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Prehistoric Times and Wheel With a Single Spoke named Best Translated Book Award finalists

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Congratulations to Sean Cotter and Alyson Waters!

Cotter’s translation from the Romanian of Nichita Stanescu’s Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems has been named a Best Translated Book Award finalist in poetry. In the category of fiction, Waters’s translation from the French of Eric Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times has advanced to BTBA finalist standing.

 

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Celebrating Antonio Tabucchi

March 25th marks the first anniversary of Antonio Tabucchi‘s passing. Born in Pisa in 1943, he died in Lisbon, his adopted home, on the 25th of March, 2012. Regarded as one of the most innovative and important writers of postwar Europe, he was honored with numerous literary prizes, including the Prix médicis étranger, the Premio Campiello, the Premio Viareggio, and the Aristeion Prize.

It is a great honor to be publishing some of Tabucchi’s inspired work, including The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico (translated by Tim Parks), The Woman of Porto Pim (available in early April, translated by Tim Parks), Time Ages in a Hurry (translated by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani, to be released in 2014), and Tristiano is Dying, (to be translated by Elizabeth Harris).

Read Tabucchi’s obituary in The Guardian.

Read Robert Gray’s column about Tabucchi in Shelf Awareness.

From The Woman of Porto Pim

translated from the Italian by Tim Parks

“A Whale’s View of Man”

Always so feverish, and with those long limbs waving about. Not rounded at all, so they don’t have the majesty of complete, rounded shapes sufficient unto themselves, but little moving heads where all their strange life seems to be concentrated. They arrive sliding across the sea, but not swimming, as if they were birds almost, and they bring death with frailty and graceful ferocity. They’re silent for long periods, but then shout at each other with unexpected fury, a tangle of sounds that hardly vary and don’t have the perfection of our basic cries: the call, the love cry, the death lament. And how pitiful their lovemaking must be: and bristly, brusque almost, immediate, without a soft covering of fat, made easy by their threadlike shape which exudes the heroic difficulties of union and the magnificent and tender efforts to achieve it.

They don’t like water, they’re afraid of it, and it’s hard to understand why they bother with it. Like us they travel in herds, but they don’t bring their females, one imagines they must be elsewhere, but always invisible. Sometimes they sing, but only for themselves, and their song isn’t a call to others, but a sort of longing lament. They soon get tired and when evening falls they lie down on the little islands that take them about and perhaps fall asleep or watch the moon. They slide silently by and you realize they are sad.

Further reading:
The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico (Archipelago), and It’s Getting Later All the TimeThe Missing Head of Damasceno MonteiroRequiem: A HallucinationThe Edge of the HorizonPeriera DeclaresIndian NocturneLittle Misunderstandings of No Importance, & Letter from Casablanca, available from New Directions

“Rereading: Pereira Maintains,” The Guardian

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Three titles on the Best Translated Book Awards longlist!

Archipelago Books has three titles on Three Percent’s Best Translated Books Award longlist: Eric Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times, translated from the French by Alyson Waters, Miljenko Jergovic’s Mama Leone, translated from the Croatian by David Williams, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. You can check the list out here.

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Read about Karl Ove Knausgaard in The New York Times Blog

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You can read about Karl Ove Knausgaard and the controversy surrounding My Struggle here.

 Lauded by critics as a literary feat (the first volume appeared in English last summer), the book played less well among Knausgaard’s own family members. Part fiction, part memoir, “Min Kamp,” or “My Struggle” as it is known in English, included not just unflinching descriptions of his father’s alcoholism and grandmother’s incontinence but also revealing details about his ex- and his current wife.

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CBC Karl Ove Knausgaard Interview with Eleanor Wachtel

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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six volume memoir My Struggle has won every Norwegian prize, has been hailed as “a masterpiece”, and was called “the greatest account of our generation” by Norway’s Culture Minister. Knausgaard writes (and speaks) with raw honesty.

Listen to the CBC Karl Ove Knausgaard Interview with Eleanor Wachtel here.

 

 

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Opening the Gate of the Sun

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Read Adam Shatz’s LRB post on the removal of 250 Palestinians from Bab al-Shams, which takes its name from Elias Khoury’s novel Gate of the Sun. ‘The imaginary and the real have met in a way that is totally amazing,” Khoury says.

Click here to read Khoury’s letter to those forcibly removed from the village.

Khoury’s latest, Sinalkol, forthcoming from Archipelago Books, has been longlisted for the 2013 International Prize for Arab Fiction.

 

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Read David Ulin's review of Yannis Ritsos's Diaries of Exile in the LA Times

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Its power comes from the way it blends the diaristic with the poetic … There is no pity in the book, nor resignation, despite the circumstance.  That clarity … has to do with giving witness, with the idea of poetry as testimony. Again and again, Ritsos records the smallest moments, as if were he to leave out a single detail of his incarceration, the whole experience might disappear. This is what poetry can do: preserve the moments that would otherwise be forgotten, and in so doing, recreate the world.

Read the full review here.

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from Janet Tucker Sarmatian Review — a review of Moving Parts

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One of the most gifted of contemporary European writers, Magdalena Tulli creates an intricate and, ultimately, inhospitable fictional world in her unsettling and fine novel Moving Parts. Tulli has been hailed as the “new Bruno Schulz,” but her literary heritage extends back to Franz Kafka, and her prose evokes the illusive and deceptive “reality” encountered in Nikolai Gogol’s later prose. Her nearest “relatives” among current authors include Cuban-born Italian writer Italo Calvino and American novelist Don de Lillo, the latter sharing Tulli’s strong sense of unease and impending disaster. Readers of English are fortunate to read her work in the masterful translation of Bill Johnston, who also rendered Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, as well as Gustaw Herling’s masterpiece The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories, into English.

 

Tulli’s most distinctive contribution to modern letters may well be her hapless narrator, who loses all control over “his” text in the course of Moving Parts. Gogol’s narrator maintains ironic dominance over text and reader, while Schulz features a first-person narrator whose perceptions shape the readers’ reactions. But Tulli’s narrator can only observe helplessly as his world flies apart, a casualty of fictional centrifugal force with a “center that does not hold.” That her narrator is male, not female like the author herself, injects yet another disquieting note. The uncertain fictional world she creates in Moving Parts brings to mind the world of Eastern and Central Europe, or societies undergoing far-reaching changes. Tulli leaves the reader in a void, completely unlike the solid ground we encounter in the realist novel of the nineteenth century. Characters appear fleetingly and uncertainly, their fates unclear. They float in a nebulous space beyond the narrator’s control, perhaps even out of the reach of the author herself.

 

To underscore the insecurity of her fictional universe, Tulli typically depicts characters on the run. We encounter them in hotels—away from home—underscoring their vulnerability. When they are at home, their relationships unravel as the readers, uncomfortable witnesses to familial collapse, observe helplessly. Not even the narrator, the traditional locus of authority in fictional works, retains any sense of constancy or security.

 

Tulli combines homelessness with a universe gone awry in her images of displaced furniture that echo uprooted characters: “sofas, armchairs, and tables of that other world, deprived of solid ground, fall chaotically . . . into oblivion” (15). (Falling furniture foreshadows to a falling woman our “heroine”, who plunges into the void and dies “instantly” [103].) “The tale,” the narrator adds, “is like a hotel; characters appear and disappear” (15). A few pages later (23), furniture is piled up in a soggy heap out in the corner of the garden, where it will wait, forgotten, until clement weather. Tulli reminds us of the spatial and temporal fragility that lurks behind superficial solidity, and furniture, an everyday component of our lives vividly underscores this vulnerability. Our universe, she stresses, is built on sand, whirling through the blackness of the void.

 

How better to increase our sense of fear and helplessness than with a senseless crime? As in Dostoevsky’s later works, violence emphasizes the tenuousness of life. However, while in Dostoevsky murder is linked with larger religious issues, no such central theme emerges in Tulli. Thus we read that workmen are shot dead with an automatic pistol, a weapon divorced from a human perpetrator. The narrator—whose discomfort and powerlessness increase exponentially throughout—is “forced” to tell us about this pointless, bloody crime. He doesn’t act of his own free will, but the reader never finds out who has compelled him to recount this exceptionally unpleasant episode. Nor do we know why he recounts any of the incidents that he attempts to describe. His efforts are made increasingly difficult by his unruly and independent characters. But the characters themselves do not gain in strength, and the centrifugal forces that the author set in motion from the beginning pull characters and events out into empty space. At the end, the story has “slipped out of [the narrator’s] hands” (121).

 

By describing the narrator from the outside, Tulli effectively takes over his role and transforms him into yet another character. Midway through the novel, he has lost the privileged position we traditionally associate with a narrator. He is a most unwilling narrator, one who is “determined to do his job at the lowest possible cost” and who “sighs and sets to” (43). He gets his feet wet when attempting to keep pace with the novel (85). Unlike Herling’s narrator, always in control, Tulli’s is helpless and reluctant. We see him “calmly open[ing] and clos[ing] a double door and put[ting] a bunch of keys on a round side table” (41). As Chekhov’s readers recall from his play The Three Sisters, possession of keys denotes control, but Tulli’s narrator surrenders control when he deposits them on the furniture. Like peripatetic characters in the hotel and displaced furniture that hovers in space or gets shoved into a corner, forfeited keys underscore transience, loss of control.

 

Tulli elegantly distills the unease of a universe that has spun out of balance. She enlists details from everyday life, details that resonate with her readers’ own unpleasant experiences. We see a married woman (encountered earlier, in a relationship with her lover) sitting uncomfortably in a dentist chair. Dental problems compound personal problems, and we never know whether anesthetic was administered. But we know “it’s going to hurt” (49) if she wasn’t medicated. Tulli forces us to imagine an unpleasant scenario, including the whirring drill. She expands fictional anxiety to include her readers, in effect forcing us into this unsettling world.

 

Finally, the void prevails, and we are deposited in a silent world, the aural equivalent of visual emptiness. In her masterful novel, Tulli strikingly and subtly captures the essence of a world in transition between tradition and modernity. This elusiveness, an apt symbol of contemporary uncertainty, may also be an echo of Poland’s complex history.