{"id":296626,"date":"2014-02-21T15:18:14","date_gmt":"2014-02-21T15:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/02\/21\/michael-orthofers-final-selections\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:44:26","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:44:26","slug":"michael-orthofers-final-selections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/02\/21\/michael-orthofers-final-selections\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Orthofer's Final Selections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review<\/a> \u2013 a book review site with a focus on international fiction \u2013 and its Literary Saloon<\/a> weblog.<\/i><\/p>\n

Final selections<\/p>\n

The deadlines approach \u2013 well, that one first, big deadline: with the Best Translated Book Award longlist due to be announced March 11 we judges have to decide what makes the 25-book cut. Twenty-five titles seems like a lot, but the procedure is that each of us submits our top-ten list (on March 1), from which the top sixteen vote-getters make the longlist, and then each judge gets to add one personal choice to round off the list, for a total of twenty-five titles. So each of us only gets to select ten+one titles. (Last year<\/a>, only six of my top-ten choices for the longlist made it (with a seventh then slipping on as the plus-one).)<\/p>\n

Since my top-ten\/must-have list currently stands at roughly fourteen titles (fluctuating daily, as two or three titles different fall in and out of favor, depending on my mood \u2026) this is proving a more arduous exercise than I had hoped. Twenty-five slots would be easy (well, easier \u2026 maybe) to fill), but ten feels really, really tight.<\/p>\n

There are half a dozen or so titles that I simply can\u2019t not<\/i> put in my top-ten (which, in cruel-tease-form I won\u2019t name here \u2013 though I\u2019m probably sufficiently on the record regarding my feelings about them elsewhere …) \u2013 because I think they are really the most deserving (and, in some cases, because I worry that they might otherwise be overlooked) \u2013 but after that it gets complicated. There are a couple of titles that so many judges already seem to feel enthusiastic about that I\u2019m not sure I need to put my full weight behind them yet \u2013 books by recent BTBA<\/span> winners like Wies\u0142aw My\u015bliwski’s A Treatise on Shelling Beans<\/a> or Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below<\/a>, for example, or Karl Ove Knausgaard\u2019s My Struggle II<\/a>, among others. But it\u2019s hard to leave off any title that I truly want in the running: one favorite not making the initial cut is okay, since we each get to add that one personal selection, but likely there will be several that don\u2019t get enough votes, making for quite a quandary with that lone personal selection\u2026..<\/p>\n

There are a lot of titles at the upper margins, the ones that I think I could make a case for \u2013 clear top-25 titles, to me, but maybe not top-ten (though some days I\u2019m convinced title X is, other days title Y …).<\/p>\n

There are the big novels my name-authors: Javier Mar\u00edas’ The Infatuations<\/a> (translated by Margaret Jull Costa), Antonio Mu\u00f1oz Molina’s In the Night of Time<\/a> (translated by Edith Grossman, The Economist<\/i> just recently reminding us<\/a> that: “Its author, one of Spain\u2019s leading writers, has been unjustly ignored in the English-speaking world. With this book, he should get the acclaim he deserves” (though Entertainment Weekly<\/i> (yes, well …) suggests<\/a> the novel moves at: “the pace of a narcotized elephant” …)), Christa Wolf’s City of Angels<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are the works by authors who have been getting great reviews and quickly gaining large followings, like Robert Walser (A Schoolboy\u2019s Diary<\/a>) and Elena Ferrante The Story of a New Name<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are translations that have already<\/i> won translation prizes: Ten White Geese<\/a> by Gerbrand Bakker, which won (under a different title) the British counterpart to the BTBA<\/span>, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013<\/a> and Dimitri Verhulst’s Vondel Translation Prize<\/a>-winning The Misfortunates<\/a>. And I was already on a translation-prize-jury that found Elfriede Jelinek\u2019s Her Not All Her<\/a> to be a worthy winner \u2013 the 2011 Austrian Cultural Forum Translation Prize<\/a> \u2013 so how can I not longlist it this time around? (Sure, the competition might be tougher here \u2013 certainly there are a lot more titles in the running \u2013 but this remarkable piece of work (and the excellent translation) continues to stand out \u2013 helped also by the fact that it\u2019s different from almost everything else we\u2019re looking at.)<\/p>\n

There are the smaller works that linger nicely (and often don\u2019t seem to have gotten enough attention). Sure, Am\u00e9lie Nothomb\u2019s Life Form<\/a> is kind of simple much of the way \u2013 but in its conclusion totally won me over. Jang Eun-jin\u2019s No One Writes Back<\/a> \u2013 among the least-Dalkeyesque of the (many) Dalkey Archive Press titles to consider \u2013 has been among this year\u2019s most pleasant reading surprises. The same goes for Uday Prakash\u2019s The Girl with the Golden Parasol<\/a>, a rare (okay, the only \u2026) translation from the Hindi we get to consider. And while Yoko Ogawa\u2019s Revenge<\/a> is the rare smaller (paperback original, too) title in translation to get pretty widespread coverage I still think it\u2019s widely misread as a story-collection: I find it comes together beautifully and very effectively as a unified novel-whole. And then there\u2019s a book like Jan Jacob Slauerhoff’s The Forbidden Kingdom<\/a>, which held me rapt and whose strangeness still haunts me.<\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s than annual search for a worthy \u2018genre\u2019 title \u2013 a top-notch thriller, solid sci-fi, or the like. There were certainly mysteries and thrillers galore to consider this year (like every year), but it was not a great year \u2013 with the highly touted ones feeling particularly derivative. I suppose Ogawa\u2019s Revenge<\/i> might be considered genre, of sorts (horror). Otherwise, there\u2019s only one of these titles in my mix: Ofir Touch\u00e9 Gafla\u2019s The World of the End <\/a> (and not just because of the author\u2019s awesome\/ridiculous name \u2013 touch\u00e9<\/i>!), which certainly hasn\u2019t gotten the (\u2018mainstream\u2019) attention it deserves.<\/p>\n

Of course, time is not yet up, the decision doesn\u2019t have to be made yet. I still have a few weeks<\/strike> days of reading ahead of me, a few more books to discover and consider. Part of me hopes to find another gem \u2013 but part of me also worries: what then? which book gets knocked off the already too-long list?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review \u2013 a book review site with a focus on international fiction \u2013 and its Literary Saloon weblog. Final selections The deadlines approach \u2013 well, that one first, big deadline: with the Best Translated Book Award longlist due to be announced March 11 we judges have to decide what makes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1646],"class_list":["post-296626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317686,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296626\/revisions\/317686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}