I have written of the crucial importance that The Great Gatsby holds for me. As a responsible translator, therefore, it behooves me to try to explain that importance in more concrete terms.

When someone asks, “Which three books have meant the most to you?” I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer), yet if I were forced to select one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby. Had it not been for Fitzgerald’s novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there).

Writers criticise Tesco for ‘chilling’ Thai libel actions
· Leading authors sign letter to retailer’s chief executive
· Supermarket chain urged to uphold human rights

*

Jacob Russell looks at beginnings:

I wanted to begin with opening paragraphs rather than sentences, precisely to get past the “hook” –the workshop clincher that’s become a cliché of the genre. Though short fiction typically opens in medias res, a story that dispensed altogether with opening exposition would likely be received as “experimental,” or in some way, unconventional. The opening exposition, we all know, may establish setting, tone, introduce characters, present necessary facts; those are the obvious functions, but some of these may not come till later in the narrative, and none of them alone quite hit on what may be the defining features, those that truly begin the story–which initiate the process and stamp everything that follows with its particular identity, such that, were the writer to violate what has been laid out in that beginning, she would have to change it–or lose the story in a narrative cul-de-sac.

*

An interesting report from the Literary Saloon at Metaxu Cafe, on the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. An impressive line-up moderated by PW-editor Sara Nelson, and including publishers Edwin Frank (New York Review Books), Michael Krüger (German Hanser Verlag), Halfdan W. Freihow (Norwegian Font Forlag), and Morgan Entrekin (Grove/Atlantic) made for a good trans-Atlantic mix and showed up the gaps in different cultural approaches to translation and publishing.

. . . perhaps a translator is a bit like a Chinese restaurant owner, who finds himself serving mostly a non-Chinese clientele: should I assume my diners have unadventurous palates and always serve them the familiar “chow mein” and “kung-pao chicken”? Or should I assume that everybody is a potential epicurean and serve up complex flavors from regions and with ingredients that they would not have heard of? How do I transmit to my diners, in the famed dish of “Westlake Carp Braised in Vinegar,” the flute on the causeway and lingering scent of the lotus flowers just above the water?

Carlin Romano over at the Philadelphia Inquirer takes a look at some of the texts and illustrates why the task fails miserably and how it should never have been undertaken.

I’ll confine myself here to a famous soliloquy in Hamlet. You’ll remember

To be, or not to be: that is the question

No Fear’s reader-friendly version, in an inspired translation comes up with this:

The question is: is it better to be alive or dead?

Rage away . . .

It’s a lousy Napoleon cake. The cream should be a pale yellowish white and light, but this one is feverish yellow and sticky. I eat just the top and leave the rest on the plate. I ought to complain, hold the cake up in front of the lady at the counter and say: “This is a cheap imitation. I want my money back.” But I have never done that. I have never complained about anything except badly written books and the world situation, and you don’t get your money back when little Nepalese girls are sold by their families to brothels in Bangkok, or because the World Bank refuses to waive cruel loans to Uganda. On the contrary. And lousy books; they just look at you and say: “Why don’t you write one yourself, then?”

That’s what I’ve tried to do. Several times.

I stub out my fag in the revolting yellow cream and get up and leave. I could have stayed there for a while to see if Thor the poet from Skjetten would turn up on his bike as he often does at this time of day to get a cup of coffee when he’s desperate with writer’s block, which is often the case, and we could have talked about how hopeless it is, the path we have chosen and gossip over colleagues who may have received a big grant from the state or do not sell books at all, and why that isn’t in the least odd. Instead, I go by the escalator up to the first floor and go into the bookshop to see what others are up to while I am stuck. That is not inspiring. The piles left over from Christmas are still there and have not diminished at all, and there are none of mine on the shelves. That is not so strange. It is more than three years since I last published anything, and the woman behind the counter does not recognise me although I have at least twice sat in front of that counter at a small table signing books. I remember myself at eighteen reading Keats and Shelley and Byron and dreaming of publishing one book, or maybe two, which would be on everyone’s lips and be everyone’s mirror, and when they looked in that mirror they would see the people they might have been and they would have to cry, and after that I would just disappear, become one of the young dead and thus immortal, but now I am one of the middle-aged forgotten.

The book is an examination of the crippling grief and incomprehension experienced by forty-three-year-old Arvid after his family are killed in a ferry accident. His marginalization from society is all but complete. He has some commerce with his neighbour, a Kurdish immigrant who lives in one of the flats above him, but apart from the humanity they recognise in each other they have little contact, sharing only two or three words of a common language. There is a light in a flat across the road (shades of Gatsby here) where he sometimes glimpses a woman’s face.

We travel with Arvid while he drives or walks around Oslo and we are included in his recollections of memory. We watch as he begins to write again. Are involved with his slow repatriation into a bearable level of function.

This 1988 novel, translated almost flawlessly by Anne Born in 2002 is short and woven together wistfully in Petterson’s immaculate prose, recognisable from his later novels, To Siberia and Out Stealing Horses.

If you are not yet familiar with Per Petterson’s work, this novel could be a good place to begin an acquaintance.

The Broken Vase

A fan’s light tap
Was enough to chip
This flower vase
In which the roses
Now are dying.
No sound it made

But a hairline crack
Day after day
Almost unseen
Crept slowly round the glass
And dropp by dropp
The water trickled out

While the vital sap
In the roses’ stems
Grew dry.
Now no-one doubts:
“Don’t touch”, they say,
“It’s broken”.

Often, too, the hand one loves
May lightly brush against the heart
And bruise it.
Slowly then across that heart
A hidden crack will spread
And love’s fair flower perish.

The original French version is available here.

I simply do not understand how a tiny company, as we and some notable others are, can say ‘what the hell: this is a damned sight more interesting, exciting, than Dan Brown, and if we love it others will’ and sell enough copies to keep itself in tea and biscuits, and other publishers cannot.

The winner was Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa. He collected the award and a cheque for £10,000 for his novel, The Book of Chameleons, published by Arcadia. The prize is divided equally between the author and his translator from the Portuguese version, Daniel Hahn.

Here’s my plan (because it’s good to have a plan) : I am aiming to read 100 books from 100 different countries in one year.

The plan belongs to the blogger behind the website and the year in question is already more than halfway through. The books read include novels by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (Spain), Jean Cocteau (France), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Gabriel Garcia Márquez (Colombia), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Pedro Juan Gutierrez (Cuba) and Primo Levi (Italy). There are also a host of lesser-known writers. But check them out for yourself.