A customer was in today looking for the second Stieg Larsson mystery, The Girl Who Played With Fire; it will be released at the end of the month, I told her, and lots of us can’t wait. If you happen to understand Swedish, however, you can go ahead and read the entire trilogy. She said her grandfather has done just that. So of course we got to talking about the aspects of translated novels (and especially poetry) that must be altered to retain a semblance of their meaning or are even completely lost during translation.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels have been praised for, among other things, their beautiful language. But can we really say it’s his language that’s so lovely? Isn’t it more accurate to say that his novel’s translator painstakingly pored over each sentence until it most closely resembled Marquez’s aim and cadence in Spanish?
And were another translator to do her thing, mightn’t she transform Marquez’s work into something more lovely yet less accurate or, vice versa, more pointed but less musical? One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite novels, but I can’t help wondering if I’m missing something because I can’t read it in Spanish.

I’m a big fan of the Russian novelists, especially Nabokov, who actually did most of his own translating and eventually wrote solely in English. But let’s talk about the big ones, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky– there are more translators for their novels than books to translate. How important is it to read the translations of one of the “chosen,” like Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky? Is it okay if you read another version, or are you missing out?
I’m sure it’s not all hype; I’ve read their translation of Anna Karenina and it is very good, and I’m looking forward to reading their translation of War and Peace (I just wish I hadn’t bought that other edition for fifty dollars before they got around to translating it).

Where the hype fell flat for me, though, is when I jumped on the bandwagon and picked up Robert Fagles’s acclaimed translation of The Aeneid. When I came to one of my favorite parts, the “break-up” scene in book four, at the end of which Dido throws herself on a sword, Fagles’s translation seemed so sterile and overwrought compared to the lines in my dog-eared, beloved copy translated by Allen Mandelbaum:

The supple flame devours her marrow;
Within her breast the silent wound lives on.
Unhappy Dido burns.
(IV 88-90)

This is Fagles’s translation of the same lines:

The flame keeps gnawing into her tender marrow hour by hour
And deep in her heart the silent wound lives on.
Dido burns with love — the tragic queen.

It’s better than some others, like the prose-ified translation by David West (there should be a law against rendering epic poems into prose form), but it’s so modernized that it makes Dido’s feelings seem almost adolescent. The terse line “Unhappy Dido Burns” grabs onto you; I feel it frees the passage, allowing it to echo through St. Augustine, “To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears,” all the way to T.S. Eliot:

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

(The Waste Land, lines 307-311)

I am positive that Fagles’s translation is more faithful to the original Latin than Mandelbaum’s, but what I’m wondering is, does it matter?  Which is more important, the accuracy of content or the accuracy of art?

The “newest” classic out right now is Anne Carson’s An Oresteia, three Greek plays about the fall of the house of Atreus.  I have read some of Carson’s poetry and her essays (Eros the Bittersweet is an amazingly readable volume of essays in which she examines the Greek concept of Eros), and I’m excited to dig in to her latest effort.

On a more modern note, our foreign fiction section gets more and more traffic every day.  Carlos Ruiz Zafon‘s prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game (signed first ed) was just released in the U.S. I finally got around to reading The Shadow of the Wind recently; it’s unputdownable, and I can’t wait to read Zafon’s latest. There are so many great foreign writers available to read in English, but unfortunately not everything makes it over here.  New York Magazine ran an article, “Lost in Un-Translation,” about some books we English speakers are missing out on.

One heroic effort to make more non-English books available is being undertaken by the publisher Europa Editions.  These paperbacks with stylish covers provide English speakers with some of the best foreign novels, memoirs, and narrative nonfiction.  Hopefully we’ll see some of the books mentioned in the article above soon, published by Europa.  I’ve read Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and her second book, Gourmet Rhapsody, will be out soon. I just picked up a book of novellas by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, The Most Beautiful Book in the World, which Lisa highly recommends.

Take a look at your bookshelves–how many of your favorites were originally written in another language? I’ll bet there’s more than you think, so hopefully we’ll continue to benefit from the tireless efforts of translators to make our literary oeuvre more complete.

Our good friend Tom Piazza won the Willie Morris Award for Fiction! Congratulations Tom! If you haven’t read City of Refuge you ought to check it out – it’s a great book.

We got this great book poster in a few weeks ago.  What actually drew me to it was the Eudora Welty photograph used as the cover of the book.  The saying of don’t judge a book by it’s cover didn’t apply here with me because I couldn’t wait for the book to come in so I could read it.  I picked the book up and then noticed that Fannie Flagg had written the introduction which gave it more points.  So what we have is a brand new southern author, Gin Phillips, with a glowing introduction written by Flagg and a Welty photograph on the cover…I am sure to be disappointed with the story.  Well, I was wrong.

The Well and the Mine is the story of the Moore Family in Carbon Hill, Alabama , a coal mining town in 1931.  Albert is a righteous man who works hard in the mines and then comes home and works his land to provide food and other needs for his family.  Leta works equally as hard to take care of the home and family and sometimes will do without to make sure her family has plenty.  Their children, Virgie, Tess and Jack are slightly sheltered not realizing how hard the times are but that is soon to change.

One night, Tess is daydreaming on the back porch when she notices a woman walk up to the well and drop a baby into it.  She immediately tells her family who think that her imagination is running wild until the next day when Leta grows to draw the daily water and a blanket comes up in the bucket.  This begins a change in the way that the family sees their town, neighbors and basically their own way of life.  Tess of course is affected the most by what she saw and begins to have nightmares which she feels like is a message from the baby.  Virgie and Tess decide they are going to solve this mystery of the “Well Woman” and find out who she is.  The main question being is what would drive a mother to do this type of thing.  They begin by making a list of all the women who they know have had babies recently.  Knowing that in a small town that a missing baby would not go unnoticed they start to visit the homes of the women on their list.  This gives the girls insight into how their neighbors live and the struggles that they are going through during the Depression and how much their parents sacrifice so they can have all of their needs provided for.

The story is told from each family members perspective so you do feel like you are getting the “entire” story by actually knowing how each character is feeling.  Phillips does an excellent job of letting the reader feel like they are in 1930’s Alabama and seeing how each character evolves and how the family as a whole evolves by giving us plenty of storylines but not overwhelming the reader with too much information.

I think that this novel will be a great read especially for those readers who enjoyed The Help and Mudbound.  Bookclubs will enjoy this novel because it will lead to great discussion on many topics.

“When you close the book, you’ll miss these characters. But The Well and the Mine doesn’t just give you characters who’ll stay with-it gives you a whole world.”—Fannie Flagg

Gin Phillips will be coming to Lemuria on Friday, July 24 to sign and read at 5 p.m.

You may have heard that a restored edition of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was published this month. Once Hemingway’s papers were released in 1979, scholars have since studied the changes that were made to the original manuscript under the direction of his widow, Mary Hemingway, and Harry Brague of Scribner’s.

Hemingway’s grandson, Sean, describes the restored edition in the introduction: “Presented here for the first time is Ernest Hemingway’s original manuscript as he had left it at the time of his death in 1961. Although Hemingway had completed several drafts of the main text in prior years, he had not written an introduction, nor had he decided on a title. In fact, Hemingway continued to work on the book at least into April of 1961” (2).

Some of the changes in the restored addition include: the addition of ten incomplete chapters; the reordering of chapters in chronological order; and the inclusion of material relating to Hemingway’s love affairs which would have been sensitive to Mary Hemingway.

The title, A Moveable Feast, is not written anywhere in the original text and was actually suggested to Mary by a friend of Hemingway’s. Many of you may recall the quote:

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast” (XIII).

I never read the 1964 edition of A Moveable Feast. In college, I managed to read only one Hemingway novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, without much effect on my psyche. However, this last week my emotions have been sent into a twirl. A Moveable Feast, to say the least, is a charming book, but for those individuals who have spent any considerable length of time living in a foreign country, it may have a particular effect. I lived in Austria for four years and have since then tried to synthesize this experience with my subsequent professional and personal choices in the United States. Austria is my moveable feast.

Hemingway’s son, Patrick, elaborates eloquently in the Foreword on the idea of a moveable feast: “In later life the idea of a moveable feast for Hemingway became something very much like what King Harry wanted St. Crispin’s Feast Day to be for “we happy few”: a memory or even a state of being that has become a part of you, a thing that you could always have with you, no matter where you went or how you lived forever after, that you could never lose. An experience first fixed in time and space or a condition like happiness or love could be afterward moved or carried with you wherever you went in space and time” (XIV).

Since I came back to the States I have never wanted to romanticize Austria or Europe. From the age of 25 to 29, certainly I was there long enough to have every experience and emotion imaginable even while the landscape was a picture postcard. As I read Moveable Feast, I also try not to romanticize Paris, Hemingway, or that time period.

Patrick Hemingway writes that his father had many moveable feasts, one of them being his D-Day landing on Omaha Beach. So we must all have our own variable moveable feasts. Each one is our own memory of the time and place; and our remembrance reflects our current place in time and space.

Patrick also includes the last of his father’s professional writing, a true introduction for A Moveable Feast: “This book contains material from the remises of my memory and my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist”(XIV).
*

My favorite memoir, The Prime of Life, by Simone de Beauvoir is sadly out-of-print in the U.S. Beauvoir was a French writer and philosopher who had a long relationship with Jean-Paul Sarte.

Although I had lived alone for years, living abroad gave me an ever larger sense of freedom and possibility. I thoroughly identified with Beauvoir’s thoughts after getting her first teaching position: “The most intoxicating aspect of my return to Paris  . . . was the freedom I now possessed . . . From the moment I opened my eyes every morning I was lost in a transport of delight . . . I too had a room to myself . . . I papered the walls orange . . . I could get home with the milk, read in bed all night, sleep till midday, shut myself up for forty-eight hours at a stretch, or go out on the spur of the moment . . . I felt like I was on vacation forever . . . I remember how tickled I was when I got my first salary cheque. I felt like I had played a practical joke on someone” (11-12).

See? I just fall from one memoir to another . . . maybe it’s okay to get lost in a romanticized past. I guess it is the gift of compensation that comes when we have left a time and place.

Because I recently graduated from the Art History program at Savannah College of Art and Design, The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr was recommended to me.  I was immediately intrigued.  The book follows the investigation of one of the many missing Caravaggio paintings, The Taking of Christ. Harr recounts the work of three people who spent years searching for a painting done by the Baroque artist who is now recognized as a genius.  Michelangelo Merisa de Caravaggio mastered painting at a young age and is known for the dramatic use of light depicted in his compositions. In Harr’s book, Dennis Mahon, an English Caravaggio expert, Francesca Cappelletti, an Art History student in Rome, and Sergio Benedetti, an Italian restorer at the National Gallery in Dublin, all use their skills to rediscover the masterpiece.

The research done by Francesca, and one of her fellow students, leads them to the archives of the Mattei family who were patrons of Caravaggio generations before.  Sergio Benedetti used X ray and infrared photographs of paintings to discover the authenticity of the work as well as the artist’s techniques, by looking under the layers of paint to the under drawings.  In Caravaggio’s case, however, the drawings were actually made in the gesso with the end of a paintbrush, not charcoal or paint.  The restorer’s process is important because it helps us distinguish between the original paintings and their multiple copies.  Harr’s nonfiction story takes us into a detailed account of how The Taking of Christ was rediscovered.  This New York Times Bestseller keeps the characters and the process of their research interesting until the end of the book, whether you are an art expert or not.

-Sarah Clinton