My A.M. Homes post which mentions translation (and which seems to have fired several of you up based on your emails...who knew?) got me thinking about other new/forthcoming works in translation that aren't Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. There's been much buzz recently about works in translation and it struck me that many books I read are works in translation, but I'm not wholly aware of that when I begin reading the book. It also begs the question that A. M. Homes alluded to during her reading: what is lost in translation?
I'm reminded of my year-long trek through Proust in English and then in French and then side-by-side to see what was lost in the turning into English. On the whole, the "gist" was there, the big stuff and many nuances came out on the other side fully intact. Yet, there were subtle shifts in language, in idiom and the like, that were missed. Those "missed" bits left me wishing I spoke several other languages well enough to read the works in their original tongue. This seems especially important for writers who really play with language, with double, triple and hidden meanings. I think also of those writers whose work is especially lyrical, rhythmic. How to capture this in translation? Alas, I do not speak any other languages and so I must throw myself at the mercy of the excellent translators working today.
A few new works that have caught my eye in the last few days and that I'm curious to check out:
- Lauren Cerand of the super-stylish Lux Lotus features a just-for-us translated section of Evi Labropoulou's forthcoming novel, All the Lucky Apples. Very yummy stuff - makes me wonder what other excellent writers we are missing because of the translation gap. Also see Cerand's recent interview with Evi.
- Laura Restrepo's Delirium has been hailed by Carolyn See as "complex & mind-blowing." Quite a statement for See, in any language. I'm always a sucker for books about professors, so there's that. Restrepo's book was translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Wimmer has translated many well-known works of Mario Vargas Llosa and recently translated both Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Fresan's Kensington Gardens.
- Mallarme's Divagations has been on my mind. I know it won't be a necessarily "fun" read -- but I'm so curious to know what he thought of some of the great writers of his time. The table of contents alone is enough to inspire grandeur. He's got a section called "Important Miscellaneous News Briefs" that contains chapters such as: Gold, Accusation, Cloisters, Magic and Bucolic. Very interesting. Translated from the French by Barbara Johnson.
- My eye has also been on Carlo Emilio Gadda's That Awful Mess on the via Merulana that's been expertly (I'm told) translated from the Italian by William Weaver. Weaver has translated Italo Calvino's work and Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose.
