Literature in translation

Since its founding a decade ago, Tilted Axis has gained a reputation for bringing out a wide range of groundbreaking, genre-defying literature in translation. 

With only eight employees working part-time on a tight budget, it has published 42 books translated from 18 languages, including Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Eastern Armenian, Kazakh, Kannada, Bengali, Uzbek and Turkish. Alexandra Alter, NYTimes

Why 2024 was the year of the audiobook

Audiobooks aren’t new: the American Foundation for the Blind pressed recordings of books on to vinyl records in 1932. Later, books became popular on cassette tape and then CDs. But the smartphone era has given the format a new lease of life, and data from the Publishers Association (PA) shows that UK audiobook downloads increased by 17% in the year between 2022 and 2023.

The official statistics for 2024 won’t be released until the spring, but it’s already clear that “2024 has been another record year for audiobooks [...] Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The Guardian

Latin American authors on rise

Today’s boom in Latin American literature is spearheaded by women, from Fernanda Melchor, to Mariana Enriquez, to Samanta Schweblin, who engage with femicide, trauma and violence through horror and speculative fiction. Madeleine Feeny, The Guardian

 

Nella foto: Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin

 

si parla dell'International Booker prize 2024

Reading is so sexy

They have killed skinny jeans and continue to shame millennials for having side partings in their hair. They think using the crying tears emoji to express laughter is embarrassing. But now comes a surprising gen Z plot twist. One habit that those born between 1997 and 2012 are keen to endorse is reading – and it’s physical books rather than digital that they are thumbing. Chloe Mac Donnell, The Guardian

Proust, ChatGPT and the case of the forgotten quote

The other day, I was looking for a quote in Proust, so I thought I would ask ChatGPT. Here’s how it went.

EB: Is there a passage in In Search of Lost Time when Proust talks about how love affairs repeat themselves, and says that when you’re writing about a love affair in the past, you’re often drawing inspiration from a different love affair in the present?

CHATGPT: Yes ... Elif Batuman, The Guardian

The End of the English Major

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. Nathan Heller, New Yorker

un articolo molto interessante, che collega il declino delle humanities ai costi stellari delle università americane e ai conseguenti debiti che gli studenti devono ripagare alla fine degli studi, ma anche a molti altri fattori, come al fatto che molti studenti hanno idee vaghe su che cosa siano le humanities. Colpa nostra, anche. Comunque da leggere.

sempre sul New Yorker, un bell'articolo sui mondi di Italo Calvino, Mavellous Things, Merve Emre.

ancora su Old Babes in the Wood (Chatto & Windus),  Lisa O'Kelly interevista Margaret Atwood, The Guardian

e anche:  

Growing numbers of women in UK are joining forces with friends to run independent bookshops, Nadia Khomami, The Guardian

e la longlist dell'International Booker Prize, sempre sul Guardian

 

Leggere

 the joy of reading slowly:

Elizabeth Strout, the Booker-shortlisted author of Olive Kitteridge and the Lucy Barton books, is also taking books at a more tranquil pace. “I was never a fast reader [but] I think I read more slowly than I used to. This is partly to savour every word. The way a sentence sounds to my ear is so important to me in the whole reading experience, and I always want to get it all – like when you read poetry.” Susie Mesure, The Guardian

the joy of reading everything:

n the summer of 2011, during the quieter days that followed hurricane Irene, the writer Phyllis Rose headed to the New York Society Library on the Upper East Side of the city in search of a 1936 novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Hurricane [...] Once it was in her hand, however, her enthusiasm for it began to trickle away. [...] The question was: what should she read instead? [...] This was unnerving. It made her mildly anxious, her sudden awareness of all these unknown authors and their unknown books, and perhaps as a means of assuaging this unease, she began to formulate a plan. What if she was to pick, at random, a fiction shelf and read her way through its contents? What, if anything, would she learn? Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

Book Clubs e traduzioni

Book clubs, by their nature, interfere with the way a book is meant to be experienced. By removing enjoyment as an explicit factor in picking up or sticking with the book (because you’re reading it for the book club), they call into question the worth of the exercise as a whole. Naomi Kanakia, LA Review of Books

una lunga discussione sul perché i book club sono noiosi e come si dovrebbe discutere di un libro. E un'altra lunga discussione sull'arte della traduzione,"The Art of Betrayal: Translation in an Age of Suspicion"

Each language is a world unto itself and has been at least since the destruction of the Tower of Babel. It may share certain territories or weather systems with others, but it is not, nor ever can be identical to another. As Emily Apter pointed out in her introduction to the Dictionary of Untranslatables, “Nothing is exactly the same in one language as in another, so the failure of translation is always necessary and absolute. Apart from its neglect of the fact that some pretty good equivalencies are available, this proposition rests on a mystification, on a dream of perfection we cannot even want, let alone have.” Tess Lewis, The Hudson Review

What Makes Censors Tick?

[...] a “censor is one who seeks to exert control over the culture through law, based on the idea that he or she, speaking for the community, has a right to draw the boundary lines for speech.” The censor is convinced that “some forms of expression are so vile or dangerous that they should be restricted, or so valuable that they should be compelled.” Consequently, censors “claim the moral sanction to speak for the collective, either by enforcing ‘community standards’ against evil expression or by mandating speech that they believe serves the ‘public interest.’” Stephen Rohde, LARB

di fatto Stephen Rohde cita un paragrafo di un libro sulla censura uscito alla fine dello scorso anno, Robert Corn-Revere, The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder: The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma (Cambridge University Press)

un altro libro curioso, uscito alla fine dell'anno scorso, è quello di  Jonathan Purkis, Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us About Humanity (Manchester University Press)

The earliest known written account of hitchhiking was by a student named Charles Brown Jr, who in 1916 described his 800-mile journey from Fort Wayne, Indiana to New York City. He got rides from, among others, a priest, an artist, a teacher and a doctor, the last of these so fascinated by Brown’s adventure that, despite being en route to a medical emergency, he overshot his destination by ten miles.  Mike Jay, LRB

Old Bookstores

Marius Kociejowski opens his enthralling memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade,” (Biblioasis) by observing that bookstores have begun to follow record stores into nonexistence. “With every shop that closes so, too, goes still more of the serendipity that feeds the human spirit.” While there may be “infinitely more choice” in buying from online dealers, “to be spoiled for choice extinguishes desire.” As he says, “I want dirt; I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery. I want to be able to step into a place and have the sense that there I’ll find a book, as yet unknown to me, which to some degree will change my life.” Michael Dirda, WP

What Comes After Meritocracy?

The system of educational selection based on standardized testing to identify the intellectually talented is now under withering attack, and it is in the process of failing. The projects to replace it with more representative systems are appealing but ultimately inadequate for addressing the range of problems the country faces. Fortunately, it is possible to identify an approach that is adequate to our condition. That approach focuses on selection in line with the civic ideals elite colleges already profess but do not fully engage. Steven Brint, Chronicle of Higher Education

un articolo interessante sul declino della meritocrazia e su quali criteri affidare la selezione degli studenti.
Inoltre, i piaceri dei romanzoni...

The unique pleasures delivered in long books are unforgettable enough that every reader will likely have his own catalog, and some instances are quite famous. One pleasure arises when a forgotten minor character returns unexpectedly to divert the plot, years after his role seemed at an end. (It happens memorably in different volumes of Balzac’s The Human Comedy, as in The Black Sheep, when the belligerent brother, Philippe, returns to foil the new bully menacing our hero.)

Another occurs when a protagonist absorbs an antagonist’s understanding of an event long after its reality seemed fixed, revising our conception of what has transpired. Mark Greif, The Atlantic

 

 

Smells

If all our genius lies in our nostrils, as Nietzsche remarked, the nose is an untrained genius, brilliant but erratic. The human nose can detect a dizzying array of smells, with a theoretical upper limit of one trillion smells—yet many of us are incapable of describing these smells in words more precise than smelly and fragrant. Jude Stewart, The Believer

Un bell'articolo sugli odori, un altro su come si legge un libro (sono sempre stata incuriosita da come si legge!). 

The 20-page rule: Novelist Mark Billingham advises readers to angrily launch a book across the room after 20 non-gripping pages – but almost 40% of people will keep going right to the end, The Guardian

infine Hannah Arendt, sempre affascinante:

As her friend Mary McCarthy once said, Arendt was “a magnificent stage diva”.  Christopher Bray, The Critic

Ebooks Are an Abomination

Personalmente, ho adottato senza problemi, anzi con piacere, il kindle. Di seguito un interessante articolo sul perché c'è chi lo ama e chi o odia, e come questo ha a che fare con quel che significa per noi leggere.

Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why. [...] But what it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down. Ian Bogost, The Atlantic

Trovare le parole giuste: From adoption to sexuality, early pregnancy to death, a palliative care doctor explores the discussions we often try to avoid. Joanna Cannon, Guardian

Elena Ferrante parla di sé

Rispondendo a domande molto interessanti da parte di traduttori ed editor americani e inglesi.

For Lila and Elena, the experience of reading Little Women is extremely important. What (other) literary figures affected you as an adolescent? Stefanie Hetze, bookseller, Germany

[...] But the book I read and reread obsessively was Wuthering Heights. Today I still find extraordinary the way it describes love, mixing good and bad feelings without any break. Catherine is someone who should be revisited from time to time: she’s useful, when you write, for avoiding the danger of sickly-sweet female characters. The Guardian.

Reading Posture

Loving to Read

"If anything, the fervor of the Janeites [i folli amanti di Jane Austen] puts into relief a fact almost too obvious to notice: the world of books is a romantic world. Romance structures literary life, and to be a reader is, often, to follow its choreography, from susceptibility and discovery (“I just saw it there in the bookstore!”) to infatuation, intimacy, identification, and obsession. We connect with books in an intellectual way, but the most valuable relationships we have with them are emotional; to say that you merely admire or respect a book is, on some level, to insult it. Feelings are so fundamental to literary life that it can be hard to imagine a way of relating to literature that doesn’t involve loving it. Without all those emotions, what would reading be?" Joshua Rothman, newyorker.
Nell'articolo sono citati gli autori cult del momento e, sorpresa sorpresa, c'è la nostra Elena Ferrante! insieme a Karl Ove Knausgaard. Il libro recensito è Loving Literature: A Cultural History di Deidre Shauna Lynch (University of Chicago Press). (La bella foto è di Ferdinando Scianna)

Una lezione di stile

Alfred Bendiner: Sweet Innocence, 1936

For some time, I’d wanted to teach these two texts, both of which I’d long admired: the opening twenty-five pages of Rebecca West’s Greenhouse with Cyclamens I (1946), an excerpt from the first section of her lengthy report on the Nuremberg trials; and William Finnegan’s 1994 account of a trial in Manhattan in which he sat on the jury. Both had appeared in The New Yorker. It was partly a coincidence that we were reading them when so much national attention was focused on the Brown and Garner cases. ...
I’d thought it would be fun and interesting to teach these essays in a course on literary style, as a very general lesson about how two different styles can be used to portray a similar setting: in the texts in question, courtrooms in which cases of vastly unequal magnitude were being tried. Francine Prose, nybooks

La Moby Dick Marathon

La "Moby Dick Marathon" si è tenuta dal 14 al 16 novembre in vari locali di Manhattan dove scrittori e non hanno letto l'intero romanzo di Melville. A Joshua Ferris è toccato leggere un punto particolarmente ostico. "The novelist Joshua Ferris was standing in the basement of the Ace Hotel in Midtown on Friday night, looking frustrated. He had just read ten minutes of “Moby-Dick” to a crowd of more than a hundred devotees. He was pretty sure he hadn’t nailed his passage. “I was confronted with a shit-ton of tribal names!” Ferris said. He opened his copy of the book and pointed to the passage, which read: “But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical.” He shook his head. “That word has three ‘g’ ’s in it and only three consonants! And this one has four ‘e’ ’s in it.” newyorker.

Libri che fanno piangere

Un interessante articolo su quali sono i libri che fanno piangere, e come e perché. Pelagia Horgan, "Tears have had a surprisingly prominent place in the history of the novel. Readers have always asked about the role that emotion plays in reading: What does it mean to be deeply moved by a book? Which books are worthy objects of our feelings? In different eras, people answered those questions in different ways". newyorker.

Leavitt on Leavitt

Leavitt parla di sé e dei libri che legge:

What books are currently on your night stand?

Dorothy L. Sayers’s “Gaudy Night,” Georges Simenon’s “The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien” and Gretchen Rubin’s “Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill.”

Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?

Penelope Fitzgerald. “The Beginning of Spring,” “The Gate of Angels” and “The Blue Flower” are novels I return to again and again, with joy and awe.

Among writers working today, I have the greatest admiration for Norman Rush. I also admire John Weir, who deserves to be far better known than he is. And I was floored by Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. nyt.