News

I just got Orhan Pamuk’s new collection of essays, Other Colors, and I am so excited about it, I can’t wait to dive into it. The review by Michael McGaha in this weekend’s SF Chronicle makes me look forward to it. It’s interesting, too, to read his comments about the translation, by Maureen Freely:

The best thing one can say about Freely’s translation is that it doesn’t read like a translation. If you didn’t know, you would never guess this book had originally been written in a foreign language. Freely’s approach to translation seems to be to think about the meaning of Pamuk’s Turkish and then rephrase the idea in English as she would have expressed it. For example, when Pamuk writes “from now on until the end of my life, I will never smoke a cigarette again,” Freely translates: “I’m never going to smoke again, ever.” The basic idea is there, and Freely’s sentence sounds more natural in English than Pamuk’s, yet something important is lost.

Sometimes her formulations seem to complicate things unnecessarily. When Pamuk writes, “Looking out the window was such a basic habit that when television did come to Turkey, people started looking at it as if they were looking out the window,” the aptly named Freely translates: “Looking out the window was such an important pastime that when television did finally come to Turkey, people acted the same way in front of their sets as they had in front of their windows.” In this case even the meaning seems somewhat distorted, and once again, the poetry of the original is lost. Why not let Pamuk be Pamuk?

You can read the article in full here.

From Peter Conrad’s Guardian review of a new biography of Rudolph Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh:

If he didn’t like a ballerina he was partnering, he ungallantly let her thud to the ground. Once, he dragged an uncooperative dancer across the floor by her necklace, grazing her throat; he fractured the jaw of a male colleague who annoyed him. He ripped up costumes, hurled Thermos flasks into mirrors, spat at photographers and kicked police cars. In a tizz at Zeffirelli’s chintzy villa, he hurled a wrought-iron chair at his host and pulled down a curtain rod with which he pounded some majolica pottery to smithereens. Expelled from the premises, he paused to shit on the steps like an indignant, incontinent dog.

There’s more here, too.

The UK Telegraph has published sales figures for this year’s shortlisted books. Kind of shocking.

I am back at home after a couple of days in New York, where I met with my editor, my agent, caught up with some good friends, and stopped by Columbia to attend the CJR panel on book reviewing (podcast here.) On the plane over, I read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which for some reason I had never read before. I’ve said before that writing a novel is like having a religion: you see signs everywhere. I felt like this book came at the right time for me; it’s helped me see how a character’s tortured inner life can be dissected and every feeling, every thought, every impulse recorded. Pretty stunning.

I am in New York for a couple of days, for meetings with my agent and my editor, and to catch up with some friends. On Tuesday night, my friend Mark Sarvas will be taking part in a panel discussion at the Columbia School of Journalism, and I plan on being in the audience. Join us, won’t you? Here are the details:

Panel on the crisis in book reviewing
7 p.m.
Tuesday, September 18
Third-floor lecture hall, Journalism Building
116th and Broadway
The panelists will be Steve Wasserman, Peter Osnos, Elisabeth Sifton, Carlin Romano, and Mark Sarvas.

The moderator for the panel will be CJR’s publisher, Evan Cornog