Roundup on recent English translations

A shot from Carol Reed's The Third Man.

From John Gray's review of a new translation of Curzio Malaparte's The Skin:

If you want a vividly realistic picture of the state of Naples when it was liberated, you should turn to Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 – another blackly comic book that is also luminously sane. If you want to enter into the delirium and cruelty of the period, it is The Skin you must read.

I like Gray's juxtaposition here of Lewis' greater accuracy with Malaparte's greater truth. An embellished account may be truer to life. This reminds me of a similar contrast between Blunden's Undertones of War and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That: Blunden stuck closer to the facts while Graves, despite his greater freedom with the truth, gave us a book that better conveys what it was like (at times) to be there.

W. W. Norton & Company has issued Susan Bernofsky's new translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Here's an excerpt, and here's an essay that Bernofsky adapted from her Afterword. Rebecca Schuman reviews the new translation in Slate.

Schuman reviews two more books on Kafka (h/t LGH). And here are two reviews of Reiner Stach's Kafka biography: one by John Banville and one by Stephen Mitchelmore.

Robert Pogue Harrison reviews Zibaldone, a translation of Giacomo Leopardi's notebooks, all 2592 pages of them. The translation was produced by a team at the University of Birmingham. Joshua Cohen calls Leopardi's notebooks 'one of the greatest blogs of the nineteenth century'. Tim Parks on the translation of 'zibaldone': 'The word zibaldone comes from the same root as zabaione and originally had the disparaging sense of a hotchpotch of food, or any mixture of heterogeneous elements, then a random collection of notes....'

From Mark O'Connell's review of W. G. Sebald's A Place in the Country (Jo Catling's translation of which has just been released in North America by Random House):

Sebald has a way of viewing the world whereby seemingly minor misfortunes or cruelties are made to stand for catastrophes too terrible to be directly observed.

Here's an excerpt from Sebald essay on Robert Walser. Here's an interview of Catling and Anthea Bell on translating Sebald.

Alma Books publishes Sandor Marai's poems in English: 'This collection, the first and only edition of Márai's poems in the English language, presented in John Ridland's and Peter V. Czipott's brilliant verse translation, and with an introduction by Tibor Fischer, offers a comprehensive selection spanning the author's whole career.'

Zsófia Szilágyi on a newly discovered manuscript by Sandor Márai: 'Confessions of a Bourgeois is undoubtedly one of Márai’s most significant books, with one of the most beautiful endings in Hungarian literature, narrating the news of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination that reached the writer in an idyllic summer milieu. “Princip has aimed precisely. Exactly into the middle of our lives”, as Márai wrote elsewhere.'

David van Dusen on Miklós Szentkuthy's newly translated Marginalia on Casanova, which is 'Szentkuthy’s commentary on the German edition of a French memoir written by a Venetian librarian, Giacomo Casanova, in the 1790s.' Nicholas Lezard included Marginalia in his list of the best paperbacks of 2013. The translation was published by Contra Mundum Press. Rhys Tranter liked it.

Here's Rainer Hanshe on Szentkuthy's Towards the One and Only Metaphor.

Biographer Bengt Jangfeldt on “the battle for Mayakovsky”.

Amanda Lewis on Haruki Murakami and the Nobel Prize. Several more pieces on Murakami.

Reviews, anniversaries & re-issues

Antonina Pirozhkova, an engineer who designed several stations in the Moscow subway system, and who was Isaac Babel's common-law wife, and about whom I learned from Elif Batuman's funny book, The Possessed

A map of Turkey's reading culture. Among the findings: the most popular Turkish authors are Ömer Seyfettin, Ayşe Kulin and Orhan Pamuk, and people in the northern province of Tokat prefer detective novels. No word on William S. Burroughs' popularity -- one of his books is being investigated in Turkey for 'incompliance with moral norms' and 'hurting people’s moral feelings.'

The Hindu's review of Orhan Pamuk's Naive and Sentimental Novelist: the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Here's Alberto Manguel discussing the same book. 

There's a Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg

An article by Gerard Smyth in the Irish Times on the centenary of Czeslaw Milosz's birth

Chandrahas Choudhury on George Szirtes' translation of Sandor Marai's Portraits of a Marriage

Marjorie Perloff reviews a new book on Georg Trakl: 'Christian Hawkey’s brilliant Ventrakl, which puts Trakl’s tragic life squarely into the poetic equation, testifies to the enormous change that has come over lyric poetry in the twenty-first century.'

A clip from Barbara Gowdy's 1993 interview with Leonard Cohen:

Robert Boyers reviews Anthea Bell's translation of Stefan Zweig's Journey into the Past.

Jesse Freedman reviews Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters

Amelia Atlas on Joseph Roth's Radetzky March

Willard Spiegelman on The Leopard: 'If one mark of a great novelist is the ability to forgive everything by understanding everything, then [Giuseppe] Tomasi [di Lampedusa]'s only rivals are George Eliot, Tolstoy and Proust.'

A review of a collection of lectures by Natsume Soseki (published by Columbia Univ Press)

Finnegan's Wake on-line, with glosses for the puzzling words and phrases

Nicholas Allen reviews R. F. Foster's Words Alone re. Yeats' intellectual origins

A newly recovered story by Daphne du Maurier 

Brendan Behan at the pub:


Jane Smiley on the re-issue of Nancy Mitford's novels

Paul Theroux on the 'the trouble with autobiography'

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Here's an extensive site by the Australian Broadcast Corporation (with several audio clips) to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible 

Three talks by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Narnia