Blame the Translator
Over at Paper Republic, Lucas Klein just posted an interesting piece about the recent translation snafu that marred Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to the Congo. For anyone who hasn’t heard about this, during a Q&A session an interpreter supposedly “misinterpreted” a question from the audience ...
>
Landscape in Concrete
We meet a familiar angst-ridden Russian early in the pages of Jakov Lind’s novel Landscape in Concrete: Dostoevsky’s Underground man surfaces in the guise of Gauthier Bachmann to here tread the desolate earth of the Ardennes during WW ll. No longer confined by inertia to his wretched little room, this protagonist is on ...
>
Selçuk Altun
Total broken record moment, but if you haven’t subscribed to the Publishing Perspectives daily newsletter, you definitely should. The pieces are always interesting, and very well done. Anyway, a couple months back I was planning on writing a long piece on Turkish fiction coming out this year, including Ahmet Hamdi ...
>
Free Wall in My Head Galley
We’ve never really tried this before, but for a limited time, the complete galley of The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain can be accessed via Yudu by clicking here.- The book is absolutely gorgeous (thanks to Rohan, Nate, Sal, and many others), and has an impressive list of ...
>
The Year of Jakov Lind
In just under a year, three Jakov Lind books will be reissued (the Open Letter edition of Landscape in Concrete is available now, with NYRB’s edition of Soul of Wood coming out later this fall and our reprint of Ergo releasing in January), and to celebrate this rediscovery, Jeff Waxman wrote an interesting piece for the ...
>
Bloomberg.com and Art
I’ve written before about how excellent the books/art coverage is at Bloomberg.com, and how much this surprises me. (It shouldn’t, I know.) Still, when I came across this editorial by Jeremy Gerard about the new NEA chairman Rocco Landesman, I assumed it would be some sort of anti-arts funding diatribe . . . but ...
>
Retranslated Classics
Sticking with PW for another post, Lynn Andriani has a great piece about three “iconic 20th-century novels being released in new translations” this fall: Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle (translated by Harry T. Willetts, and which restores nine chapters missing from the “lightened version” ...
>