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January 19, 2016
Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Kim Seung Hee
Poetry is an emergency room and ‘avantgardists’ are butterflies in these powerful poems by South Korean author Kim Seung Hee
By Kim Seung Hee and Brother Anthony of Taizé for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
Poetry is emergency room, poetry is oxygen tent, poetry is red blood inside a cold apple,
January 18, 2016
Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week – from poetry to combat the January blues, to books about how to stop caring what others think... Dip in.
salfordexile66 is “knackered” after sitting up for half a night, reading HHhH by Laurent Binet – about the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during World War II – in one sitting:
Truly moving tale about the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. People who overuse the term ‘hero’ should read this book and take note.
I’ve also started Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett about modern Spain and how the legacy of Franco and the Civil War has been almost airbrushed from history. Good so far so I’ll give it a recommend too.
Overall, it was a lovely book, switching easily back and forth between modern times as the narrator makes a humanitarian trip to enemy territory and the past told through her grandfather’s recollections. I had bought it when it was a massive hit back in 2010, but the hype put me off of it for a bit, I try to avoid bandwagon hopping. It was very much Marquezesque in the oddly fantastic stories of the grandfather, dealing with tigers and the undying, but it was never quite comparable to master of magical realism (but then again, who is?). Mostly it was an enjoyable read with the underlying darkness of the post-Balkan war recovery. I thought there were a few plot lines, stories that felt extraneous, but it didn’t much hinder the reading.
It covers a pretty wide range of translation issues (law, diplomacy, film subtitles, poems, books) and consequently doesn’t get into any area in much depth. Most surprising to me was that Bellos does not seem to think that, beyond publishers’ desire for copyright protections, there is much need for re-translations of classic works; he makes an exception of the cases where there is some new text in the original language, such as an unexpurgated edition of a previously censored work. Perhaps I’ve been somewhat brainwashed by the publishing industry, but I kind of thought that it was “a truth universally acknowledged” that classic works needed to be re-translated (at least) every generation or so. I suppose Bellos’s opinion is in keeping with what I sensed was his general attitude that most translations that get published are acceptable versions of the work, conveying the same information with the same force as the original.
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Poem of the week: The Gartan Mother’s Lullaby by Joseph Campbell
Originally written as a folk song, with Herbert Hughes, figures from Irish mythology are used here to weave a fresh, beguiling spell
The Gartan Mother’s Lullaby
Sleep, O babe, for the red bee hums
The silent twilight’s fall:
Áibheall from the Grey Rock comes
To wrap the world in thrall.
A leanbhan O, my child, my joy,
My love and heart’s desire,
The crickets sing you lullaby
Beside the dying fire.
January 15, 2016
Flash Friday: Birthday
How do you celebrate a dog’s birthday in a way it understands? Our latest instalment of flash fiction explores the relationship between humans and pets
By Ian Denning for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network
My wife still wouldn’t leave her room so I had to take the afternoon off to bring Buster into the vet. At home the dog was hungry and all the lights were off. There were two more sympathy cards in the mail. I threw them away. Buster was tearing ass around the house and wanted to play so I had to tackle him to get him into his crate. He cried and cried.
It was Buster’s one-year check-up. The vet breathed hard through his mustache and prodded my dog everywhere. Buster sat still for once. “You’ve got a healthy little guy,” the vet said. “Weight good, heart and lungs good, teeth good, everything good.”
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Enough's enough – authors can't work for free | Philip Pullman
The novelist and children’s writer explains why he resigned as a patron from the Oxford literary festival
I resigned as patron of the Oxford literary festival because I couldn’t reconcile it with being president of the Society of Authors, which is campaigning strongly for speakers at literary festivals to be properly paid (to be paid at all, actually).
The OLF has never paid me for any of the events I’ve done during the 20 years of its existence. In the early days, when it was a smaller-scale affair run on a shoestring, local patriotism inclined me to speak for no payment, but later it became much grander, with a large array of corporate sponsors. It gave itself an air of being exclusive and prestigious, with black tie dinners and receptions involving minor members of the royal family. None of that has anything to do with literature, in my view, but everyone to their own taste: it just isn’t mine.
Related: Philip Pullman: professional writers set to become 'an endangered species'
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January 13, 2016
Is James Joyce's Ulysses the hardest novel to finish?
James Joyce died 75 years ago this week, leaving a lifetime of books beloved by many... and Ulysses, heralded as both the best novel in the English language and the hardest to read. So what do you do if you get stuck?
When James Joyce finished writing Ulysses, he was so exhausted that he didn’t write a line of prose for a year. I can believe it; I needed a nap after reading 40 pages.
For the last three months, I’ve glared at its fat, lumpen form on my floor with a vague sense of personal failure. I’ve opened Ulysses twice, determined to finish it, and achieved getting all the way to page 46 (it’s a bit longer than that). I have read so little both times I started that I have never bothered with a bookmark; it seemed too sad flagging such a hollow achievement.
Related: Finnegans Wake – the book the web was invented for
Related: ‘Just 1,238 pages to go’: could you read War and Peace in a week?
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Be careless with your wishes: A Igoni Barrett on the writing life in Nigeria
Nigerian author A Igony Barrett recounts how a personal rebellion led him to writing – and to confronting his worse bully: his own country
By A Igoni Barrett for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network
One day eleven years ago I swallowed fear, stuck my neck into the noose of fate and swore I would swim or drown. I was 25 years old and had never held a job, never strayed far from my mother’s protection, never stopped depending on her for feeding money, pocket money, any money. Yet I ignored her entreaties to endure my final year in university, and after gathering up my beloved books and 2Pac CDs, I jumped into unknown waters to make my way as a writer.
Every revolution ends the instant it begins. Mine ended up in Lagos. It began as a son’s rebellion against his mother’s devotion, and today, with three books to my name, I see what I’ve achieved in all these years of revolt is to refocus my gaze on the actual bully, that stomping boot in which I’ve lived like a foot for thirty-six years. My country, Nigeria.
All my life I had read alone; no one had exchanged books with me or recommended writers to me.
I made friends whose mothers’ kitchens I can still describe, as well as friends who shared drinks and orgasms with me
No experience in life is wasted, especially when you’re writing
In the midst of writers who acknowledge your own writing, self-denial begins to seem like self-deception
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January 12, 2016
Translation Tuesday: extract from Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs by Lina Wolff
Read an extract of the debut novel in English by Swedish writer Lina Wolff, an offbeat tale of prostitutes in a run-down Spanish brothel naming stray dogs after writers. Here, the protagonist recalls the visits of her mother’s lovers
By Lina Wolff and Frank Perry for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs will be published on January 14. Get a copy at the Guardian Bookshop hereSo no Dad, not that I’ve lacked for stand-ins. Only my fathers have all been mayfly dads, the kind that are here one day and gone after three days at most. Some left traces behind, a khakicoloured toothbrush in the bathroom, an inhaler, a book on a bedside table, and sometimes those traces would give rise to hopes that they might come back, come in the door to the flat and suddenly be struck by the idea that this really was a bit like returning home, that everything was already here – a home, a wife and a child – all they had to do was enter and start living. I wrote about all of them in my diary, and because their names eventually started to blur (Valerio, Enrique, Álvaro, José María) I began calling them “the Jogging Pants Man”, “the Chuckling Man” and “the Tartare Man” instead, and then their images would immediately reappear before me. “The Tartare Man” once made himself a steak tartare on our terrace. I had no idea what steak tartare actually was until he explained with a lofty expression on his face that this was what sophisticated bohemians in Paris ate. The sophisticated inhabitants of Paris were people whose taste buds had not yet been destroyed by charred meat and fried onions. He took the ingredients out of the bag and put the tartare together in front of us. The tartare consisted of cutting up a packet of raw mince and mixing it right there and then with egg yolk, salt and pepper. Have a taste – it’s delicious, he said and offered the greasy plastic tray to Mum. She turned her head away and pretended not to look, but I did. His fingers closed hungrily around the mess and you could see the pleasure in his face as he pushed the morsel into his mouth. Uhhnn, he said. Then he swallowed and it was impossible not to think of a snake as his Adam’s apple pushed the mouthful down his throat. Please don’t let her let him move in, I thought, and she didn’t.
Only my fathers have all been mayfly dads, the kind that are here one day and gone after three days at most
Before he arrived Mum explained that this man wasn’t ugly, or attractive, but attractively ugly
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Your book-sharing stories: from a grandma’s precious gift to an online date gone wrong
Here are the titles our readers love to share at any opportunity – plus their best anecdotes around the act of giving and receiving books
What’s your favourite book to share? Let us know in the comments, or upload a picture on GuardianWitness
From Oscar Wilde to The Remains of the Day, Guardian writers have been sharing the books they wish more people would read on our blog for the last few weeks. To end our series, here are our readers’ favourite titles to share – and some of their most heartfelt and hilarious book-giving anecdotes.
I livened it up with a copy of Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures which I had found both smart and erotic
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January 11, 2016
Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week – you’ve all kicked off 2016 in force and with books by your side.
The Seth was a joy – an account of a roundabout trip to Delhi from north-western China via Tibet and Nepal, a journey he undertook as a visiting student in the early 1980s. Seth’s an irresistible storyteller; From Heaven Lake is almost a tenth of the size of his magnum opus A Suitable Boy, but it is full of the same wit and compassion found in that later fictional work.
Pedro Páramo, on the other hand, is a novel I’d read about – Susan Sontag called it one of the 20th century’s most influential novels and Salman Rushdie recently dubbed it a surrealist masterpiece – and thought I’d squeeze in in the last few days of the 2015. A story of a young man who fulfils a promise to his dying mother to visit her hometown and meet his father, the the character of the title. When he arrives, he finds himself in a place where the worlds of the living and the dead intersect, and so unfolds the story of the downfall of a corrupt landowner and the community over which he lorded. Pedro Páramo is very much a work of proto-magical realism, and its influence on García Márquez and other Boom authors is clear in its dense, lyrical prose, shifting viewpoints and non-linear structure. It’s a probably a work that gains from being read twice, so I may revisit it in the future.
... which I found very satisfying – a sort of sci-fi thriller without the low-budget monsters. The science Wells invents to explain invisibility also feels more convincing and appealing than his attempts in The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, the two other novels of his that I’ve read. I think I’d have to say that I like it more than those two. His prose is plainer than what I usually go for, but he had a knack for wild plots.
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