Found in Translation

[shewhomust]

Still working my way through last week's Guardian...

On Wednesday, the G2 section listed:

• Mulisch


• Heym


• Nooteboom


• Benabou


• Laxness


• Goytisolo


• Kross


• Darrieussecq


• Congwen


• Ugresic

and asked:

Small towns in Hungary? A Korean cocktail menu? Or the ten greatest writers you've never heard of?

None of the above, since I have at least heard of several of these people:
The article took off from the publicity surrounding the award of the first International Booker prize, and the complaint that the British don't read "foreign literature". Which is no doubt true, even of that minority who do read "literary novels" Yet I, who can't really claim to belong to that minority, ran my eye down this list of ten, and recognised four names: I've even read one of them. By now I've read the list often enough that all the names are looking familiar, but my first time through goes something like this:

• Harry Mulisch: of all the names I didn't recognise, this was the one which - when I saw it in full inside the paper - looked most familiar.


• Stefan Heym, I could have told you, was a German, post-war novelist. And I'd have been pretty much correct.


• Cees Nooteboom: I could supply nothing but a name (which, left to my own devices, I would have misspelled) and a nationality. He apparently wrote a book of essays about Spain called Roads to Santiago, which is probably the context in which I came across him.


• Marcel Benabou was a name I absolutely did not recognise: yet the description of his book Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books was familiar, if not attractive. Google supplies a clue: the dread word OuLiPo.


• Halldor Laxness: again, I could provide a full name, a nationality, an approximate period (I thought of him as late nineteenth century; in fact he was born in 1902, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955). The description of his books did persuade me to add one to my current Amazon order, so we'll see...


• Juan Goytisolo: another one that meant nothing to me on the first pass through, but was vaguely familiar once the given name was revealed.


• Jaan Kross is a complete unknown to me - Estonia's most translated writer, it seems.


• The inclusion of Marie Darrieussecq on this list didn't fill me with faith in the selection process. I read her first novel, Truismes (translated as Pig Tales, which is quite neat), and found it slight, but entertaining. It was published with great fuss and publicity, partly because she was young enough and attractive enough to interest the press, partly because it is a fantasy published as a literary novel; it has a simple premise which is easy for journalists to write about, and a strangeness which is very appealing. But her subsequent novels have been less well reviewed, and I haven't felt any desire to track them down.


• Shen Congwen is completely unknown to me,


• as is Dubravka Ugresic.

On the basis of this comprehensive ignorance, I note that the majority of these writers were born early in the last century; the two women on the list are younger. This suggests a number of interesting questions, which I think I will leave unasked. As does the geographical distribution; it would seem that those parts of the world which, as Saki put it "unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally" are prone to convert some of the surplus into literature. This may be pure coincidence, but a majority of the writers chosen are commended for their portrayal of great events and terrible times in the history of their country - the greatness of their writing is in part, at least, the greatness of their subject matter.

That's my score, as a voracious but not particularly literary reader: anyone else?

Comments

[profane-stencil.livejournal.com]

My score: zero.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Is that because the US is even more resistant to translated fiction than the UK, because these are not the sort of books you read, because there is enough in Pynchon to keep a reader occupied for ever - or some other reason?

[profane-stencil.livejournal.com]

I think it's mostly an indicator of how distanced I've been from fiction of any sort for the last decade or so.