i has a stik . . .
Being, in so many respects, a "late adopter" of the tools and norms of this medium, I've only just figured out that it is possible to set up an Amazon wishlist and then put it out in public space.
In case, you know, any reader out there wants to express support in some tangible way....
This is only slightly more dignified than the posture assumed in the catchphrase "ain't too proud to beg."
TRUMANSBURG, TOMPKINS COUNTY — An unusual search is going on in Tompkins County. The search is on in Trumansburg for a group of buffalo that escaped from a farm today. The buffalo were apparently wandering around a state park and police are still trying to locate them. We're told this is breeding season for buffalo. If you happen to see the herd, do not approach it.
Paul Bart, a Trumansburg resident who lives near Taughannock Falls State Park, said people have been wandering off the trails near his home to tell him his buffalo are loose.
“But we don't have any buffalo,” he said.
At the Harper’s blog, Wyatt Mason interviews Adam Thirlwell, the author of The Delighted States: A book of novels, romances, & their unknown translators, containing ten languages, set on four continents, & accompanied by maps, portraits, squiggles, illustrations, & a variety of helpful indexes.
As a whole, the interview is really interesting, especially because a huge chunk of it focuses on Thirlwell’s translation of Nabokov’s “Mademoiselle O,” one of only two stories Nabokov wrote in French.
They get into a lot of details concerning the translation, especially the aspects of the story that proved troublesome and Dmitri Nabokov’s revisions to Thirlwell’s translation is particularly interesting.
But this the bit that grabbed my attention—mainly because we are publishing Macedonio Fernandez’s Museo de la Novela de la Eterna next year:
Can we expect to see you take on a longer translation in the future?
I’d love there to be more translated from South American writers from the early twentieth century: Roberto Arlt, Macedonio Fernandez. Then a more complete version of Central Europeans like Bohumil Hrabal. And also more from less well-known periods of major literatures, like the libertine French novels of the eighteenth century, by novelists like Crébillon fils. As for me, though, I don’t know when I’ll ever undertake any of these. I was asked by my publisher if I wanted to translate Madame Bovary—which initially excited me and then I thought of the time it would take—about the time, basically, it would take to write Madame Bovary. I wish more novelists translated novels, but novelists, rightly, in a way, are selfish, and translation of long works takes up so much time. The great novelist-translators like Nabokov and Kundera are massively concerned with the translation of their own works, not the translations of other people. Nabokov’s Pushkin is an uncharacteristically altruistic monument.
(Also worth checking out Mason’s post about The Delighted States.)
In honor of Raymond Chandler's 120th birthday yesterday, Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy asked a slew of folks, including Tod Goldberg, the Mystery Bookstore's Bobby McCue, Denise Hamilton and yours truly, to send birthday greetings and gifts to the hardboiled legend:
Goldberg: "I like to give people presents they can use, so I'd probably give Chandler a shovel and a pick-axe, which would be useful in getting out of the grave and for beating to death all the people — including this one — who've ripped him off over the years. I suspect Chandler would also find it very odd to go into a Barnes & Noble and find that every mid-list crime novelist is being compared to him, and usually favorably, in their jacket copy. In fact, I don't know a single crime writer (including members of my family!) who've not been called Chandleresque, which makes me think most people haven't really read much Raymond Chandler."
Judith Freeman, author of THE LONG EMBRACE: RAYMOND CHANDLER AND THE WOMAN HE LOVED: "A night with Cissy. And of course red roses."
There's more in the comments, too.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, the new issue of the Hungarian Quarterly is now available. (Some pieces are available online, but in most instances, there’s just a sample.)
There are quite a few interesting pieces, including an interview with Magda Szabó (whose most famous novel—The Door appears to be out-of-print on Amazon . . . Can this possibly be right?), and a “Close-Up” featuring called Doom and Gloom that begins:
I’ve often wondered what would happen were Hungary to slip off the face of the Earth from one day to the next. Would anyone care? Who’d mourn, who’d rejoice? What would the world stand to lose or gain from such an odd cataclysm?
Although it’s not really made explicit, this issue seems to have a special focus on Gyula Krudy. There’s a piece called Gyula Krúdy’s Visions of Unexpected Death, a couple short stories by him (Last Cigar at the Gray Arabian and The Journalist and Death) and a review of Ladies Day that came out from Corvina Press last year.
Krudy’s Sunflower came out from NYRB last year and was one of my favorite translations of 2007. (It actually made our Top 10 list.) The book is very strange and captivating, and definitely worth reading. Krudy’s Adventures of Sindbad is available here in the States, but that seems to be it . . . which is really unfortunate, since Ladies Day sounds so interesting and unique:
Hungary’s conflicted history—its shifting frontiers, drastic amputations of territory and population—has produced, George Szirtes suggests, a particular reaction in Hungarian writing—“an interest in the grotesque, the black joke, the magical gone wrong [my italics]”. That last thought might have been written—perhaps was written—with Gyula Krúdy’s extraordinary fictions especially in mind. Even more than Sunflower, the novel which immediately preceded it, Ladies Day, now available in John Batki’s American-English translation, is shot through with a queer magic, a disturbed energy of language, character and situation for which it’s hard to think of a parallel, in the Anglo-Saxon literatures, at least.
Yeah, this place again
Nothing was permitted to disturb the cocoon-view that the students would move frictionlessly into the ruling class, unless stroking counts as friction. The "corruption" of grade inflation was part of this cosseting environment; no teacher dare give less than a B without risking "petty harassment." "I do not mean merely that the students are never so aggressive and articulate as when they hunt for grades," Summers, who had a series of one-year appointments, wrote. "I mean that they wage political reprisals against the B-minus grader and send gifts to high-placed academic directors." (Stephen Bradt, a Harvard spokesman, said he could not respond to the allegation about gifts unless Summers provided more specifics. I emailed Summers, who is now at BC's Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, but have not yet heard back.) [...]
