Lost in Translation Reading Challenge

possibilities: night train to lisbon

Night Train to Lisbon 

By Pascal Mercier 

Translated from the German by Barbara Harshav 

Grove / Atlantic, Inc. 

"A huge international best seller, this ambitious novel plumbs the depths of our shared humanity to offer up a breathtaking insight into life, love, and literature itself. A major hit in Germany that went on to become one of Europe’s biggest literary blockbusters in the last five years, Night Train to Lisbon is an astonishing novel, a compelling exploration of consciousness, the possibility of truly understanding another person, and the ability of language to define our very selves. Raimund Gregorius is a Latin teacher at a Swiss college who one day—after a chance encounter with a mysterious Portuguese woman—abandons his old life to start a new one. He takes the night train to Lisbon and carries with him a book by Amadeu de Prado, a (fictional) Portuguese doctor and essayist whose writings explore the ideas of loneliness, mortality, death, friendship, love, and loyalty. Gregorius becomes obsessed by what he reads and restlessly struggles to comprehend the life of the author. His investigations lead him all over the city of Lisbon, as he speaks to those who were entangled in Prado’s life. Gradually, the picture of an extraordinary man emerges—a doctor and poet who rebelled against Salazar’s dictatorship." (from the publisher)

possibilities: poetry in translation

Favorite independent bookstore here in DC, Politics and Prose, recently posted this list of poetry in translation. All currently available of course. From them would be great as you won't find this list on Amazon.

possibilities: brothers

Would you like to win a copy of this book? Go the Nonsuch Book main page to enter through end of day Monday, February 23.

Brothers

By Yu Hua

Translated from the Chinese by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas

Pantheon

"Baldy li, our Liu Town’s premier tycoon, had a fantastic plan of spending twenty million U.S. dollars to purchase a ride on a Russian Federation space shuttle for a tour of outer space. Perched atop his famously gold-plated toilet seat, he would close his eyes and imagine himself already floating in orbit, surrounded by the unfathomably frigid depths of space. He would look down at the glorious planet stretched out beneath him, only to choke up on realizing that he had no family left down on Earth." 

"A bestseller in China, recently short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and a winner of France’s Prix Courrier International, Brothers is an epic and wildly unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running amok. 

Here is China as we’ve never seen it, in a sweeping, Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of rough-and-rumble Chinese history that has already scandalized millions of readers in the author’s homeland. Yu Hua, award-winning author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two brothers riding the dizzying roller coaster of life in a newly capitalist world. As comically mismatched teenagers, Baldy Li, a sex-obsessed ne’er-do-well, and Song Gang, his bookish, sensitive stepbrother, vow that they will always be brothers--a bond they will struggle to maintain over the years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love and making and losing millions in the new China. Their tribulations play out across a richly populated backdrop that is every bit as vibrant: the rapidly-changing village of Liu Town, full of such lively characters as the self-important Poet Zhao, the craven dentist Yanker Yu, the virginal town beauty (turned madam) Lin Hong, and the simpering vendor Popsicle Wang. 

With sly and biting humor, combined with an insightful and compassionate eye for the lives of ordinary people, Yu Hua shows how the madness of the Cultural Revolution has transformed into the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a monumental spectacle and a fascinating vision of an extraordinary place and time." (from the publisher)

Reviews:

Washington Post

Los Angeles Times

NPR

The New Yorker

possibilities: borges and the eternal orangutans

Borges And The Eternal Orangutans 

By Luis Fernando Verissimo 

Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa 

New Directions 

“I will try to be your eyes, Jorge. I am following the advice you gave me when we said goodbye: "Write, and you will remember." I will try to remember, with more exactitude this time, so that you can see what I saw, so that you can unveil the mystery and arrive at the truth. We always write in order to remember the truth. When we invent, it is only in order to remember the truth more exactly.”(first line from the novel) 

Discovered this gem today via a Nancy Pearl NPR list. Definitely goes on my tbr list as how could one go wrong with Borges, Poe, literary mystery, and comparison to The Name of the Rose?

“Vogelstein is a loner who has always lived among books. Suddenly, fate grabs hold of his insignificant life and carries him off to Buenos Aires, to a conference on Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for reasons that a mere passion for literature cannot explain, he finds himself at the center of a murder investigation that involves arcane demons, the mysteries of the Kaballah, the possible destruction of the world, and the Elizabethan magus John Dee's theory of the "Eternal Orangutan," which, given all the time in the world, would end up writing all the known books in the cosmos. Verissimo's small masterpiece is at once a literary tour de force and a brilliant mystery novel. 

Celebrated novelist Luis Fernando Verissimo is Brazil's most popular writer thanks to his satirical columns in the national weekly Veja. He is also a cartoonist, and plays saxophone in a jazz band. 

Translator Margaret Jull Costa lives in Leicester, England, and has translated works by Portuguese writers as well as a number of notable Spanish authors.” (from the publisher)

possibilities: pushkin's second wife and other micronovels

Pushkin's Second Wife and Other Micronovels 

By Yuri Druzhnikov 

Translated by Thomas Moore 

Peter Owen Ltd. 

“Yuri Druznhikov is often described as a cross between Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, has been a bestseller many times over in his native Russia, has received ecstatic plaudits in France, Italy,Germany and across Eastern Europe and has even been nominated for the Nobel Prize He has not yet, however, received similar recognition in the English language. 

Perhaps this volume will help. In this heartfelt collection of stories Druznhikov describes life in Russia before and after the collapse of Communism as well as the plight of Russian emigres in the USA in post - communist times. A tour guide is so in love with Pushkin that she lives with his wooden effigy, a businessman intent on enjoying his Kaif, a teacher informed that he wants to retire, a taxi driver taking his daughter along with him on his rounds . . . The characters to be found in this rambunctious volume are both recognizable and bizarre, capable of cowardly corruptions but also heroic honesties, oppressed and bewildered but also invigorated by the challenge that everyday life presents - whatever economic system they live under.” (from the publisher)

Review:

Three Percent

possibilities: friendly fire

Friendly Fire: A Duet

By A.B. Yehoshua

Translated from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman

Harcourt

"A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Amotz, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife, Daniella, flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister. There she confronts her anguished seventy-year-old brother-in-law, Yirmiyahu, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by “friendly fire." Yirmiyahu is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of man’s primate ancestors as he desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.  

With great artistry, A.B. Yehoshua has once again written a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered deatils of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways." (from the publisher)

First Chapter

Reviews:

The New York Times

The Washington Post

literature for a post-racial world: the other

The Other

By Ryszard Kapuscinski

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Verso

Two weeks in a row, the Washington Post Book World has offered up a review of a translated gem. Today, under the headline that I "borrowed" above, Francine Prose reviews two telling works from our post 9/11 world, one of which is The Other.

"Ryszard Kapuscinski witnessed and reported major wars, coups and revolutions as they happened throughout the developing world and global South. In this distillation of his reflections accumulated from a lifetime of travel, he takes a fresh look at the Western idea of the Other: the non-European or non-American. Looking at this concept through the lens of his own encounters in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and considering its formative significance for his own work, Kapuscinski traces how the West has understood the Other from classical times to colonialism, from the age of enlightenment to the postmodern global village. He observes how today we continue to treat the non-European as an alien and a threat, an object of study that has not yet become a partner in sharing responsibility for the fate of the world. In our globalised but increasingly polarised post-9/11 age, Kapuscinski shows how the Other remains one of the most compelling ideas of our times." (from the publisher)

Reviews:

Washington Post

The Observer 

possibilities: a blessed child

A Blessed Child

By Linn Ullmann

Translated from the Norwegian by Sarah Death

Knopf

Saw this book reviewed in today’s Washington Post style section, and was intrigued by the prospect of female adolescent angst in an extreme form usually reserved for male teenage protagonists. Like that the reviewer, Jennifer Vanderbes, points this out with references to classic literature. Want to read about these finely drawn characters. Never read anything by daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman. How long is my list for 2009 getting? Way beyond six works in translation. 

“From the internationally acclaimed author of Stella Descending and Grace, a captivating story of sisterhood and of the inescapable chords of childhood memory.

Every summer Isak Lövenstad gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarsö. Here Erika, Laura, and Molly know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of children, each undergoes the rites of growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none compares to Erika’s bond with the rebellious misfit Ragnar, the intensity of which makes them inseparable. But when they reach the age of fourteen and their relationship threatens to relegate Erika to Ragnar’s outcast state, she suddenly turns away—a common enough teenage betrayal that nonetheless precipitates an incident of such senseless cruelty as to forever alter Isak’s family. Twenty-five years later, returning to Hammarsö to see their father—now eighty, a bereaved widower, and in year-round exile there—the three women confront, finally, the specter of that awful summer, the mark of which each has since carried.__Bold and starkly beautiful, A Blessed Child is a haunting parable of innocence lost.” (from the publisher)

Reviews:

The Washington Post

The Guardian

The New York Times

what participants are thinking about reading...

What are other challenge participants thinking about reading in 2009? Check it out:

http://www.caribousmom.com/2008/12/08/lost-in-translation-challenge-2009/

 http://www.kucki68.blogspot.com/

 http://1330v.blogspot.com/2008/12/lost-in-translation-challenge.html

 http://anotherbookblog.blogspot.com/

 http://bookwormwhit.livejournal.com/78104.html

 http://cafeshree.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/lost-in-translation-challenge/

 http://katrinasreads.blogspot.com/2008/11/lost-in-translation-2009.html

 http://1morechapter.com/2008/11/09/lost-in-translation-challenge/

 http://litchick.typepad.com/mellymel/2008/11/up-for-a-challenge.html

http://fleurfisher.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/lost-in-translation-challenge/

http://tanabata.blogspot.com/2008/12/lost-in-translation-reading-challenge.html

http://lostinagoodstory.blogspot.com/2008/12/lost-in-translation-reading-challenge.html

 

 

possibilities: spring flowers, spring frost

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost 

By Ismail Kadare 

Translated from the original Albanian into French by Jusuf Vrioni 

Translated from the French by David Bellos

Arcade Publishing 

Albanian? I have not read down that path before so this one is going on my personal challenge list that, like many of yours, is still in the draft stage. Oooh – a double translation too. Do we get some type of extra credit for this?

"In a town at the foot of the northern Highlands, life goes on as always, but people are in a state of shock: a bank has been robbed, a sure sign of the Westernization of this backward Balkan land. Meanwhile, other strange events-such as the marriage of a girl and a snake-confirm that ancient legends still prevail. People are flocking from far and wide to search for a tunnel to the Secret State Archives, said to house records of crimes they may have committed. Some even claim the ghosts of former dictators Hoxha, Brezhnev, and Ulbricht-not to mention Oedipus-have been seen there. . . . Against this backdrop, a simple and sensual love story between a painter and a girl stands out as light against dark." (from the publisher) 

Intrigued? Read a sample off this NPR link. 

Reviews: 

The New York Times 

The New Yorker