Conversations about translation continue this month. Some have come to me by email, opening new doors.
Laura Hansen, owner of Bookin' It in Little Falls, Minn., wrote in response to last week's column about translated mysteries with a recommendation: "I might add Dog Day by Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett (trans. by Nick Caistor), set in Barcelona, as one I enjoyed and recommend."
She shared what we'd call a "cool idea of the day" here at Shelf Awareness: During the past two summers, Bookin' It offered "a spin-off book club from the Reading the World list; the first year reading three novels and the second summer three travel memoirs. We took this summer off, but after reading the article I wish we had done mysteries in translation for this year. Maybe next summer!"
Hansen added that the world reading group "was lovely because we were able to meet away from the store, at my home on the river and a member's cabin at the lake. It attracted about half of our regular contemporary fiction book club regulars. One book I wanted to include in the first year of the world book club was Orhan Pamuk's Snow, but it wasn't out in paperback at the time. I think it is stunning."
Chad Post, one of the founders of Reading the World (and currently developing Open Letter Press at the University of Rochester) informed us he will soon be "launching a site dedicated to international lit called Three Percent. We work very closely with students from the developing literary translation program, giving them internships, helping them to do sample translations for the web, etc. Our focus is on 20th and 21st century international literature from around the world. Cosmopolitan literature, books that stimulate and provoke readers by doing something unusual and interesting. Books that will last. Known authors like Dubravka Ugresic, and new voices that should be known."
Jaime Starling of Stone Bridge Press confessed that our reference to translators' names vanishing from book covers "made me check the covers of our own translated mystery novels (Tokyo Zodiac Murders and crime novel The Inugami Clan), and they actually do feature the translators' names. Then again, most of our translated books do."
Rebecca Passick of Milet Publishing drew our attention to a Milet reference title, Outside In: Children’s Literature in Translation, edited by Deborah Hallford and Edgardo Zaghini.
So much that is good about the book business involves such conversations, and when I think about that word in connection with the Reading the World, I remember a man named Charles Tuttle and a brief conversation I had with him a couple of decades ago.
Tuttle, who died in 1993, was a native of Rutland, Vt., a small city where I lived for many years. He had served as an American soldier in Tokyo after World War II, and fell in love with Japanese arts and culture. In 1948, he established Tuttle Publishing to introduce this world to American readers. In 1971, he was named Publisher of the Year by the Association of American Publishers, and was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Emperor of Japan in 1983.
It's not an exaggeration to say that I began reading the world in the 1970s because of Charles Tuttle. A significant part of my introduction to translated work came from a small bookstore Tuttle Publishing had in its Rutland office. It was there that I purchased my first copies of The Izu Dancer & Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata, Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, Seven Japanese Tales by Junichiro Tanizaki and so many others.
I once met Mr. Tuttle quite by chance on a golf course. We played a few holes together before I found the courage to thank him for the new doors he had opened for me. It was a brief conversation about how I learned to read the world. I think he understood.
One of the books I bought from Tuttle Publishing back then was Zen Art for Meditation by Stewart Holmes and Chimyo Horioka (1973). It rests on my desk as I write these words, open to page 90 and a Soseki haiku, translated by "Mrs. Yasuko Horioka":
Butterfly! These words
From my brush are not flowers,
Only their shadows.
Read those shadows, too.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)