Salonica World Lit

The Longlist Has Arrived!

2012-02-29T06:26:43Z

Three Percent Announces Fiction Longlist
for the Fifth Annual Best Translated Book Awards

February 28, 2012—The 25-title fiction longlist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Awards was announced this
afternoon at Three Percent (www.rochester.edu/threepercent/)—online resource for international literature at the
University of Rochester. This is the fifth year for the BTBA, which launched in 2007 as a way of highlighting the
best works of international literature published in the U.S. in the previous year.

Featuring authors from 14 countries writing in 12 languages, this year’s fiction longlist illustrates the prize’s dedication to literary diversity, ranging from works by established and classic authors, such as Moacyr Scliar’s Kafka’s Leopards and Imre Kertesz’s Fiasco, to works by emerging voices, like Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, and Inka Parei’s The Shadow-Boxing Woman.

The longlist also includes an eclectic mix of translators, from Steve Dolph—whose translation of Juan José Saer’s
Scars is his second full-length publication—to world-renowned translators Bill Johnston—who has two entries
on this list, Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski and In Red by Magdalena Tulli. As in years past, the list is
dominated by smaller independent publishers, such as Dedalus, Seagull Books, Melville House, and Archipelago
Books, although a number of larger houses—like W.W. Norton, Knopf, and Bloomsbury—are also represented.
“We had such a difficult time culling this year’s longlist down to just twenty-five titles,” said fiction judge Gwendolyn Dawson. “Although a small percentage of books published in the U.S. each year are original translations, those books are generally excellent and unique. We are excited by this year’s strong longlist and daunted by the task of narrowing the list to a shortlist of only ten titles.”

Books eligible for this year’s award include titles published between December 1, 2010 and December 31, 2011 that have never before appeared in English translation in any form. Selection criteria include both the quality of the
book itself and the quality of the translation, with the goal of honoring translators and authors for their joint effort
in making future classics of world literature available to English readers.

This year’s set of judges consists of Monica Carter (Salonica), Gwendolyn Dawson (Literary License), Scott Esposito (Conversational Reading and Center for the Art of Translation), Susan Harris (Words Without Borders), Annie Janusch (Translation Review), Matthew Jakubowski (writer & critic), Brandon Kennedy (bookseller/cataloger), Bill Marx (PRI’s The World: World Books), Edward Nawotka (Publishing Perspectives), Michael Orthofer (Complete Review), and Jeff Waxman (Seminary Co-op and University of Chicago Press).

For the second consecutive year, Three Percent is also proud to announce that Amazon.com is supporting the
awards through a $25,000 grant that will provide $5,000 cash prizes to all of the winning authors and translators,
as well as $5,000 to bring the judges to New York for the awards ceremony.

The 10-title fiction shortlist will be announced on Tuesday, April 10th, concurrent with the announcement of the
finalists for the poetry award. Winners in both categories will be announced in New York City, as part of the PEN
World Voices Festival.
And here they are:

Leeches by David Albahari.
Translated from the Serbian by Ellen Elias-Bursać.
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec.
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret B. Carson.
(Open Letter)

Demolishing Nisard by Eric Chevillard.
Translated from the French by Jordan Stump.
(Dalkey Archive Press)

Private Property by Paule Constant.
Translated from the French by Margot Miller
and France Grenaudier-Klijn.
(University of Nebraska Press)

Lightning by Jean Echenoz.
Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale.
(New Press)

Zone by Mathias Énard.
Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell.
(Open Letter)

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?
by Johan Harstad.
Translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin.
(Seven Stories)

Upstaged by Jacques Jouet.
Translated from the French by Leland de la Durantaye.
(Dalkey Archive Press)

Fiasco by Imre Kertész.
Translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson.
(Melville House)

Montecore by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.
Translated from the Swedish by
Rachel Willson-Broyles.
(Knopf)

Kornél Esti by Dezső Kosztolányi.
Translated from the Hungarian by Bernard Adams.
(New Directions)

I Am a Japanese Writer by Dany Laferrière.
Translated from the French by David Homel.
(Douglas & MacIntyre)

Suicide by Edouard Levé.
Translated from the French by Jan Steyn.
(Dalkey Archive Press)

New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani.
Translated from the Italian by Judith Landry.
(Dedalus)

Purgatory by Tomás Eloy Martínez.
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne.
(Bloomsbury)

Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski.
Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston.
(Archipelago Books)

Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz.
Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange.
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Shadow-Boxing Woman by Inka Parei.
Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire.
(Seagull Books)

Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger.
Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin.
(W.W. Norton)

Scars by Juan José Saer.
Translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph.
(Open Letter)

Kafka’s Leopards by Moacyr Scliar.
Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas O. Beebee.
(Texas Tech University Press)

Seven Years by Peter Stamm.
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.
(Other Press)

The Truth about Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint.
Translated from the French by Matthew B. Smith.
(Dalkey Archive Press)

In Red by Magdalena Tulli.
Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston.
(Archipelago Books)

Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas.
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean.
(New Directions)

Stay tuned, lit lovers, as we navigate the world of literature together!

Looking Ahead in 2012

2012-01-24T04:28:57Z

2012 is upon us and I am finally settling into it. As the 2011 reading list trails off, I am already piling up what to read in 2012. Again, it is that time of year were last year's translated novels are being bandied about, each one being sized up as a potential long-lister for the Best Translated Book Awards. This is an arduous process that ultimately boils down to passion and plain, good writing. With that in mind, the anticipation for what will make next year's list is simmering with each new publisher catalog I receive.

I can't possibly list everyone novel that I want to read, I can only go through some of my favorite publishers' offerings and give you a heads up on what to look out for when you're meandering the aisles of your local indie or loading up your online shopping carts. Let's take a look:

Archipelago
You knew I was going to bring them up, didn't you? They're that good. So let me run down some of their new titles for the first half of the year...

As Though She Were Sleeping

by Elias Khoury

translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth
April 2012

As Though She Were Sleeping is an homage to dreaming, "the only way of escaping oppression, be it familial, religious, or political." Milia's response to her new husband and to the Middle East of 1947 is to close her eyes and float into parallel worlds where identities and faces shift, and where she can converse with the dead and foresee the future. As the novel progresses, Milia's dreams become more navigable than the strange and obstinate "reality" she finds herself in.

Harlequin's Millions

by Bohumil Hrabal

translated from the Czech by Stacey Knecht
April 2012

Milan Kundera says of Hrabal that he “embodies as no other the fascinating Prague. He couples people’s humor to baroque imagination.” Hrabal’s work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. His most popular novels include Closely Watched Trains and I Served the King of England. Harlequin’s Millions is set in a home for the elderly, full of eccentric characters reminiscing about their lives and their changing country. The central characters are as playful as they are stubborn and melancholy, forever gazing back into their personal and collective history with transcendent wonder.

Prehistoric Times

by Eric Chevillard

translated from the French by Alyson Waters

April 2012

Chevillard’s characters in Prehistoric Times remind us of the inhabitants of Beckett’s world: dreamers who in their savage and deductive folly try to modify reality. The writing, with its reservations, its burlesque variations, its accelerations and ruptures, takes us into a frightening and jubilatory delirium, where the beginning of the story is forever deferred. With an entirely original voice and mind, Chevillard asks looming, luminous, and very funny questions about who we are, where we come from, and where we might be going.

My Struggle

by Karl O. Knausgaard

translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett

May 2012

Winner of the Brage Award, the Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, the P2 Listeners' Prize, and the Norwegian Critics' Prize

Nominated for the Nordic Council Literary Prize

A Norwegian Marcel Proust. This nerve-striking, addictive piece of hyper-realism, by the Norwegian Critics' Prize-winning author of A Time For Everything, has created a phenomenon throughout Scandinavia. Written as though his very life were at stake.

Almost ten years have passed since Karl O. Knausgaard's father drank himself to death. He is now embarking on his third novel while haunted by self-doubt. Knausgaard breaks his own life story down to its elementary particles, often recreating memories in real time, blending recollections of images and conversation with profound questions in a remarkable way. Knausgaard probes into his past, dissecting struggles--great and small--with great candor and vitality. Articulating universal dilemmas, this masterpiece opens a window into one of the most original minds writing today.

Book of My Mother

by Albert Cohen

translated from the French by Bella Cohen

May 2012

A moving memorial to the author's mother and, in the words of Paris-Match, "one of the most beautiful love stories ever written." Shortly after Albert Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis, he received news of his mother’s death in Marseille. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of moving pieces for La France libre, which later grew into Book of My Mother. Achingly honest, intimate, and moving, this memoir-in-glimpses is a tribute to all mothers.

Catastrophes

by Breyten Breytenbach

translated from the Afrikaans by Breyten Breytenbach

August 2012

Reminiscent of Cortázar's Cronopios and Famas, this incandescent collection of lyrical and often nightmarish visions—now in English for the first time—is a feast for the senses and mind. At once raw, chiaroscuro, unearthly, and musical, these dreamscapes shed light on the human condition, history, isolation and connection, death and rebirth. Warning: these bite-sized pieces may detonate within.

Mama Leone

by Miljenko Jergović

translated from the Croatian by Stela Tomasevic and David Williams

September 2012

The Croatian writer Miljenko Jergovic, whose remarkable debut collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro – winner of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize – was published by Archipelago, has masterfully created a novel which draws the reader into an episodic, profoundly personal recounting of a childhood destroyed by war. Narrated from one boy's perspective, Mama Leone’s episodic events are held together by several recurring motifs rather than a historical or narrative chronology. Dazzling, rhapsodic, and above all humane, Jergovic has created a novel that is simultaneously ultra-modern, grotesque, and suspenseful.

Open Letter Books
With their colorful, distinct cover designs and their superb choices, it looks like Open Letter is really hitting their stride this year. Eccentric, quirky and necessary, the books they've chosen to publish all look like they're worth reading.

The Smoke of Distant Fires
By Eduardo Chirinos
Translated from the Spanish
by G. J. Racz
January 2012

The Smoke of Distant Fires contains thirteen new poems from the contemporary Peruvian poet, essayist, critic, translator, and children’s book author, Eduardo Chirinos. Precisely organized and formally inventive, each poem in the collection is itself a collection of ten numbered stanzas, and each of the stanzas themselves are fully formed poems, a series of rhythmic, elliptical fables from a fully recognizable, yet wholly original, world.

The third collection of Chirinos’s poetry to appear in English, The Smoke of Distant Fires signals an exciting new direction in Chirinos’s poetics—its multivocal stanzas, evocative intertextuality, and enigmatic transparency join forces to perform a poignant interrogation of what it means to write poetry in the early twenty-first century.

The Cyclist Conspiracy
By Svetislav Basara
Translated from the Serbian
by Randall A. Major
March 2012

The Cyclist Conspiracy tells the tale of a secret Brotherhood who meet in dreams, gain esoteric knowledge from contemplation of the bicycle, and seek to move in and out of history, manipulating events; the Brothers are part of a conspiracy so vast and so secret that, in many cases, the conspirators themselves are unaware of their participation in it. Told through a series of “historical documents”—memoirs, illustrations, letters, philosophical treatises, blue prints, and maps—the novel details the story of these interventions and the historical moments where the Brotherhood has made their influence felt, from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to a lost story of Sherlock Holmes.

Masterfully intertwining the threads of waking and dreams into the fabric of the present, the past, and the future, Svetislav Basara’s Pynchon-esque The Cyclist Conspiracy is a bold, funny, and imaginative romp.

Children in Reindeer Woods
By Kristin Omarsdottir
Translated from the Icelandic
by Lytton Smith
April 2012

Eleven-year-old Billie lives at a ‘temporary home for children’ called Children in Reindeer Woods, which she discovers one afternoon, to her surprise, is in the middle of a war zone. When a small group of paratroopers kill everyone who lives there with her,and then turn on each other, Billie is forced to learn to live with the violent, innocent, and troubled Rafael, who decides to abandon the soldier’s life and become a farmer, no matter what it takes.

A lyrical and continually surprising take on the absurdity of war and the mysteries of childhood, Children in Reindeer Woods is a moving modern fable.

My First Suicide
By Jerzy Pilch
Translated from the Polish
by David Frick
May 2012

Neither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise My First Suicide straddle the line between intimate revelation and drunken confession. These stories reveal a nostalgic and poetic Pilch, one who can pen a character’s lyrical ode to the fate of his father’s perfect chess table in one story, examine a teacher’s desperate and dangerous infatuation with a student in the next, and then, always true to his obsessions, tell a remarkably touching story that begins by describing his narrator’s excitement at the possibility of a three-way with the seductive soccer-fan, Anka Chow Chow.

The stories of My First Suicide combine irony and humor, anecdote and gossip, love and desire with an irresistibly readable style that is vintage Pilch.

The Planets
By Sergio Chejfec
Translated from the Spanish
by Heather Cleary
June 2012

When he reads about a mysterious explosion in the distant countryside, the narrator’s thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted from his home years ago, during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes, hoping in this way to reanimate his friend and relive the time they spent together wandering the streets of Buenos Aires.

Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets is an affecting and innovative exploration of mourning, remembrance, and friendship by one of Argentina’s modern masters.

Dalkey Archive
Dalkey keeps growing and offering the high quality novels and translations that we have come to expect form them. They hold a special place in my Oulipian heart.

The Book of Emotions
By Joao Almino
Translated by Elizabeth Jackson
January 2012

Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions “a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera.” Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. João Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.

Mathematique
By Jacques Roubaud
Translated by Ian Monk
January 2012

The third “branch” of Jacques Roubaud’s epic, Proustian Great Fire of London, Mathématique: is also an excellent entrance into the series. Adopting math as a career relatively late in his studies, Roubaud here narrates his difficulties both personal and pedagogical, while also investigating the role of mathematics in his life as a remedy to all the messiness of lived experience. “I sought out arithmetic,” he writes, “to protect myself. But from what? At the time, I would probably have replied: from vagueness, from a lack of rigor, from ‘literature.’” But mathematics also provide a refuge from human fears, and from coping, eventually, with tragedies like the death of his wife Alix. As with the previous volumes of The Great Fire of London, Mathématique: is a riveting and humorous anecdotal memoir as well as a fiendishly digressive fiction about the functions of memory and the written word.

Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta
By Aglaja Veteranyi
Translated by Vincent Kling
January 2012

A nomadic family of circus performers, refugees from Romania, travels through Europe and Africa by caravan. The mother’s death-defying act causes constant anxiety for her two daughters, who voice their fears through a grisly communal fairy tale about a child being cooked alive in polenta—but their real life is no less of a dark fable, and one that seems just as unlikely to have a happy ending. An actor and performance artist as well as a poet and novelist, Veteranyi was acclaimed for her seemingly “artless” narrative voice, in which pain and hilarity always vie for the upper hand—a voice at once lyrical and jaded, prurient and spiritual, comical and horrifying.

Autoportrait
By Edouard Leve
Translated by Lorin Stein
February 2012

In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond “sincerity,” Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Levé’s prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine —until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author’s dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction . . . made entirely of facts.

The Family of Pascual Duarte
By Camilo Jose Cela
Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
Back in action and sooo good! (Okay, I am pushing a little backlist. Sue me.)

New York Review Books
The tortured sophisticate of the bunch, NYRB consistently puts out delicious new titles and fantastic reprints of classics. It's difficult to ignore their discerning taste. Zweig, anyone?

Amsterdam Stories
By Nescio
Translated by Damion Searls
March 2012

The first English-language collection of stories by the great Dutch writer, Nescio.

J. H. F. Grönloh was a successful Dutch businessman, executive of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company and father of four, with a secret life: under the pseudonym Nescio (Latin for “I don’t know”), he wrote a series of short stories that went unrecognized at the time but that are now widely considered the best prose ever written in Dutch.

Nescio’s stories look back on the enthusiasms of youth with an achingly beautiful melancholy comparable to the work of Alain-Fournier and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He writes of young dreams from the perspective of adult resignation, but reinhabits youthful ambition and adventure so fully that the later perspective is the one thrown into doubt—and with language as fresh as when it was written a century ago. His last long story, written and set during World War II, is a remarkable evocation of the Netherlands in wartime and a hymn to our capacity to take refuge in memory and imagination.

This is great literature—capturing the Dutch landscape and scenes of Amsterdam with a remarkable poetry, and expressing the spirit of the country of businessmen and van Gogh, merchants and visionaries. This first translation of Nescio into English—all the major works and a broad selection of his shorter stories—is a literary event.

Confusion
By Stefan Zweig
Translated by Anthea Bell
April 2012

In Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, a venerable privy councilor approaching the end of his career adds a “secret page” to the public record of his accomplishments, confessing the true story of his youthful initiation into the delights and perils of intense scholarship. After a first semester in Berlin more devoted to amorous adventures with local shop girls than books, he makes a fresh start in a small university town in central Germany where a professor’s brilliant lecturing style sparks a new all-consuming passion for learning and reading. He takes lodgings above the apartment of the professor and his wife and is soon a regular visitor there, dining with them on a daily basis and successfully inspiring the older man to make a fresh attempt to complete his magnum opus. And yet the professor’s enthusiasm for his devoted protégé alternates with cold scorn and sudden dismissals, leaving the perplexed student crippled by feelings of inadequacy and rejection, feelings only the professor’s frustrated young wife seems to understand. But the secret anguish behind the older man’s apparently irrational cruelty will not so easily out…

Laying bare the fraught relationship between human instincts and higher callings, physical longing and the desire for knowledge, muddled emotions and the quest for intellectual clarity, Zweig’s intoxicating novella probes the mysteries of the creative process and the limits of sublimation.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary
By Victor Serge
Translated by Peter Sedgwick
April 2012

Victor Serge is one of the great men of the twentieth century, anarchist, revolutionary, agitator, theoretician, historian of his times, and a fearless truthteller. Here Serge describes his upbringing in Belgium, the child of a family of exiled Russian revolutionary intellectuals, his early life as an activist, his time in a French prison, the active role he played in the Russian Revolution, as well his growing dismay at the Revolutionary regime’s ever more repressive and murderous character. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, and barely escaped the Nazis to find a final refuge in Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary describes a thrilling life on the frontlines of history and includes brilliant portraits of politicians from Trotsky and Lenin to Stalin and of major writers like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely. Above all, it captures the sensibility of Serge himself, that of a courageous and singularly appealing advocate of human liberation who remained undaunted in the most trying of times.

Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary was cut by a fifth when it was first published in 1963. This new edition is the first in English to present the entirety of Serge’s book.

Dead Souls
By Nicolai Gogol
Translated by Donald Rayfield
May 2012

Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is an undisputed masterpiece of world literature. The tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con who establishes a thriving trade in “dead souls”—serfs who though no longer alive can still, he finds, be profitably sold—is at the same time a brilliant spoof of a corrupt society, full of the living dead. Most important, however, Gogol’s great novel is a sheer delight, a book spilling over with humor and passion and absurdity, and fed by an unflagging stream of stylistic invention. At once a phantasmagoria and a work of careful, if not a little mind-boggling, realism, Dead Souls is a supremely living work of art.

Donald Rayfield’s new translation at last provides English readers with a version of this great novel that does justice to the wonderful richness of the original. Noting the theatrical nature of Gogol’s inspiration and style, Rayfield has given his English sentences a pitch and presence that allows them to be spoken aloud throughout. He also presents a much fuller text than has previously been available to English readers of the controversial second part of the book, which Gogol sought to destroy.

Rayfield’s synoptic text draws on remaining sections of both the first and second drafts of this second part, revealing it as a major literary achievement in its own right.

Tyrant Banderas
By Ramon de Valle-Inclan
Translated by Peter Bush
May 2012

The first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the avowed inspiration for García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme, Tyrant Banderas is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American Republic in the grip of a monster. Valle-Inclán, one of the masters of Spanish modernism, combines the splintered points of view of a cubist painting with the campy excesses of 19thcentury serial fiction to paint an astonishing picture of a ruthless tyrant facing armed revolt.

It is the Day of the Dead, and revolution has broken out, creating mayhem from Baby Roach’s Cathouse to the Harris Circus to the deep jungle of Tico Maipú. The tyrant steps forth, assuring all that he is in favor of freedom of assembly and democratic opposition. Meanwhile, his secret police lock up, torture, and execute students and Indian peasants in a sinister castle by the sea where even the sharks have tired of a diet of revolutionary flesh. Then the opposition strikes back. They besiege the dictator’s citadel, hoping to bring justice to a downtrodden, starving populace.

Peter Bush’s new translation of Valle-Inclán’s seminal novel, the first into English since 1929, reveals a writer whose tragic sense of humor is as memorably grotesque and disturbing as Goya’s in his The Disasters of War.

Selected Essays
By Jean-Paul Sartre
Edited by Ronald Abronson and Adrian Van Den Hoven
May 2012

Philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, journalist, and activist, Jean-Paul Sartre was also—and perhaps above all—a great essayist. The essay was uniquely suited to Sartre because of its intrinsically provisional and open-ended character. It is the perfect form in which to dramatize the existential character of our deepest intellectual, artistic, and political commitments. This new selection of Sartre’s essays, the first in English to draw on the entire ten volumes of his collected essays as well as previously unpublished work, includes extraordinarily searching appreciations of such writers and artists as Faulkner, Bataille, and Giacometti; Sartre’s great address to the French people at the end of the occupation, “The Republic of Silence”; sketches of the United States from his visit in the 1940s; reflections on politics that are both incisive and incendiary; portraits of Camus and Merleau-Ponty; and a candid reckoning with his own career from one of the interviews that ill-health made his prime mode of communication late in life. Together they add up to an unequaled portrait of a revolutionary and sometimes reckless thinker and writer and his contentious, difficult but never less than interesting times. The essays have been translated by several translators.

Other Notables

Perlmann's Silence
By Pascal Mercier
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
January 2012

Philipp Perlmann, prominent linguist and speaker at a gathering of renowned international academics in a picturesque seaside town near Genoa, is struggling to maintain his grip on reality. Derailed by grief and no longer confident of his professional standing, writing his keynote address seems like an insurmountable task and, as the deadline approaches, Perlmann realizes that he will have nothing to present to his expectant colleagues. Terrorstricken, he decides to plagiarize the work of Leskov, a Russian colleague, and breathes a sigh of short-lived relief once the text has been submitted. But when Leskov’s imminent arrival is announced and threatens to expose Perlmann as a fraud, Perlmann’s mounting desperation leads him to contemplate drastic measures.

An exquisite, captivating portrait of a mind slowly unraveling, Perlmann’s Silence is a brilliant, textured meditation on the complex interplay between language and memory, and the depths of the human psyche.

Epistolophilia
Writing the Life of Ona Simaite
By Julija Sukys
March 2012

The librarian walks the streets of her beloved Paris. An old lady with a limp and an accent, she is invisible to most. Certainly no one recognizes her as the warrior and revolutionary she was, when again and again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide, and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau.

Through Epistolophilia, Julija Šukys follows the letters and journals—the “life-writing”—of this woman, Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970). A treasurer of words, Šimaitė carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her life, including thousands of letters, scores of diaries, articles, and press clippings. Journeying through these words, Šukys negotiates with the ghost of Šimaitė, beckoning back to life this quiet and worldly heroine—a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem’s honored “Righteous Among the Nations”) and yet so little known. The result is at once a mediated self-portrait and a measured perspective on a remarkable life. It reveals the meaning of life-writing, how women write their lives publicly and privately, and how their words attach them—and us—to life.

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats
By Jan-Philipp Sendker
Translated by Kevin Willarty
January 2012

A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present. When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion that will reaffirm the reader’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.

Me and You
By Niccolo Ammaniti
Translated by Kylee Doust
February 2012

From internationally best-selling author Niccolò Ammaniti, comes a funny, tragic, gut-punch of a novel, charting how an unlikely alliance between two outsiders blows open one family’s secrets. Lorenzo Cumi is a fourteen-year-old misfit. To quell the anxiety of his concerned, socially conscious parents, he tells them he’s been invited on an exclusive ski vacation with the popular kids. On the morning of the trip, Lorenzo demands that his mother drop him off before they arrive at the train station, insisting that his status will be compromised if he shows up accompanied by his mother. Reluctantly, she agrees, and as soon as she is safely out of the vicinity, he turns around and makes his way back to his neighborhood, to put his real plan in motion: for one blessed week, Lorenzo will retreat to a forgotten cellar in his family’s apartment building, where he will live in perfect isolation, keeping the adult world at bay.

But when his estranged half-sister, Olivia, shows up in the cellar unexpectedly, his idyll is shattered, and the two become locked in a battle of wills—forced to confront the very demons they are each struggling to escape.

Evoking the fierce intensity and the pulse-quickening creepiness of I’m Not Scared, Ammaniti’s best-selling first novel, Me and You is a breathtaking tale of alienation, acceptance, and wanting to be loved by “a fearsomely gifted writer” (The Independent).

When the Night
By Cristina Comencini
Translated by Marina Harss
April 2012

Manfred, a surly mountaineer recently abandoned by his wife, rents the upstairs apartment in his home in the Dolomites to Marina, a woman from the city, and her difficult young son. Deeply suspicious by nature, especially of women, Manfred spies obsessively on Marina, in whose shortcomings as a mother he finds resonances of his own mother’s desertion of him in childhood. When Marina’s frustration over her son’s refusal to eat or sleep leads her to harm the child, Manfred steps in, and the silent power struggle between them escalates. Yet Manfred’s attraction to Marina is as powerful as his distrust. In this alternately shocking and moving novel, Cristina Comencini has created a complex, psychologically profound portrait of two damaged, vulnerable people and the painful bond that develops between them as they are drawn into each other’s worlds.

True
By Riikka Pulkkinen
Translated by Lola M. Rogers
March 2012

Elsa is dying. Her husband, Martti, and daughter Eleonoora are struggling to accept the crushing thought that they are soon to lose her. As Elsa becomes ever more fragile, Eleonoora’s childhood memories are slipping away. Meanwhile, Eleonoora’s daughter Anna spends her time pondering the fates of passersby. For her the world is full of stories. But the story that will change her forever is the one about Eeva, her mother’s nanny, whom her grandparents have been silent about for years. Eeva’s forgotten story, which Anna first learns of when she discovers an old dress of Eeva’s, is finally revealed layer by layer. The tale that unfolds is about a mother and daughter, about how memory can deceive us—and sometimes that is the most merciful thing that can happen.

That's it for now, readers. I am sure there are more great books to come and many that I have left out, but these are gems to be sure. Drop me a line with you thoughts.

The Week in Links - 11.18.11-11.25.11

2011-11-25T21:06:41Z

The Week in Links 11.18.11-11.25.11

You caught me. I went fishing last week and this week. But on Black Friday, I return with a new collection of links to ponder while you're waiting in line to buy that $100 flat screen.

Asymptote makes my heart race with this excerpt from Robert Walser's Full due out in January from NYRB.

The Guardian gives the spotlight to a few authors to wax on about their favorite books this year ...diverse choices (many memoirs) as well as the expected. You can join in on the debate, too.

A history of cars through the panels of TinTin
is amazing and informative.

Just a hop, skip and a click away, the Alta blog

has a fascinating post promoting
Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory By Sherry Simon
which came out in September as part of Routledge's exciting
new series, New Perspectives in Translation Studies.

And for all you Henson fans, here is a librarian going bonkers:

Remember, read wisely.

The Week in Links - 10.29.11-11.4.11

2011-11-04T19:13:48Z

Week in Links

The City and the Writer: In Dubai with Nujoom Al-Ghanim Words Without Borders focuses on the writer today in the city of Dubai.

Ruth Franklin, Irmgard Keun and Amos Oz:
Yes, Over at The New Republic, the esteemed Ruth Franklin discusses the politics of Amos Oz and Irmgard Keun. So good.

Claire Messud and Amos Oz in the NYT Books section this Sunday. Can't wait!

The Racy Madame Bovary Don't act like you don't know she was all vamp and tramp. At least, according to this pulp cover!

Have you read any of these? Lorin Stein of THE Paris Review hasn't...
Have you lied about reading?

Murakami! Graces the NYT Book Review section this Sunday. Match made in literary Heaven?

Last, and certainly not least, the next time you are involved in a book conversation with Lorin Stein or anyone else you surmise might be lying about what they have read, here is a video to help you notice the telltale signs:

How to Tell if Someone is Lying with Body Language

As always, Read Responsibly.

The 5-1: Get to Know Translator Elizabeth Harris

2011-11-03T22:47:11Z

5-1 Questionnaire

Elizabeth Harris

Elizabeth Harris has translated Italian authors like Domenico Starnone, Mario Rigoni Stern, Giulio Mozzi, and Marco Candida. Her recent translations appear in The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, and Words Without Borders, as well as in Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2010 (Mozzi) and Best European Fiction 2011(Candida).

1.Name your 5 favorite translated books:
Achh! Hard! The older translations of these aren’t considered the most "accurate.” But I fell in love with the authors with these translated versions, and it's hard to let go...

Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories, Norton Edition, various translators
Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, translated by Walter Morison (OOP)

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Francis Steegmuller

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa

Complete Stories of Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

2. Name 4 favorite translators:
Achh again!

Constance Garnett
William Weaver
Gregory Rabassa
John DuVal

3. Name 3 books you wish you could translate:

Elio Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia
Premo Levi's Se Questo è un uomo (currently being re-translated by another of my favorite translators, Ann Goldstein)
Giovanni Verga’s Collected Stories

Pipedreams, all.

4. Name 2 things you try to avoid when you translate:

I try to avoid translating work I don’t love: when I translate something I don’t love, I get depressed.

I also try to avoid imposing myself too much on the original story or novel even while I also always try to remember that my translation has to work, has to be beautiful, in English.

5. What are you working on now?
I’m just finishing up a story collection by Giulio Mozzi, Questo è il giardino (This is the Garden).
I’m also working on Marco Candida’s novel, Il diario dei sogni (“Dream Diary”).

Constance Garnett
William Weaver

In Red by Magadalena Tulli

2011-11-03T01:23:39Z

Magdalena Tulli~Poland

Anyone who makes it to Stitchings appreciates its promising misty grayness and the moist warm breeze in which desires flourish so handsomely. A wide choice of furnished rooms with all the modern conveniences, and homemade meals available just around the corner, cheap and filling. Daybreaks and sunsets at fixed times. A moderate climate, flowers throughout the year. It's well worth making the long steamboat journey, putting up with seasickness, till the port of Stitchings comes into view crowded with freighters flying various flags. Or for the same number of days rattling along in a train, dozing form tedium, rocking to the rhythmic clatter of the wheels. The visitor--for instance a traveling salesman with a valise bursting at the seams, as if instead a few samples he had stuffed it with all of his possessions--can choose to come by land or by sea, restricted only by the properties of the place form which he sets out. But his choice of route determines the fate that awaits him upon his arrival.

Magadalena Tulli's In Red is a read worth your time. And your thought. Known for her prose works, In Red shows her talent for a surreal and encompassing narrative that, at 160 pages, is a workhorse of a novel. The reader is instantly thrown into the story of the town of Stitchings, a small town in the imaginary fourth partition of Poland. Set in an indeterminate time, the disembodied narrator swiftly takes through the lives of inhabitants and the main character, which is the town itself.

Not that this is a novel of fireside chats, but a novel of mendacity via greed, jealousy, neglect and imprisonment. Centered around three businesses--Strobbel's factory, Neumann's factory and Loom and Sons. These business keep the town afloat but eventually competitiveness and greed destroy in one way or another each one. A love affair begins between a young general and Emilka, only daughter of the Looms. Unfortunately, she is killed, yet her heart continues to beat on. This is where the novel begins it's teetering between worlds--the real and the unreal. It carries over into the narrative as well, wondering exactly what we are reading, but always wanting to continue.

There are many imaginable oddities amidst the rotating cast of characters who all seem to intertwine in some way. Emilka, young girl dead with a beating heart, wants to go dancing, a man is shot and the bullet boomerangs around the world only to come back and hit him again, and an celebrated singer who disappears forever in an air balloon. Throughout the novel, characters die but don't seem to fade away. This is best said by townspeople when sipping coffee at the local cafe:

"The dead are running the show."

And this permeates the novel making it feel ominous tonally and with their lives caught in the space between life and death. Stylistically, Tulli incorporates her gift for metaphor and a well-bred distant voice meant for story-telling. Everything seems to wrap back around again, like the ways out of Stitchings:

Merchants locked themselves in their storerooms along with their wives and children, barricading the door, so as to wait out the worst and then simply flee--to the port or the train station. But what port were they talking about! They must have dreamed it. See--there was nothing but a boarded-up harbor building, the narrowest of jetties with a dilapidated bench at the end, over which a hurricane lamp hanging from a pole was lit after lunch and put out come what may after supper. By the landing stage, a peeling fishing boat rocked on the waves, its skipper afraid to take it out to sea. A real ship could surely only enter this harbor by mistake. And what kind of train station was that, it's ticket offices bolted shut, the chintz curtains drawn from inside, with scraps of timetables blowing about the waiting room by the unlit stove.

A Polish writer of note (paired with a translator of note Bill Johnston), Tulli continues to showcase her growth as a writer. Weaving the fantastical fairy tale about the impossible fate of its habitues indelibly marked by the fate of the town. Tulli knows that there is beauty in tragedy and sets it before us beautifully.

In Red
Magdalena Tulli
Translated by Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books
Softcover, 160 pp.
ISBN:9781935744085
$16.00

Other works by Magdalena Tulli:

The Week in Links - 10.22.11-10.28.11

2011-10-28T18:58:01Z

All I can tell you is that World Literature Today continues to impress and bring to our attention works in translation from new voices. This issue is focuses on Post-Soviet Literature: Twenty Years After the Fall, but their web exclusive is equally fascinating, Emerging Ukrainian Women Prose Writers: Twenty Years After Independence . WLT puts a massive amount of work into each issue and it consistently manages to inform and surprise. Subscribe if you don't already.

Congrats to translator Damion Searls who won this year's Translation award from PEN Center USA. His translation of Dalkey Archive's Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse beat Sarah Green's translation of Symphony in White and Jordan Stump's translation of The Collaborators.

Lots of great stuff over at Asymptote, including beaucoup de Toussaint and a Dutch translation by Lydia Davis of A.L.Snijders work, but this feature on Eileen Chang is wonderful.

Get your Asian Lit on over at Publishing Perspectives.

As a fan of Patrick Hamilton, looking forward to this BBC production.

I've mentioned this site before, but really, you must visit 50 Watts (this link is for book covers in Switzerland.)

And for a little fun:

Remember, read responsibly.

Urs Widmer's My Mother's Lover

2011-10-26T19:37:47Z

Urs Widmer~Switzerland

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He'd been a musician, a conductor. Three days before he died, he conducted his final concert in the Stadthalle. Gyorgy, Ligeti, Bartok, Conrad Beck.--My mother loved him all her life. Not that he noticed. That anyone noticed. No one knew of her passion, not a word did she ever speak on the subject. 'Edwin,' mind you, she would whisper when she stood alone at the lake, holding her child's hand. There, in the shade, surrounded by quacking ducks, she'd look across at the sunlit shore opposite. 'Edwin!' The conductor's name was Edwin.

Many may not have heard of Urs Widmer, but if you're wanting to get a good taste of modern Swiss literature, he's definitely the man to start reading. Born in 1938, he looks like the love child of Perec and Gene Hackman. And if it weren't for Seagull Books, we may not have had the pleasure of reading this contemporary author. My Mother's Lover is a quick-paced and tragic tale of obsession. If you're into grim fairy tales about unrequited love, this is the book for you. Beginning around the turn of the century, it chronicles the love affair between Edwin and Clara.

At turns digressive and narrative, the first part of the book focuses on their burgeoning relationship and their familial heritage. They meet in the '20's in a town in Switzerland. Edwin is a poor musician and Clara is rich and beautiful. Edwin, remote and talented, conducts The Young Orchestra which dares to bring the works of new composers to his town. Half the audience would cheer and half would hiss in disapproval. Clara, a devout music lover, becomes a volunteer secretary for Edwin and the Young Orchestra who are youthful, eager, and all working for free. Clara does an excellent job fixing whatever problem arises and without much notice from Edwin. Until a trip to Paris when after a joyous performance, the go back to her room and consummate their relationship.

After this, the Depression hits and tragedy strikes Clara. Her father dies (her mother had been dead many years) and she loses everything. Because Edwin is becoming successful, he offers her a room. Soon after her father's death, she visits his relatives in Italy. Welcomed with love and fanfare, she feels a unity she has not felt before and admires the strength of her uncles. When she returns home, Edwin is cold and cruel, only visiting her to sate his sexual needs. She becomes pregnant. Edwin cannot abide this at his point in his career. She aborts. Edwin's best friend, Wern, than asks her to escort him on a trip to Frankfurt. When they return, she is heartbroken to learn that Edwin has married a rich heiress and lives on the lake in huge mansion. By this time, she has quit her job with The Youth Orchestra out of anger.

This is when Widmer covers a lot of historical ground. Clara marries and lives on the other side of the lake from Edwin. Widmer decides never to mention the husband's name or anything about their relationship, which is because her love is for Edwin only and he doesn't matter to her. At night, she walks along the lake and takes the heaviest stone she can find in her arms and walks into the lake repeating 'Edwin'. This ritual continues, even when she has a child and replaces the stone with a child. This is a gruesome image and it is explored more in the dreams she has which are blood-filled and violent.

This obsession with Edwin is never revealed to anyone. And is often the case with unrequited love, if it is not processed, it implodes and madness becomes the result. As her madness becomes frenetic, Edwin's success and riches abound. Eventually, she becomes hospitalized and given electroshock treatments. When she returns home, it is during the lead-in to WWII, and she rips out all the flowers and begins to plant trees and vegetables. This is where Widmer's intention of paralleling the rise of Hitler and the demise of Clara who could be seen as the blind followers of the Nazis and the Fascists, as he cleverly shows in this passage:

She put wood wool beneath the still green strawberries. She sprayed poison. (Hitler bombed Coventry to bits.) She ran with the wheelbarrow, full of peat or old leaves, along the paths between the vegetable patches, paths the width of her feet. Yes, she ran, she didn't ever walk. She forced the garden hose into a mouse hole, turned the water on, and used her shovel to kill the mice that fled from the other holes. (Hitler had now reached Narvik too, the North Pole, or almost.)

The her use of the garden hose on the mice symbolizes Hitler's hunt for Jews. These political themes are present in the beginning but grow much more ominous as the novel progresses. When Clara decides during this time to visit her Italian relatives, she is ignored because of the arrival of Il Duce (Mussolini) at her relatives house for a meal. They have succumbed to Fascism, but Clara is oblivious to who Il Duce is and to the horrific war happening. All she has is her love for Edwin.

The prose is clipped and sparse. Nothing seems extraneous which also speaks well for the translation because his minimal style loses nothing in the translation by Donal McLaughlin. This reportage style contrasts the sadness that permeates My Mother's Lover. Edwin's name is used most often and Clara is most often referred to by the narrator, Clara's son, as 'my mother.' This emphasizes the rich and powerful vs. the poor and powerless construct that threads through the narrative as well.

It's obvious that this isn't going to end well for Clara. Until her death, she keeps her devotion as her link to life. A tragic story, told in a fairy talesque manner, My Mother's Lover examines how love destroys in many manners--love of nation, unrequited love and love of self. The males in the novel are regarded highly while Clara represents the silenced women of a patriarchal society. And like the men who wage wars, Edwin dismisses Clara and smites a life and a love of a person her never really knew.

My Mother's Lover
By Urs Widmer
Translated By Donal McLaughlin
Seagull Books
Hardcover, 130 pp.
ISBN: 9781906497965
$21.00

The Week in Links - 10.14.11-10.21.11

2011-10-21T18:57:21Z

It's been a great week for international literature, but more importantly, for Iceland. Talk about coverage. There's the current issue of Words Without Borders, a spate of posts over at Three Percent and Amazon Crossing's commitment to publish at least ten titles from Iceland. Holy Bjork. Oh, and let's not forget Iceland is being honored at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Had enough of Iceland, how about checking out the new German Book Prize Winner?

Murakami!

Jose Manuel Prieto talks books in Castro's Cuba.

Wall Street and Walser, Occupied.

Murakami!

Sorokin at Stanford

Really great interview with Adrienne Celt of Hayden's Ferry Review about translation in lit journals...she was in my writing workshop this summer and she is one smart cookie.

Murakami!

Besides all that linkage, e-met the world's foremost Peter Handke expert, Mike Roloff. Finished up reading Leeches. Began working as an ambassador for Archipelago Books and if you don't know about them, you should.

Read wisely, life is short.

Before I go, let me leave with a hilarious vid of Bjork talking about her television. Check out her silver leggings!

Bjork's T.V. - The most popular videos are a click away

Kafka's Leopards by Moacyr Scliar

2011-10-19T20:38:40Z

Moacyr Scliar~Brazil

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Leopards in the Temple

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can e calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.

--Franz Kafka (1883-1924), (transl. Clement Greenberg), from Parables and Paradoxes, 1946

Perhaps the leopards symbolized something. A leopard is a wild beast. Capitalists are ferocious in their greed for profit and their exploitation of the proletariat. Killing a leopard in a zoo might be a way of demonstrating to the capitalists that their days were numbered. But, reasoned Mousy, workers are also ferocious when demanding their rights or going on strike. How to differentiate the ferocity of one class form that of the other? How to tell progressive ferocity from its reactionary counterpart? Could the answer be to leave an explanatory message at the side of the executed leopard, explaining that the animal had been sacrificed to serve as an example to those in power?

After reading Moacyr Scliar's work, Kafka's Leopards, I have encounter yet another work that riffs off the work of someone else. Although this isn't a new concept, the result of doing so does present challenges because it inherently measures the text against the original text. In this instance, Scliar chose to base his work off of a 28 word aphorism written by Kafka, The Leopard in the Temple, and does write an entertaining novel. Part fiction and part fact (aka. critifictional), Kafka's Leopards is an amalgam of literary and mystery sensibilities. In addition, Scliar addresses British and European literature, Jewish Writing, and the question of a reader's interpretation as his primary themes.

The novel centers around the life of Benjamin "Mousy" Kantarovitch. Described as a mouse, "Not on of those happy mice that you find in children's books--no, one the contrary, a melancholy, solitary mouse, perpetually ensconced in his hole," Mousy is a young man who is taken by the idea of rebellion. Living in a small community of Chernovitsky, he wants very much to make a difference in the world as opposed to following his father's footsteps as a tailor. Mousy becomes enamored with Communism and The Communist Manifesto. He idolizes his friend, Yossi, who claims to have met Trotsky. Trotsky gave a mission to Yossi in order to prove his loyalty to the Party. When Yossi falls deathly ill, he asks Mousy to carry out his task. Leaving home for the first time, Mousy ends up in Prague to meet secure a message from a Jewish writer which will be the clue to the rest of his mission. Mousy is not a lucky man. He loses his satchel on the train which contained his contact all the other mission's information. Once in Prague, he tries to remember the all the information but can only come up with bits and pieces of his information.

This leads Mousy to attempt to figure out on his own who the writer is and what the message would be. Along the way, he makes deductions and assumptions based on his interpretation of signs and what information he does remember. He finds the real Kafka, not aware of who he is, and Kafka gives him the 28 word aphorism. Through jewelry stores, synagogues and churches, Mousy still cannot come up with the message he was supposed to receive. He returns home defeated and becomes a tailor.

Later in his life, he develops a close relationship with his grand-nephew, Jaime, who discusses Communism with him. Jaime becomes involved in a revolution himself and gets arrested. The faded yellow aphorism was in his pocket. Mousy is the only person that can prove his innocence to get him released. So, from beginning to end, Mousy is a Communist without really succeeding at it.

His journey to Prague occupies the majority of the novel and within these pages are the ruminations and rationalizations of Mousy's decisions. It seems a bit heavy handed with the exploration of the reader's interpretation as a theme. This slows the pace down but without adding more tension. Mousy's attempts at consistently comparing the tenets of Communism to Kafka's aphorism is comical even if it does linger too long. Interestingly enough, Mousy gains courage and strength from Communism, but his misinterpretations only lead to discouragement and failure.

Encompassing so much in a thin novel, barely one hundred pages, is a valiant effort and a nice addition to this series, The Americas. Scliar succeeds in this as well as ascribing deeper meaning to the tale of the bumbling Mousy. A fun read that masks the seriousness of his intentions. It's enjoyable even if one doesn't understand the subtext, but it sure helps.

Kafka's Leopards
By Moacyr Scliar
Translated and Introduction by Thomas O. Beebee
Texas Tech University Press
Hardcover, 96 pp.
ISBN: 9780896726963
$26.95

Peter Handke Does Beckett

2011-10-11T19:02:24Z

Peter Handke~Austria

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For the dark, gloom-ridden person was, perhaps is me, me, the woman here. My act now? No, in my night I never needed to act. You, you're the master actor, world champion at broad-daylight acting. No one can compete with you in that, no one, never. But I can be your audience. 'I can put up with being ignored,' another woman once said to another man. Accordingly I join you in my signless night, stammer vaguely to myself and at the same time I feel the urge to sing my stammering, the refrain to the song you're humming of the shadow creeping down our mountains, of the azure sky growing dull, of the noise ebbing from the countryside around us, of our sleep in the coming peace. And I'm singing my stammered echo now, singing my joyful anger as a treble clef, just as you're singing your serene lack of illusion. I wonder if that adds up to a duet?

Heads up, actresses, use Till Day Do You Part or A Question of Light as a monologue source. Fashioned as a female response to the woman referred to in Beckett's one-act play, Krapp's Last Tape, this is Peter Handke doing what he does so well. His ability to distill emotion fits perfectly for the ups and downs of this monologue. I haven't read Krapp's Last Tape or ever seen it, but from other Beckett works I have read, I see the similarity in their incisive voice and use of language.

To provide a brief synopsis, Beckett's play is about a sixty-nine year old man who, every year on his birthday, tapes his reflections and events of the previous year. This birthday he is listening to a tape of himself thirty years ago and thus unravels the complexity of this character. Handke echoes this monologue structure in that he begins with an angry woman and ends with the woman realizing that perhaps her and Krapp are simpatico, are really lovers until the end.

There are so many great passages in this monologue which is only thirty-two pages long, it would difficult to choose the highlights. They are all highlights. And speaking of simpatico, Mike Mitchell has been translating Handke for such a long time that there is not one misstep in capturing Handke's prose and character. Seagull Books publishes this piece and chose to include the German and French version following the translation which I always think is interesting whether I understand that language or not.

Till Day Do You Part or A Question of Light is a great riff on Beckett that just so happened to turn out brilliantly. It would be really intriguing to see these pieces performed together. Even though I haven't reviewed any Handke, I am a huge fan and this is a perfect treat for any fan. Beckett lovers will surely not be disappointed either. Handke embodies the voice of a woman and I can't help but be impressed by that. This monologue deserves an audience.

Till Day Do You Part or A Question of Light
By Peter Handke
Translated by Mike Mitchell
Seagull Books
Hardcover, 103 pp.
ISBN: 9781906497736
$17.95

Other Handke Titles: