Nathan "N.R." Gaddis > Status Update
Nathan "N.R." Gaddis
added a status update
Best Translated Book Award 2020 goes to Michael Cooperson for transforming "Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English." "Impostures" by al-Ḥarīrī
— Dec 31, 2019 02:27PM
11 likes · Like flag
Comments Showing 1-6 of 6 (6 new)
date
newest »
newest »
"One might describe al-Hariri's 12th-century Arabic classic as 'Melville's Confidence Man meets Queneau's Exercices de style,' but in this remarkable Oulipean carnival of a translation by Michael Cooperson, there are so many other voices—and languages: Singlish, Spanglish, Shakespeare, middle management-speak, Harlem jive, the rogue's lexicon, Naijá... Impostures is a wild romp through languages and literatures, places and times, that bears out and celebrates Borges's dictum: 'Erudition is the modern form of the fantastic.'"— Esther Allen, translator of Zama, winner of the 2017 National Translation Award
This is a good tip for the 2021 BTBA - each year's prize is for books published in the previous calendar year. Books published and/or distributed in the US in 2019 are eligible for the 2020 award.
Antonomasia wrote: "This is a good tip for the 2021 BTBA - each year's prize is for books published in the previous calendar year. Books published and/or distributed in the US in 2019 are eligible for the 2020 award."Either way I'm doubtful it'll even get noticed. Too scholarly. Or there'll be some technicality that it doesn't qualify.
Leg Over Leg was (though it didn't win) and this seems similar.Vol 1 was shortlisted in 2014.
Sounds incredible. What genius exists in text. Only a handful of humans can purchase a Davinci in their lifetime, yet anyone can go to a bookstore or library and take home the work of a true master. I’m humbled by what the human mind can achieve.
As always in these cases :: cf Moore's Novel History.