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Zorba the Greek review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Peter Bien's new translation of Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek -- noteworthy because it's the first English translation from the original Greek.
       Yes, you might have thought that what is perhaps the most famous modern Greek novel (admittedly thanks in no small part to the very successful movie-adaptation) would long have been available in a translation done from the language it was written in, but, no, US/UK publishers have long played fast and loose with translations, and they certainly did with this one. Now, at least, Simon & Schuster have belatedly tried to set things right (Faber, with their UK edition ... apparently not so much yet ...). Still, that took a while.

       Note also that in the back-cover information about the author Simon & Schuster say Kazantzakis was: "nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature", but actually they're selling him (or the Nobel-nominators) short: he was nominated a total of fourteen times (and apparently came very close to winning it in 1957 -- inconvenient though that would have been, what with him dying between the announcement of the prize and the actually ceremony).

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