Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

by Tim Parks

deixis,

In translation, stripped of its style, Gatsby really doesn’t seem a very remarkable performance.

In the long run, whether through a growing awareness of the situation on the part of writers, or simply by a process of natural selection, it seems inevitable that style will align with what can be readily translated more or less into multiple languages and cultural settings, or into an easily intelligible international idiom.

What we have then is a propensity in modern life to substitute cataloguing and recording for doing,

however much literature may appear to be opposed to bureaucracy and procrastination, it actually partakes of the same aberration?

we revel in the mind’s ability to possess the world in language, rather than to inhabit it or change it.

bathos.

We’re not quite talking hagiography, but special pleading is everywhere evident, as if biographers were afraid that the work might be diminished by a life that was less than noble or not essentially directed toward a lofty cause.

there is simply an enormous resistance to admitting what a tyrant the man was, seeking to control the lives of those around him to an extraordinary degree, deeply disappointed and punitive when they didn’t live up to his expectations,

(Dickens frequently acknowledged that certain negative characters in his books were based on himself),

One of the problems of seeing creative writing as a career is that careers are things you go on with till retirement. The fact that creativity may not be coextensive with one’s whole working life is not admitted. A disproportionate number of poets teach on these courses.

Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, or Peter Stamm’s On a Day Like This, or going back a way, the marvellous Australian writer, Christina Stead’s Letty Fox: Her Luck)

Whatever in the future masquerades as a canon for our own time will largely be the result of good marketing, self-promotion and pure chance.

Joseph Anton (the pseudonym that aligns Rushdie with two of the greatest writers of modern times)

I still recall a conversation around my father’s deathbed when the visiting doctor asked him what his three children were doing. When he arrived at the last and said young Timothy was writing a novel and wanted to become a writer, the good lady, unaware that I was entering the room, told my father not to worry, I would soon change my mind and find something sensible to do. Many years later, the same woman shook my hand with genuine respect and congratulated me on my career. She had not read my books.

The prospect of publication, the urgent need, as they see it, to publish as soon as possible, colours everything they do.

I wrote seven novels over a period of six years before one was accepted for publication.

his last words, when pulled out of a car accident were, reputedly, ‘Give me l’ultima sigaretta.’

What I am suggesting is that in the genesis of a novel, or any work of literature, there will often be private tensions playing a part in the creative decisions made.

So that certain aspects of a novel are, in fact, or are also, conversations overheard, and as such perhaps more intriguing than comprehensible?

Or is the author finding in fiction a way to smuggle a message through the taboo, while leaving it officially intact?

Aquila is in the Abruzzo region of Italy, my territory.

In my case the present novel is set in a meditation retreat, but they may have read the one featuring kayaking in the Alps, or a coach trip to take a petition to the European Parliament.

They have long since understood that almost nothing of interest can really be said about books at an event.

You will talk about the book as if you were in control of its creation, and perhaps you are to a degree, but behind and before that is a vast hinterland of experience and events over which you had no control.

It’s as if the stream of consciousness had been invented to allow the pain of a mind whose chatter is out of control to be transformed into a strange new beauty, which then encompasses the one action available to the stalled self: suicide.

Richard Ford,

Henry Green.

Frustrated in his marriage, Hardy writes of people who yearn to break society’s rules, above all be with the partner they desire, but are invariably destroyed when they actually try to do so, as if these novels were a message to himself not to risk it.

Working non-stop, travelling recklessly, he died at forty-four.

died at the age of fifty-eight.

sixty-four.

Europa, Destiny, Cleaver;

At last in 1985 a novel of my own was published in London

ironic anthropology.

I was now quite different people in England, Germany and Italy, where I had begun to write newspaper articles in Italian on Italian issues for Italians, without the framing and contextualising needed when talking about such matters to those who don’t know the country.

The day came when writers actually sought out exile, left voluntarily, and were proud of it.

Byron, Shelley, Lawrence, Joyce – they stood outside the societies that had made them and became in their own lifetime international figures.

I don’t do this with cynical calculation. It simply happens, like an adjustment to the weather, or the language you are speaking, or your new girlfriend’s parents;

Barbara Pym,

In many ways Pym is untranslatable into Italian,

Contemporary Italian more frequently puts the adjective before the noun, more frequently uses possessives for parts of the body, more frequently introduces a pronoun subject, and more frequently uses the present progressive, all changes that suggest the influence of English.

More than anything else, what makes a foreign country foreign, and difficult, is its language, and though we can’t be expected to learn a new language for every country we want to know about, it seems important to be reminded of the language, reminded that one’s own language is not the supreme system for understanding the world, but just one of thousands of possibilities.

Jamie McKendrick

To the Italian ear, and to mine these days, much of what is said in Italian grates.

Frost’s notion that ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’,

Only around 5 per cent of Italians were actually speaking and reading Italian when the country achieved political unification in 1861.

The literary language, dating back to Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio, was Tuscan

What I’d like to stress is my intense awareness, as I read their translation, of each reader’s response, which is the inevitable result, I suppose, of the individual background we bring to a book, all the reading and writing and listening and talking we’ve done in the past, our particular interests, beliefs, obsessions.

I translated Machiavelli’s The Prince during the Iraq war.