The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Szabó Magda's The Door, Len Rix's translation, published in the UK in 2005, finally making it to the US, courtesy of New York Review Books.
One wonders whether (and strongly suspects ...) it took the anticipation of Szabó István's (director of the Academy Award-winning Mephisto) film-version -- starring Helen Mirren ! -- to seal that deal and finally get it published stateside. As it turns out, the film seems to have turned out to be acomplete bit of a dud -- it doesn't seem to have even gotten a US release -- but this edition is doing fine, thank you very much, thanks to Claire Messud's rave ("If you've felt that you're reasonably familiar with the literary landscape, The Door will prompt you to reconsider") in the most recent issue of The New York Times Book Review: as NYRB reports: "some online retailers are out of stock" -- including Amazon.com, where its sales rank is a lofty 272 (and it's -- a bit dubiously -- listed as the: "#1 Best Seller in War Fiction").
Messud suggests in her review:
Yet it also came out a decade ago, in this translation, in the UK, and garnered some great reviews -- they even recycled Ali Smith's TLS review as an 'Introduction' for this edition. But even that apparently wasn't enough for anyone to have a go at bringing this out in the US for ten more years.
On the one hand, it's great to see a review in The New York Times Book Review help a book find the audience it deserves. On the other hand ... that's what it takes ? (I note with some dismay that this week's NYTBR is almost comically retro-Tanenhausian in its coverage of literature-in-translation: yes, two reviews is more than usual, but one is of a work by a Nobel laureate (Mo Yan), the other of a re-translated work by a dead author (the Szabó). As usual, there's some serious boat-missing going on here .....)
As I recently noted re. another recent work in translation, Christian Bobin's The Lady in White, (in)visibility -- in its broadest senses -- still seems to be a huge problem, especially regarding works in translation (so also, for some two decades, that of the 1995 translation of the Szabó). Frustrating.
One wonders whether (and strongly suspects ...) it took the anticipation of Szabó István's (director of the Academy Award-winning Mephisto) film-version -- starring Helen Mirren ! -- to seal that deal and finally get it published stateside. As it turns out, the film seems to have turned out to be a
Messud suggests in her review:
The dismaying discussion of how little translated work is available in the United States must wait for another venueBut surely the question is a slightly different one: as she (admirably) notes, The Door was actually first translated into English and published in the US two decades ago. So it's hardly simply a matter of 'availability'. Yes, as she notes, it was: "brought out here by an academic publisher" -- so is that the problem ? That an 'academic publisher' can't/won't be able to find an audience ? (Given how dismally the book did -- in terms of the numbers of reviews, and copies sold --, very well: maybe.)
Yet it also came out a decade ago, in this translation, in the UK, and garnered some great reviews -- they even recycled Ali Smith's TLS review as an 'Introduction' for this edition. But even that apparently wasn't enough for anyone to have a go at bringing this out in the US for ten more years.
On the one hand, it's great to see a review in The New York Times Book Review help a book find the audience it deserves. On the other hand ... that's what it takes ? (I note with some dismay that this week's NYTBR is almost comically retro-Tanenhausian in its coverage of literature-in-translation: yes, two reviews is more than usual, but one is of a work by a Nobel laureate (Mo Yan), the other of a re-translated work by a dead author (the Szabó). As usual, there's some serious boat-missing going on here .....)
As I recently noted re. another recent work in translation, Christian Bobin's The Lady in White, (in)visibility -- in its broadest senses -- still seems to be a huge problem, especially regarding works in translation (so also, for some two decades, that of the 1995 translation of the Szabó). Frustrating.