An interesting piece on why more foreign books don’t make it to U.S. shores. The take away? U.S. publishers generally don’t speak foreign languages and can’t readily assess a book’s quality.
Why doesn’t more foreign fiction make it to the U.S.?
sail I said sail I will Sail
In an opinion piece for the Irish Times, Julian Gough asserts that the Irish Naval Service’s decision to name two ships after famous writers is a problem because “the State hasn’t yet earned the right to be associated with Beckett and Joyce.”
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The Recuyell Sells
The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, the first book published in English, recently sold at auction for almost 2 million dollars.
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Perfectly Imperfect Proust
In a piece for the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes about a new life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the first translator of Proust into English, and about the strange success and beauty his imperfect translation of Remembrance of Things Past achieved. The essay as a whole pairs well with both our own Bill Morris's essay against literary biography and Barclay Bram Shoemaker's Millions review of Mo Yan's Frog and "the trouble with translation."
Kindle Price Drop
Amazon's response to the iPad? The pricetag for a Kindle has just dropped to $189.
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