The new but same old The New York Times Book Review ...

       As I mentioned last week, The New York Times Book Review has a new leader, as Pamela Paul has taken over from longtime head-man Sam Tanenhaus.
       As I've noted so many times over the years, one of the issues I've had with Tanenhaus' leadership is the woeful neglect of coverage of anything in translation (and, of course, Tanenhaus went out with a translationless issue).
       One of my observations over the years -- and proof for me of how deeply conservative (in the sense of closed-off-to-anything-new) Tanenhaus is -- has also been that an inordinate percentage of the few books-in-translation that did receive review coverage in the NYTBR were:

• a) by dead authors
• b) and/or retranslations (i.e. new translations of works that had previously been available in other translations)

       (My interpretation of this has always been that Tanenhaus somehow believed publication-after-death and, more obviously, the seal of approval that a new translation of a previously available work (if it's worth translating yet again, it must be okay ...) imparts make such selections safe bets. (Same with things like the Nobel Prize -- the NYTBR did cover foreign-language-writing laureates' books too, but of course they don't churn out all that many of those.))
       Now of course it's much too early to judge how things will go under Paul, but I have to admit a first look at the first issue under her charge ... well, it was like a slap in the face. Yes, Marilyn Stasio offers brief discussion of two translated mysteries in her crime-roundup, so that's something, but the only full review of a book in translation is Joseph Luzzi's review of ... Dante's Divine Comedy, in Clive James' translation.
       I don't know whether to laugh or cry.