, and I have nothing to say about Georg Trakl other than that the poem I paste below, a timely poem I have never more than dimly understood, made a deep impression on me when I first came across it ten or fifteen years ago. There are translations of it on the Interwebz...

Not long ago I submitted a piece to a fairly well known literary journal from Toronto; to my surprise, it was accepted for publication in an upcoming issue. Later, though, it was pulled from that issue because, as the managing editor told me, the journal receives Canadian government funding, all...

Spilling black bile all over the forum is oddly satisfying but perhaps not ultimately for the best. So I will reverse course for a bit and start a thread--I imagine it will be a short one--on a writer's diary (La tentaci?n del fracaso, or "The Temptation of Failure") I admire greatly. Diaries...

An interesting writer, born and raised in Hungary, which he fled in 1956, later a Canadian citizen (I don't know what flag to choose for him), and most well known for the novel In Praise of Older Women. A very nice novel, written in English, it recounts the coming of age of a teenager in...