This was a great series. The connection to Teju Cole is interesting as well. Open City is a masterpiece, and his first book, Every Day is for the Thief is also quite good. Open City was rightly celebrated, Every Day is for the Thief I think was admired as well once people went back to it after Open City. But his recent novel, Tremor, seems to have been met with relative silence, at least after its initial publication. I was hugely disappointed, in part because Cole seemed to be writing the book he thought people wanted rather than the book he wanted to write. Perhaps he was going for "world author" status, but the book seemed rather cliched to me and not at all in keeping with his previous efforts. I'll be interested to see what he writes next.
Just one point for your data. Out of personal curiosity, I looked up Krasznahorkai in Albanian, and both The Melancholy of Resistance and Satantango have been translated. I think in the graph in a previous post it was indicated only one novel had been translated.
Just quickly about the data: we may very well have missed translations. I will check what we have—I recall looking on the Albanian National Library site, or at least trying.
Can you please share a link where you found it? Thanks!
Thank you. This is at least not too embarrassing for us to have missed--what we did not know about is a 2023 translation, which would not have appeared yet in the various catalogs we searched.
To give you a bit more detail about the data: our larger project ends with 2009, because there is a big dataset (from UNESCO's Index Translationum) that we use as our starting point. We are trying to complement that from other sources, but in the absence of a comparable dataset, we decided to focus, for now, on teh period up to 2009.
For the Krasznahorkai post, we scraped together whatever we could, from libraries but also other websites--there is an Arabic translation that I remember finding on the website of a bookstore. Such searches are obviously far from systematic. We have been planning to write another post about the limitations of the coverage (in fact, promised to do so in response to a comment from @James Elkins, https://translationpatterns.substack.com/p/laszlo-krasznahorkai-world-author-cfb/comment/99415290 )
One can do such searches for a specific author, but when doing "Hungarian Literature," it is impossible. We are trying to find ways to get more data (see the link to a post above, in my previous comment), but it is a very complicated task: library catalogs turn out to be pretty messy and unreliable when it comes to identifying books as translations, and it is even harder to search them for translations from a specific language.
You seem to be interested / familiar with Albanian literary culture. I would love to know more about it. Is that something you might write about?
I have no doubt about the difficulty involved, something that makes your research all the more impressive. I would never attempt it, so what you’re doing here is very appreciated.
About Albanian lit, I’m certainly no expert but I guess I know a bit more than the average person. My partner is Albanian and I spent about 8 months there in 2020, but my reading doesn’t extend far beyond Ismail Kadare. I wish it did, but I also don’t read Albanian and options are limited in translation. I do have a post in my drafts on Kadare’s “The File on H,” a wonderful novel that takes up the “Homeric Question.” It’ll be about the novel as well as Albert Lord’s “The Singer of Tales,” which details his research into the oral nature of epic poetry (sorry if you know all this already). Hopefully that’ll come out in a month or two, it’s been on the back burner as some other projects take precedence…
Were those 8 months in Albania an escape from the Covid shutdown or just a coincidence?
I visited in the early 1990s--a group of people rented a bus and drove across the country from Shkoder to the Greek border, stopping at a bunch of places. It was beautiful. One of my greatest travel experiences, even though our exposure to life and culture was obviously very limited.
Trying to make up for that, I also read a bunch of Kadare after the trip, lent to me by an American expat friend who lived in Budapest at the time. I was particularly taken by novels about blood feud / revenge. Broken April is a title I remember. He also gave me an anthology of poetry, the title was "An elusive eagle" I think. That is pretty much my exposure to Albanian literature, and it is now 30 years ago. I never read the General of the dead army, which was one of Kadare's earlier novels also translated into Hungarian. I every now and then think about reading it--would you recommend it?
I know the country changed completely since then. I would love to go back sometime--and to learn more. Even without reading Albanian, you must be aware of a lot. Just a post about Kadare as a phenomenon might also be worth thinking about. Sorry, this is probably inappropriate, but I got excited!
No, this is great, I'm happy to know my Kadare post will have some interest on here! And thanks for mentioning the book on Milman Parry, I hadn't seen that one.
About my time in Albania, it started as a trip of a few weeks (went right before the pandemic) and then with all the chaos at that time I sort of got stuck there. Long story, but really a happy accident. I was in Tirana but spent a lot of time at the beach in Golem, outside of Durres. You could do a lot worse...
I actually just bought Broken April a few weeks ago, will read it at some point. The novels from Kadare I like a lot are The Palace of Dreams, and then one that's totally different, a pretty standard realist novel, The Great Winter. For whatever reason, this one hasn't been published in English (I read it in French), which is a shame as I think it's a classic--tons of intersecting characters and historical relevance. Real life people mixed in as well, so sort of a historical fiction. If he was still alive and had a shot at the Nobel, maybe we'd get the English, but that ship has probably sailed. And I haven't read General of the Dead Army, a big blind spot for me!
Your trip in the 90s sounds wonderful by the way, that must have been a fascinating time to visit.
Thanks for that. (The "Digression," by the way, is especially entertaining, full of pathos in its depiction of your author.) A couple of comments on method in regard to your two metrics, awards and translations.
You're noting or valuing awards mainly by their effect on sales, not by their politics or their clarity of purpose (for example you're not talking about the Goldsmiths Prize). But in the absence of sales figures that can be tied to specific awards, you're necessarily using press coverage and advertising prominence as proxies -- and in that case, it's a question of which news outlets and advertising are being noted. I'm sympathetic to the problems of research here, especially because they include literary and aesthetic criteria (noticing awards that notice literary fiction), financial criteria (sales figures), and what Dan Sinykin calls "Big Fiction" issues (publishers, publicity budgets, the effect of conglomertes).
Regarding your second metric, translation. When you say "Krasznahorkai has not been introduced into a new language since 2020" the phrase implies that his books are being introduced to everyone who reads in that language—but it's not necessarily the case that readers in a given language who are interested in literary fiction will find a title just because it's been translated; and there are the further problems of measuring large and small languages, adjusting for the size of the press that does the translation relative to the country's population, and estimating the relevant percentage of the population who are engaged with fiction.
All this is to say that you might consider starting from the other side: an essay on what you read, what you subscribe to, what publishers you note, what awards you like, what countries you live in, what languages you speak -- all to put these meditations, which can be very informative, into a context.
Thank you for a fascinating post, even answering my earlier question in detail. (I have to agree with your evaluation of those "forgotten" books.)
Your point about the importance of literary prizes, just as the role of reviews has diminished, is very interesting. This could be connected to the air of mystery surrounding those prizes, especially the Nobel. I guess it also works as a marketing tool: create lots of expectation -- but also a sense of the unexpected, when the winner is finally revealed. However, if there is not much public discussion about why certain books are good / better than others, then the whole process becomes a mystery.
This was a great series. The connection to Teju Cole is interesting as well. Open City is a masterpiece, and his first book, Every Day is for the Thief is also quite good. Open City was rightly celebrated, Every Day is for the Thief I think was admired as well once people went back to it after Open City. But his recent novel, Tremor, seems to have been met with relative silence, at least after its initial publication. I was hugely disappointed, in part because Cole seemed to be writing the book he thought people wanted rather than the book he wanted to write. Perhaps he was going for "world author" status, but the book seemed rather cliched to me and not at all in keeping with his previous efforts. I'll be interested to see what he writes next.
Just one point for your data. Out of personal curiosity, I looked up Krasznahorkai in Albanian, and both The Melancholy of Resistance and Satantango have been translated. I think in the graph in a previous post it was indicated only one novel had been translated.
Just quickly about the data: we may very well have missed translations. I will check what we have—I recall looking on the Albanian National Library site, or at least trying.
Can you please share a link where you found it? Thanks!
(We had a post earlier about data—how hard it is to get it, and where we look for it: https://open.substack.com/pub/translationpatterns/p/data-about-translation-flows )
No problem, here's a link to an Albanian bookstore selling both books: https://www.shtepiaelibrit.com/store/sq/1975__laszlo-krasznahorkai
Not necessarily an official source as in a database, but proof the book exists. Just thought it might be useful if using the data again in the future.
Thank you. This is at least not too embarrassing for us to have missed--what we did not know about is a 2023 translation, which would not have appeared yet in the various catalogs we searched.
To give you a bit more detail about the data: our larger project ends with 2009, because there is a big dataset (from UNESCO's Index Translationum) that we use as our starting point. We are trying to complement that from other sources, but in the absence of a comparable dataset, we decided to focus, for now, on teh period up to 2009.
For the Krasznahorkai post, we scraped together whatever we could, from libraries but also other websites--there is an Arabic translation that I remember finding on the website of a bookstore. Such searches are obviously far from systematic. We have been planning to write another post about the limitations of the coverage (in fact, promised to do so in response to a comment from @James Elkins, https://translationpatterns.substack.com/p/laszlo-krasznahorkai-world-author-cfb/comment/99415290 )
One can do such searches for a specific author, but when doing "Hungarian Literature," it is impossible. We are trying to find ways to get more data (see the link to a post above, in my previous comment), but it is a very complicated task: library catalogs turn out to be pretty messy and unreliable when it comes to identifying books as translations, and it is even harder to search them for translations from a specific language.
You seem to be interested / familiar with Albanian literary culture. I would love to know more about it. Is that something you might write about?
I have no doubt about the difficulty involved, something that makes your research all the more impressive. I would never attempt it, so what you’re doing here is very appreciated.
About Albanian lit, I’m certainly no expert but I guess I know a bit more than the average person. My partner is Albanian and I spent about 8 months there in 2020, but my reading doesn’t extend far beyond Ismail Kadare. I wish it did, but I also don’t read Albanian and options are limited in translation. I do have a post in my drafts on Kadare’s “The File on H,” a wonderful novel that takes up the “Homeric Question.” It’ll be about the novel as well as Albert Lord’s “The Singer of Tales,” which details his research into the oral nature of epic poetry (sorry if you know all this already). Hopefully that’ll come out in a month or two, it’s been on the back burner as some other projects take precedence…
Having a post on The File on H will be really great! I very much look forward to it. (In case you have not come across it, there is this recent book about Milman Parry which I really enjoyed; it had a lot of stuff about Parry's time in the Balkans: https://bookshop.org/p/books/hearing-homer-s-song-the-brief-life-and-big-idea-of-milman-parry-robert-kanigel/15177948
Were those 8 months in Albania an escape from the Covid shutdown or just a coincidence?
I visited in the early 1990s--a group of people rented a bus and drove across the country from Shkoder to the Greek border, stopping at a bunch of places. It was beautiful. One of my greatest travel experiences, even though our exposure to life and culture was obviously very limited.
Trying to make up for that, I also read a bunch of Kadare after the trip, lent to me by an American expat friend who lived in Budapest at the time. I was particularly taken by novels about blood feud / revenge. Broken April is a title I remember. He also gave me an anthology of poetry, the title was "An elusive eagle" I think. That is pretty much my exposure to Albanian literature, and it is now 30 years ago. I never read the General of the dead army, which was one of Kadare's earlier novels also translated into Hungarian. I every now and then think about reading it--would you recommend it?
I know the country changed completely since then. I would love to go back sometime--and to learn more. Even without reading Albanian, you must be aware of a lot. Just a post about Kadare as a phenomenon might also be worth thinking about. Sorry, this is probably inappropriate, but I got excited!
No, this is great, I'm happy to know my Kadare post will have some interest on here! And thanks for mentioning the book on Milman Parry, I hadn't seen that one.
About my time in Albania, it started as a trip of a few weeks (went right before the pandemic) and then with all the chaos at that time I sort of got stuck there. Long story, but really a happy accident. I was in Tirana but spent a lot of time at the beach in Golem, outside of Durres. You could do a lot worse...
I actually just bought Broken April a few weeks ago, will read it at some point. The novels from Kadare I like a lot are The Palace of Dreams, and then one that's totally different, a pretty standard realist novel, The Great Winter. For whatever reason, this one hasn't been published in English (I read it in French), which is a shame as I think it's a classic--tons of intersecting characters and historical relevance. Real life people mixed in as well, so sort of a historical fiction. If he was still alive and had a shot at the Nobel, maybe we'd get the English, but that ship has probably sailed. And I haven't read General of the Dead Army, a big blind spot for me!
Your trip in the 90s sounds wonderful by the way, that must have been a fascinating time to visit.
Thanks for that. (The "Digression," by the way, is especially entertaining, full of pathos in its depiction of your author.) A couple of comments on method in regard to your two metrics, awards and translations.
You're noting or valuing awards mainly by their effect on sales, not by their politics or their clarity of purpose (for example you're not talking about the Goldsmiths Prize). But in the absence of sales figures that can be tied to specific awards, you're necessarily using press coverage and advertising prominence as proxies -- and in that case, it's a question of which news outlets and advertising are being noted. I'm sympathetic to the problems of research here, especially because they include literary and aesthetic criteria (noticing awards that notice literary fiction), financial criteria (sales figures), and what Dan Sinykin calls "Big Fiction" issues (publishers, publicity budgets, the effect of conglomertes).
Regarding your second metric, translation. When you say "Krasznahorkai has not been introduced into a new language since 2020" the phrase implies that his books are being introduced to everyone who reads in that language—but it's not necessarily the case that readers in a given language who are interested in literary fiction will find a title just because it's been translated; and there are the further problems of measuring large and small languages, adjusting for the size of the press that does the translation relative to the country's population, and estimating the relevant percentage of the population who are engaged with fiction.
All this is to say that you might consider starting from the other side: an essay on what you read, what you subscribe to, what publishers you note, what awards you like, what countries you live in, what languages you speak -- all to put these meditations, which can be very informative, into a context.
Thank you for a fascinating post, even answering my earlier question in detail. (I have to agree with your evaluation of those "forgotten" books.)
Your point about the importance of literary prizes, just as the role of reviews has diminished, is very interesting. This could be connected to the air of mystery surrounding those prizes, especially the Nobel. I guess it also works as a marketing tool: create lots of expectation -- but also a sense of the unexpected, when the winner is finally revealed. However, if there is not much public discussion about why certain books are good / better than others, then the whole process becomes a mystery.