Anyway, in terms of our actual “Best Nonfiction of 2011” lists, you have to listen to the full podcast to get all the details, but here are a few highlights:

• Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos

Along with The Hour of the Star and Scars, I won’t stop talking about this until my tongue is ripped from my mouth. (So violent!)

• My Life As a Russian Novel by Emmanuel Carrere, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Carrere is on my proverbial list of “authors I must read,” especially this book, the one he wrote about Philip K. Dick, Lives Other than My Own, The Adversary, Class Trip & The Mustache.

• Rich People Things by Chris Lehmann

I think everyone in America should read this book. Especially people enrolled in Business School. And anyone who doesn’t get the Occupy Movement.

• El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin by Molly Molloy and Charles Bowden

For those who became interested in Mexico and Ciudad Juarez via Bolano’s 2666 . . .

This week’s intro/outro song is “Midnight City” by M83, the first song to be featured both on a Three Percent Podcast and a Victoria’s Secret commercial. Not much of a spoiler here, but I’ll be talking about M83’s epic Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming on next week’s “Best Music of 2011” podcast. And although we don’t usually post videos, I feel obliged to share the video of this song with anyone who hasn’t seen it. It’s a perfect complement to the song itself—triumphant and a little spooky, with glowing eyes and a bit of smashing. Enjoy!

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

That’s not all that surprising, since Thirlwell is such an excellent writer and translation enthusiast. (His The Delighted States is definitely worth reading.) And this book is right in his wheelhouse (so to speak).

I’m just going to quote at length, since Adam gets so many things right about Is That a Fish in Your Ear?:

David Bellos’s new book on translation at first sidesteps this philosophy. He describes the dragomans of Ottoman Turkey, the invention of simultaneous translation at the Nuremberg trials, news wires, the speech bubbles of Astérix, Bergman subtitles. . . . He offers an anthropology of translation acts. But through this anthropology a much grander project emerges. The old theories were elegiac, stately; they were very much severe. Bellos is practical, and sprightly. He is unseduced by elegy. And this is because he is on to something new.

Bellos is a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University, and also the director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication there (at which, I should add, I once spoke). But to me he’s more interesting as the translator of two peculiarly great and problematic novelists: the Frenchman Georges Perec, whose work is characterized by a manic concern for form, and the Albanian Ismail Kadare, whose work Bellos translates not from the original Albanian, but from French translations supervised by Kadare. Bellos’s twin experience with these novelists is, I think, at the root of his new book, for these experiences with translation prove two things: It’s still possible to find adequate equivalents for even manically formal prose; and it’s also possible to find such equivalents via a language that is not a work’s original. Whereas according to the sad and orthodox theories of translation, neither of these truths should be true. [. . .]

We’re used to thinking that each person speaks an individual language — his mother tongue — and that this mother tongue is a discrete entity, with a vocabulary manipulated by a fixed grammar. But this picture, Bellos argues, doesn’t match the everyday shifts of our multiple languages, nor the mess of our language use. Bellos’s deep philosophical enemy is what he calls “nomenclaturism,” “the notion that words are essentially names” — a notion that has been magnified in our modern era of writing: a conspiracy of lexicographers. It annoys him because this misconception is often used to support the idea that translation is impossible, since all languages largely consist of words with no single comprehensive equivalent in other languages. But, Bellos writes: “A simple term such as ‘head,’ for example, can’t be counted as the ‘name’ of any particular thing. It figures in all kinds of expressions.” And while no single word in French, say, will cover all the connotations of the word “head,” its meaning “in any particular usage can easily be represented in another language.”

The misconception, however, has a very long history. Ever since St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, discussion of translation has dissolved into the ineffable — the famous idea that each language creates an essentially different mental world, and so all translations are doomed to philosophical inadequacy. In Bellos’s new proposal, translation instead “presupposes . . . the irrelevance of the ineffable to acts of communication.” Zigzagging through case studies of missionary Bibles or cold war language machines, Bellos calmly removes this old idea of the ineffable, and its unfortunate effects.

Like the book itself, this review makes me really happy. It’s so positive and honest and uplifting and pragmatic—traits that aren’t always present in discussions about literary translation. (As Bellos said in an article we referenced earlier in the week, “bellyaching is part of the community.”)

Anyway, you must read this book. It’s brilliant and fun and incredibly informative. If you want a taste, we featured this at Read This Next, so you can read an excerpt by And be sure to check out that Bellos wrote about the origins of the book, etc.

To be more specific, David will be talking at McNally Jackson (52 Prince Street, between Lafayette & Mulberry) on Thursday, October 13th at 7pm.

Here’s some info from website:

“Forget the fish—it’s David Bellos you want in your ear when the talk is about translation. Bellos dispels many of the gloomy truisms of the trade and reminds us what an infinitely flexible instrument the English language (or any language) is. Sparkling, independent-minded analysis of everything from Nabokov’s insecurities to Google Translate’s felicities fuels a tender—even romantic—account of our relationship with words.”
—Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and 2666

“In the guise of a book about translation this is a richly original cultural history . . . A book for anyone interested in words, language and cultural anthropology. Mr Bellos’s fascination with his subject is itself endlessly fascinating.”
—The Economist

Funny and surprising on every page, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means—whether we wish to understand Astérix cartoons or a foreign head of state. Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron’s Avatar. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across human experience to describe why translation sits deep within us all, and why we need it in so many situations, from the spread of religion to our appreciation of literature; indeed, Bellos claims that all writers are by definition translators. Written with joie de vivre, reveling both in misunderstanding and communication, littered with wonderful asides, it promises any reader new eyes through which to understand the world.

Definitely go check this out—I can guarantee that it will be fascinating, fun, and interesting.

As a result, a lot of theoretical and critical writings from translators tend to be either deferential or to fall into the trap of preaching to the choir. And more strident pieces, ones that proclaim the seemingly obvious importance of literature in translation, can oftentimes come off as whiny. Bellos, manages to avoid all of these traps while crafting a book that’s interesting to everyone—those involved with translation, as well as those who aren’t—a book that’s pragmatic, evenhanded, filled with fascinating historical anecdotes, and, for those of us who are involved in the field, life-affirming.

Chapter Four—“Things People Say about Translation”—is a perfect example of all of these qualities. It starts simply enough:

It’s a well-known fact that a translation is no substitute for the original.

It’s also perfectly obvious that this is wrong. Translations are substitutes for original texts. You use them in the place of a work written in a language you cannot read with ease.

This is straightforward enough, and a rather common sort of rebuttal to an age-old complaint—one that translators can all relate to and get behind. But Bellos takes this further, grouping this cliche with other oft-repeated, and not exactly true cliches.

The claim that a translation is no substitute for an original is not the only piece of folk wisdom that isn’t true. We happily utter sayings like “crime doesn’t pay,” or “it never rains but it pours,” or “the truth will out” that fly in the face of the evidence—Russian mafiosi basking on the French Riviera, British drizzle, and family secrets that never get out. [. . .]

People who declare translations to be no substitute for the original imply that they possess the means to recognize and appreciate the real thing, that is to say, original composition as opposed to a translation. Without this ability they could not possibly make the claim they do.

Again, this is a sort of refrain among translators—especially in relation to book reviews by monolingual reviewers—but here’s where Bellos makes his special mark. After discounting the “translation is no substitute for the original” sentiment, he goes on to spell out a series of “translation hoaxes”: Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, which wasn’t written by Ossian and translated from Gaelic, but rather was written by English poet James Macpherson; Horace Walpole initially claimed The Castle of Otranto was translated from the Italian; Andrei Makine’s first few books were presented in French as having been translated from Russian by the non-existent Francoise Bour; and the in the opposite direction, Romain Gary wrote three books that were believed to have been written in French, but had actually been composed in English and secretly translated by Gary’s editor. Point being, if it’s so obvious that a translation is no substitute for the original, than these games really wouldn’t have worked . . .

In addition to the practical, cooly rational, life-affirming sort of investigations into rather large issues (e.g., translating humor, the history of simultaneous interpretation, how Google translate works, the “global flows” of translation), Bellos includes some great anecdotes of translation obstacles he faced, which really puts a fine point on his arguments and further demonstrates his brilliance. (A particular favorite involves one of the games found in Perec’s 53 Days, and the phrase “Bellos Dunnit,” which will make sense when you read this book.)

It’s hard to write a review of this book, since it is so big, and so erudite, and so well put together. Instead, you should just trust me—Is That a Fish in Your Ear? is brilliant, and well worth the price of admission.

As I mentioned on a couple of our Three Percent podcasts, this is one of the fall books that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. And now that I’ve had a chance to read it in full, I feel confident in saying that this is a perfect book for anyone involved or interested in translation. It’s wide-ranging, very readable, filled with fascinating anecdotes, and very thought-provoking. You can read my full review by clicking here.

Over at you can read three chapters from the book: “Global Flows: Center and Periphery in the Translation of Books,” “Match Me If You Can: Translating Humor,” and “Style and Translation.”

In addition, you can read about how Bellos came to write this book.

But when in June 2009 a plump, pink-faced person offhandedly remarked at some academic party that “a translation is obviously no substitute for the original”, I pedaled straight home, sat down at my desk and dashed off a squib against that thoughtless cliché.

It struck me that other translation clichés deserved similar treatment. I sketched out short essays against “making it sound like the original,” “traitor, translator,” and “les belles infidèles.” It was good to get them off my chest.

A few weeks later my son came to visit, and I showed him my pages. “Dad,” he said, “if you could stop writing like an academic, you could make a living out of this.”

There’s also a really great interview with David over at the

How would someone keen to work in the field of translation be best able to develop the required skills?

Go to university. Read lots of books. Write. Then read some more. Live in the country. Get married, have children and learn their nursery rhymes. Watch television. Read some more. Write. Then try your hand at translating. Best to start with a book you feel passionately interested in. But actually, there is no ‘main’ or ‘direct’ route into a career as a translator into English. Most of my colleagues in the field got into it by happenstance. Just don’t expect it will ever pay your rent.

And if you want a different sort of intro to the book, watch this video:

I’ll also write up a long review about it in the near future . . .

The book officially comes out in October, but in the meantime, here’s a trailer: