I'm on my way to Philadelphia for the 125th annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Odd, for someone who's decided against academia as a career path? The theme this year is Translation, and it's a big enough meeting that I can find something to interest even me. There are sessions on "The Disciplinary Challenges of Translation Studies," "Uses of Literature," and "The New Latin American Canon"--and that's just today.
There are people at this meeting, in other words, interested in writing, reading, and translating literature, not just analyzing and interpreting it. There are people who approach writing through reading and vice versa. There are publishers who want their books to be read, not studied.
While I do go, in part, to better know my enemy, not everyone and everything at the MLA is my enemy. There are reasons for hope.
27 December 2009
23 December 2009
Stoner
The flood of literary news and opinions doesn't let up, even in the face of holidays, a new year, a new decade, my impending birthday. I would like to think that I have some unique perspective to contribute, even just at the level of curating a collection of links, but the amount of time it takes me to follow and filter the flow doesn't leave enough time for the good writing that should be the entire point of the exercise.
Feeling a little under the weather on Monday, I went to the library (two blocks away) and found John Williams' Stoner. It was originally published in 1965 and the NYRB Classics reissue came out three years ago, but it continues to turn up on many "Best Books I Read in 2009" lists. I'm sure it'll be on mine, even though I'm just a third of the way into it. I suspect it might be on my 2010 list, too, because I think I'll want to reread it as soon as I finish.
The tale is good—the disappointed life of William Stoner, a professor of English—but what stuns me is the plain, clear, balanced prose. It never stoops to flashy effects but maintains a moderate, even tone throughout. I'm afraid I'm not sure how to describe it without making it sound boring, and for the same reason to excerpt it might undermine my case.
But here are two samples. First, Williams describes Stoner's announcement that he will stay for graduate school rather than returning to the family farm:
And here is his first evening with the woman he marries:
I'm reading Stoner slowly because I want to savor its prose—its rhythm and pacing, not just sentence by sentence, but paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. Here there seem to be none of the refracted interiorities and layered subjunctives of James or Proust, nor does it overflow with associations like Saramago or Joyce. One of the few reading experiences I can compare it to is Anita Brookner—she of the twenty-five similar-sounding novels of disappointment, loneliness, and loss. In my teens and twenties, when I held high-tech jobs—a young man who perhaps could not differ more from her expected audience—I used to buy and read the new Brookner each year as soon as it came out. It's been some time, but I remember her prose as similarly classic, though in an English rather than American register.
I admire the acrobatics of grammar and idea that dominates literary prose; I enjoy seeing it done well. Lish-style minimalism (much discussed lately because of the de-Lished edition of Carver in the Library of America volume) can also be impressive, though, like Monk at the piano, its spareness seems to invite disastrous imitation. The third way—the path of moderation—may be just as difficult as these two, and for its necessary reticence its masters may be even rarer.
Feeling a little under the weather on Monday, I went to the library (two blocks away) and found John Williams' Stoner. It was originally published in 1965 and the NYRB Classics reissue came out three years ago, but it continues to turn up on many "Best Books I Read in 2009" lists. I'm sure it'll be on mine, even though I'm just a third of the way into it. I suspect it might be on my 2010 list, too, because I think I'll want to reread it as soon as I finish.
The tale is good—the disappointed life of William Stoner, a professor of English—but what stuns me is the plain, clear, balanced prose. It never stoops to flashy effects but maintains a moderate, even tone throughout. I'm afraid I'm not sure how to describe it without making it sound boring, and for the same reason to excerpt it might undermine my case.
But here are two samples. First, Williams describes Stoner's announcement that he will stay for graduate school rather than returning to the family farm:
Stoner tried to explain to his father what he intended to do, tried to evoke in him his own sense of significance and purpose. He listened to his words fall as if from the mouth of another, and watched his father's face, which received those words as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist. When he had finished he sat with his hands clasped between his knees and his head bowed. He listened to the silence of the room. (p. 23)What image could match that for futility? And yet, its force is boxed in words as imperturbable as either man.
And here is his first evening with the woman he marries:
She continued to talk, and after a while he began to hear what she was saying. Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love. (p. 53)Every possibility of failed communication and misdirected love is already encapsulated here.
I'm reading Stoner slowly because I want to savor its prose—its rhythm and pacing, not just sentence by sentence, but paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. Here there seem to be none of the refracted interiorities and layered subjunctives of James or Proust, nor does it overflow with associations like Saramago or Joyce. One of the few reading experiences I can compare it to is Anita Brookner—she of the twenty-five similar-sounding novels of disappointment, loneliness, and loss. In my teens and twenties, when I held high-tech jobs—a young man who perhaps could not differ more from her expected audience—I used to buy and read the new Brookner each year as soon as it came out. It's been some time, but I remember her prose as similarly classic, though in an English rather than American register.
I admire the acrobatics of grammar and idea that dominates literary prose; I enjoy seeing it done well. Lish-style minimalism (much discussed lately because of the de-Lished edition of Carver in the Library of America volume) can also be impressive, though, like Monk at the piano, its spareness seems to invite disastrous imitation. The third way—the path of moderation—may be just as difficult as these two, and for its necessary reticence its masters may be even rarer.
17 December 2009
Life Among the Savages
OK, so my new content schema and posting schedule aren't working out as awesomely as I'd hoped. Oh, I'm collecting stuff, sure, but with a blog, "behind the scenes" pretty much doesn't count by definition. And we all know where good intentions lead, even if the paving stones are literary doorstops.
What derailed me yesterday wasn't a doorstop but a slim, quick book: I read Shirley Jackson's memoir of raising children, Life Among the Savages. I haven't read "The Lottery" since middle school, but I loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle and always intended to read more. Monday was her birthday, and a post on the Barnes & Noble blog gave chilly hints of her real life and made me curious to read the memoir.
Life Among the Savages begins when Jackson, husband, and two children are forced by high rents to exile themselves from New York City into the untamed wilderness of Vermont. By the end of the book, there are four children and the wilderness appears to have won. Memoirs of the terrors and trials of raising children still thrive these days as a genre, but in 1953 Jackson's was one of the first to tell these tales with such pointed humor, and certainly there aren't as many drinks, cigarettes, and sharp kitchen implements in the hands of most of today's memoir-writing moms.
It's also a blast to read, because its scattershot organization reflects the subject at hand. In yesterday's unintended absorption in the book, I was comforted by her praise of lists: "You can start from any given point on a list and go off in all directions at once, the world being as full as it is, and even though a list is a greatly satisfying thing to have, it is extraordinarily difficult to keep it focused on the subject at hand" (p. 79). "Extraordinarily difficult to keep it focused," indeed, in 1953; how much more so, then, in the age of Google? Like Umberto Eco, I'm a big fan of lists. (Eco's new book, tied to his show at the Louvre, looks interesting; here's an interview with Eco on the topic.) But I won't dive in to some scholarly analysis, which would end up with Foucault and Borges, because 1) it would take too long; 2) you wouldn't read it anyway; 3) I wouldn't actually know what I'm talking about; and 4) I don't want to analyze lists, I just want to appreciate them.
Another unexpected pleasure in Life Among the Savages: the section which begins on page 133 with "We are all of us, in our family, very fond of puzzles." Over the next ten pages, without pausing for narrative breath, Jackson develops a set-piece about one night's movements of the family (including the dog) and their accompanying blankets and bedside objects from bed to bed as everyone seeks a warm or cool or quiet spot to suffer "the grippe." It's a great parody of the story problems in logic which ask you to deduce who lives in the blue house and drives the red car and works for Mr. Green. In Jackson's puzzle, the question is "what became of the blanket from Sally's bed?" I don't know whether it's solvable or not, and I don't care.
For the first twenty pages, it also looked like Life Among the Savages would be to Vermont what The Egg and I is to the area hereabouts: a reminder of just how close we still are, in the 21st century, to the days of pioneer homesteading, both physically and culturally. I have family not too far from where Jackson lived, and those twenty pages do ring true—but alas, that's all there is.
What derailed me yesterday wasn't a doorstop but a slim, quick book: I read Shirley Jackson's memoir of raising children, Life Among the Savages. I haven't read "The Lottery" since middle school, but I loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle and always intended to read more. Monday was her birthday, and a post on the Barnes & Noble blog gave chilly hints of her real life and made me curious to read the memoir.
Life Among the Savages begins when Jackson, husband, and two children are forced by high rents to exile themselves from New York City into the untamed wilderness of Vermont. By the end of the book, there are four children and the wilderness appears to have won. Memoirs of the terrors and trials of raising children still thrive these days as a genre, but in 1953 Jackson's was one of the first to tell these tales with such pointed humor, and certainly there aren't as many drinks, cigarettes, and sharp kitchen implements in the hands of most of today's memoir-writing moms.
It's also a blast to read, because its scattershot organization reflects the subject at hand. In yesterday's unintended absorption in the book, I was comforted by her praise of lists: "You can start from any given point on a list and go off in all directions at once, the world being as full as it is, and even though a list is a greatly satisfying thing to have, it is extraordinarily difficult to keep it focused on the subject at hand" (p. 79). "Extraordinarily difficult to keep it focused," indeed, in 1953; how much more so, then, in the age of Google? Like Umberto Eco, I'm a big fan of lists. (Eco's new book, tied to his show at the Louvre, looks interesting; here's an interview with Eco on the topic.) But I won't dive in to some scholarly analysis, which would end up with Foucault and Borges, because 1) it would take too long; 2) you wouldn't read it anyway; 3) I wouldn't actually know what I'm talking about; and 4) I don't want to analyze lists, I just want to appreciate them.
Another unexpected pleasure in Life Among the Savages: the section which begins on page 133 with "We are all of us, in our family, very fond of puzzles." Over the next ten pages, without pausing for narrative breath, Jackson develops a set-piece about one night's movements of the family (including the dog) and their accompanying blankets and bedside objects from bed to bed as everyone seeks a warm or cool or quiet spot to suffer "the grippe." It's a great parody of the story problems in logic which ask you to deduce who lives in the blue house and drives the red car and works for Mr. Green. In Jackson's puzzle, the question is "what became of the blanket from Sally's bed?" I don't know whether it's solvable or not, and I don't care.
For the first twenty pages, it also looked like Life Among the Savages would be to Vermont what The Egg and I is to the area hereabouts: a reminder of just how close we still are, in the 21st century, to the days of pioneer homesteading, both physically and culturally. I have family not too far from where Jackson lived, and those twenty pages do ring true—but alas, that's all there is.
15 December 2009
France: agents, Beauvoir, Proust, and doorstops
Are agents necessary? The lead article on Publishing Perspectives never quite asks that question: it just describes how, over the last few decades, American-style literary agents have come to be accepted (grudgingly, it seems, and still a minority taste) by French publishers. The article introduces the possible benefits to authors—better information about contracts and sales, particularly foreign rights sales—but whether an agent is an improvement seems to depend on what publisher you're comparing him or her to. The official line of the French Publishers' Association is "editors do everything agents do and more—for free."
The "bonus" annex asks the hard question: "Are French Authors Better Off With or Without Agents?" It starts by questioning the assertion by the American Jonathan Littell (Les Bienviellantes won him the Prix Goncourt, but it bombed when translated into his native tongue as The Kindly Ones): "In France, barely any authors make a living; the entire chain profits from the book, except the writer." Somehow this is supposed to mark a contrast with the US? Editor Edward Nawotka replies: "Littell’s observation seems a bit extreme.... In fact, with the generous government support given to the arts, and the myriad of prizes and honorifics bestowed on French authors, they may have it better than their fellow writers in the US and elsewhere." My gut feeling is that adding another middleman to the system—whose sole motivation is to seek out the best deal—inevitably puts the values of the market over the values of art. That's the real choice you're making.
A second Sex: Less controversially (now)... Maîtresse reminds us that in the UK (last week) and US (April 2010), a new, complete translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is being published. It sounds like readers and scholars could hardly have been worse served by the old translation; a replacement is overdue and quite welcome.
A year of Proust: Over at The Cork-Lined Room, they began reading In Search of Lost Time last month—in easy daily chunks of 10-15 pages—and will continue through next October. Readers are just approaching the end of Swann's Way, so it's not impossible to catch up. (I'm attempting it in French; I'm still a bit behind.)
The really big books: The site fluctuat.net has added a new twist to the year- and decade-end lists flooding the litblogosphere these days: they call it "Les pavés cultes des années 2000"—where pavé means cobblestone or paving stone—but I'll pull it into American bookselling idiom and dub it Doorstops of the Decade: 15 volumes comprising 13,289 pages of heavy reading. Much of the list is familiar: the seven titles by six American authors (the prolific William T. Vollmann has two); Littell's The Kindly Ones; Bolaño's 2666. In fact, only four were originally written in French. But the four we can't read in English (Enard's Zone is coming next year from Open Letter) look really interesting. Here they are, with my translations of their "tweet-sized" summaries:
- Mantra by Rodrigo Fresán: Mexico City dissected through three strangely intertwined narratives, an unbound atlas, and a crowd of artistic references. (Fresán was a friend of Bolaño's, and his work sounds a little more speculative and a little lighter.)
- Villa Vortex by Maurice G. Dantec: A dying cop remembers his hunt for a psychopath turning young women into electronic dolls. (Dantec writes cyberpunk doorstops with a political and philosophical edge and sounds a bit like Neal Stephenson; some of his other big books have been translated, but not this one.)
- Quartiers de ON! by Onuma Nemon: A cosmological novel that, in eleven poetic songs, invites the reader on an unfinished—and excessive—voyage in space and time. (No, I don't know what that really means. From what I can tell, Onuma Nemon is a group pseudonym, like Italy's bestselling Wu Ming/Luther Blissett, only far weirder.)
- Flying Camel by Vladimir Zagreba: Between memoir and fiction, a joycean odyssey that traces the survivors of Stalinism in their wanderings in exile. (Co-translated by the author from Russian into French for its first publication, Flying Camel sounds like it's full of wordplay. The author describes it as "a Pandora's box.")
The "bonus" annex asks the hard question: "Are French Authors Better Off With or Without Agents?" It starts by questioning the assertion by the American Jonathan Littell (Les Bienviellantes won him the Prix Goncourt, but it bombed when translated into his native tongue as The Kindly Ones): "In France, barely any authors make a living; the entire chain profits from the book, except the writer." Somehow this is supposed to mark a contrast with the US? Editor Edward Nawotka replies: "Littell’s observation seems a bit extreme.... In fact, with the generous government support given to the arts, and the myriad of prizes and honorifics bestowed on French authors, they may have it better than their fellow writers in the US and elsewhere." My gut feeling is that adding another middleman to the system—whose sole motivation is to seek out the best deal—inevitably puts the values of the market over the values of art. That's the real choice you're making.
A second Sex: Less controversially (now)... Maîtresse reminds us that in the UK (last week) and US (April 2010), a new, complete translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is being published. It sounds like readers and scholars could hardly have been worse served by the old translation; a replacement is overdue and quite welcome.
A year of Proust: Over at The Cork-Lined Room, they began reading In Search of Lost Time last month—in easy daily chunks of 10-15 pages—and will continue through next October. Readers are just approaching the end of Swann's Way, so it's not impossible to catch up. (I'm attempting it in French; I'm still a bit behind.)
The really big books: The site fluctuat.net has added a new twist to the year- and decade-end lists flooding the litblogosphere these days: they call it "Les pavés cultes des années 2000"—where pavé means cobblestone or paving stone—but I'll pull it into American bookselling idiom and dub it Doorstops of the Decade: 15 volumes comprising 13,289 pages of heavy reading. Much of the list is familiar: the seven titles by six American authors (the prolific William T. Vollmann has two); Littell's The Kindly Ones; Bolaño's 2666. In fact, only four were originally written in French. But the four we can't read in English (Enard's Zone is coming next year from Open Letter) look really interesting. Here they are, with my translations of their "tweet-sized" summaries:
- Mantra by Rodrigo Fresán: Mexico City dissected through three strangely intertwined narratives, an unbound atlas, and a crowd of artistic references. (Fresán was a friend of Bolaño's, and his work sounds a little more speculative and a little lighter.)
- Villa Vortex by Maurice G. Dantec: A dying cop remembers his hunt for a psychopath turning young women into electronic dolls. (Dantec writes cyberpunk doorstops with a political and philosophical edge and sounds a bit like Neal Stephenson; some of his other big books have been translated, but not this one.)
- Quartiers de ON! by Onuma Nemon: A cosmological novel that, in eleven poetic songs, invites the reader on an unfinished—and excessive—voyage in space and time. (No, I don't know what that really means. From what I can tell, Onuma Nemon is a group pseudonym, like Italy's bestselling Wu Ming/Luther Blissett, only far weirder.)
- Flying Camel by Vladimir Zagreba: Between memoir and fiction, a joycean odyssey that traces the survivors of Stalinism in their wanderings in exile. (Co-translated by the author from Russian into French for its first publication, Flying Camel sounds like it's full of wordplay. The author describes it as "a Pandora's box.")
Translation: press merger, funding campaign, podcast plans
In an attempt to tame the incoming flood of RSS feed updates, I'm going to start posting and linking according to a schedule, with a designated focus for each day. The categories are still evolving, but at the moment Tuesday is designated as the day for news and links about 1) translation and language; and 2) French literature and publishing. So this is the translation and language post...
Northwestern University Press has acquired Curbstone Press, according to an Inside Higher Ed report last week—though the news isn't mentioned on either press's website. Northwestern has long been strong in publishing translations, though that strength has faded in recent years. They were one of the few to have published Herta Müller in the US long before the Nobel Prize, so maybe that (luck? foresight?) has prodded them to pick up the pace again. Curbstone has a focus on social justice and human rights, which sounds like just the sort of thing not to entrust to a wonkish university press, but they also have put out a few translations, mainly from Latin America. Unfortunately, the Curbstone website appears to be totally borked at the moment.
The Center for the Art of Translation wants your help. These folks do some nice stuff: publishing the translation-anthology series Two Lines; running a translation-in-the-schools program for kids called "Poetry Inside Out"; and hosting the "Lit&Lunch" series of readings by writers and translators (in San Francisco, but they can be heard online). To make it easy, they've set their donation threshold ridiculously low: just $5. (C'mon, anyone can manage that!) And there's a reward, too: you'll be entered in a drawing to win signed copies of some of this year's most significant translations.Call Click now, operators are standing by!
Making the translator visible—and audible! Chad Post is catching up with his "Making the Translator Visible" series at the Three Percent blog. (My slot in that series two weeks ago was the prod that got me to launch this blog.) Today's post is on Erica Mena, but it also contains Chad's note that he and Erica will be starting "a translation-centric podcast" next year. You'll remember that voice—literally, the sound of the spoken word—was one of the ancillary aspects of "character" that I launched this blog to cover. I'm excited to hear about this new venture—and yes, I'll prod Chad and Erica about getting involved somehow.
Chad mentions that they're going to start work at the MLA convention in Philadelphia in two weeks. The convention theme this year is "The Tasks of Translation in the Global Context," so I'll be going to Philly to see what's up with that. I'll post a more detailed preview next week.
Northwestern University Press has acquired Curbstone Press, according to an Inside Higher Ed report last week—though the news isn't mentioned on either press's website. Northwestern has long been strong in publishing translations, though that strength has faded in recent years. They were one of the few to have published Herta Müller in the US long before the Nobel Prize, so maybe that (luck? foresight?) has prodded them to pick up the pace again. Curbstone has a focus on social justice and human rights, which sounds like just the sort of thing not to entrust to a wonkish university press, but they also have put out a few translations, mainly from Latin America. Unfortunately, the Curbstone website appears to be totally borked at the moment.
The Center for the Art of Translation wants your help. These folks do some nice stuff: publishing the translation-anthology series Two Lines; running a translation-in-the-schools program for kids called "Poetry Inside Out"; and hosting the "Lit&Lunch" series of readings by writers and translators (in San Francisco, but they can be heard online). To make it easy, they've set their donation threshold ridiculously low: just $5. (C'mon, anyone can manage that!) And there's a reward, too: you'll be entered in a drawing to win signed copies of some of this year's most significant translations.
Making the translator visible—and audible! Chad Post is catching up with his "Making the Translator Visible" series at the Three Percent blog. (My slot in that series two weeks ago was the prod that got me to launch this blog.) Today's post is on Erica Mena, but it also contains Chad's note that he and Erica will be starting "a translation-centric podcast" next year. You'll remember that voice—literally, the sound of the spoken word—was one of the ancillary aspects of "character" that I launched this blog to cover. I'm excited to hear about this new venture—and yes, I'll prod Chad and Erica about getting involved somehow.
Chad mentions that they're going to start work at the MLA convention in Philadelphia in two weeks. The convention theme this year is "The Tasks of Translation in the Global Context," so I'll be going to Philly to see what's up with that. I'll post a more detailed preview next week.
14 December 2009
Literary scouts
Until this morning, I had never heard of literary scouts. Not agents, not editors, not readers: scouts. I read the entire article promising a look "Inside the Secret World of Literary Scouts" and now I know what they do.
But I still don't know what they're good for. As far as I can tell, this is an entire profession devoted to schmoozing, hype, and matching the value of a "deal" to the value of a "property." It's all based on insider knowledge and speculative bidding-up based on market perceptions rather than intrinsic values. Scouts (if I got this right) are trying to sell options and rights, based on exaggerated speculation on market movements years in the future, before theproduct manuscript itself is complete. They usually get access to proposals, outlines, or drafts from friendly editors, under the table. The same kinds of activities in the financial sector—well, they wouldn't be illegal, because Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have hijacked purchased the government—but they would still be seen by the general public as empty work at best, and most likely as morally suspect profiteering and exploitation of the unsuspecting innocent.
The innocents here are writers and readers. Williams' article mentions authors only off-handedly, as people who entrust their product to an agent so the marketplace can work its magic. Readers—actual readers of published books that have managed to survive this process—are never mentioned at all.
I don't know Emily Williams, but I'm sure she and her fellow scouts are all lovely people. Within the world of publishing conglomerates, apparently this is the way the game is played, and I'm sure it's possible to be good at the game and still be a nice person. (Really: I have known nice people who were investment bankers. Not at the same time—they were bankers, and then they stopped being bankers, and then they were nice—but they were the same people.) But to me it just emphasizes how little the world of publishing conglomerates has to do with writers, readers, and what I know as literature.
Williams' article will be followed by two more parts, discussing the international scene and translation. Fortunately, they're a week or more off, so there's some chance I'll be able to calm down and read them with an open mind.
But I still don't know what they're good for. As far as I can tell, this is an entire profession devoted to schmoozing, hype, and matching the value of a "deal" to the value of a "property." It's all based on insider knowledge and speculative bidding-up based on market perceptions rather than intrinsic values. Scouts (if I got this right) are trying to sell options and rights, based on exaggerated speculation on market movements years in the future, before the
The innocents here are writers and readers. Williams' article mentions authors only off-handedly, as people who entrust their product to an agent so the marketplace can work its magic. Readers—actual readers of published books that have managed to survive this process—are never mentioned at all.
I don't know Emily Williams, but I'm sure she and her fellow scouts are all lovely people. Within the world of publishing conglomerates, apparently this is the way the game is played, and I'm sure it's possible to be good at the game and still be a nice person. (Really: I have known nice people who were investment bankers. Not at the same time—they were bankers, and then they stopped being bankers, and then they were nice—but they were the same people.) But to me it just emphasizes how little the world of publishing conglomerates has to do with writers, readers, and what I know as literature.
Williams' article will be followed by two more parts, discussing the international scene and translation. Fortunately, they're a week or more off, so there's some chance I'll be able to calm down and read them with an open mind.
11 December 2009
Slogans and taglines
After I finished up my last big post with a link to outside.in, I figured it was time for me to actually go sign up for their service and experience it myself. What it's supposed to do is "geotag" content so that you can find news and events based on where they take place, not who's involved or what job they hold. Sounds like just the thing for discovering what kinds of writers, translators, and publishers might be doing good stuff near you.
Well, the tools for bloggers are still coming up to speed—they're getting my feed now, but (despite that post, largely about Port Townsend) have still concluded "0 posts from your site (0.00%) were about a specific place or address in the past 1 week." But in trying to sort things out I had a nice email exchange with someone at outside.in, and she suggested that "All culture is local" should be my tagline. I like the sound of it, and I'm surprised the phrase hasn't been used much before.
That got me thinking, though, about other ways to characterize what I'm doing here. I've used "Curation, Creation, and Recreation" as a way of highlighting the three roles I take. Curation is the main thing that happens on this blog, what with all them links; creation, OK, that's kinda dormant right now; and I'm not the first to enjoy the ambiguity recreation/re-creation.
That last, though, led me to another idea—and a way of linking puzzles and cognition and OuLiPo into the slogan-fest. The phrase occurred to me first, but I think I agree with it: "Play is the highest form of thought." That one's definitely not a new idea; it goes back at least to Schiller (though that link is to a review of Brian Boyd's recent book).
I'm trying out all these new taglines. Clear language is bracing; I'll see what strength I can take here.
Well, the tools for bloggers are still coming up to speed—they're getting my feed now, but (despite that post, largely about Port Townsend) have still concluded "0 posts from your site (0.00%) were about a specific place or address in the past 1 week." But in trying to sort things out I had a nice email exchange with someone at outside.in, and she suggested that "All culture is local" should be my tagline. I like the sound of it, and I'm surprised the phrase hasn't been used much before.
That got me thinking, though, about other ways to characterize what I'm doing here. I've used "Curation, Creation, and Recreation" as a way of highlighting the three roles I take. Curation is the main thing that happens on this blog, what with all them links; creation, OK, that's kinda dormant right now; and I'm not the first to enjoy the ambiguity recreation/re-creation.
That last, though, led me to another idea—and a way of linking puzzles and cognition and OuLiPo into the slogan-fest. The phrase occurred to me first, but I think I agree with it: "Play is the highest form of thought." That one's definitely not a new idea; it goes back at least to Schiller (though that link is to a review of Brian Boyd's recent book).
I'm trying out all these new taglines. Clear language is bracing; I'll see what strength I can take here.
10 December 2009
Typefaces, letters, languages, and book covers (again)
In celebration of my win in a metal type I.D. contest, I'm bringing some real character to today's link-fest.
Local letters (subway division): By now it's well understood that the type in the London tube isn't Gill Sans but an original design by Edward Johnston. But in New York, especially thanks to the hit movie, plenty of people think that the subway signage is in Helvetica. Well, sure—now. (As in the punchline of that old joke about the Sahara Forest.) Paul Shaw has done the research and discovered that, even in the '60s and '70s, Helvetica's first heyday, the typeface the system standardized on was Akzidenz Grotesk. Of course, the New York subway system represents more than a century of lettering history, and Paul's book documents it. I can't think of a better gift for any fans of type and cities you may know—hint, hint.
Local languages: In Turkey, the official alphabet's lack of Q, W, and X is causing some serious problems for Kurds, whose language needs those letters. It sounds like an Oulipian plotline, something preposterous to justify a lipogrammatic text—but, as La Disparition itself demonstrates, even language games are not always laughing matters. The sentence is this case is not 500 pages, but 18 months.
Meanwhile, in Montana, they're using a dog to rescue a language. Well, OK, so the dog isn't sent out into the mountains with the linguistic equivalent of a cask of rum—but if it weren't for the dog, who would the rabbi talk to? (It's not a punchline, it's a real question.)
Local coverage: From lipograms we move naturally to Georges Perec, whose Life A User's Manual (now in a revised translation) was chosen by Simon Winchester for a year-end list at OUP. I've got better things to do than keep track of all those lists, especially since this year we're also getting the decade-end lists. But it's worth noting that Amazon 1) includes a list of the year's best cover designs (see, book covers really do matter online!) and 2) lets you vote. Unfortunately, the 10 covers (out of 60) that made it to the final round aremostly crap not, in my opinion, representative of the book designer's highest art. Here's a visual palate-cleanser: Polish crime novels. And to bring it full circle, publisher David R. Godine notes criticism of the (old) cover of, yes, Life A User's Manual. (In terms of my own hobbyhorse, I'll point out that the new edition is also clearly part of the Verba Mundi series of literature in translation and thus instantly recognizable to browsers who are looking for that sort of thing.)
Local letters (subway division): By now it's well understood that the type in the London tube isn't Gill Sans but an original design by Edward Johnston. But in New York, especially thanks to the hit movie, plenty of people think that the subway signage is in Helvetica. Well, sure—now. (As in the punchline of that old joke about the Sahara Forest.) Paul Shaw has done the research and discovered that, even in the '60s and '70s, Helvetica's first heyday, the typeface the system standardized on was Akzidenz Grotesk. Of course, the New York subway system represents more than a century of lettering history, and Paul's book documents it. I can't think of a better gift for any fans of type and cities you may know—hint, hint.
Local languages: In Turkey, the official alphabet's lack of Q, W, and X is causing some serious problems for Kurds, whose language needs those letters. It sounds like an Oulipian plotline, something preposterous to justify a lipogrammatic text—but, as La Disparition itself demonstrates, even language games are not always laughing matters. The sentence is this case is not 500 pages, but 18 months.
Meanwhile, in Montana, they're using a dog to rescue a language. Well, OK, so the dog isn't sent out into the mountains with the linguistic equivalent of a cask of rum—but if it weren't for the dog, who would the rabbi talk to? (It's not a punchline, it's a real question.)
Local coverage: From lipograms we move naturally to Georges Perec, whose Life A User's Manual (now in a revised translation) was chosen by Simon Winchester for a year-end list at OUP. I've got better things to do than keep track of all those lists, especially since this year we're also getting the decade-end lists. But it's worth noting that Amazon 1) includes a list of the year's best cover designs (see, book covers really do matter online!) and 2) lets you vote. Unfortunately, the 10 covers (out of 60) that made it to the final round are
09 December 2009
Read it here first
In the past few days, when I've taken a break from tending to this new home of mine on the web and attending to the RSS feeds which keep it going, I've stepped out into my actual town, Port Townsend, Washington. Without doing anything particularly physically involving—I shopped for food, went for a run, watched a movie, ate a meal with a friend—I nonetheless felt I had re-grounded myself in this particular place, this local-ity, and coming back to this website necessarily would mean somehow risking or at least diminishing that sense of place, that local character that's supposed to be its animating principle.
But I know that's not true, and this post is an initial attempt to explain why. What do I mean by “local”—especially in reference to a business, translation, which consists in moving things from one place, one language, to another?
All culture is local. That includes reading. I'm writing this in Port Townsend, but you might be reading it in New Zealand or in Germany. You can only read where your eyes are; wherever you are, whatever language you read becomes one of the languages of that place. On Saturday, I watched a film set in Quito, Ecuador, brought here by the local film festival. I don't speak Spanish, but between Italian and Portuguese and the subtitles I think I followed many of the subtleties of the language. But the characters in the movie—doctors, taxi drivers, mothers, sons—did not exist inside of any language. They were simply people going about their lives, going about their city, just like us in the audience. For readers, translation removes that barrier of language and makes it possible to read and appreciate the culture of another place—without having to go there ourselves.
Port Townsend is at the end of a peninsula; to get here, you have to be going here. (Local legend holds that Santa makes it his first stop, but I'm sure that's only because it's not on the way to any place else.) At the farmer's market on Saturday, I bought fresh, local ingredients and told the farmers what I would be cooking with them. When I described jota as "kind of an Italian stew with sauerkraut" they looked puzzled—what do stew or sauerkraut have to do with Italian cooking?—but when I explained that it came from the north-east corner of Italy where Slavic and Austrian influences date back centuries, they understood. Jota may have its origin in a specific place, but it can be recreated and appreciated anywhere. Like a work of literature.
Nothing has just one home. One of the messages of Herta Müller’s Nobel lecture on Monday was the pettiness of nationalism. She quoted her grandfather: “When the flags start to flutter, common sense slides right into the trumpet.” Müller's family belonged to the German minority in Romania—a minority which has apparently gained local support in recent years, a surprise in a part of the world where national and ethnic identities have recently been more divisive than unifying. (That support appears not to have been enough to turn the presidential election.)
But, in the context of Müller's Nobel win—and in response to some direct snubs of American literature by people involved with the Nobel Prize—The New York Times itself didn't point to how widely our culture is accepted abroad, the apparent hunger of people everywhere for translations of American books, Dan Brown above all. Instead, the NYT article lauded the American genius for attracting and absorbing people from other cultures and embracing their hybrid products—written in America, in English—in service of the expansion of American culture, thus (the article claimed) "enriching the world’s understanding of itself." That article has been sliced and diced already (for instance here, here, and again here), but this attitude really should come as no surprise.
What The New York Times praises is absorbing other cultures and reading their writers only when they've learned English: waiting for the world to come to us, recognizing our ground as the only valid and relevant place for a writer to stand. Even when we do make the effort, the translator Johannes Göransson finds that we want to be recognized and praised for that effort—to the exclusion of notice of the foreign work or author. In an interview he says, "Part of the problem with a lot of translation is that the way they are packaged has sort of ghettoized them as the foreign text. And we go to them out of some kind of ethical duty to engage with the foreign and widen our horizons and learn more about foreign cultures." What that attitude is really looking for is validation of its own culture.
That's very different from what translators try to do: we make the effort ourselves to understand another culture and language and recreate them, to the best of our abilities, in our specific time and place. Translation does not appropriate or replace the original work; it allows the work to exist in two places at once. Thus when a Brazilian blog laments about a previous Nobel laureate that "there are no books by Szymborska available in Portuguese" ("não há nenhum livro de Szymborska disponível em português"), they don't dismiss her as unworthy of being read, but point to English-language sources. That's part of what the saying Literature is universal means: you can read it where you are, in your language—or in whatever language you can get it in.
Be here now. In The New York Times again (sorry, but they do stick out, even from way over here in the opposite corner of the country) we read that a historic city in this rainy region is tired of being overlooked because it happens to share a name with that other Vancouver. I used to live in Bloomington, Indiana, a town without a commercial airport; I heard many tales of people who bought tickets for Bloomington, Illinois, instead (those I-states are all the same). Names are important, but place is a lot more specific than that.
One of the things that happens when you actually inhabit the place where you live is that you start to care about your neighbors: you buy your food locally, you go to local theater, you read the local paper. Maybe it can't be absolute—maybe they don't make cars or wine or computers in your town—but you do what you can. Not out of nationalism, but out of interest in the welfare of your home place. Even the Times has jumped on the bandwagon, by letting you click to find books at your local bookstore. (My own clicky-buttons will come soon—at this point I assume my readership is too small for it to represent much in terms of lost income.)
In terms of translation, that means it's OK to import something when it doesn't grow natively where you are. But you should try to recreate it sensitively, not as a hybrid or an adaptation.
Cyberspace is nowhere. Independent businesses are inherently more local than big companies—and I'm not even talking about the multinational conglomerates. In the wake of Borders UK's bankruptcy, there are still people who see a future for bookselling and a value to browsing in person in a physical store, curated by live humans. I use the word "curated" deliberately; as I tried to argue in my post on book covers, the role of the editors, librarians, booksellers, and reviewers who help us figure out what to read needs to be much more visible. The translator, too, has been invisible—and also plays a curatorial role in identifying what to translate. The less visible and the more virtual all these steps become, the more we are at risk of losing our sense of where we are. (Today's Port Townsend Leader has a great op-ed on supporting independent bookstores—but it's only available in the print edition. I guess you had to be here.)
Meanwhile, even some of the smaller independent publishers apparently think that "people out there don’t really read" and Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. has to move to survive. Real people exist everywhere—and wherever people are, that place matters.
A place emerges from what goes on there. Home stretch here, folks.
So what I guess I'm arguing—and I do apologize for not doing it with all the latest hip theoretical terminology—is that culture happens in the act and in the place of translation and of reading, not just in the act and place of writing. And that if we want local culture to thrive, it's not necessary that every step of creation and curation happen locally, but simply that we make the most of what is available. That means reading local authors—and local translators, even when they're translating work from far away. That means reading the local newspaper, and books published by local presses. That means going to readings. That means making yourself visible as a local reader or writer or translator, as someone who expects the library or bookstore to stock the latest translations, because you'll want to read them. When you make yourself visible, you change, ever so slightly, the place where you are.
American publishing has long been centered in New York and many of the people doing great work in translation and translation publishing are still there. But now they're also in San Francisco, in Rochester (New York, not Minnesota!), in Champaign, in Northampton. It can happen anywhere—thanks in part to the internet. But the internet has a disturbing tendency to make work invisible, to un-tether it from person and place.
One of the things the internet was supposed to bring was "mass customization." That doesn't seem to have happened—unless you count the customization of the internet itself, with Web 2.0 and social technologies. Instead, it seems possible that one of the emerging benefits of the web's status as "no-place" is that it makes a great tool for finding out about where you are.
In the end, I guess that's what I'm doing here, too: finding out about where I am.
But I know that's not true, and this post is an initial attempt to explain why. What do I mean by “local”—especially in reference to a business, translation, which consists in moving things from one place, one language, to another?
All culture is local. That includes reading. I'm writing this in Port Townsend, but you might be reading it in New Zealand or in Germany. You can only read where your eyes are; wherever you are, whatever language you read becomes one of the languages of that place. On Saturday, I watched a film set in Quito, Ecuador, brought here by the local film festival. I don't speak Spanish, but between Italian and Portuguese and the subtitles I think I followed many of the subtleties of the language. But the characters in the movie—doctors, taxi drivers, mothers, sons—did not exist inside of any language. They were simply people going about their lives, going about their city, just like us in the audience. For readers, translation removes that barrier of language and makes it possible to read and appreciate the culture of another place—without having to go there ourselves.
Port Townsend is at the end of a peninsula; to get here, you have to be going here. (Local legend holds that Santa makes it his first stop, but I'm sure that's only because it's not on the way to any place else.) At the farmer's market on Saturday, I bought fresh, local ingredients and told the farmers what I would be cooking with them. When I described jota as "kind of an Italian stew with sauerkraut" they looked puzzled—what do stew or sauerkraut have to do with Italian cooking?—but when I explained that it came from the north-east corner of Italy where Slavic and Austrian influences date back centuries, they understood. Jota may have its origin in a specific place, but it can be recreated and appreciated anywhere. Like a work of literature.
Nothing has just one home. One of the messages of Herta Müller’s Nobel lecture on Monday was the pettiness of nationalism. She quoted her grandfather: “When the flags start to flutter, common sense slides right into the trumpet.” Müller's family belonged to the German minority in Romania—a minority which has apparently gained local support in recent years, a surprise in a part of the world where national and ethnic identities have recently been more divisive than unifying. (That support appears not to have been enough to turn the presidential election.)
But, in the context of Müller's Nobel win—and in response to some direct snubs of American literature by people involved with the Nobel Prize—The New York Times itself didn't point to how widely our culture is accepted abroad, the apparent hunger of people everywhere for translations of American books, Dan Brown above all. Instead, the NYT article lauded the American genius for attracting and absorbing people from other cultures and embracing their hybrid products—written in America, in English—in service of the expansion of American culture, thus (the article claimed) "enriching the world’s understanding of itself." That article has been sliced and diced already (for instance here, here, and again here), but this attitude really should come as no surprise.
What The New York Times praises is absorbing other cultures and reading their writers only when they've learned English: waiting for the world to come to us, recognizing our ground as the only valid and relevant place for a writer to stand. Even when we do make the effort, the translator Johannes Göransson finds that we want to be recognized and praised for that effort—to the exclusion of notice of the foreign work or author. In an interview he says, "Part of the problem with a lot of translation is that the way they are packaged has sort of ghettoized them as the foreign text. And we go to them out of some kind of ethical duty to engage with the foreign and widen our horizons and learn more about foreign cultures." What that attitude is really looking for is validation of its own culture.
That's very different from what translators try to do: we make the effort ourselves to understand another culture and language and recreate them, to the best of our abilities, in our specific time and place. Translation does not appropriate or replace the original work; it allows the work to exist in two places at once. Thus when a Brazilian blog laments about a previous Nobel laureate that "there are no books by Szymborska available in Portuguese" ("não há nenhum livro de Szymborska disponível em português"), they don't dismiss her as unworthy of being read, but point to English-language sources. That's part of what the saying Literature is universal means: you can read it where you are, in your language—or in whatever language you can get it in.
Be here now. In The New York Times again (sorry, but they do stick out, even from way over here in the opposite corner of the country) we read that a historic city in this rainy region is tired of being overlooked because it happens to share a name with that other Vancouver. I used to live in Bloomington, Indiana, a town without a commercial airport; I heard many tales of people who bought tickets for Bloomington, Illinois, instead (those I-states are all the same). Names are important, but place is a lot more specific than that.
One of the things that happens when you actually inhabit the place where you live is that you start to care about your neighbors: you buy your food locally, you go to local theater, you read the local paper. Maybe it can't be absolute—maybe they don't make cars or wine or computers in your town—but you do what you can. Not out of nationalism, but out of interest in the welfare of your home place. Even the Times has jumped on the bandwagon, by letting you click to find books at your local bookstore. (My own clicky-buttons will come soon—at this point I assume my readership is too small for it to represent much in terms of lost income.)
In terms of translation, that means it's OK to import something when it doesn't grow natively where you are. But you should try to recreate it sensitively, not as a hybrid or an adaptation.
Cyberspace is nowhere. Independent businesses are inherently more local than big companies—and I'm not even talking about the multinational conglomerates. In the wake of Borders UK's bankruptcy, there are still people who see a future for bookselling and a value to browsing in person in a physical store, curated by live humans. I use the word "curated" deliberately; as I tried to argue in my post on book covers, the role of the editors, librarians, booksellers, and reviewers who help us figure out what to read needs to be much more visible. The translator, too, has been invisible—and also plays a curatorial role in identifying what to translate. The less visible and the more virtual all these steps become, the more we are at risk of losing our sense of where we are. (Today's Port Townsend Leader has a great op-ed on supporting independent bookstores—but it's only available in the print edition. I guess you had to be here.)
Meanwhile, even some of the smaller independent publishers apparently think that "people out there don’t really read" and Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. has to move to survive. Real people exist everywhere—and wherever people are, that place matters.
A place emerges from what goes on there. Home stretch here, folks.
So what I guess I'm arguing—and I do apologize for not doing it with all the latest hip theoretical terminology—is that culture happens in the act and in the place of translation and of reading, not just in the act and place of writing. And that if we want local culture to thrive, it's not necessary that every step of creation and curation happen locally, but simply that we make the most of what is available. That means reading local authors—and local translators, even when they're translating work from far away. That means reading the local newspaper, and books published by local presses. That means going to readings. That means making yourself visible as a local reader or writer or translator, as someone who expects the library or bookstore to stock the latest translations, because you'll want to read them. When you make yourself visible, you change, ever so slightly, the place where you are.
American publishing has long been centered in New York and many of the people doing great work in translation and translation publishing are still there. But now they're also in San Francisco, in Rochester (New York, not Minnesota!), in Champaign, in Northampton. It can happen anywhere—thanks in part to the internet. But the internet has a disturbing tendency to make work invisible, to un-tether it from person and place.
One of the things the internet was supposed to bring was "mass customization." That doesn't seem to have happened—unless you count the customization of the internet itself, with Web 2.0 and social technologies. Instead, it seems possible that one of the emerging benefits of the web's status as "no-place" is that it makes a great tool for finding out about where you are.
In the end, I guess that's what I'm doing here, too: finding out about where I am.
08 December 2009
America discovers Brazil?
Publishing Perspectives has noticed that Brazil—with a population of nearly 200 million—represents the 8th largest book market on the planet and, despite the “global” recession, its publishing industry is doing fine. On that page, YouTube interviews (in English) really fill out the story—and continually expose the interviewer's surprise that the Brazilian market can thrive independently of the US/European conglomerates and their business models.
One strong sector of the market is door-to-door sales, especially outside the major cities. But in case that sounds old-fashioned, rest assured that Brazil is also facing the e-book revolution (covered here, in Portuguese). The publisher Edidouro, despite some stumbles with Rubem Fonseca's O Seminarista, has promised all its titles in e-book format beginning next month at their (ahem) Amazon-like shop LojaSingular. Saraiva is developing an even more ambitious, iTunes-like platform, working with many publishers and targeting music and videos as well as e-books. Yes, the Kindle is coming—but on December 15th, Gato Sabido will launch an e-book store and its own reader, based on the British Cool-er.
For American readers, it's time to learn that Paulo Coelho no more represents Brazilian literature than Dan Brown represents American literature. Publishing Perspectives, in a "bonus" feature, solicits suggestions of Brazilian books that should be translated into English. The brand-new winter issue of The Quarterly Conversation includes a nice appreciation by Michael Moreci of Machado de Assis, the nineteenth-century master who belongs on any list of the world's great writers; in the fascinating feature "Translate This Book!"—expert recommendations of texts overdue for a proper English translation—I put forth the case for Machado's short stories. The American Benjamin Moser has written Why This World, the first full biography of Clarice Lispector, one of the few authors who can match Machado's stature in Brazil; the book has been well received (New York Times, New York Review of Books) and translated (I want to write "back") into Portuguese.
The apparent success of Clarice, in Brazil is the exception that proves the rule. Somehow it seems foreigners keep getting the idea that they can impose their culture on Brazil, but it just doesn't work. It didn't work in the 1550s (according to Hans Staden); it didn't work for Henry Ford. The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, in his "Manifesto Antropófago" of 1928 (an English version is here), famously re-purposed Staden's cannibal imagery, calling for foreign cultures to be not adopted, but ingested, digested, and turned into Brazilian culture. There's no reason to doubt it will happen again and again.
For the Americans it's better, perhaps, to stick to translation.
Two sites—and their blogs and Twitter feeds—keep me up to date on what's going on in Brazilian publishing: 30 Por Cento and Livros e Pessoas. I'm always happy to hear about others!
One strong sector of the market is door-to-door sales, especially outside the major cities. But in case that sounds old-fashioned, rest assured that Brazil is also facing the e-book revolution (covered here, in Portuguese). The publisher Edidouro, despite some stumbles with Rubem Fonseca's O Seminarista, has promised all its titles in e-book format beginning next month at their (ahem) Amazon-like shop LojaSingular. Saraiva is developing an even more ambitious, iTunes-like platform, working with many publishers and targeting music and videos as well as e-books. Yes, the Kindle is coming—but on December 15th, Gato Sabido will launch an e-book store and its own reader, based on the British Cool-er.
For American readers, it's time to learn that Paulo Coelho no more represents Brazilian literature than Dan Brown represents American literature. Publishing Perspectives, in a "bonus" feature, solicits suggestions of Brazilian books that should be translated into English. The brand-new winter issue of The Quarterly Conversation includes a nice appreciation by Michael Moreci of Machado de Assis, the nineteenth-century master who belongs on any list of the world's great writers; in the fascinating feature "Translate This Book!"—expert recommendations of texts overdue for a proper English translation—I put forth the case for Machado's short stories. The American Benjamin Moser has written Why This World, the first full biography of Clarice Lispector, one of the few authors who can match Machado's stature in Brazil; the book has been well received (New York Times, New York Review of Books) and translated (I want to write "back") into Portuguese.
The apparent success of Clarice, in Brazil is the exception that proves the rule. Somehow it seems foreigners keep getting the idea that they can impose their culture on Brazil, but it just doesn't work. It didn't work in the 1550s (according to Hans Staden); it didn't work for Henry Ford. The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, in his "Manifesto Antropófago" of 1928 (an English version is here), famously re-purposed Staden's cannibal imagery, calling for foreign cultures to be not adopted, but ingested, digested, and turned into Brazilian culture. There's no reason to doubt it will happen again and again.
For the Americans it's better, perhaps, to stick to translation.
Two sites—and their blogs and Twitter feeds—keep me up to date on what's going on in Brazilian publishing: 30 Por Cento and Livros e Pessoas. I'm always happy to hear about others!
07 December 2009
Herta Müller, Quarterly Conversation
My reasoning in launching this blog last week was simply that there was no time like the present, no excuse for delay. But it does take time to figure out new patterns of reading and writing to deal with all the news and ideas I want to track and share here.
In the meantime, if you're here because of an interest in world literature then you should certainly know about two things that happened today:
In Stockholm, Herta Müller has just delivered her Nobel lecture.
InSan Francisco cyberspace, a new issue of The Quarterly Conversation has just been posted.
In the meantime, if you're here because of an interest in world literature then you should certainly know about two things that happened today:
In Stockholm, Herta Müller has just delivered her Nobel lecture.
In
04 December 2009
Judging books by their covers
My first post here included a list of books I hoped to review. Those books are now stacked on a corner of my work table where I can see them out of the corner of my eye as I type. Or rather, I can see their covers.
We’ve all been told Never judge a book by its cover—but we do it anyway: in bookstores, in libraries, even online. How often, when you choose a book, do you already know it inside and out? (If you do, you’re probably replacing an established favorite and so likely to be that much pickier about getting one that looks nice.) We have to judge books, at least in part, by their covers; publishers know this and design covers that make us want to buy books. It’s not rocket science.
Hold that thought, and add this: Part of the “common knowledge” about translation is that American readers are afraid of or somehow intimidated by works in translation. The giant New York conglomerates point to publishing disasters like Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones to show what can befall the foolish editor who dares venture into that terra incognita. And yet there are many small presses which seem to make a go of it with translated works, surviving year after year (if at times precariously) to produce exciting, original, award-winning books. These books find readers who are not afraid of translations. What do these presses do differently?
Maybe it’s the covers.
Here are four small presses. All are strong in translation, and all produce books with not only strong cover designs, but a consistent design identity across every book they publish:
Europa Editions: Europa publishes mainly books in translation, but quite a few English originals. The covers are photographs or illustrations, usually simplified, reduced to a few colors, or otherwise abstracted/posterized, in a 1/4" white frame. The title and author are presented conservatively: top of the cover, usually centered, usually in a serif face, caps and lowercase; the publisher's name and mark appear at the bottom of the cover. The translator—even the fact of translation—is never indicated on the front. All books are paperback, all the same trim size, all with flaps. (Covers designed by Emanuele Ragnisco.)
Open Letter: Open Letter publishes works in translation exclusively. No single visual element unifies the design, but Open Letter covers are all highly abstracted, with saturated colors and simplified images. Author and title are presented in large, clear type, usually all-caps sans serif, integrated into the design; the translator is always listed on the cover* (though in much smaller type). All books are paperbacks (now), all the same trim size except for special publications like The Wall in My Head. (Most covers are designed by Milan Bozic.)
* Except for William Weaver on Elsa Morante's Aracoeli: wha'ppen, Chad?
Archipelago: Archipelago also publishes only translated works, with the exception of a few books by the South African author Breyten Breyenbach written in English. Their covers are very formal: a single image, not simplified, centered on a background of rich color, with author and title centered above and translator information below, caps and lowercase, almost always in a classic serif face. The covers use laid paper with a noticeable texture. Archipelago publishes both hardbacks and paperbacks, in a variety of trim sizes; paperback covers often have flaps. (All covers are designed by David Bullen.)
New York Review Books (NYRB Classics): Translations make up, at a rough guess, about two-thirds of the NYRB Classics list. The cover is an edge-to-edge image (relevant art or photography), with title and author in a contrasting-color box, always in all-caps Meta Sans. (The color is repeated on the spine, giving a shelf of NYRB books a distinctive look.) The author of the introduction is credited on the cover, but not the translator (unless it's the same person, or a highly visible translator like Richard Howard, above left). All books are paperbacks, no flaps, same trim size. (Covers designed by Katy Homans.)
The two books in my to-be-reviewed stack are from Clockroot and Dalkey Archive; I’ll talk about those publishers when I get to the book reviews. I'll cover Melville House sometime, too. These four publishers are just a sample.
The point of all this is branding. If you're not reading a brand-name author, you need some other way of picking what to read next. There are reviews, sure, but a lot of dedicated readers still go in person to bookstores, where they can become overwhelmed by choice and desperate for something familiar—such as a book that looks just like one they recently enjoyed. As one bookseller blogged about Europa books: "The distinctive look of their books—all paperbacks with a clean cover design, front and back flaps, and their distinctive bird insignia—make them easy to find." In other words, the visual brand offers a possible foothold of predictability in a disorienting profusion of choices.
The fact of translation might be said to contribute to that disorientation, in its intimidating suggestion that we don't know enough about other languages and literatures. (At Thomas Riggs, a blogger commented: "Somehow, it makes literature in translation seem a bit sexy." Note the "seem.") Open Letter and Archipelago make it clear that they are publishing translations; Europa and NYRB Classics might be said to hide the fact. So if these covers don't necessarily scream Translated Work!, what do they indicate? The visual brand implies a certain consistency of editorial direction—of quality, certainly, and probably style. Judging books by their covers means choosing books based on your experience with the editor as a curator, even though he or she is probably not a visible personality. Publication with the familiar cover is the outward sign that this book has appealed to a familiar and trusted taste: that of the editor.
European publishers are typically much more uniform in their design. Most publishers have a distinct "look" like the four above, and the large publishers maintain a multitude of distinct imprints and series. Bookstores are often organized by publisher and series. Translated books are not segregated per se, but a publisher specializing in translations will form its own niche. (Europa Editions, in fact, is affiliated with the Italian publisher Edizioni E/O.) So in Europe, it's easy to find more books chosen by the same editor/curator.
Given that American bookstores are usually organized by genre and author, a strong visual identity is a simple necessity—to help the browser find the books! Europa's white trim, NYRB Classics' colorful spines, Open Letter's bold poster-like graphics: these are all easy to spot from across a room, crowded among other books on a shelf. (Archipelago's designs may be too elegant and subtle, unless they are stocked facing out on the shelf; their variable size also doesn't help.) The first step to getting a reader to buy an unfamiliar book is to get him or her to pick it up and think this looks like something I'll enjoy.
It still works online: Amazon shows book covers in search results, in customer lists, in site recommendations. Okay, it's not easy to begin to browse visually, but once you've gotten going you can easily jump from one cover to another. The publisher is listed but not prominently; there's absolutely no indication of the editor who curated the collection, the person whose tastes you follow. The main information you have to go on is the visual correlate, the cover design.
It gets a little more complicated with e-books. Some commentators treat the physical experience of a book as unimportant and like the way electronic platforms let the reader choose design attributes, but I would counter that not everything worth searching for can be tagged with a keyword. Speaking of Google, Cory Doctorow—in discussing the “boring” covers included with the public domain books in Google Book Search—suggests “there's plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers.” As others have noted, here's an opportunity for a return to the model of bookstore-as-publisher: The actual live person whose name you know and whose hand you can shake becomes the editorial curator of a series of visually distinct books. The cover becomes part of how a bookstore can build its (ahem) local character.
There are plenty of small presses that do an excellent job of cover design without creating any specific identity—anything more specific than that excellence itself: New Directions, Copper Canyon, many university presses. But even those presses recognize the power of uniformity in creating a brand to sell an author: viz. Copper Canyon’s Neruda series, or New Directions’ Bolaño. (Or maybe it’s just Chilean authors?) This is, of course, a strategy widely applied with brand-name authors, as The New Yorker's books blog recently observed—although, as those Faulkners show, it's not always easy to find appropriate design correlates for a given book or author.
What all of this comes down to is that I find it necessary to judge books by their covers. Unless I already know the author—usually not the case for translated works—I depend on a strong cover design to tell me what kind of book it might be. The cover is one of many tools publishers can use to get past the bias that says that Americans don't read translations. Strong and consistent cover design can teach us to trust the editor, even if we're intimidated by an unknown culture or context. But for the New York conglomerate publishers, that just seems to be another casualty of the blockbuster-at-all-costs culture: maybe editors don't want to be saddled with the responsibility of being trustworthy. Fortunately—at small presses and tucked away here and there at the large ones—there are editors and book designers who do get it.
I also wanted to discuss how cover design is related to another of my interests, car design, but I've rambled on too long as it is; instead, I'll just leave you with a link to Car Design News, a site dedicated to the topic.
The indispensable site for cover design is The Book Design Review.
We’ve all been told Never judge a book by its cover—but we do it anyway: in bookstores, in libraries, even online. How often, when you choose a book, do you already know it inside and out? (If you do, you’re probably replacing an established favorite and so likely to be that much pickier about getting one that looks nice.) We have to judge books, at least in part, by their covers; publishers know this and design covers that make us want to buy books. It’s not rocket science.
Hold that thought, and add this: Part of the “common knowledge” about translation is that American readers are afraid of or somehow intimidated by works in translation. The giant New York conglomerates point to publishing disasters like Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones to show what can befall the foolish editor who dares venture into that terra incognita. And yet there are many small presses which seem to make a go of it with translated works, surviving year after year (if at times precariously) to produce exciting, original, award-winning books. These books find readers who are not afraid of translations. What do these presses do differently?
Maybe it’s the covers.
Here are four small presses. All are strong in translation, and all produce books with not only strong cover designs, but a consistent design identity across every book they publish:
Europa Editions: Europa publishes mainly books in translation, but quite a few English originals. The covers are photographs or illustrations, usually simplified, reduced to a few colors, or otherwise abstracted/posterized, in a 1/4" white frame. The title and author are presented conservatively: top of the cover, usually centered, usually in a serif face, caps and lowercase; the publisher's name and mark appear at the bottom of the cover. The translator—even the fact of translation—is never indicated on the front. All books are paperback, all the same trim size, all with flaps. (Covers designed by Emanuele Ragnisco.)
Open Letter: Open Letter publishes works in translation exclusively. No single visual element unifies the design, but Open Letter covers are all highly abstracted, with saturated colors and simplified images. Author and title are presented in large, clear type, usually all-caps sans serif, integrated into the design; the translator is always listed on the cover* (though in much smaller type). All books are paperbacks (now), all the same trim size except for special publications like The Wall in My Head. (Most covers are designed by Milan Bozic.)
* Except for William Weaver on Elsa Morante's Aracoeli: wha'ppen, Chad?
Archipelago: Archipelago also publishes only translated works, with the exception of a few books by the South African author Breyten Breyenbach written in English. Their covers are very formal: a single image, not simplified, centered on a background of rich color, with author and title centered above and translator information below, caps and lowercase, almost always in a classic serif face. The covers use laid paper with a noticeable texture. Archipelago publishes both hardbacks and paperbacks, in a variety of trim sizes; paperback covers often have flaps. (All covers are designed by David Bullen.)
New York Review Books (NYRB Classics): Translations make up, at a rough guess, about two-thirds of the NYRB Classics list. The cover is an edge-to-edge image (relevant art or photography), with title and author in a contrasting-color box, always in all-caps Meta Sans. (The color is repeated on the spine, giving a shelf of NYRB books a distinctive look.) The author of the introduction is credited on the cover, but not the translator (unless it's the same person, or a highly visible translator like Richard Howard, above left). All books are paperbacks, no flaps, same trim size. (Covers designed by Katy Homans.)
The two books in my to-be-reviewed stack are from Clockroot and Dalkey Archive; I’ll talk about those publishers when I get to the book reviews. I'll cover Melville House sometime, too. These four publishers are just a sample.
The point of all this is branding. If you're not reading a brand-name author, you need some other way of picking what to read next. There are reviews, sure, but a lot of dedicated readers still go in person to bookstores, where they can become overwhelmed by choice and desperate for something familiar—such as a book that looks just like one they recently enjoyed. As one bookseller blogged about Europa books: "The distinctive look of their books—all paperbacks with a clean cover design, front and back flaps, and their distinctive bird insignia—make them easy to find." In other words, the visual brand offers a possible foothold of predictability in a disorienting profusion of choices.
The fact of translation might be said to contribute to that disorientation, in its intimidating suggestion that we don't know enough about other languages and literatures. (At Thomas Riggs, a blogger commented: "Somehow, it makes literature in translation seem a bit sexy." Note the "seem.") Open Letter and Archipelago make it clear that they are publishing translations; Europa and NYRB Classics might be said to hide the fact. So if these covers don't necessarily scream Translated Work!, what do they indicate? The visual brand implies a certain consistency of editorial direction—of quality, certainly, and probably style. Judging books by their covers means choosing books based on your experience with the editor as a curator, even though he or she is probably not a visible personality. Publication with the familiar cover is the outward sign that this book has appealed to a familiar and trusted taste: that of the editor.
European publishers are typically much more uniform in their design. Most publishers have a distinct "look" like the four above, and the large publishers maintain a multitude of distinct imprints and series. Bookstores are often organized by publisher and series. Translated books are not segregated per se, but a publisher specializing in translations will form its own niche. (Europa Editions, in fact, is affiliated with the Italian publisher Edizioni E/O.) So in Europe, it's easy to find more books chosen by the same editor/curator.
Given that American bookstores are usually organized by genre and author, a strong visual identity is a simple necessity—to help the browser find the books! Europa's white trim, NYRB Classics' colorful spines, Open Letter's bold poster-like graphics: these are all easy to spot from across a room, crowded among other books on a shelf. (Archipelago's designs may be too elegant and subtle, unless they are stocked facing out on the shelf; their variable size also doesn't help.) The first step to getting a reader to buy an unfamiliar book is to get him or her to pick it up and think this looks like something I'll enjoy.
It still works online: Amazon shows book covers in search results, in customer lists, in site recommendations. Okay, it's not easy to begin to browse visually, but once you've gotten going you can easily jump from one cover to another. The publisher is listed but not prominently; there's absolutely no indication of the editor who curated the collection, the person whose tastes you follow. The main information you have to go on is the visual correlate, the cover design.
It gets a little more complicated with e-books. Some commentators treat the physical experience of a book as unimportant and like the way electronic platforms let the reader choose design attributes, but I would counter that not everything worth searching for can be tagged with a keyword. Speaking of Google, Cory Doctorow—in discussing the “boring” covers included with the public domain books in Google Book Search—suggests “there's plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers.” As others have noted, here's an opportunity for a return to the model of bookstore-as-publisher: The actual live person whose name you know and whose hand you can shake becomes the editorial curator of a series of visually distinct books. The cover becomes part of how a bookstore can build its (ahem) local character.
There are plenty of small presses that do an excellent job of cover design without creating any specific identity—anything more specific than that excellence itself: New Directions, Copper Canyon, many university presses. But even those presses recognize the power of uniformity in creating a brand to sell an author: viz. Copper Canyon’s Neruda series, or New Directions’ Bolaño. (Or maybe it’s just Chilean authors?) This is, of course, a strategy widely applied with brand-name authors, as The New Yorker's books blog recently observed—although, as those Faulkners show, it's not always easy to find appropriate design correlates for a given book or author.
What all of this comes down to is that I find it necessary to judge books by their covers. Unless I already know the author—usually not the case for translated works—I depend on a strong cover design to tell me what kind of book it might be. The cover is one of many tools publishers can use to get past the bias that says that Americans don't read translations. Strong and consistent cover design can teach us to trust the editor, even if we're intimidated by an unknown culture or context. But for the New York conglomerate publishers, that just seems to be another casualty of the blockbuster-at-all-costs culture: maybe editors don't want to be saddled with the responsibility of being trustworthy. Fortunately—at small presses and tucked away here and there at the large ones—there are editors and book designers who do get it.
I also wanted to discuss how cover design is related to another of my interests, car design, but I've rambled on too long as it is; instead, I'll just leave you with a link to Car Design News, a site dedicated to the topic.
The indispensable site for cover design is The Book Design Review.
03 December 2009
Death, Taxes, and Apple
In 1957, a few years after her teenage debut with Bonjour Tristesse, French novelist Françoise Sagan crashed her car, got hooked on painkillers, and went to detox. There she kept a journal, published in 1964 as Toxique, with appropriately raw illustrations by the painter Bernard Buffet.
Recently Sagan's son, Denis Westhoff, still saddled by tax debt on his mother's estate and looking for new outlets, had the idea of producing a digital edition for the iPhone. He contacted a publisher expert at turning bandes-déssinées into digital versions.
They submitted it to Apple, who rejected it on the grounds that the illustrations—in particular, the breasts and pubic hair shown in the rough ink sketches—would offend the American public. Buffet's son Nicolas rightly objected to the idea of cutting them out.
The solution: The version available on iTunes (still in French) uses animation to scan quickly over the "naughty bits." (It also requires that the purchaser be 17 or older.) The version available at Ave! Comics (for €9.99 or $11.99, same as the iTunes version and quite a bargain at current exchange rates) shows everything in detail.
The moral of the story: At least digital self-censorship doesn’t require pulping a print run.
(From Pierre Assouline's great blog, La république des livres, at Le Monde.)
Recently Sagan's son, Denis Westhoff, still saddled by tax debt on his mother's estate and looking for new outlets, had the idea of producing a digital edition for the iPhone. He contacted a publisher expert at turning bandes-déssinées into digital versions.
They submitted it to Apple, who rejected it on the grounds that the illustrations—in particular, the breasts and pubic hair shown in the rough ink sketches—would offend the American public. Buffet's son Nicolas rightly objected to the idea of cutting them out.
The solution: The version available on iTunes (still in French) uses animation to scan quickly over the "naughty bits." (It also requires that the purchaser be 17 or older.) The version available at Ave! Comics (for €9.99 or $11.99, same as the iTunes version and quite a bargain at current exchange rates) shows everything in detail.
The moral of the story: At least digital self-censorship doesn’t require pulping a print run.
(From Pierre Assouline's great blog, La république des livres, at Le Monde.)
02 December 2009
Bad girls, Stendhal, and translation support
I suspect most people reading this blog follow many of the same news sources I do, so I'll keep my links limited. And, yes, I'll start building up a blogroll and all those other goodies ... all in good time.
Translator Idra Novey, guest-blogging for BOA Editions (who published her translation of Paulo Henriques Britto's The Clean Shirt of It) disagrees with Mario Vargas Llosa's contention that translators are squeezed between languages: rather, they get to range more widely and be "bad girls"
Stendhal's manuscripts, in all their squiggly greatness, can now be viewed online: see The Guardian's coverage
The Germans and the French are doing their best to get more books translated into English, by offering coordinated information, money for publishers, and prizes for translators. If only the Italians were so organized!
Translator Idra Novey, guest-blogging for BOA Editions (who published her translation of Paulo Henriques Britto's The Clean Shirt of It) disagrees with Mario Vargas Llosa's contention that translators are squeezed between languages: rather, they get to range more widely and be "bad girls"
Stendhal's manuscripts, in all their squiggly greatness, can now be viewed online: see The Guardian's coverage
The Germans and the French are doing their best to get more books translated into English, by offering coordinated information, money for publishers, and prizes for translators. If only the Italians were so organized!
01 December 2009
Highsmith, Machado, Pavić
I'm wrapping up a post on book covers; in the meantime, here's some news from around the web:
Joan Schenkar's new biography The Talented Miss Highsmith presents Patricia Highsmith as an author "as American as rattlesnake venom": Leonard Cassuto at the Barnes & Noble Review.
A time travel story—from nineteenth-century Brazil: Machado de Assis' "A Visit from Alcibiades" at Words Without Borders
"I have always wished to make literature, which is non reversible art, a reversible one. Therefore my novels have no beginning and no end in the classical meaning of the word." (source) The Serbian novelist Milorad Pavić, a great experimenter with form best known for Dictionary of the Khazars, has come to his end, in the classical meaning, at age 81: see the Literary Saloon
Joan Schenkar's new biography The Talented Miss Highsmith presents Patricia Highsmith as an author "as American as rattlesnake venom": Leonard Cassuto at the Barnes & Noble Review.
A time travel story—from nineteenth-century Brazil: Machado de Assis' "A Visit from Alcibiades" at Words Without Borders
"I have always wished to make literature, which is non reversible art, a reversible one. Therefore my novels have no beginning and no end in the classical meaning of the word." (source) The Serbian novelist Milorad Pavić, a great experimenter with form best known for Dictionary of the Khazars, has come to his end, in the classical meaning, at age 81: see the Literary Saloon
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
