Edwin Frank, editor of NYRB Classics at the New York Review of Books, writes about some of their recent translated titles.
The NYRB Classics series is designedly and determinedly exploratory and eclectic, a mix of fiction and non-fiction from different eras and times and of various sorts.
We publish nineteenth-century novels and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, tell-all memoirs and learned studies, established classics and cult favorites, literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. NYRB Classics are, to a large degree, discoveries, the kind of books that people typically run into outside of the classroom and then remember for life.
Inevitably literature in translation constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, simply because so much great literature has been left untranslated into English, or translated poorly, or deserves to be translated again, much as any outstanding book asks to be read again. (After all, translation is, among other things, a form of extremely intensive reading).
Let me start with an example of a wonderfully original, entirely delightful, writer who has hardly been translated into English whose work we will be bringing out this year. Polymathic and eccentric, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is a Russian fabulist who wrote during the twenties and thirties, abandoned the book for the bottle, and died almost entirely unpublished. Krzhizhanovsky’s stories spiral inwards and ramify outwards, stories generating ever more extravagant stories (the Eiffel Tower runs amok and terrorises Paris; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn’t join it as there’s no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral) like the work of a Soviet Scheherezade.
You could compare Krzhizhanovsky to Laurence Sterne or to Stanislaw Lem, except he is finally incomparable, his exuberantly clever and quite astonishing work both a pleasure in its own right and a secret protest against not only the Communist conformism he had to endure but conformism of any kind.
No less new – to English that is – are several works translated from the French that we will be publishing in 2009. First there is the the sly and sexy late-eighteenth-century novella No Tomorrow, by Vivant Denon, about a young man, a somewhat older and certainly more worldly woman, and a memorable stroll on a summer night through the moonlit grounds of a chateau.
This small masterpiece, one of the pinnacles of French libertine literature, is a favorite work of Milan Kundera’s and has been translated by Lydia Davis, a fine writer in her own right, much acclaimed for her recent translation of Proust’s The Way by Swann’s.
No Tomorrow displays the sophistication and the optimism of the eighteenth century, dramatising a thoroughly unconventional ethics of love; Alien Hearts, the little-known last novel of the great Guy de Maupassant, unavailable in English for close to 100 years, is a deeply disabused, ultimately heartbreaking story of emotional dependency and exploitation. Translated by Richard Howard, a master of the art, Alien Hearts complements another NYRB Classic, Afloat, Maupassant’s dazzling impressionist account of sailing the Mediterranan coast, as translated by another master, Douglas Parmee.
Georges Simenon, of course, is a writer who has been translated all over the world and whose many books have outsold everything apart from the Bible. Nonetheless Simenon’s finest work, what he called his romans durs, or tough novels, had fallen out of print in English until NYRB Classics began to revive them some years ago.
The romans durs are case studies in the psychology of unleashed desire and self-deception, short, harrowing, and perfectly pitched. Written fast, they demonstrate the agility and inventiveness of a great jazz impoviser, introducing, reworking, opening up, and returning to familiar themes in all sorts of striking ways. Dark masterpieces of the mid-twentieth century, Simenon’s novels continue to find admirers among contemporary writers as different as Anita Brookner, Paul Theroux, and John Banville, who has said that Simenon helped to inspire his Benjamin Black novels.
These are only a few of the treasures in translation that can be found in the NYRB Classics series, which also includes the Goncourts Journals (readers can enjoy an introduction by Geoff Dyer and dine in the company of Flaubert), The Rider on the White Horse, a great ghost story by Theodor Storm, new translations of Euripides by the celebrated modern poet and classicist Anne Carson, and Ice, a scarifying dystopian fantasy by the contemporary Russian provocateur Vladimir Sorokin which has been shortlisted for the Rossica translation prize—these among much else.
Great writing opens the world and opens the word. The Russian masters of the nineteenth century and the Latin American magic realists are only two examples of foreign literatures that have permanently marked literature in English, transforming not only our perceptions of what books can do and be but of reality itself. In the NYRB Classics series we will continue to look for works from other tongues that have gone unheard, that are unexpectedly relevant to the way we live now, or that are simply unignorable, in the hope of bringing readers a glimpse of elsewhere and otherwise.
Edwin Frank (May 2009)
