The Global Novel: Created for Problem-free Translation?

http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/archive/201002a.htm#qn3

What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives.

Comments

# 1.   

Certainly hegemony and homogeneity are concerns, but here's a line from the original article that left me baffled:

This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go toward it than away from it.

WHAT??

Lucas, February 11, 2010, 9:14p.m.

# 2.   

I did not notice that which Lucas said, it seems like maybe the blogger revised it. Maybe you had your effect!

I do not like this article because it makes competition between works. Murakami writes works easy to translate; people read his books, they are good; it does not mean that they read less of other books, it means maybe that they read more of other books.

I also do not like national and cultural specificity assumed to be a important part of what makes works good. I do not read Horace or Chekhov because they are very Roman or very Russian. I do not care about Rome or Russia, I care about people and ideas and places and images and life. I hope nobody reads a book like this reviewer does and says, euh, this is not French enough.

toomer, February 14, 2010, 6:06p.m.

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