Alan Riding considers the life and work of Josep Pla:
“… a passing reference to, say, traveling by horse and cart or celebrating the end of World War I reminded me that Pla was writing almost a century ago. For the most part, he seemed to be addressing me today.”
Read the full review here.
Scott Esposito of the Kenyon Review calls Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding “truly audacious” and, at times, “disgusting”. Read the full review here.
The French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval explored the irrational with lucidity and exquisite craft. At the time of his death, he was dismissed as a friend of many writers but not a writer himself, as an emotional and financial failure and a madman. Shortly afterwards, however, his literary fortune changed, and with the publication of his collected works, Nerval entered the French literary pantheon. Marcel Proust acknowledged him as the inspiration for his own explorations of time lost and regained. Antonin Artaud placed Nerval beside Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Van Gogh. André Breton claimed him as a forerunner of surrealism. Modernists working between the world wars recognized the prophetic and visionary quality of his art, celebrating him as a precursor of their own aesthetic. Equally enthusiastic post-modernists claimed Nerval as a pioneer in blurring the boundaries between outer and inner, fact and fiction. Carl Gustav Jung described his oeuvre as a work of extraordinary magnitude.
Thanks to translator Richard Sieburth and Archipelago Books, we now have our Nerval for the twenty-first century. The Salt Smugglers – originally an experimental serial novel, ostensibly an account of the life and adventures of the “abbé Bucquoi” – is a wonderfully subversive book that the writer must pass off as history in order to get by the censors who have suddenly, arbitrarily forbidden the publishing of “fiction” in the press. This is a spirited, playful, and ironic tale that will be held close to the heart by every victim of the new totalitarianism that is contemporary bureaucracy, and who amongst us is not?
Craig E. Stephenson
Author of Anteros: A Forgotten Myth, and editor of C. G. Jung on Gérard de Nerval, an unpublished lecture, 1945 (to be published in 2015 by Princeton University Press).
Congratulations to Archipelago Books translator, Don Bartlett, whose name was announced last week as one of the recipients of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ 2014 awards.
Don Bartlett is the translator extraordinaire of the infamous My Struggle series
The Arts and Letters Awards in Literature honor exceptional accomplishment in any genre.
Awards will be presented in New York in May at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial.
For the complete list of award recipients see the Academy of Arts & Letters’ full release.
The third installment in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett, has received a starred review in Publishers Weekly:
The ever-present threat of Karl Ove’s father provides an engrossing source of tension, however, and Knausgaard skillfully recreates the point of view of a child. This segment of a genre-defying and unusual novel will leave readers hungry for the following installments, and serves as a fine entry point into the series.
Read the full review here.
Alex Estes profiled Archipelago Books for our 10th Anniversary in Publisher’s Perspectives:
Ten years in and it doesn’t look like Archipelago is slowing down. This past year Random House became their distributor, which will hopefully get them closer to what Schoolman calls “the next level.” She can see that it’s right there, and she knows Archipelago will reach it. It’s only a matter of time. But no matter what happens in the future, it is safe to say that the American reader is better off with Archipelago in the picture, large or small. Salman Rushdie said that “[i]t is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation,” but that he clings “obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.” One can credit Archipelago Books, at even the most very basic level of giving readers the very opportunity of “getting lost” in the translation.
Read the full profile: “Archipelago Books: 10 Years, 100 Titles, 26 Languages“
Congratulations to Tom Christen, translator of José Ángel Valente’s Landscape with Yellow Birds from the Spanish, for his nomination for a Northern California Book Award.
Landscape with Yellow Birds has been nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Translation-Poetry as one of the best works by a northern California author published in 2013. Congratulations to Archipelago translator, Tom Christensen!
Harlequin’s Millions by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Stacey Knecht, just received a starred review on Kirkus Reviews:
[A] uniquely compelling blend of parable, fantasy, social realism and testament to the power of storytelling. . . . the voice of the narrator is spellbinding, even as the reader becomes less sure of her credibility. . . . An enchanting novel, full of life, about the end of life.
Check out the full review here.
John Taylor just published a piece on Michon’s translation in English for The Arts Fuse. On Michon’s style:
Offering the long view, as would a novel, of life as a concatenation of a great number of events between birth and death would not suit [Michon’s] stylistic inclinations. Instead, he focuses on a handful of scenes and musters his exceptional style — arguably, closer to the prose poem than to narrative prose — in an attempt to make them at once palpable and emblematic. Nothing is diluted; these are heady, compassionate distillations — like cognac.
Read the whole review here.
