NWR: Lit Nobel

... And if you can't get through Garicia Marquez, well, I don't know what to say. Many of the names I've left off, I just haven't read. Clezio, Fo and Bellow all seem minor talents to me (though I do have a fondness for Augie March)and Naipaul is just impossible.
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I enjoyed Henderson the Rain King and A Bend in the River. And I do find some Garcia Marquez hard to read. But then again, I like Zinfandel.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:

Well, Sartre refused the award and Beckett-even cooler to my mind--just told them to send the money, but didn't show up.
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I think the all-time greatest send-someone-else award acceptance speech was by Professor Irwin Corey when he accepted the National Book award on behalf of Thomas Pynchon.

-Eden (Sasheen Littlefeather accepting Marlon Brando's Oscar wasn't nearly as entertaining as Corey)
 
I've just tried to read some Camilo Jos Cela in English. My goodness! Yet at his best he was eminently readable - La Colmena, Pascual Duarte and Pabelln de Reposo are three compact, stupendous novels. And so is Mario Vargas Llosa, who has a magical sense of rhythm. I wonder how many really good Spanish-English translators there are around.
 
originally posted by VS:
I wonder how many really good Spanish-English translators there are around.
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Or in any language, really.

Topically, given the new Franzen buzz, back when The Corrections came out, I wrote an article about it for the French review Critique. I'd read the novel in English, but since the article was in French, I bought the published French translation to provide quotes from the novel. I was shocked and appalled by the translation. It had lost any interest or novelty in his prose. (Early on, he describes Denise as holding "a cone of pink flowers," which is translated flatly as "un bouquet de fleurs.") And worse, the translator many times misunderstood what Franzen was saying. In a Dean & Delucalike high-end food store, he mentions all the "strollers" therewhich is translated as "badauds," meaning "idlers/gawkers," rather than what the word meant, baby strollers, i.e. "poussettes."
 
I'm not really surprised at these translation stories. It takes two or three translations,usually,to get any stylistically interesting novel right. Poetry is, of course, impossible. As Newton said, we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. When the giants aren't there, well, then, we're just dwarves.
 
From a noted lurker:

You guys are getting me all exited, but I dont think Im allowed to post People trying Saramago should start with The History of the Siege of Lisbon, which is a magnificent book and gets better with multiple readings And what about Sebastian Barry, or is he too, shall we say, easy? But The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is pretty good.
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I'm just the messenger and have no idea what this all means.
 
My feeling about this was wonder that they still give out such prizes, considering we live in a post-literate world and every day holding on to any notion of "Literature" seems more and more... Well, fill in the blank. I wonder if they include Don Mario's latest tweets...

Best,

LL
 
originally posted by The Latin Liquidator:
My feeling about this was wonder that they still give out such prizes, considering we live in a post-literate world and every day holding on to any notion of "Literature" seems more and more... Well, fill in the blank. I wonder if they include Don Mario's latest tweets...

Best,

LL
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Eh, people have been predicting the demise of the novel for as long as I've been alive. And yet someone is buying all those Kindles (which, btw, I totally and completely love).
 
originally posted by Jay Miller:

Eh, people have been predicting the demise of the novel for as long as I've been alive..
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Novels may not die overnight (or at least in any of our lifetimes). But there is no reason to think they will continue to look, feel, and function the same way that they do now. (Which your Kindle point makes rather clearly).

Literature changes over time. The world of 200 years ago (literary or vinous) was quite different!

That said, I'm not quite sure that I agree with LL that prizes will be unnecessary.
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:
That said, I'm not quite sure that I agree with LL that prizes will be unnecessary.
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Fer goodness sake... most people like competing. I'm sure Eugene O'Neill was secretly delighted to trounce Margaret Mitchell, and they both laughed till spaghetti came out their noses at Walt Edmonds.
 
Hegel declared art dead back in 1830 or so. The novel has been dead since the early part of the 20th century according to reliable reports. And there is an element of truth to both statements. Art is not for us what it was in times where it was the primary mode of communicating a culture's deepest beliefs. The novel is no longer the form in which our culture expresses its social understanding to itself.

But great art still gets made, among it great novels. And there will probably be readers until another art form becomes as culturally central and even after. After all, we still produce new operas, and if ever a form was dead as dead can be, it's opera.
 
I'm not worried about great art being produced. I'm worried about it being compensated by anything other than a feeling of self-satisfaction, and in terms of this debate I'm worried about its distribution. Our modes of transferring knowledge of art have shifted from a bimodal system of critical gatekeepers on the one hand and popular appeal on the other, to an absorption of the former by the latter...in which case it very quickly becomes all popular acclaim, and for many fully immersed in this world (especially the young), they might not understand or care that there's a difference even if it's explained to them.

Maybe they should install "Like" buttons in opera houses.
 
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