Tag Archives: New York Review Books
The Bourgeois Shudder: Fantasy, Politics, Race
New York Review Books has been relaunching Dino Buzzati’s writing in English, bringing out new translations as well as reprints, and I am assembling a retrospective selection of fifty stories. The Italian texts pose unique challenges to a translator, partly because they were written some time ago (1930s-1970s), but also because the fantastic is perhaps the most subversive of narrative discourses, resistant to understanding, or indeed any form of interpretive control. It establishes an unreal world that disrupts dominant notions of what is real, making them seem variously unfamiliar, questionable, irrational – i.e., unreal in turn. Can this unsettling effect, I wonder, be recreated in a translation of Buzzati’s stories today, many decades after they were first published in Italian?
Ginster, the Critical Idiot? Siegfried Kracauer’s “Ginster,” translated from German by Carl Skoggard
One does not think of fiction when one hears of Siegfried Kracauer, which is a shame. Most Americans who know of the man are acquainted with the two books on cinema he produced after escaping Nazi Europe for New York: the highly influential “From Caligari to Hitler” (1947) and the tome that is “Theory of Film” (1960). But Kracauer also wrote two novels, “Ginster” (1928) and “Georg” (1973, posthumous), and a handful of novellas and short stories, all of which have so far evaded the readerly radar on this side of the Atlantic.
Translating Natalia Ginzburg’s “Voice That Says ‘I’” in the Twenty-First Century
By Eric Gudas For decades, no matter how many of my books sit boxed up in storage, I’ve always had a tattered photocopy of the chapter entitled “The End of the Affair,” from Natalia Ginzburg’s novel Voices in the Evening (1961) in the translation by D.M. Low first published in 1963 by Hogarth Press. This […]
Putting a Brave Face on Loneliness and Loss: Natalia Ginzburg’s “Family” and “Borghesia”
By Jeanne Bonner I do not think of Natalia Ginzburg as a sad figure or a writer of sad, tragic works. I’ve seen her in old interviews, and I’ve read her nonfiction work. Archival photos often show her smiling. She was not melodramatic. She did not seek pity or any kind of rapt attention beyond […]
Unlived Lives in Natalia Ginzburg’s “Valentino” and “Sagittarius,” Translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni
By Eric Gudas One refers, as a commonplace, to “the unlived life”; but fiction excels at dramatizing people’s myriad unlived lives. Natalia Ginzburg’s fiction links stifled hopes and ambitions with suppressed speech. The narrators of Ginzburg’s Valentino and Sagittarius: Two Novellas (1957), which New York Review Books Classics has just reissued in Avril Bardoni’s decades-old […]
Alone With One’s Thoughts: Henri Bosco’s “Malicroix,” translated from French by Joyce Zonana
Before the story begins, Bosco alludes to a number of pages omitted from the novel and reserved for that moment when “someone truly qualified” might gain access. And so Malicroix puzzles and conceals even after it is closed.
Finding Power, Losing Love: Graciliano Ramos’ “São Bernardo,” translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan
Padma Viswanathan allows readers to recognize anew the importance of community in such a precarious moment with her translation of Graciliano Ramos’ rustic satire, São Bernardo.
Voices of the Post-Soviet Intellectual: Maxim Osipov’s “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” Translated from Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson
By Jonathan Stone The Grannies took the most practice. There were three of them, and as I prepared to read out loud Alex Fleming’s translation of Osipov’s essay “The Cry of The Domestic Fowl,” I kept vacillating between voices. The one who’s in the worst health hears and sees things: “Yuri, is that you?” she’ll […]
Cruel Imaginations: The Stories of Mariana Enriquez and Silvina Ocampo
Reviewed by Rebecca DeWald At the Edinburgh International Book Festival last summer, I heard Mariana Enriquez read from her short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire, the first English translation of her work, by Megan McDowell. Twice, in fact: At the official reading, and at a more informal evening event with readings and […]
“Many Days of Slights and Oversights”: Zama by Antonio di Benedetto, Translated by Esther Allen
Reviewed by Andrea Shah Originally published in 1956, Zama took over 60 years to appear in English (as translated by Esther Allen), despite having been deemed a masterwork by literary luminaries such as Juan José Saer. Zama is the first and best-known novel written by Antonio di Benedetto, then a young Argentine journalist who had […]
Paris on Zero Dollars a Day: Jean-Paul Clébert’s Paris Vagabond, Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Reviewed by Alex Andriesse Legend has it that Jean-Paul Clébert composed Paris Insolite (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as Paris Vagabond) from “a hopeless conglomeration of used envelopes, newsprint edges, unfolded Gauloises packets, and multicolored and multifarious scraps of paper” (3). He hoarded this conglomeration in a paper bag and, most impressively, held onto it through […]