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

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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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