Back in the first post of July—Norwegian Literature Month at Three Percent, because nothing reminds me more of Norway than a 110 degree heat index—I shared a bunch of statistics on Norwegian literature in English from 2008 through 2018. Including this:

This is the breakdown of Norwegian books by men (123 titles or 73%) published in English translation compared to those written by women (47 titles or 27%). That’s a����ܲ�����discrepancy! Almost three titles by Norwegian men for every single title by a Norwegian woman? Not a great look.

And because I have the data in front of me, I can list all 21—only twenty-one!—Norwegian women who, since 2008, have had work translated into English for the first time ever:

Selma Lonning Aaro

May-Brit Akerholt

Merete Andersen

Brit Bildoen

Hanne Bramness

Gro Dahle

Janne Drangsholt

Karin Fossum

Kari Hesthamar

Vigdis Hjorth

Anne Holt

Merethe Lindstrom

Maja Lunde

Hanne Orstavik

Gunnhild Oyehaug

Edy Poppy

Agnes Ravatn

Ingelin Rossland

Kjersti Skomsvold

Amalie Skram

Linn Ullmann

Compared to a number of other countries, that’s not bad, but aside from the mystery writers—Karin Fossum and Anne Holt in particular—and the one(?) Big Five author (Gunnhild Oyehaug), I’m curious to see how many of these other authors are easy to find out about online.

Let’s back up for a second first.

*

Shortly after putting together a really ambitious plan for Norwegian Month—and a to-do list that’s longer than a Texas mile—I took a kind of selfish “work” vacation. I went to an AirBNB alone (a place with no TV and no Internet) to work on a book idea I had (er, have, I suppose) about, well, baseball and framing and stuff. The vision I have makes no sense when I explain it, no matter how valiantly I try, but, in essence I want to write about non-quantifiable value at a time when everything is being quantified and analyzed.

The biggest problem I’m having—aside from a near-constant state of self-deprecation, especially when I think that these posts can serve as some sort of “proof of concept” behind my whole insane book idea—is that writing about value mostly means writing about failure. And when I’m writing about failure—in a book that’s at least partially autobiographical—I’m really just pondering my own failures. And how my life/career/ideas/editorial selections stack up against others. Definitely not well!

Anyway, putting aside that moment of self-doubt (fuck self-doubt! fuck aspiration! fuck ego! and fuuuucccckkkk Twitter!), my other big plan for my time away was to read a couple books by Norwegian women—the two that are referenced below—and prep some posts for Three Percent.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, I discovered Shirley Jackson, aka, one of my five most favorite authors ever of all time.

This started by downloading���Ჹ�Բ�������������for my Kindle before taking off to the AirBNB. (And please, come at me if you want. If you work at an indie bookstore between Rochester and Great Barrington, MA and had a copy of �Ჹ�Բ�������������in stock, please send a picture. It wasn’t available in the central library here, nor in the U of R one, and, to be honest, there is something rewarding about being able to read in the dark, on a roof, well into the wee hours of the morning.)��Hangsaman came up in a marketing meeting about Sara Mesa’s Four by Four, as a suggestion from one of our summer interns as a possible comparison, and as a voice that might help with editing this strange, captivating book.

(Side note: Four by Four is AMAZING. It’s the sort of book that gets stuck in your mind, forcing you to puzzle it all out. And dwell on it. The editing process has been incredibly illuminating for this title. We’re taking the translation to a new level.��Just wait, y’all. Just wait.)

Everyone who went to high school already knows of Shirley Jackson. She’s the author of “The Lottery,” which, because bold claims are the thing in 2019, I’m going to state, emphatically, with no qualifications or any hand-wringing, that this is��the Greatest American Short Story Ever. We all know it. It caused a bit of controversy. It’s layered. It’s immaculately well-crafted. It’s singular in its voice. And it’s not by Hemingway. (Big plus.)

Everyone who watches Netflix knows about��The Haunting of Hill House, which is pretty much not at all related to the Jackson novel of the same name—but who cares? Lots of people watched this. “Inspired by” is the new “adapted from.”

And some people know��We Have Always Lived in This Castle, which I first heard about and read in 2008 when Bragi Ólafsson recommended it during his reading tour here in the States. When the aforementioned intern recommended Jackson as a possible comparison point for Sara Mesa’s novel, this was the book I thought of. A novel with a weird interplay between voice and perspective, plot and narrative framing.

I didn’t want to reread that, though, which then led to my finding out that Jackson had written four novels I’d never heard of:��The Road through the Wall,��Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest, and��The Sundial.��

I have no doubts that some readers of this website have read some/most/all of these books, but for whatever reason—because of “The Lottery”?, because she’s a she?, because her books are supposedly “genre”?—Jackson flew under my radar.

Looking at her earlier books,���Ჹ�Բ�������������jumped out. A book about a school (like��Four by Four) that’s both sinister and a parody (again,��Four by Four), and a lesser known book from a famous author (I am a total mark for being “that guy who read the book by XXXX that no one else ever reads”), sounded ideal to me.

In fits and starts, as I worked on my book (aka came to terms with several of my limitations as a writer and thinker), I read Hangsaman. And when I finished, I had two thoughts:��What the fuck did I just read? Who else has written about the connections between this book and��Twin Peaks?��

*

The first book I planned on reading on my little write-a-cation (I’ll let myself out) was Anatomy. Monotony.��because the description sounded so very horny. (FYI: . Can someone let me know what’s going on? Anyone?)

What is fidelity? In��Anatomy. Monotony., Edy Poppy examines this question with an intimacy and ruthlessness worthy of Marguerite Duras. Vår, a young woman from a small Norwegian town, and Lou, a Frenchman from Nîmes, maintain an open marriage. But their polyamorous experiment is freighted with jealousies. Their life in London is broken into by one fascinating stranger after another, until eventually they decide to move away, back to Vår’s rural hometown―a decision that will change the nature of their relationship forever.��Anatomy. Monotony.��is a novel about sex, love, and the creation of literature in no uncertain terms.

Admittedly, I’m not digging too deeply into my Google results, but at first glance, there seems to be almost no conversation whatsoever of this book. “too personal, too forced,” and , but wins, due to this opening paragraph:

I have lived with the novel Anatomy. Monotony. for the entire 19 years of my real-life story with its author, Edy Poppy. I’ve known its players, the inside story – from her first notes in the galleries of Tate in London. Now I have a chance to read it. Dare I?

Oh, shit!

*

The first result I got for “what does Hangsaman by Shirley jackson mean?” was a GoodReads page that was basically a cold, objective evaluation: With a grand total of 9 ratings, the book had received a 3.22 rating.

NOT A SIDE NOTE: What is a small sample size for book review ratings? In baseball, 600 plate appearances is �����ٳٲ���valid. No trends stabilize before 100 plate appearances. But off of 9 GoodReads ratings this book is mediocre.

This book is definitely not a 3.22 out of 5.00. That’s like giving a C to a student because you’re too dumb to notice they know more than you. But who’s going to go on there and try and change that score? What are we doing, rating books in this way?

*

Vigdis Hjorth is a big name in Norwegian literature. Her novel��Will and Testament (forthcoming from Verso) sold like, if I can remember the number from the press release I threw away, like 140,000 units.

Open Letter��has sold more than 120,000 net units over our history. That’s not a failure. I don’t think? It’s not. No way. Success isn’t only sales figures. Right?

Four siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret.

When a dispute over her parents’ will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different—a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.

Will and Testament��is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman’s struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth’s novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.

I did read a bit of this book. My hot takeaway: It’s worth checking out, but the most interesting part of the first 60 pages is about the narrator having an affair with a married man. The most boring parts are all the whining about the summer houses and the inheritance. It’s very repetitive. But I assume it becomes more and more interesting as it goes along. In Verso I trust. They are not failures. Every editorial decision they make is lauded.

That said,��Will and Testament��is no��The Sundial��by Shirley Jackson, which I immediately downloaded after finishing �Ჹ�Բ�������������(although, in all fairness, I did go to the local independent bookstore, , and bought the only Jackson book they had in stock, a Netflix tie-in version of��The Haunting of Hill House), and ended up devouring over the course of a single day.

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All clickbait headlines are awful, but this one really bugs me: ““

I’ve spent the week so far reading mid-century-style: pocket paperbacks and folded pages, making notes in the margins with ballpoint pens. When I finish Shirley Jackson’s 1951 novel Hangsaman��today, though, I immediately head to the 21^st century—I take out my phone and start Googling furiously.

What else would you do? Everything you can imagine exists online somewhere, so, obviously, someone must have tried to articulate this weird novel. Go on, Dan Kois, editor of��Slate:

“Natalie is lonely at school. And because of who she is, and because of what kind of novel this is, her loneliness is terrifying. The dangerous power of awareness, quotidian social brutality, loneliness, and existential fear propel��Hangsaman��toward the edge of becoming a psychological thriller, rather like one of Patricia Highsmith’s, only less physically violent, funnier, more lyrical, imaginative, and interior.”

At the very least I’m reassured that I didn’t miss some enormous plot point. Instead, I’m left with the thoroughly enjoyable activity of chewing over the book I’ve just read: thinking back on Natalie’s voices, her diaries, her puffed-up father and desperate mother, the man at the party, the one-armed diner and the best friend, only some of whom, it’s clear, actually exist.

Just to clarify, Dan quotes Francine Prose’s intro, and then reassures himself that his (unarticulated) reading of the book wasn’t 100% off-base.

It would take many more paragraphs to address even half of the interesting things you can find in this book. Questions or observations like:

1.) Natalie was sexually assaulted, right?

2.) What an amazing parody of a domineering father . . .

3.) . . . AND of a man who thinks he’s a writer.

4.) Those letters home from college.

5.) The history of that college (Bennington?) is so wonderful in its specificity.

6.) And that ending? Let’s assume Tony isn’t real. Natalie still has��very uncanny experiences��with several adults in the last third of the book.

7.) Including the very unnerving car ride back to town, which seems to take place at a very different point in time.

9.) And don’t forget about the 0ne-armed man!

But is any of this addressed in the only contemporary review of this book? Nope! The rest of his review is this:

My hunch is that the establishment of the trade paperback as an exciting format for lit-fiction—cemented by the��, launched in 1984 and a fabulous success almost instantly thanks to Jay McInerney’s��—meant that suddenly every author wanted a large-format paperback edition for herself. They also cost more: more money for publishers, higher royalties to authors. So where once most trade paperbacks��, that format now became a way to differentiate high-toned fiction from its pulpier, poppier, mass-market brethren. The bet was that readers would pay for quality. For a while, they did.

Now, of course, the only thing I’m willing to pay for is speed. I spent $8.89 to download a book in seconds, even though it’s just data, words on a screen, more ephemeral even than the shabby mass-market tucked into the cupholder of my beach chair. Fifty years from now��Hangsaman��will be over 100 years old, and this little object that once sold for 50 cents may well still survive—in my daughter’s house, or in a thrift shop somewhere, or on the shelves of some other mass-market fetishist like me, carefully tending the last remaining treasures in his collection. That $9 Kindle version will be long evaporated into the ether, just another obsolete file format, more orphaned data lost in the dark where no one will ever find it.

Wait, what?

*

Every Shirley Jackson book I’ve read has a moment when the main character gets lost in the woods and has some sort of vision that’s maybe real, maybe in their (broken) mind, possibly supernatural. Someone ���ܲ�����be talking about this. Somewhere.

*

Where does discussion of the���Դdz�-���𲵲�-��DZ�ܱ�������books take place nowadays?

This is something I want to include in my aforementioned book in progress—or on a podcast, or something—but the democratization of book culture via the Internet has only really reinforced the gap between immense success and being completely ignored. A book is only going to be talked about in detail if���𱹱����DzԱ���is talking about it. It’s very rare to see someone going out on a limb and talking up a book that others haven’t already anointed. Or that isn’t positioned to be “the next big thing.”

Which will always strike me as weird, since I grew up at a time when everyone was desperately trying to set themselves apart through their choices of which bands, authors, movies, etc. Never admit to liking a book that���Դǰ�����������really like.

I don’t feel like that’s the vibe anymore, although maybe I’m just wrong. Twitter is probably���Դdz���the best way of assessing culture at large.

*

The only other thing I could find online about Hangsaman was on . Initially, this made me feel hopeful. It would make sense for conversations about more obscure books to happen here. But then, this:

This is going back to the old point that I’ve written about (and podcasted about) a million times, but the most pressing issue for the field of international literature��������’����increasing the infamous 3% number, it’s cultivating conversations around the books that����������published. Of the 600+ translations published last year, there were probably a dozen that received a respectable amount of attention from reviewers, literary websites, booksellers, Twitter, and the like, with the overwhelming majority of international titles (and, to be honest, most books in general), just fading away.

None of this is new, or insightful. But if you start to unpack���ɳ����certain books receive 90% of the conversation, and others get absolutely nothing . . . That’s interesting. Even a bit disconcerting if you accept that it’s not the������������ǰ���most worthy��titles that get the attention, that there are other forces at work, shaping our culture. (Shadowy forces and luck. It’s always all about luck.)

So it’s not surprising that it’s hard to find people talking about��Will and Testament��(hopefully that will change when the book is officially released) and��Anatomy. Monotony.��I’m not sure there’s anything to be done, but I’m becoming more and more despondent about a culture that seems to only value the mega-hit. Twitter broke me this week when, after not checking it for days and days, I opened up the app and saw every silly tweet as someone’s attempt to go viral. Just keep chucking out those puns and witty observations and one day you’ll make it!��Like trying to understand YouTubers, this really bums me out. We don’t see value in the object itself, but rather in the number of references and likes that object has received. And since most people, especially nowadays, want to be part of the in crowd, once something starts to be popular, we all rush to like and retweet it, to make sure that we can demonstrate that we know what’s good.

*

�Ჹ�Բ�������������is a fantastic book. And��The Haunting of Hill House is exquisitely crafted. But, in the end, my favorite Shirley Jackson novel is The Sundial. It’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, a sort of comedy of manners set against a somewhat sinister backdrop. The Victor LaValle foreword (posted on����as a “book review,” which is odd) does a great job articulating what makes her book so damn good:

The Hallorans, and their extended hangers-on, become a kind of cult when one of them, Aunt Fanny, receives prophetic messages from her long departed, much revered father. He has appeared to his only daughter to warn that the world is soon to end. All those in the Halloran home must prepare for the coming doom. Shut the doors and windows, close themselves off from the cursed world. Prepare to become the last of the human race. In quick time the family members are drawn into paranoia and conspiracy. They come to believe the prophecy. They have been chosen to inherit the earth. Jackson proceeds to illustrate, in rich detail, just how sad such a fate would be. The whole world ends, and��this��is all that’s left? Jackson spares no one her precise, perceptive eye. Sadder still is how much I recognize myself, from my worst moments, in one character or another. What saves me from despair is Jackson’s wit, her deadpan demolition of human foibles. For me, that kind of reading experience is essential, and when I discovered Shirley Jackson, it was as if she’d understood what I wanted, what I needed, and set it all down on the page long before I was even born. That recognition is profound, life changing, whether it comes in a darkened movie theater or between the covers of a novel.

Personally, I love the way Aunt Fanny keeps trying to get in bed with one of the hangers-on by pounding on his door and insisting that she’s “only 48” and therefore, still desirable. That and how the granddaughter keeps questioning whether or not the post-apocalyptic world, in which everyone outside of the house has simply vanished, is actually a good thing, since they’ll all still be stuck with one another . . . Oh, and the set-piece where the Halloran Cult meets the True Believers, who share their own vision of the coming end of the world—a vision that the Hallorans find absolutely ridiculous. (I don’t want to give away any more of that scene though . . . Those few pages alone are worth the price of admission.)

. . .�� poor translations, he asserted, were the worst crimes an academic or a writer could commit, and a translator shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves a translator until their translation had been read by hundreds of scholars and for hundreds of years, so that, in short, a translator would never know if they were a successful translator in their lifetime, which, to Jacov, made perfect sense, and, following this train of thought, a translator wasn’t a real translator until they died . . .

—Reinhardt’s Garden, Mark Haber

There are a lot of great things to be said about Translation Loaf. The natural beauty of Vermont. The amazing instructors (which included John Balcom, Lissie Jaquette, Suzanne Jill Levine, Emily Wilson, and Edward Gauvin this time around). The summer camp vibe. All the readings—those by students and those by instructors. (Who didn’t��fall in love with Helen MacDonald this year?)

Translation Bread Loaf

Those things alone make my visit to Translation Loaf one of my favorite weeks of the year, but looking back on it now, I think my absolute favorite thing is being able to talk to emerging (and experienced) translators in a number of different contexts. Some of my interactions are just basic, like my annual talk on contracts, while others are more situation-specific (giving advice to individual translators about their specific projects), and sometimes there are moments when I sort of think aloud and reflect on translation and publishing in a much more general way. This year that included giving really specific advice on how to write a good query letter and the “Three Levels of Translation.”

The query letter thing doesn’t really fit this post, so I’ll save it for later, but the Three Levels kind of does . . . To give you the full context, during my group meeting with ten translators, I started explaining to them why we chose to work with certain translators. Sure, it’s all relationships and coincidence, but there are reasons we keep��working with particular translators that can be articulated.

This is painting with broad strokes, but translators tend to go through three stages:

1) Ability to translate words, literally

This is pretty basic, and where a lot of my students start out. They can render a sentence from one language to another and capture the meaning. This is what I think of as the “functional” stage of a translator’s career.

 

2) Ability to translate style

This includes the ability to capture tone and register, to understand how an author tells a story, to understand style and structure.

 

3) Ability to interpret and convey meta-patterns

Somewhat rare, but the greatest of translators understand the books they work on such a deep level that they know how to choose particular words to echo other parts of the text, to sequence subtle textual changes to illustrate the craft and structure of a book, and much more. This might seem similar to the earlier points, but there’s an intentionality and confidence among these translators that is palpable and alters one’s understanding of the text as a whole.

 

I’m more than willing to admit that this rubric is bullshit, but I have to be honest and admit that I do put translators into these three buckets and make certain decisions based on that. I want proposals from translators in stages 2 & 3 . . . But how do I know someone is at that level?

I have ideas! And these ideas dovetail with yesterday’s post about the Five Tools of Authorship: Are there “Five Tools of Translation”? If so, what are they? Are they different from the ones for authors?

I think the answer to all three of those rhetorical questions is “YES,” but before I explain, I need one more digression . . .

I just went through our catalog to try and identify all the translators whose first book-length translation we published (aka, Translation Debutants) ALONG with at least one more title. I’m probably missing a few people, but I came up with: Will Vanderhyden, J.T. Mahany, Steve Dolph, Lytton Smith, David Williams, maybe Heather Cleary . . . There are also quite a few translation debutants we’ve worked with, but have yet to do a second book with us. That isn’t a comment on their quality at all—in every instance I can think of, the translator is great��but we haven’t found the right project yet—but for the purpose of this post I’m mostly thinking about the translators with multiple Open Letter projects.

What if we applied my “soccer player” idea to not just authors, but translators? Are there elements of translation that would cause me—as a publisher—to want to “buy” a translator’s future value early on? Like, if, you had bought Megan McDowell’s career—and published every author she’s worked on as part of that—it seems like you’d be doing really well.

It’s hard to divorce a translator’s qualities from the success of the��book��they’ve translated, but I’m going to give it my best shot. (Since, in a way, one of the qualities of a great translator is their ability to pick great projects. This is especially important for translators who are actively pitching projects.)

And just to make sure this is as clear as can be, I’m writing this from the point of view of a publisher looking to invest in translators. I’m not a professional (or amateur) translator and know that there are far more “tools” and aspects to the art and craft of translation than what I’ve listed below. This is my limited, flawed perspective, one that—once again—originates from the publishing/business side of things.

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Before we get into the Five Tools of Translators, I want to shine a light on the most recent addition to the translators named above: Katie Whittemore. I met Whittemore at Bread Loaf last summer, where she read a short story from Sara Mesa—whose books are forthcoming from Open Letter, so, yes, this is full-on nepotism (or self-promotion or whatever)—and more or less started her career as a literary translator. Since last Translation Loaf, she’s published something like 49 stories and excerpts, and has seven full-length projects in the works with three different publishers. We’re planning on working with her on five different books, including��Four by Four, which will be her debut . . .

I could write this post with any of the above translators (or a hypothetical one) in mind, but given the recency of Bread Loaf and the fact that I got the first part of Sara Mesa’s Four by Four��in over the weekend, it makes some sense to use Katie as a bit of a frame to help articulate what the Five Tools of Translation are—the tools that I’ll be looking for as I start working through this book.

Tool One: Tone and Register

I mentioned this above as part of the “second stage” of being a translator, but, to be honest, even within that second stage, some people are better at it than others. Some translators are attune to the nuances of tone and register, are very careful about choosing the right words for a particular character, about not jumping from an academic tone to a very informal one without rhyme or reason.

In terms of judging this as a “tool,” a really great translator will be��more than consistent. More than accurate. A great translator is also a great writer, and a great writer (see yesterday’s post) uses atmosphere, tone, and register to create tension, expectation, and characterization. It’s one thing to do a functional translation that is internally consistent and “readable”; it’s another to produce a translation that captures the nuances of tone and register that make a book “fantastic.”

This is something that I’m not sure can be taught . . . It’s something that you can absorb by reading a lot, and having the ability to understand what the tone of the original is and how that tone can be conveyed in the target language. It requires the confidence to step away from the original a bit, which is one reason why beginning translators (who tend to be terrified about doing anything that’s not exactly like the original) struggle with this a lot. Usually when a translator says “that’s how it is in the original” they’re focusing on a solitary word choice rather than the overall tone/register/style of a piece.

When a translator has a natural knack for capturing this (Will Vanderhyden is particularly gifted in this regard with his Fresán translations), they’re worth their weight in gold. It’s an incredible amount of work to transform a flat translation into something engaging. Which is why I would invest in a translator with this tool . . .

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I’ll write more about the whole of Sara Mesa’s��Four by Four��in a few weeks, but for now, it’s worth noting that it’s comprised of three very different sections. The first is polyvocal, describing a boarding school in a possibly post-apocalyptic town that is attended by the elite and a handful of scholarship students. The second part is a diary from an aspiring writer who is working as a substitute in this school. The third is a surreal, unsettling journal from the teacher whom the substitute replaced.

These sections are very different and require shifts in tone and register to really work. Here are three paragraphs from Whittemore’s first draft that illustrate this:

Sara Mesa

THE SEAT

The new school year has just begun and her seat is empty. It’s been empty all week, almost since the first day, and the blank space is an accusation. Teeny knows that Celia isn’t sick, the others all know it too, but no one asks, no one says a word.

French class is about to start when the door opens and the Booty stalks in, asking permission as she makes her way through the rows of desks without waiting for an answer. She climbs up to the podium, smoothes her blouse, looks around, speaks.

She doesn’t talk about Celia, but she makes it known that absence is always the answer to something. She makes it clear, above all, that this absence is permanent.

She employs the usual symbols—caged birds, weeds that hinder the rosebushes’ nourishment, clouds that block the sun: a whole apparatus of lifeless nature she navigates naturally—but there is a tremor behind her words, an anxious fury, and this, yes, is strange.

The girls whisper among themselves, passing the words below their breath. A hum spreads like a net through the classroom.

From part II:

I met Señor J. and still don’t know what to make of him. The headmaster of the colich looks more like a stockholder than the head of a school. It’s hard to explain, but he looks like a smug businessman, not someone responsible for educating young people. A relaxed, self-satisfied man. Pleasant face, a deep, confident voice, a graying goatee that he strokes now and then.

He looks at me almost sweetly—ironically, perhaps—from behind his round glasses. He shakes my hand and welcomes me enthusiastically. Suddenly, I’m at ease.

The assistant head is also in the meeting. Skinny and pale with dark circles under his eyes, he’s submissive to Sr. J., eager to please. With him, there’s no firm handshake, just a limp and noncommittal grasp. He smiles broadly, showing long and yellowed teeth. He’s friendly, but it’s an awkward kind of friendliness: fixed gaze, stiff expression. I can’t say whether he liked me or not.

The conversation is short-lived. I have the impression that they both think I already know all the details about the school, or perhaps they don’t want to bore me early on with superfluous explanations. They limit themselves to brief, precise instructions. The assistant head gives me a folder with my students’ files, the notebook of the teacher I’m substituting for, a copy of my contract, and a memory stick.

“You start tomorrow,” he adds.

And finally:

THEY WERE TOLD IT WAS WORTH trying this way of life. It was a simple and easy life. They accepted. They forgot the old life.

Once in a while, a girl disappears, or a boy.

It became frequent and it became normal. And in becoming normal, it was accepted as the natural order of things. No one was overly sorry about it, just as no one is overly sorry about the fact that it sometimes rains or hails, given that—naturally—it has to rain and hail.

 

THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THEIR SKIN is pleasing. Between their bodies, ages. Occasionally, the contrast is grotesque, but always stimulating.

There are those who take pleasure in seeing this. The girl is thin, compliant; the man is flabby, covered in veins. A difference of forty years, perhaps more.

Symbols of power: the pants lowered and bunched over his shoes, the raised cigar in hand, an early sign of victory as he assails her over and over.

The girl doesn’t remember anything else and prefers this to loneliness.

She holds him when he’s finished, calls him papi. The one watching moves away, leaving them alone.

The watcher does not believe this coupling should be questioned. It is perfectly clear that it works.

One must never interfere with the laws of the market.

 

THERE IS A SINK, a toilet. The girl turns on the tap to watch one drop of water drip slowly, then another, and another. The falling droplets mark the time.

She moves closer. At first, it’s just a shiny quiver in the mouth of the faucet. It grows fuller and fatter, heavier, drops, and explodes.

One droplet. Then another.

Robinet, the girl whispers. She remembers that word from school.

She doesn’t remember “sink” or “toilet.” She doesn’t remember the school. She only remembers robinet, robinet.

There’s something sinister beneath all three excerpts, but it’s slightly different each time, which is something we’ll have to play with as we work on this translation. As it is though, the changes in rhythm—evolving from longer, more objective sentences to something more informal to a world that appears quite strange and disturbing—along with particular word choices make these bits work.

Tool Two: Ear and Fluidity

This is kind of close to tone/register, but I think it deserves its own category. If tone/register is the translation equivalent of baseball’s “hitting for power,” this is the one for “hitting for contact.” Both are about hitting, but different aspects of it.

A translator with this tool avoids those stilted bits of mediocre translations that turn off general readers. Although translationese can show up anywhere, a lot of times it can be found in dialogue. Awkward, unbelievable conversations can completely kill a book. I mentioned something similar yesterday about being “taken out of a book” when a voice doesn’t feel quite authentic—that fear is ten times more prominent when it comes to translations. Although I don’t believe that readers are genuinely “afraid” of translations, I do have the sense that the slightest stumble will remind them that they’re reading a translation, causing at least some portion of readers to set the book aside. We don’t want that!

Like with tone/register, the best way to develop a good ear is by reading a lot and writing a lot. Having a sense for how things sound in English and the confidence to step away from the original text to make sure that the text��sounds��right. Easier said than done, I know, but when a translator has this feel for language, their translations tend to read really well and, for better or worse, a translation that reads really well will be more “valuable” than one that has meaningful cultural content but is rendered in a stiff, awkward way.

Tool Three: Flexibility

After years and years of working with translations, I’ve become pretty good at identifying when a translator is sticking too close to the original rather than having the flexibility to know what can come over in the translation, and what needs to be left behind. I’ve heard a number of translators talk about compensation within a text—knowing that one pun/joke won’t work, but regaining that in a different spot by��adding��something that wasn’t there in the original.

That’s the sort of flexibility that sets a translator apart. It’s kind of like knowing your limits. Never trust a translator (or a writer) who thinks they can translate (or write) everything. I remember talking to Jordan Stump once about translating a book for Dalkey, and he passed because, although he loved the book, he knew that he would never be able to capture the voice in a satisfactory way.

Since I’m not a translator, I’m probably overstepping my bounds a bit, but I think that the idea of “flexibility” can encompass a number of different approaches to translation. Whether or not you take more of a Venuti approach and make sure the text proclaims its status as a translation through the inclusion of various “foreign” elements. And for someone trying to really domesticate a potential bestseller, they also need to have a certain flexibility in both thinking and writing.

I think there’s a lot more that could be said about this (or explained by a professional translator), but I’ll let it go for now.

Tool Four: Interpretation and Readership Strategy

This is key for me, both in terms of the translation itself AND in pitching a translation to a prospective publisher.

John Balcom

The idea for this came up during John Balcom’s talk in Bread Loaf last week. He compared a couple different translations of an epic, extremely important and extremely long, Chinese novel and articulated the ways in which the two different translations were aimed at different types of readership. One translation was done in such a way as to imitate a Victorian novel. People like Victorian novels, and the form did sort of map onto the original, so the translators used various��Tom Jones tricks in rendering it in English.��A more recent translation was done for a more general, contemporary readership, employing a much lower register, more slang, a certain looseness in the text.

Both versions have their pros and cons and, as anyone involved in this part of the literary world knows, there’s no single,��right��way to do a translation. My point: As much as a translator allows the source text to guide them, they still have to make a series of choices, and if they have some overarching idea of what’s best for the book—based on an interpretation and close reading of the original—their translation will work much better. Again, this is related to what I think of as a��confident��translation. The choices are deliberate and work together as a whole. Like when talking about style, it’s hard to put a finger on this, but when a translator has it, they have it. And I would totally invest in their career!

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Related to that, and to bring Katie Whittemore back in here for a second, is the ability to present a title to a publisher in such a way that it’s clear that you, as a translator, understand what makes the book��work. What makes it a��good piece of writing.��

I’m never swayed by reader’s reports (or cover letters) that rely exclusively on a book’s��cultural importance as the reason why we simply�����ܲ�����bring them into English. There’s more to publishing than simply doing a book because it’s worthy of being translated. That’s part of it, sure, but just as when agents talk about how many copies a book sold in its original country (), I feel like we’re missing something essential. I greatly prefer reports and cover letters that articulate a way to approach the book. That unpack its style, its structure. That can explain why this particular book is better than the 70,000 other books we��could��be publishing. (And don’t tell me it’s because the book is important and has been overlooked. I want specifics! Specifics and urgency. Why��this book.��Why��now.)

This is one of the key elements in why we’ve signed on a number of projects that Katie Whittemore has presented to us. Her reports provide a deep dive into the text itself, and knowing that she knows a) how a book works and b) how to talk about it, gives me a great deal of confidence that she’ll be able to do a good job with the translation. Or, at least, be able to explain her thinking in the editing process. And/or be able to take edits and work them through a more interpretive lens that’s informing the translation.

Translators with this tool ��������incredibly��valuable. Especially if their aesthetics of reading are in line with your press’s . . . To have someone capable of both pitching the right books, and being able to translate them at such a sophisticated level is invaluable. Buy this translator’s career! $25K up front and $5K per title! (Or more.)

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One last note on this: That “third stage” reference above fits in here, I think. There are lots and lots of readers in the world, but not nearly so many��readers. Translators who understand how an author’s prose works on a line-by-line basis, and can see the structure of the book as a whole, and can pick up on textual patterns that run throughout the text echoing and playing off one another? Those translators are likely to have long, prosperous careers. (If prosperity and quality actually correlate, which is . . . not that likely?)

Tool Five: Cultural and Literary Fluency��

One one level this seems really obvious: A good translator understands the cultural context a text is coming out of AND the cultural context into which they’re translating it. Is that really that simple and obvious though? There’s a tendency among emerging translators to either over-explain or under-explain cultural differences. Great translators know how to avoid footnotes, and have the flexibility��to know what can be brought over wholesale, and what needs to be recontextualized.

Again, in the simplest terms, it’s the difference between knowing the language and knowing the culture surrounding the text being translated. This can also be extended into understanding the literary tradition a book is coming out of. A translator who knows what books/ideas their author is reacting to, or referencing, or playing with, is much more likely to produce a 10-star translation. (Or, in Norwegian parlance, a “6,” because, yes, they grade all books on a scale of 1 to 6 and then put a picture of a die with the appropriate number of dots on the front cover of the book, which is, in my opinion, a bit maddening because no one thinks in sixes. Just a little fun fact for anyone who’s made it this far.)

The same level of literary fluency with regard to the target language is��also��necessary. In the end, maybe all these tools come down to being really well-read . . . If you know a lot about literature, you have more tools at your disposal to play with when you’re working on a text. You know where it’s coming from, what other works it’s in conversation with, and how you can capture those relations in both the English language and the American marketplace.

A great example of this is Will Vanderhyden’s translations of��Rodrigo Fresán’s books. Rodrigo is a self-proclaimed “referential maniac,” who has read/seen/listened to so much. Granted, a lot of the movies and music he works into his texts are from America, but Will still has to know these allusions in order to make sure they land right in the translation. Because he’s read a lot of Philip K. Dick and Fresán’s other works and contemporary, weird Spanish-language literature as a whole, Will’s well-suited for making all of these references play.

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One final thought about these “Tools”: Although the Five Tools I’d use to predict an author’s future are different from the five I use with translators, it’s not like one set is easier to attain��than the other. Both sets of debutant writers have to be excellent at a lot of different things for a publisher to have a lot of confidence in their future output. Writing is hard! I know everyone thinks they can do it (and everyone can, technically write, I suppose), but you can easily tell the difference between a��Five Tool Author or Translat�ǰ���and someone whose writing is totally��fine��(they roll a 3?).

To set this up, you might want to read Part I and/or this write-up about the first of the four parts of the massive novel.

If you don’t feel like reading either of those, here’s what you need to know about��Anniversaries��before reading Damion’s responses:��Anniversaries centers on Gesine Cresspahl, a young mother living in New York in 1967 with her daughter, Marie. Using a diary format, she recounts their life in NYC while also explaining the history of her family back in Eastern Germany in the build-up to World War II. The diary entries range from recaps of what was in the��New York Times��that day to long stories to Marie about Germany to short anecdotes about their trips to Staten Island and the like.

I think that’s all you need to know. Probably. These questions are kind of in the weeds, but I think you’ll find them interesting—even if you haven’t read the book.

Chad W. Post: One thing that struck me in reading the first volume of the book was Marie’s age. She’s supposed to be 10, but does a lot of things—exploring the new subway lines on her own, doing a lot of shopping alone, very politically aware (which doesn’t seem too out of keeping with her age)—that don’t really seem age appropriate. (I barely trust my eleven-year-old to change his underwear on a daily basis.) Times were different, I suppose? Or, what occurred to me as I started reading this second part, was that Gesine is the one describing Marie’s action. And in both a conversation with Marie about Robert Papenbrock and one of the internal ones with Jacob, Gesine acknowledges either leaving out particular information or refashioning it for the story. So maybe this is Marie as being told to us by Gesine? And not Marie a very-realistic-depiction-of-a-10-year-old-in-1967? I don’t necessarily have a question about this, except that I wonder if the “believability” of Marie’s age struck you at all as you read/translated?

Damion Searls: Marie as a precocious child is one of the things that strike most readers of the novel. As a very eminent realist novelist commented to me over email (in private, so I won’t say who it is), precocious kid characters are really hard to pull off, in novels or movies, but when it works they’re amazing, and Johnson really nails it, in this writer’s opinion and in mine.

What Marie does is certainly different from children today, for instance in the great chapter where she explores the new NYC subway lines on her own, but I have to say that I was a child in New York not too long after her, in the 70s, and I took the subway by myself at age six or seven, for example, so I don’t think it’s that unrealistic.

Probably more interesting is what these aspects of Marie’s personality say about her character. I mean think about it: she has no father, minimal to no extended family, she moved to a new country speaking a foreign language at age 3—she has had NO ONE in the world except Gesine, and has obviously adapted accordingly. Naturally she’s going to be independent, with interesting things to say about intellectual topics, someone who pleases adults, and so on.

It’s smart of you to think about the fact that Gesine is shaping the presentation (the way she also, of course, shapes the child by being her mother!). There’s an incredible chapter you’ll get to soon where Gesine suddenly asks Marie: So, what do you think of my family? and Marie gives her take, and we suddenly realize that the whole third-person novel we’ve been getting about Germany is a first-person story after all, shaped by Gesine. As the book goes on, especially near the beginning of Part 3, there’s an increasingly clear story arc of Marie’s growing confidence and self-awareness: she is more and more able to challenge Gesine and is slowly getting closer to adolescent rebellions.

CWP: Another thing I’m obsessed with right now (and/or have been for ages) are various patterns in narrative structure. Anniversaries basically declares its cyclical structure in both title and diary structure. There’s also the parallel between the advent of World War II and the ongoing Vietnam War in a “history repeats itself” style. But what particular draws me to this book, so far, is how time is represented in the two-plus narrative styles. There’s: 1) the faster moving Germany sections in which years pass, and time elapses between visits to that storyline; 2) the daily occurrences reported in the New York Times and relayed in a factual, of-the-moment fashion; and 3) Gesine’s accounts of their days, which are in between the two in terms of narrative compression. What I’m more curious about—and in part because of your comment that this was initially intended to be a trilogy, which you can see in the three water scenes—is is there is another level of organization that a first-time reader might not pick up on. Like the three water scenes that open books I, II, and III, but not IV, or more subtle things about how frequently certain settings/situations/characters recur. A more simply way to ask all this: Are there other markers I should be noting as I read through this the first time?

DS: The swimming scenes are the most apparent markers—there are a few others I know about (e.g., one all-New York Times chapter per part), but I don’t think they’re very important to readers, or to me as a translator. I think that’s one of the strengths of the book, actually. Compared to, say, Dante, where every little piece fits together into this giant system, or Proust, which gets so much of the big picture into every little detail—practically any pair of adjectives describing any noun in the book is the whole polarity and structure of the Proustian universe in microcosm—Anniversaries is much looser. There is an openness to different kinds of material, new ways of telling the story, the book is actually very playful and moves more unpredictably.

And in any case, the structure changes and kind of falls apart in part 3, which turned into parts 3-4—the balance between the storylines shifts, which is why those months got so much longer.

CWP: Silly technical translation question: Did you refer to any of the actual NY Times articles when translating those bits?

DS: Absolutely, of course. Sometimes Johnson/Gesine is directly quoting Times articles (translating them into German), so I wasn’t going to try to reverse-engineer the English; more often, Gesine is filtering the Times, emphasizing or being sarcastic about various bits, and so I would refer to the English, decide where I thought Gesine was changing the article instead of just translating it, and then morph the English to match. Plus the language was just different then than it is now: the still-new term “teen-ager” was hyphenated; they referred to “Negro” issues, of course, including “racial disorders” instead of unrest or violence; Vietnamese place names were spelled differently; the whole tone was slightly different. Things brings in good sixties texture. I was sometimes sad to lose some of the nuance or humor in Johnson’s translations—for example, the informer explaining drug slang to the Times saying “Geschwindigkeit ist tödlich,” i.e., “Rapidity is deadly,” as Johnson’s very German translation for “Speed kills”: I think that’s funny and I tried to think of a way to keep it in without it being too obtrusive, but eventually I let it go.

CWP: There is so much violence permeating this book—the Times reports, the mafia section in book I (which was the weirdest bit to me), the wars—and yet there’s such a sense of calmness to this book. Part of that, I think, is due to the tight focus on the characters as characters, but there are other craft things that keep the violence as a sort of lurking backdrop rather than the sole focus. Not sure if you’d agree with me, or if I could properly articulate all those techniques (the pastoral depictions of Jerichow that accompany the changing social situation, Marie’s seeming invulnerability giving the reader a sense of security, the switch to more domestic interests like marriage after chapters of more upheaval), but I wondered if this informed your writing of the text. If there were particular words or phrasings that you avoided or tones you leaned into in order to maintain this tension.

DS: That’s a perceptive and sensitive way to put it—I hadn’t thought of it quite that way. I agree that Johnson’s lyricism and sensitivity to nature (sunsets, rivers, light and water) are crucial and beautiful counterpoints to the brutal history. Marie is certainly confident, but it’s hard for us as adults to have faith in her own sense of invulnerability, so that doesn’t feel safe and secure to me. I tend to think more about Gesine’s pretty strong defense mechanisms, her ways of trying to keep experience and history at least partly under control, so I don’t think of it as calm, exactly. The more outwardly cool she is, the more turmoil and horror she’s trying to keep at bay.

Johnson, a bit like Gesine, almost-suppresses a lot: he writes in a very slanting and sometimes cryptic German, where it’s not always obvious what’s going on and a tiny little nuance is all he gives the reader to figure it out with. This is like life, of course, where we have to interpret people from occasional encounters and glancing gestures.

In terms of the tone, that’s what I was thinking about most: compression, rapidity, little sharp details that open up into much wider meanings but don’t spell everything out. Which is hard as a translator, because I have to figure it out and then compress it down again—unpack everything and then “repack” it, you might say. My best example of this comes in Part 4—ask me about it then if you’re still interested!

Some of the titles mentioned on this podcast include:

by Witold Szablowski (trans. by Antonia)

��by Remigiusz Ryziński (trans. by Sean)

by Ryszard Kapuscinski (trans. by ?? not on Penguin’s site or Amazon)

��by Hannah Krall (trans. by Philip Boehm)

Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine��by Wojciech Tochman (Antonia is working on a sample)

by Filip Springer (trans. by Sean)

You can find Antonia , and Sean on the website.

The intro/outro music on this episode is from “” by Foals.

You can also follow and on Twitter and Instagram (, ) for book and baseball talk.

If you don’t already subscribe to the Three Percent Podcast you can find us on and other places. Or you can always subscribe by adding our feed directly into your favorite podcast app: http://threepercent.libsyn.com/rss

To be fair, there is a two-year period in which the nonfiction data is passable��(thanks to the funding of the Italian Trade Agency), but it’s never really been my focus. Not because I have anything against nonfiction (who hates facts? Oh. Yeah. Ugh. Don’t answer that), but because there are 24 hours in a day, 168 in a week, and I really want to do something else for a little while every day. (I just bought myself four books to read for “fun” and then realized they don’t fit into my reading schedule until August. That’s a bit of a bummer.)

Anyway, here you go. The graph charting my minor data gathering failure:

When I decided to do a month of reading and writing on nonfiction in translation, I had some seriously aspirational ideas for posts. A breakdown of which languages were most popular in terms of nonfiction works. The types of nonfiction that made their way into English. A sort of reverse analysis of what kinds of books we’re missing as a culture.

Then I remembered that I haven’t done the work. I don’t have data that I can believe it. It’s like looking at baseball stats on April 9th. SMALL SAMPLE SIZE.

Which is where YOU come in. I’ll sacrifice my weekends and confirm every single nonfiction title you enter by the end of the month. And run a chart that’s more complete. I’ll do the work, but I could really use your help. If you’ve translated a nonfiction title, just . It’s easy! And fun!

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The dumber result of my not trusting my data is that I’m going to totally Buzzfeed these nonfiction posts. In part because I’m working on a much longer—and more structured—piece that I have to finish this month, and in part, or, well, in most?, because I became obsessed with one silly idea while I was walking and talking at AWP. We’ll get there though. First I want to plug a couple good books.

��by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf)

Let’s get the negative of this article out of the way: YES, long-time readers, there are a few “friggings” in here, which I couldn’t help but notice. But I respect Christina MacSweeney’s choice! She’s a great translator, and although I personally could never use the word “frigging,” I also can’t translate, so what does my opinion matter? Besides, two “friggings” has virtually no impact on the rest of this very well-written, well-translated book.

And yes, this book is solid. It’s about a racist massacre in Mexico that Herbert unpacks in ways that meld fictional narrative ideas with non-fictional situations. I don’t know that in the end it’s as good as Tomb Song, but it’s definitely an important, interesting book. And hits at one of the types of narrative nonfiction that��should��be translated more frequently: historical-cultural journalism.

by Alva Noë (Oxford University Press)

Would it be OK if I put aside Anniversaries��and Marie-Claire Blais for two weeks to read this?

To be honest, I’m suspicious of this book to its core. “In this deeply entertaining book, philosopher and baseball fan Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game.” Oh no. That’s not my baseball. But I’ll give it a try?

Some argue that baseball is fundamentally a game about numbers. Noë’s wide-ranging, thoughtful observations show that, to the contrary, baseball is not only a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, but is intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths.

Did I just spend $24 on a joke for a future column? MAYBE. I need to put aside some other books and find out.

by Jane Alison (Catapult)

Can I be 100% honest? I��love��books about narrative structures. It’s the only sort of academic-adjacent book I’ll spend money on.

And yet, when I realized this was a Catapult book, I had to pause for a moment. I don’t want to give money to the Koch Brothers! That’s worse than buying a book from Amazon!��But then again, publishing books that reference Marie Redonnet is one of the��least��evil things that can be done with Koch Money. And Catapult employs a lot of people I like! And it’s 2019, the Year of Being Chill and Positive!

This might be my most anticipated book of the spring. And will hopefully help me work out the little book I want to write this July . . .

by Hannes Råstam, translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Day (Canongate)

When I did that two-year study of nonfiction books back in 2013 or so, I found this. A book about a convicted serial killer who was a straight liar. Who used drugs + newspapers + suggestion + cognitive dissonance to lie like no one has ever lied before. Lies that made him the first and only and most intense “serial killer” of Sweden.

It’s pretty fascinating to see how this one guy conned the system, and was convicted of several murders that he clearly didn’t commit. It all fits together with my obsession with how our brains fill in gaps to help us believe what we already want to believe.

The problem with this book? If you know the punchline—”Thomas Quick” didn’t actually kill 30+ people—this book is, like, 300 pages too long.

Also: This cover is lazy AF.

��by Meredith Broussard (MIT)

Because I want to tell Tom Roberge how all his AI loving friends are ridiculous.

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Let’s talk about Chris Davis!

So, Chris Davis, who most certainly will not read this post, is a baseball player for the Baltimore Orioles who has been “struggling.” Which is the nicest way I can refer to his all-time record-setting hitless streak over his past 49 at bats. 0-49 is epically bad. Granted some of this is luck—I watch every one of his at bats because I’m��fascinated—and he has made some good contact! But right at a fielder. And so 49 times, dating back to last September, he’s come up to the plate and not gotten a hit.

Going 0 for 49 does some really wonky things to statistics like wRC+. wRC+ (or weighted runs created plus) is a measure of how effective a batter’s offense is. The + part is a statistical thing making sure that 100 is AVERAGE, so that you can compare players against one another in a fairly objective way. So, an average batter has a 100 wRC+ and Mike Trout has a 293 wRC+ as of April 10th.

Here’s the wRC+ for Chris Davis (who signed a contract in 2016 for $161 million over 7 years) over the past few seasons (again, 100 is AVERAGE AVERAGE NORMAL AVERAGE): 92 (8% below AVERAGE), 46 (64% below AVERAGE), and -76 (176% BELOW AVERAGE). NEGATIVE 76 so far this season. Oof.

Chris Davis has been the worst baseball player in baseball history for the past season+. Which sucks for him! I’m sure he’s a totally lovely person, but I kind of never want him to get a hit again. I want him to break statistical measurements. And I will continue to watch every at bat, hoping to see failure.

Which is weird. And reminds me of an AWP conversation . . .

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Are there any cult “bad bad bad so bad they’re good” authors?

In terms of music, we have Nickelback. Worst band ever! And yet, Germans LOVE THEM. (Stop. No jokes about Germans. Just. No. No. I know they have no sense of humor. I know, I know. Just let it go.)

In movies?��The Room? That’s up there. I would watch that again right now, make fun of Tommy Wiseau’s awful sex scenes and then listen to How Did This Get Made?��and laugh at all that all over again.

I mean,��How Did This Get Made? has uncovered dozens of terrible gems that people are willing to spend a lot of time and money on. There’s something compelling about things that are really bad. (Like Chris Davis’s statistics, or ““)

Is there a literary equivalent? Franzen? I mean, sure, he’s a pile of hot garbage as a writer—I hear you, Chapman—but he’s not bad enough��to be “cult bad.” E. L. James? I guess? Maybe? But do people read her books to just laugh at them?

and his ? Maybe?

There must be “cult bad” writers, right? Not just “pot boilers” or “brain candy” sort of books, but books that are undeniably, patently absurd. Maybe written by Chris Davis-esque writers who were GOOD and then fell—no, ����ܳ�����ٱ��—like Icarus. Someone who writes books compiled solely of sentences worthy of the Bulwer-Lytton prize? Who fits that? And it is weird if we don’t have this sort of sub-genre for books? I know that I’ve gotten a lot of valuable insight into narrative and storytelling from watching terrible movies, and it seems like there’s something similar to be gained from really bad, bad writers. Like how seeing the backside of the tapestry—the negative, inverse of what works and is awesome—could be useful.

Sure, it takes a lot longer to read a bad book than listen to basically anything from Blink-182, but for writers trying to hone their craft, I think they should stop trying to emulate the all time greats, and instead spend some time down in the dregs, figuring out how���Դdz���to write garbage.

If anyone has something so silly and bad that it’s worth reading (? I think maybe monster porn is it), please let me know. I need a break from the good-to-excellent books.

Chad W. Post: How did you first come to Uwe Johnson’s work?��

Damion Searls: He wrote a book in homage to his friend, the great Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, after she died tragically young in 1973—I was and am a huge fan of hers so that was how I first discovered Johnson. Bachmann’s Letters to Felician and Johnson’s book about her, A Trip to Klagenfurt, would be the first two books I translated. But when I found out he had written a four-volume novel that takes place three blocks away from where I grew up in New York City, of course I had to read that.

CWP: This is a super mundane question, but given that I’m planning on spending the better portion of four months reading this book, I’m curious how long it took you to translate it all.

DS: I first read it—it took me about a year—some 25 years ago, which is halfway between now and the events of the story. I translated a couple of chapter/days back in the 90s, but the main part of the work was in 2013–18, during which I also wrote a book and translated a lot of other things. I usually say it took me 2 years to translate over the course of about 5 years, but that’s aside from the 20 years of lead time.

CWP: What’s the full story behind the first version of Anniversaries��in English? I know it was abridged, came out in a weird way with multiple translators, and has been out of print for quite some time. But why was it abridged? Were the cuts motivated by the publisher to try and reach a wider audience? Or by the author/translators?��

DS: So in German the book was originally going to be a trilogy, which is why Parts 1 and 2 cover four months each. The first four months were published in 1970—fast! really soon after 1967–68!—and then the second four months came out in 1971—also fast!—and the last four months was announced for 1972. But then Johnson got stuck, putting off Part 3 until 1973 and eventually publishing only half of the last third then, as the current Part 3. Life crises and creative crises and health problems meant that Part 4, the last two months of Gesine’s year, wasn’t finished until 1983.

There are internal signs of the book’s tripartite structure still in there, for example every part begins with a swimming scene but Part 4, i.e. the second half of “Part 3,” doesn’t.

Johnson was forced to drastically abridge the book for the English translation, and did, which is why it’s sometimes said the abridgement was “with his blessing”; it wasn’t totally voluntary though. Leila Vennewitz translated the abridged first six months (abridged Part 1 + abridged first half of Part 2) and that came out in 1975; she went ahead with the next four months (half of abridged Part 2, all of abridged Part 3), then had to wait, and died before Johnson published Part 4 in 1983. They brought in Walter Arndt to translate the abridged Part 4, and that was included with the rest of Vennewitz’s work as the second half of the two-volume Anniversaries in English, published in 1987. By that time, Vennewitz’s first half was long since forgotten; I wonder if anyone made their way through the second half of the English.

Aside from the heavy cuts, which really change everything, Vennewitz’s translation is also flawed in other ways, though it’s not my place to go into that in detail. Arndt kind of phoned his part in, I have to say, though you can’t blame him. When I proposed translating the rest of Anniversaries and splicing it into the existing translation, Edwin Frank, the editor of NYRB, read the earlier one and said no, it doesn’t work, you need to do the whole thing.

CWP: Putting aside the issue of time, what are the other main challenges in translating a book of this magnitude? And how much did you rely on the earlier translation?

DS: I didn’t rely on it, but I certainly referred to it; Vennewitz also had the advantage of translating while Johnson was alive, so there is some correspondence between them about tricky translation problems in the book. I was glad to have his answers to her questions. The book is very canonical in German, so there are books and books of secondary literature on it too; there’s a giant line-by-line commentary, also available online, that gives all the references and everything like that.

That said, as I’ve , it’s the slowest, hardest book I’ve ever translated, not because of the references or because the novel is a difficult readerly experience, if anything because it ������’t. It’s quick and sharp and fluid, but that means you have to be really on the ball as a translator and find ways to keep the narrative moving, so it doesn’t get sluggish and turgid. ��(We can maybe talk about some examples once you get farther into the book?) One of the really helpful edits I got from Edwin Frank was encouraging me to use a lot more contractions (“couldn’t” or “it’s” or “aren’t”), which translations from German often underuse because there aren’t contractions in German, so if you’re not really thinking about it, a two-word translation (“could not,” “it is”) is the easy way to go. And yet contractions really keep things moving in normal English—this paragraph has eight of them. Not using them is part of what can make translations from German feel heavy, or in a worst case sound robotic.

As for the length of the book, those difficulties were mostly logistical, about funding and carving out enough time to do it. NYRB could take on the project only once I’d gotten quite a lot of funding from elsewhere: a Guggenheim, the Cullman Center, a multiyear grant from the Goethe Institut.

CWP: It’s been a decade since I read any Uwe Johnson books, but in my memory, Speculations about Jakob��and��Two Views��are pretty . . . experimental, for lack of a better word. What struck me in starting��Anniversaries��was that, from a simple reader’s perspective, it’s pretty easy to fall right into. I’m not sure if it’s because of the primary setting (NYC), the way the��NY Times��bits grounds the time period, or the mostly straightforward switches between Gesine’s life in NYC and that of her parents, but, so far at least, this is far less “work” than I would’ve expected going in. Is there anything you’d say to readers out there who might be intimidated to start this? Any background info that’s particularly useful to approaching this book?

DS: I really think Anniversaries feels much more contemporary and vivid and relatable than the other big masterpieces, Ulysses and Proust and The Man without Qualities and even Tolstoy. You’re right, Johnson’s earlier books are more difficult, arguably unnecessarily difficult. You’re not wrong to be put off from them, especially in the existing translations. Anniversaries, on the other hand, is a joy. There are several reasons for this: Johnson was more mature when he wrote it; the story is, as you say, firmly grounded in the great character of Gesine and her daughter and the concrete situation of NYC and each date; and I do think it helps that the book is translated better than his earlier novels, keeping it more quick and alive.

The book is about someone living in the sixties and living with the legacy of the past, so there’s a lot of historical information in the book, but Johnson’s a great writer and a storyteller so he always gives the reader whatever they need. I think reviewers have sometimes made the book sound like a giant, daunting piece of grad-school homework—and maybe the publication as a big black box set of two big volumes makes it look intimidating—but it really ������’t. People like the book! It’s a story, with incredibly beautiful writing! It’s the same length as the Ferrante series, which was also published in four volumes, and no one complains that that’s too long (never mind Game of Thrones!). Also, the chapters of Anniversaries tend to be short, three or four pages long (there are just a lot of them); each new chapter bounces the different storylines off each other in a new way, so it’s more of a page-turner than you might expect. You’re reading about Germany and eager to get back to New York, then reading about New York and can’t wait to hear what’s happening to Gesine’s parents in Germany, and Johnson keeps it going for all those hundreds of pages.

(Quick sidenote: It’s quite likely that the three volumes of Fresán’s trilogy—The Invented Part,��The Dreamed Part, and The Remembered Part—will weigh slightly more. Obviously this is now a contest. Forget covers, we should judge books by the ounce! GIVE ME FOUR POUNDS OF PYNCHON AND A HALF POUND OF LISPECTOR, THANKYOUVERYMUCH.)

But seriously, this publication is a��literary event��for that small group of readers (10,000?) who get excited by the idea of��literary events��that are unabashedly ambitious in an Old European sort of way. This sort of publishing project doesn’t happen that often anymore. Sure, there have been retranslations of Russian classics over the past decade (War and Peace��is the first that comes to mind), but those books are already known��by the general public (in contrast to the “reading public” or the “literary public”) and have a built-in network of support. You��have��to review the “definitive”��Don Quixote, and given that the book is already taught in universities across the country, there’s a natural landing place for a significant number of copies. If nothing else, critics and scholars will buy the new edition to compare against the existing ones—which will remain available, and will still have their loyal defenders who prefer an early translation for one set of reasons or a simple case of familiarity and nostalgia.

That’s not really the case here, though. Most people don’t��know of Uwe Johnson. Granted, he was published by major presses . . . back in the 1970s. The abridged version of��Anniversaries��has been out of print for more years than my students have walked the earth. (Significantly more?) And, as Edwin Frank mentioned during our discussion, there’s not a whole lot of critical materials out there on Johnson or this book.

And yet, the publication of these two volumes (in a very attractive slipcase set, which, with the forthcoming publication of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy, seems to be “all the rage”) is an��event. Again, not for everyone, or at least not in the way that a new Harry Potter book was an EVENT, but definitely an��event.��

From the����piece on its publication:

“This is recognized in Germany as a book of major importance,” [Edwin Frank] said. “It is regularly compared to some of the most famous German novels of the century: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. They would also compare them—as Uwe Johnson wanted to be compared, and consciously invited the comparison—to Proust and Joyce.”

That made the full translation of the book imperative in Frank’s eyes. “It’s a book that should exist in its entirety,” he said. “You don’t want to have just one volume of Proust. It seemed important to make it available that way. Not least because the bigness of it, and the range and scope of it, is what makes it such a pleasure.”

The only comparable publishing event of recent times that comes to mind is Dalkey Archive’s release of����by Arno Schmidt. This too was hailed as a masterpiece, praised by the literati (or Twitterati?) upon release, clocks in at over 1400 pages, and has been read in its entirety by not that many people. (And also appears to be out-of-print? That’s unfortunate. The book came out less than three years ago! Although it is impressive that it sold its entire—if press releases are to be believed—2,500 print run. That’s probably more copies than the German edition has ever sold.)

What makes these two publications��events? Similar to last week’s post about an International Hall of Fame for Writers, there are no clear cut rules or criteria. But the fact that these two publications run so counter to contemporary trends (a penchant for novellas that are short, dark, and scary), yet are accompanied by a respectable amount of anticipation and excitement makes these projects fall into a slightly different category than your run-of-the-mill new-title-from-respected-international-author. (Not to throw shade, but this is the difference between NYRB/Dalkey Archive and HarperVia. That, and the fact that the quotes Edwin Frank gives to the press actually make sense.)

Which makes it really hard to figure out how to��discuss these books. What does a valuable review of��Anniversaries��look like?

Thankfully—or thanks to Sara Kramer and Nick During?—there have been several. The (which, given the role it plays in the novel seems like a natural shoe-in for a solid assessment),��,��,��,��, the�� (where it received a grade of “A: Staggering”), etc.

All this is a long build-up to talking about “imposter syndrome,” something that quite a few of my friends have brought up lately. That feeling that their work—be it fiction, translations, blog posts, poems, scholarly articles—are lacking. That they’re a fraud on some basic level and are hustling and working some of that sleight-of-hand so that no one notices. Living in this age of anxiety and Twitter takedowns, it’s not terribly surprising; it is dispiriting to see so many talented people doubt themselves.

There’s a lot that could be unpacked about this—what success in 2019 looks like, where validation comes from in an age where everything is connected��and��instantaneous, how to trust your voice—but the reason it’s on my mind tonight is because of Christian Lorenzen’s article on book reviewing, “.”

I’m not going to rehash the whole article here (I really encourage you to read it in full to see the scope and construction of his ideas and arguments, and, if you’re curious, listen to the new Three Percent Podcast in which Tom and I share our opinions), but it has made me very aware of my own self-doubts, especially in terms of writing about books.

How should one review a literary event? Or should that be: How should one “review” a��literary event? Or:��literary��“event”?

This reminds me of a comment on a recent episode about what would make a scouting report of a superstar valuable? They were talking about a scout’s report on Peak Ken Griffey, Jr., who, for non-baseball readers, was a LEGEND. A true Hall of Famer, an unquestionably great player who the Reds eventually got from Seattle for players you definitely don’t care about. Anyway. Anyway! The point: A scout was assigned to write about “The Kid” and advise the front office of the Reds whether or not they should trade for him. Again, this is PEAK GRIFFEY. What could a scout possible say that the general manager doesn’t already know? “Saw Junior play. Really fucking good. Can hit and field. And throw. One of the best players in the game. Good at the baseball.” Is that valuable?

So what are book reviews—or blog posts, or whatever—supposed to say��about a book that history has more or less already weighed in on, that, even if it’s �Դdz���personally��to your taste, is admirable and good?��“Read��Anniversaries. It’s fucking long. Real interesting though. Kind of compares the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany with the Vietnam War. An epic, unique book that would be impossible to replicate. If we had 25 of these books on our list, we would be a singular press.”

Are reviews just blurbs with a lot of extra words?

Paraphrasing Lorentzen, are reviews supposed to shift copies (a.k.a., serve as a mouthpiece for the publisher’s marketing plans), or engage critically with the text in a way that might illustrate flaws but also tends to have a more ambivalent relationship with the text, or should we abandon this mode entirely in favor of “coverage” that’s more easily digestible and much easier to heart and/or share? Or something else?

I try not to reflect on what this website has become all that often. Clearly, times have changed since we started this in 2007 with the intent of “covering international literature.” We’ve tried to be journalistic (I know! sounds insane now), we’ve been very opinionated, we’ve tried to focus on books on hype on publishers on the shareholders in the translation community . . . and maybe the site has always suffered from imposter syndrome?

So how can I possibly write about��Anniversaries��over the course of four posts? In a way that’s not stupid, not boring, and doesn’t repeat the same old clichéd observations? What value can this sort of readerly meditation have in book culture circa 2019? (I’m 160% going against the��BuzzFeed��belief that you should never put time into things that won’t get a lot of “shares.” But whatever. It’s my time. And if I wasn’t wrestling with existential ideas about what matters and what doesn’t and��why are book reviews anyway then I’d be watching Temple play Belmont. Literally. Given that, I don’t��think��this is a waste of my time?)

All of that was supposed to be a one-paragraph introduction to my core idea: Pros vs. Cons.

Anniversaries��isn’t for everyone. No book is for everyone. If you think a book is for everyone, I guarantee you that book is bad and isn’t for me. But given that I’m not about to spit out some kind of crazy contrarian take about how this book sucks, let’s at least have a little fun setting up some sort of dialectic so that people who were already going to give it a chance know what they’re getting into, and those who aren’t ever going to embark on an 1800-page journey through 1967-68 get a taste of what they’re missing. Maybe that’s what a book review can do. Not in the traditional format—smart contextualizing intro that proves the reviewer’s literary chops, synopsis of the book itself followed by quick analysis of major themes, bit of hand-wringing over potential pitfalls in the narrative or style or structure, followed by a gentile conclusion making sure we all remain literary buddies (again, paraphrasing Lorentzen, although I also feel like I’m paraphrasing myself with this)—but in a way that reflects the game Gesine plays with her daughter, Marie, when they’re recounting their earliest years.

The Novel Is Extraordinarily Long

Undeniable! Most books are like 70,000 words long. This thing has to be like 600,000. Or more. That’s a lot of words! If you’re the sort of person who is into logging your completed books on Goodreads and fulfilling your annual “challenge” of reading XX titles, this might jack your metrics.

If you’re someone more interested in living within a given world for a very long time (people who love the��GoT? who must have some sort of self-identifying nickname, like “The GOTs” or “The Throners”? The Winter Elves?) and checking in with your favorite characters day after day, well then, this book is for you.

PUSH. Zero points awarded.

The Book Is Historical in Two Ways

As mentioned above, the book is set in America in 1967, during the Vietnam War, as the “flower power” is transforming, in the midst of great social unrest (race riots throughout the “Long Hot Summer of 1967”), at a point when America (and/or The World) could become very free and progressive or very capitalist in ways tinged with fascism.

That is the “now” of Gesine Cresspahl’s daily diary, which is��Anniversaries.

As mentioned above, the book is set in mid-1930s Germany, when Gesine’s father moves back to Jerichow to live with her and her mother and her mother’s relatives (one of whom is a straight-up Nazi) during Hitler’s rise to power.

This is the story that Gesine is telling to her ten-year-old daughter. And recounting in her daily diary. (Is “daily diary” redundant?)

One point awarded FOR the book. A historical novel working in two timeframes, while clocking itself as a sort of proto-blog is definitely an appealing aspect of the novel.

The New York Times Stuff Is Fascinating

Also mentioned this on the podcast, but most of the daily entries in the novel open with what was reported in the��New York Times��on that particular day. These usually take the form of: information about the Vietnam War, including the number of deaths; an account of civil unrest and/or a violent crime; some other random bit of information, such as a typo (Günther Glass instead of Günter Grass), or a general reflection of Gesine’s on the��New York Times��as if it were a stately old lady expressing her take on the world as a whole.

This is fun! I wasn’t alive in 1967, and it’s interesting to read about the coverage of Madison Square Garden being built. I wasn’t born too many years after 1967 (uuuugggghhhh) and this helps me feel more connected to the flow of history. (I remember having a similar experience while reading them by Joyce Carol Oates.)

The most surprising moments in volume 1? That the��NY Times��ran a series of articles from Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Stalina, in which she more or less defended her dad, while living in America. I had no idea this had been a thing, and the reactions to her being given this platform—with pretty minor rebukes—sound rather contemporary.

I wonder how some of the tragedies of 1967 strike other readers of the book. Personally, I’ve been of two opinions: 1) violence has always been a core part of this country, and b) why are things so much worse now.

POINT FOR. I can’t see how these bits don’t appeal to readers. 2-0.

There Is a Mafia Section That’s Out of This World

I think I might have fallen asleep, or read some pages after that��second��whiskey, when it came to the part about Karsch. Specifically, I can’t remember how this journalist/academic (or public intellectual? those existed in the 60s, right?) got hooked up with Gesine. But the two-three sections in which ten-year-old Marie answers a call from some mafia dudes who have kidnapped Karsch and want $2,000 (1967 dollars) to release him are WILD. They get the money. They drive from one shady location to another, following clues, eventually finding him tied up in the back of an abandoned shop . . . this is like an episode of��The Sopranos��in the middle of a Henry James novel. It’s insane, and kind of not believable? Unless 1967 academic (again, “academic?”) writers were like intrepid 2019 podcasters, willing to put themselves in crazy danger for a juicy story. (See: , which I have very mixed feelings about, having loved the last episode but then finding out that the host is the same Neil Strauss who wrote The Game, which GROSS.)

NEGATIVE ONE TO THE FOR. These sections are entertaining and wild and strange and cool, but I don’t necessarily get them? And they feel out of place. 1-0.

How Old Is Marie, Again?

Marie is 10. Ten years old. Do you know a ten-year-old? I do! I have a fifteen-year-old daughter (kill me) and an eleven-year-old son. How smart were kids in 1967? How independent? Pretty fucking? OK. Sure.

Marie rides the subway by herself all day when the three subway lines are integrated. She goes and gets groceries on a regular basis. She openly protests the Vietnam War in her private religious school. (More believable to me than anything else about her character, but then again, I’m raising non-binary anarchists.) Everyone in the neighborhood knows her and interacts with her like she’s an adult . . .

And yet, NYC is��dangerous��in 1967. Including the Upper West Side (they live on 96th).

Did Uwe Johnson have kids? Are NYC kids super advanced? Are my kids dummies? No ten-year-old I know acts/talks like this. None of them are this responsible and independent and��untended. Maybe that’s a sign of the times? Maybe it’s just weird and hard to process.

ONE POINT AGAINST. 1-1.

A Sense of Place Is Worth a Thousand Paintings

The best aspect of this book is its atmosphere.

And again the machines contentedly gulping subway token after subway token on behalf of the Transit Authority, down throats grinding with pleasure that the riders set chewing inside the three-armed turnstiles up to five times per minute, maybe six times a minute, that would be some sixteen hundred an hour in the four lanes, that’s too many, and yet there are more than that. And again the heavy rumbling noise, audible through all the sways and jolts and braking processes, which betrays the excessive weight of the payload and reflects it in the base of the skull as a feeling of almost dangerous pleasure.

POINT FOR. 2-1

Uwe Johnson Is a Character

It’s always fun when the author shows up in his/her own work, right? Mostly? Sometimes?

In Anniversaries, Uwe Johnson—who did live in NYC for a while—is giving a presentation about Germany to a Jewish organization, and doesn’t come off particularly well. He’s sympathetic, while acknowledging the recent election of a Nazi to West Germany’s government. It’s a humbling moment in the book (Johnson did grow up in East Germany, escaped when his writing career took off, lived in NYC, died in England), and a meta one.

The German who actually was there acted as if he understood not only English but the mood that had been prepared for him in the audience. He looked up at the cheerful, carefree speaker introducing him to the Jews. He was curious. From the room, the expression on his upturned face looked humorless and severe. Yet the jokes had been meant to be laughed at. Invited to the podium, the writer Uwe Johnson did not, say, leave the event at once (with thanks for the introduction) but instead began his talk in all seriousness, admittedly not with the late Middle Ages but still with the year 1945 and the subsequent development of two German states. He failed, however, to pull off the New England cadences he seemed to be trying to adopt for the occasion, and lapsed back into the wrong vowels, the wrong stresses, the not even British accent his school had let him get away with.

PUSH. Some people like that, others don’t. 2-1.

What Is the Novel’s Engine?

I can’t entirely put my finger on what makes this a page-turner (of sorts), but here are my best ideas:

1. We have no idea how Gesine’s husband died or why she emigrated to America;
2. We want to see how Gesine’s family—especially her father—pushed back against the rise of the Nazis. And how did that history all play out?

Speaking in the theoretical and general, I’m usually bored by family sagas. But something about this is compelling . . . I want to know what happens, and I want to sort through the various forms Johnson employs—first-person diaries, three-person recountings between Gesine and Marie, transcriptions of records, detailed accounts of things Gesine couldn’t possibly have been privy to, interior conversations with the dead, newspaper stories—to see how this all fits together. Is it a three-act play, or a four-season performance? What is the point of it all? Why exactly do I look forward to reading this book that I can’t get any of my friends to read?

This is where I am at the end of volume one. I’ll be back next month with some more thoughts. Imposter thoughts, most likely, but thoughts nonetheless.

This episode’s music is “” from the forthcoming Budos Band album.

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And I figured I could get a post—and a decent number of responses—to this very simple idea. Which living authors would make a Writers Hall of Fame ?

There are a lot of interesting ways to analyze this, which I will totally do below, including an incredibly well-articulated set of standards from one of the people who responded, but first, some context might be in order.

As you probably know, this is New York Review Books month at Three Percent. Which typically means that every week I read a different book from the featured region/publisher/author/whatever, and write a post that sort of hinges on that book, but mostly goes off the rails.

With NYRB, my initial plan was to write a post this week about all the “original” titles that they’ve done in translation, and then focus on the retranslations next week, after I finish reading the first volume of��Anniversaries.��And to supplement those shambolic posts, I’ll be running interviews with Nick During, Edwin Frank, and Damion Searls. (And possibly Sara Kramer? Ambitious month!)

In thinking through how to frame this week’s post—and the upcoming interview with Edwin—I spent some time thinking about how I think about NYRB. Like, what makes a book an NYRB book in my mind?

Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Interview with Nick During of NYRB

One criteria that came to mind is the one that Dalkey Archive always touted, that Archipelago repeats, and that most presses that value quality over immediate sales success tend to turn to: Books that will still be read and discussed a hundred years from now.

Which, in fairness, is really good grant copy.

But, in not so fairness, is sort of specious.

Given how crap the publishing industry is at predicting successes (if you could control for budget, publisher influence, and other external influences, I’ll bet the randomness of what takes off and what doesn’t would really stand out), how can any of us know what the trends will be like��one century from now? (When there are , will books even matter?)

And yet, and yet. I look at NYRB’s list—of books in translation, and ones written in English—and I get the sense that as long as there are English Departments, a certain set of readers will fall in love with some of these books. Because, a lot of the authors they publish (Walser, Adler, Henry Green, Machette, Uwe Johnson, Stoner) are “Hall of Fame” writers.

Yes, there is an (and “writers museums” in other parts of the world), and there are canons (I guess? These are basically the books you read in generic high schools, right? Like the “traditional canon” is the “Replacement Level Classic” that modern and postmodern classics outpace in “Value Above Replacement”? HELLO SABERMETRIC NERDS), but neither of those things are a Hall of Fame in the way that the Baseball Hall of Fame is, or the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame is. (Or the Rochester Music Hall of Fame, which, yes, is a thing, whereas an International Writers Hall of Fame is not.)

What would such a thing look like? NO IDEA. Except that I hope it wouldn’t be in Cleveland.

But can I envision a space populated by plaques and collectables by authors that a board of “experts” helps vote into the Hall of Writers? SURE, WHY NOT.

For all of these HoFs, one of the main criteria is that the player/author/rock band has already made their mark and their career is more or less done. Sure, a baseball player could be inducted, then go on to become an amazing manager; and maybe Pearl Jam will be relevant again? (More of column A than B in this case?) Point being: It’s easy to say that James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf and XYZ deserve to be in the Hall. It’s much, much harder to predict who’s writing��today��who will finish their career and be “hall-worthy”—on the first ballot.

(Speaking of ballots, if you’re sick of all these words, just go here.)

*

I am going to share with you all of the names that were proposed from the one thousand four hundred and seventeen people (approximately) who I messaged last week. But, as interesting as those names might be, I think the process of thinking through what criteria the IWHOF (International Writers Hall of Fame) voters should employ is much more interesting.

First, one more thing: Why only 10 living writers?

Answers: A) Because picking only 10 is HARD; B) Because I sort of think I heard once that there are 10 sure-fire HOFs playing in MLB at any given moment. There may be as many as 40, but the majority of those are building their case, getting in on their last year of eligibility, etc. I wanted to focus on the��guaranteed��writers who would make it. Could Richard Powers be elected to the IWHOF? FOR SURE. But has he done enough already? Maybe? Maybe he would get in on his third year of eligibility, or on his last. (Assuming the IWHOF ran in a format similar to the Baseball Hall of Fame.)

[Sorry, but one more digression: I have��no idea��how other Hall of Fames work. I feel like there’s , but you know what? I haven’t read it, so D’Agata is not on my personal IWHOF list. Also, it’s more fun to just speculate about how shit works. If there’s one upside to living in a post-fact world, that’s probably it. Sure, I could look that up, or I could ignorantly make some mostly-believable points, which will be good enough for 55% of readers. SOLD.]

Obviously, this whole post is building up to a through which I can get the temperature of Three Percent readers (THE SMARTEST READERS) and share all the results with all of you. (For those keeping track at home, that’s two posts coming from one question, which is a total win, given that I write all of these late at night when I should be doing that Netflix + chill thing.) But first, I want to pose a few questions and then present you with the most interesting breakdown of criteria that I received.

*

Should the IWHOF be a large hall, or a small hall?��

In other words, how many inductees should there be per year? Let’s say that you elect 10 authors per year. It’ll take 10 years to get to 100 authors. Out of how many thousands of worthy writers?

Would there be a mechanism for inducting obvious, “old,” writers?

AKA, “Do we need to vote in Shakespeare?” Is there a baseline of . . . 100? . . . 50? . . . authors we can just slide in there? That seems like a logical first step, except how it impacts the next point.

Should the voting committee measure the authors they’re voting on to standards of the past, or the trends of today?

This is the fundamental problem with the Baseball HOF. Every position, every era has it’s own set of standards. A catcher in 2019 is not the same as a catcher in 1950. And �Դdz���just��because we now have the technological resources to evaluate the catcher’s impact on the game via framing. (And someday via pitch calling.) Life was different in 1950. This opens up a PC/Woke quandary of how to treat authors who were racist/misogynistic/classist/etc. and yet were very important, or influential, authors of their time period.

Personally, I’d advocate for a “large” hall that inducted 10 new authors and 20 legacy authors every year, and that included assholes, but made reference to their assholery in some way shape or form, while also articulating the reasons that they advanced the art of the written word. I know it’s controversial to say this, but those who speak the cock’s language can sometimes come up with literary forms/structures/techniques that others can then employ. It’s not all about content; it’s also about craft.

*

The only people I’m going to name publicly here are Rhea Lyons and David Pomerico. Rhea is a former student turned long-time friend, who works at now, and has previously worked at Random House, Rodale, and Franklin and Siegal Associates. Her husband, David, is very into baseball (which, YES, YES, LET’S DO A BILL JAMES BIOGRAPHY), and works at and has shitty ass takes about��Twin Peaks.��(Sorry. Not actually sorry.)

Since David is baseball nerd cum book nerd, they tried to apply the to writers to determine their ten living shoe-in writers. Here is what they sent me:

• Consistency of Output: every single thing they write is anticipated and a bestseller—we don’t have GRRM [Chad Note: I assume this acronym means “dragons”]�� on this list because we think he had an early career ending injury with his writers block;
• Length of Career;
• Peak: at one point they were the #1 but then they never fully dropped off, like we don’t have Erik Larson on this list because we think he had an MVP season with Devil in the White City and never fully recovered like the other writers on this list;
• Sales: “We” hate that we are putting James Patterson on this list and I know it will piss you off but David says he’s Eddie Murray [Chad Note: Well, I would prefer George Carlin];
• Name Recognition;
• Volume AKA Consistent Performance: certain writers like Donna Tartt, Rushdie, Eugenides, didn’t quite make this list because they have only published a few books, even though they may be brilliant, they aren’t as consistent as the ones on our list;
• and to be clear we are naming people who are still at Hall of Fame level right this minute.

Here’s my only complaint about this set of criteria: It values sales above internal impact. If a book changes your life, does it get bonus points in terms of “sales”? A person named Waxman told me “when I think of the books that have changed how I thought, they’re not really by authors I think are the best. Which is weird.”

Which, to make this too complicated, indicates that there are 1) authors who IWHOF because sales; 2) those who change lives; and 3) those who do something that’s neither but who mean a lot in the long run.

*

Let’s share some names!

First off, here are Rhea and David’s nominations—of LIVING WORKING IWHOF WRITERS—using their criteria:

Margaret Atwood

Stephen King

JK Rowling

James Patterson

Nora Roberts

Danielle Steele

Haruki Murakami

Toni Morrison

Michael Lewis

John Grisham

Very Western! Almost totally white!

But if you think they’re alone, here’s a compilation of all the other names that I was sent, which, because there’s a very small percentage of people in the world who would put up with me and be my friend, there was a��lot��of overlap.

In order of how I’m finding these names in my texts:

Robert Coover

Antonio Lobo Antunes

Laszlo Kraznahorkai

Anne Carson

Gonçalo Tavares

Roberto Calasso

Samuel Delany

Rudolph Wurlitzer

Jon Fosse

Gerald Murnane

William Vollmann

Frederick Seidel

Maggie Nelson

Joan Didion

“Why are you asking me this question?”

Anna Tsing

Charles Mann

Laurent Binet

Adina Hoffman

Gabriel Josipovici

Marshall Berman

Thomas Pynchon

Javier Marias

Zadie Smith

Don DeLillo

Elfride Jelenik

Virginie Despentes

Toni Morrison

J.M. Coetzee

Joy Williams

Cesar Aira

Diamela Eltit

Elena Ferrante

Stephen Millhauser

Dubravka Ugresic

Enrique Vila-Matas

George Saunders

Ben Marcus

Rick Moody

Claudia Rankine

Ta-Nahesi Coates

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Colson Whitehead

Roxane Gay

Susan Howe

Chris Kraus

Jacques Roubaud

Rodrigo Fresan

Peter Nadas

Mike Harrison

Rae Armantrout

John McPhee

Michael McClure

Mavis Gallant

Sylvia Federici

“I am now thinking of others”

Valeria Luiselli

Paul Auster

Eliot Weinberger

Carmen Boullosa

Siri Hustvedt

Mo Yan

“I thought you were asking me a sports question and I was very angry”

Andrés Neuman

Michael Chabon

Cormac McCarthy

Haruki Murakami

Lydia Davis

I’m certain I missed a DM in there but whatever. Here’s a very Western, rather Male list to spark your voting. So go for it! You’re on the inaugural IWHOF committee and need to name ten living authors who should be elected to the first class . . .

In other words, !

This episode’s music is “” by Ty Segall.

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