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The 2010 Tournament of Books by ToB Staff - The Morning News The 2010 Tournament of Books Shortlist

The Letter as Literature's Political and Poetic Body by Tawada Yoko, translated from German by Susan Bernofsky The problems of reading within and between writing systems; via bookforumblog: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tawada-Yoko/3208

Over here in the States, April is National Poetry Month (or NaPoMo, whatever the postmodernists may say). Strangely, the top googlenewshit on it is Canadian. But 'tis worth celebrating, even if it does get cheesey at times.

Poet, novelist, essayist, critic, translator ... so opens the bookjacket backblurb on my copy of Collected Poems (Doubleday '58, '61). I won't rehash here the bioverviews provided at the Trust Society, kirjasto or wiki. I've been prompted to open this thread upon completing The White Goddess...

Alma Books (via Literary Saloon, via BlogSpy) informs that Barbara Wright is no longer with us: Regarding her first (and its first) translation of Exercises in Style: That her last words should be a revised edition of Exercises in Style (how many revisions? 99?) is a fitting conclusion to a...

Best Translated Book Winners were announced at Melville House's bookstore in DUMBO this evening. Chad Post opened the proceedings at 8PM, introducing Francisco Goldman, who, after prefactory remarks on the art of translation, announced the winners, first in poetry then in prose (I mean the...

Aviya Kushner in Wilson Quarterly: McCulture (via 3%)

Liveblogged: Fiction Roberto Bola?o, 2666. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Marilynne Robinson, Home, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project, Riverhead M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, West Virginia University Press Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge...

Cao Xueqin's The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber) is an 18th century classic of Chinese literature. Billed as a novel of manners set amidst the decline of a family of the lesser nobility, it is considerably more than that, bringing into its ambit mythic, artistic (not merely...

So says wiki, but his role in resuscitating the genre is softpedalled; first translating forgotten works from Chinese into English, he apparently wrote and translated between Chinese, Japanese and English (and Dutch I presume, not to mention compiling an English-Blackfoot dictionary). Jan Mbali...

Catch Context 22, wherein translation is always at issue: READING CULTURE How Was It for You?: On Cooperative Translation Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman Premises of a new Translation Pedagogy: Changing the Paradigm of Cultural Studies Elizabeth Lowe Translation Editing: An Unedited...

French culture’s existential angst By Christopher Caldwell (Weekly Standard sr ed [surprising considering the source]) [link up top for full article] I should add that I suspect that the stats above relate to major publishing houses; university and indie presses may well take the figure up...

Ign?cio de Loyola Brand?o: Zero (trans Ellen Watson, intro Thomas Colchie): at least ****0, + maybe: "A wild, surreal novel, vulgar, funny, self-conscious, painful. It is done in short takes, each with a headline: a kitchen sink kind of book, envisioning the hideous nature of life under a...

Ah Cheng: The Chess Master (bilinguil,trans WJF Jenner) ****0 While Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle remains the acme of gamewriting, this is a worthy contender (along with Kawabata's The Master of Go), and is of particular interest in merging modernity with tradition in both theme and composition...

From FT Arts&Weekend: William Dalrymple on Moonlight?s children At partition in 1947, the writers of India were, like everything else in south Asia, divided in two. The madness of the situation was wonderfully satirised by the Pakistani Urdu writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, in his short story ?Toba...

Lucy Kellaway in today's Financial Times: Managers can learn a great deal from fiction, or so thinks Sandra Sucher. She teaches a course at Harvard Business School in which she makes chief executives sit down and talk about novels. She thinks that business leaders should steal the idea of book...

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (trans Grace Frick, also amanuensis) ****0+ Historical autobiography, followed by bibliographic and compositional reflections. My only slight cavil is that more liberalism is projected back than seems warranted (though still so much as to be remarkable...

Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line (trans H. William Tjalsma) starts out over the top (see below), and soars ever higher from there before crashing back down to earth. Drunken exuberance reverently irreverent of soviet, religious and literary traditions, the last of which it treats...

Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa: Running the gamut (or is it gauntlet?) from A to Z and back again; the constraint (of which one is always aware, or one of them anyway, as others seem to be in force at times, provisionally, checking as one progresses) interacts with the story in curious ways...

Juan Goytisolo, Makbara (trans Helen Lane): recently reissued by Dalkey Archive. One of the rare instances where Complete-Review doesn't get it (no sense of humor on evolving issues), but does get that it's a bit much. It's a lot much. Such much! Over the top at times, including in the meta...