Words Without Borders, John K Bollard, Polar Bears

I’m very excited about the blog I’m writing for the online magazine Words Without Borders (http://www.wordswithoutborders.org). I met some of the editors (Dedi Felman, Rohan Kamicheril) earlier this month in New York and we decided I would focus on writers writing in Welsh to start with. My first blog will be about John K Bollard’s wonderful new translation of the Mabinogi that’s just come out, and later I will move to contemporary novelists and poets writing in Welsh.
Here’s a synopsis of things that caught my eye the past month:
i) The Jan/Feb edition of Poets And Writers had some great profiles of Susan Choi (American Woman, A Person of Interest), Manil Suri (a math professor turned writer whose second novel The Age of Shivra is out this month) and the London-based Tahmima Anam, whose first novel A Golden Age has just come out to huge attention in the US (it first came out in the UK a year ago). The book is “the first installment in an ambitious trilogy that will span the history of Bangladesh, from the sunset of colonial India to the present” (Nicole Pezold, PW). PW have also started a new series of interviews with “publishing’s heavy hitters” and the interview with agent Lynn Nesbit was very informative and candid.
ii) “Screams in Asia Echo in Hollywood” by Terrence Rafferty (Sunday NYTimes, Arts, Jan 27), about transplanting/remaking Japanese (and Korean to some extent) horror movies for a US audience. I liked Rafferty’s perception that “Horror is by its nature a good deal friendlier to a cross-cultural transplantation than most movie genres, because fear is universal in a way that, say, a sense of humor is not: what we dread is far less socially determined than what we laugh at. (If you had to choose between remaking a French romantic farce or a Japanese ghost story, the latter would be much the safer bet, as movie history pretty conclusively demonstrates.)”
iii) “Great Literature? Depends Whodunit” by Charles McGrath (Sunday NYTimes, Feb 3), about how genre writing is unfairly perceived as lower-brow than literary writing: “…is the assumption that genre fiction – mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories – is a form of literary slumming. These kinds of books are easier to read, we tend to think, and so they must be easier to write, and to the degree that they’re entertaining, they can’t possibly be serious. / The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow – between genre writing and literary writing – is actually fairly recent. Dickens…wrote mysteries and horror stories, only no one thought to call them that. Jane Austen wrote chick lit… What we look for in genre writing, [John] Updike suggested, is exactly what the critics sometimes complain about: the predictableness of a formula successfully executed. We know exactly what we’re going to get, and that’s a seductive part of the appeal…such books are reassuring in a way that some other novels are not./ Does that make them lesser, or just different? Probably both on occasion. But it doesn’t necessarily make them easier or less worthwhile to write.” I want to quote the whole article! It’s a very articulate piece.
iv) Penguin has just come out with a paperback edition of Robert Fagles’ translation of The Aeneid (with an introduction by Bernard Knox). Couldn’t resist slipping this news in as a Classicist. It’s a seriously brilliant, utterly magical text. Ever since I first started learning Latin at 11, I’ve been hooked.
Spring better be here soon. Otherwise the Polar Bears will be immigrating to Boston.