M. A. Orthofer at The Complete Review notes the restructuring of the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Highly recommended.

Three Percent has the fiction shortlist for the Best Translated Book Award 2010.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

The appearance in English of this new version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s best novel, mistranslated as “The First Circle” when it appeared in Britain and America more than 40 years ago, is an exciting literary event that is destined to be little noticed or appreciated in our Twitterized times.

Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post reviews the new version of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle.

Issue 13 of The Journal of Specialised Translation focuses on the difficulties of moving texts between Chinese and English.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists.

In one of my favorite chapters, Eco describes rhetorical devices, or tropes, used in listmaking, such as asyndeton, the avoidance of conjunctions. For example, I left out “and” when speaking of “schedules, calendars, in-boxes, deadlines, memoranda.” Asyndeton conveys the impression that a series could go on forever. In my immediately following sentence, I employed polysyndeton, in which a conjunction — in this case “or” — appears between each activity mentioned. Such repetition creates a feeling of almost naive breathlessness or awe, as if the writer, overwhelmed by the number of choices, can only point to an item there and another here and still another over there and . . .

Recommended.

The fiction longlist for the 2010 Best Translated Book Awards is available at Three Percent.

Recommended.

In the New York Times, Larry Rohter profiles Open Letter Books.

M. A. Orthofer of The Complete Review critiques Hansjörg Schertenleib’s A Happy Man.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times reviews Stieg Larsson’s second thriller.

The ending of “The Girl Who Played With Fire” — like the revelation about Salander’s past, which gives the book its title — comes straight out of a horror movie: it’s gory, harrowing and operatically over the top. The reason it works is the same reason that “Dragon Tattoo” worked: Mr. Larsson’s two central characters, Salander and Blomkvist, transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader’s mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability.

Recommended with reservations.

At Slate Nathaniel Rich examines the appeal of Scandinavian crime fiction.

What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness.

Recommended.

The London Review Book Shop is holding a World Literature Weekend.

Highly recommended.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

In the New York Times, Liesl Schillinger reviews Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Chad W. Post of Three Percent reviews Can Xue’s Five Spice Street.

For the Washington Post, Maureen Freely writes about translating Orhan Pamuk’s works.

Recommended with reservations.

The Complete Review critiques Tarek Eltayeb’s Cities Without Palms.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Theodor Storm’s The Rider on the White Horse.

Throughout his fiction Storm repeatedly evokes the beauty of nature, “the sharp odor of the golden tansy blossoms,” the “grieving voices” of sea birds, the “secret music of the summer night.” But he also celebrates the simple pleasures of long ago: “We had jokes and riddles and rhymes at the table; and when they served dessert, we sang all the lovely songs that are now forgotten.” Somehow, he makes this nostalgia avoid the taint of mawkishness. Sometimes, this is through a sudden harsh truth: “For the first time she was facing life directly, in all its barren poverty: it was a path that seemed endless, dry; until, suddenly, it did end: you died.”

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich profiles Europa Editions.

Recommended with reservations.

Andy Baio of Waxy.org explores how Chinese Internet users access articles from The Economist.

Recommended.

Three Percent announces its Best Translated Book Award winners.

At The New Republic, Javier Marias frets about the behavior of artists.

The most worrisome thing for those of us who have turned out to be novelists or poets or sculptors or painters or musicians is that not even as adults have we seen much reason to admire our predecessors. We might feel great admiration for their work, but we rarely take to them when their lives are recounted in books or depicted on screen. I don’t know if it’s just that our profession has been particularly unfortunate in that respect or if artists really are unbearable.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Not recommended.

The Complete Review critiques Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years.

. . . Raffel’s translation loses the original’s music without finding a music of its own; he is wordy where the original is pithy and bare where the original is lush. Chaucer is in many ways the progenitor of English fiction—he is closer to Dickens than to Keats—but he is also a great master of English poetry; and since poetry is what is lost in translation, why not take the trouble to read the original and avoid the loss?

At Slate Adam Kirsch reviews Burton Raffel’s translation of The Canterbury Tales.

Granta’s Books of the Year list is more interesting than most.

Richard Ford:

One publication I heartily recommend is Vasily Grossman’s book of cablegrams reporting on the Nazi push toward Moscow and Stalingrad. It’s called A Writer at War: Vassily Grossman and the Red Army, 1941–1945. The writing is (even in translation) extremely memorable as writing – not just for its reportorial virtues – and for the actually haunting pictures it puts into one’s mind. Grossman was a Jew, reporting on Nazis, at the same time as Stalin was exterminating Jews in various precincts of the Soviet Union. His precarious hold on his life, the truth, his profession, his sense of collegiality, his family, his own writing is a subtle but forceful torque in the writing itself.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Three Percent announces the twenty-five titles on its longlist.

In terms of criteria, we only considered original titles published (or released) in the U.S. in 2008. No retranslations, no reprints, no paperbacks of previously published hardcovers were eligible. And what we’re looking for is the best translated book, not just the best translation.

Recommended with reservations.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a segment by Rick Kleffel on the art of translation.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

The tapestries that hung so self-sufficiently at the end of part one of the novel become a backdrop for social criticism in part two. Malte seems to be merely historicizing them at first, noting that these tapestries used to hang in a private house, among the descendants of the fifteenth-century knight who commissioned them. But then he turns and notices that there are girls in the museum, modern girls with sketch pads who, like the tapestries, have moved out of the old houses and now live independently, with no one to fasten the backs of their dresses. These aristocratic girls dimly recognize that the lady in the tapestry represents everything that would have been theirs if family and religion and feminine passivity were still triumphant.

Writing for The Nation, Benjamin Lytal revisits Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

At Slate, Adam Kirsch reviews Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

Recommended.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions.

The story opens at the start of a new year in a small, unnamed modern country. As is typical of the allegorical universalism in much of Saramago’s work, we never get a precise location or time period. The frenetic, amiable narrator refers to characters only by each one’s generic function: e.g. prime minister, mother, editor. All of them are confronting the most unusual nonevent in human history: “No one died. . . . New year’s eve had failed to leave behind it the usual calamitous trail of fatalities, as if old atropos with her great bared teeth had decided to put aside her shears for a day.”

At a meeting on Wednesday morning with the Flemish Literary Fund, Jill Schoolman, the publisher and editor in chief of Archipelago Books, a nonprofit Brooklyn publisher of works in translation, discussed her plans to bring out “Wonder,” a novel by Hugo Claus, a Belgian writer who was frequently discussed as a Nobel contender before he died by euthanasia earlier this year.

For the New York Times, Motoko Rich covers the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Recommended with reservations.

National Public Radio’s Day to Day laments America’s literary insularity.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Britain is a nation of museums, where they have collected everything worth collecting. A good museum typically requires generations of hard work. With long and careful planning the British have plundered collectibles from Egypt, India and Mexico, from China, and all corners of the world, carting valuables home like tireless ants. They spent no small amount of taxpayers’ money doing this, and they have spent even more on preservation.

They were spending pounds sterling, and everyone knows how far the pound goes.

The Guardian has “Collecting” by Zhu Wen.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

In The Korea Times, Chung Ah-young covers a study by South Korea’s Literature Translation Institute on the quality of English translations of Korean literature.

According to the project, only 10 percent, or seven, among the 72 translated works scored an A in high reliability. Two thirds were evaluated as non-reliable (grade B to C) translations. There were no grade A+ works.

Not recommended.

Highly recommended.

Lindesay Irvine at The Guardian writes of “a very bright patch for a rarely spotlit field, with three awards for literary translations into English going to independent publishers in recent days.”

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

The New Yorker has a new English translation of a Nabokov short story (circa 1924).

Recommended.

In the Village Voice, Michael Feingold notes a new English translation of Viennese author Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl. The short novel “displays Zweig’s two facets, the social-psychological analyst and the Romantic sentimentalist, in what often looks like a death struggle for control of the narrative.”

Mainichi Daily News interviews Haruki Murakami about his translations of American literature.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Lindesay Irvine at the Guardian notes that Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent foreign fiction prize for writing and translating his novel Omega Minor.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Highly recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Not recommended.

Highly recommended.

Highly recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Highly recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended.