All posts filed under: literature

Conversations with Translators (I): Oliver Ready on Crime and Punishment

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I visited Oliver Ready recently at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he is a research fellow in Russian society and culture, to hear about his five-year engagement with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics, 2014): what persuaded him to take the project on? how did he limber up for it? and why – unusually – did he write his version out longhand rather than work on a computer? Below, there is a short extract from our conversation: Oliver Ready: Something Russians talk a lot about in translation is the idea of a tuning fork when you’re setting out on a translation – ‘kamerton’ in Russian – and like an actor trying to get into the role you read something which isn’t a precise model, but which moves your linguistic resources in a particular direction and starts you thinking in particular rhythms. [Translating Crime and Punishment] was experimental for me because I’d never translated a classic before and the first question people ask is ‘What are you doing? Are you going to write in the archaic …

Rebecca Mead on The Road to Middlemarch

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Rebecca Mead is an English-born, Brooklyn-based, New Yorker staff writer. I met her recently when she visited Toppings bookshop in Bath to talk about her new book The Road to Middlemarch. Rebecca’s book explores her fascination with George Eliot’s great novel, which started when she first encountered it at the age of seventeen, and has accompanied her through her life, growing, changing, developing, revealing new aspects, as Rebecca’s own life and experience have changed. ‘Reading [Middlemarch]’, she writes, ‘does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. There are books that seem to comprehend us as much as we understand them, or even more. […] This kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance. It might lead us back to the library in mid life, looking for something that eluded us before.’ Rather than a work of literary criticism, the book is a blend of biography, memoir, travel, and reflection that defies easy classification. Here’s a …

Historical novelist Maria McCann on Ace, King, Knave

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[An] exuberant revivification of grave robbers and gamblers, hucksters and whores in 18th-century London: like Hogarth sprung to life. – Hilary Mantel, Books of the Year 2013, Observer This is my second interview with Maria McCann – I first interviewed her back in 2010 about her previous novel, The Wilding, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize. That novel was set during the Restoration in 1672. For her new book, Ace, King, Knave, Maria has moved forward almost a century to the Georgian England of the mid-1760s. The novel is the tale of two young women: Sophia, born into the Somerset aristocracy, and Betsy-Ann, the daughter of travelling fair people, and their relationship with the same man, though they each know him under a different name. To Sophia, he is Mr Zedland, heir to an estate in Essex with an elegant townhouse in London. The man Betsy-Ann knows as Ned, however, comes from a much more disreputable background. The Georgian capital is a world where everyone, whether highborn or low, is looking for the Great …

Inside Writing: The Faber Academy podcast (1)

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We recorded the first Faber Academy podcast last autumn. The aim is very simple: to bring together two writers (or a writer and editor) and get them to discuss a theme or a skill likely to be of interest to other writers. The guests on each programme select a text to focus the discussion and to give listeners something read (or reread) afterwards. My guests on this first podcast were novelist Louise Doughty (above left), author most recently of Apple Tree Yard, and her editor at Faber, Sarah Savitt. The text they chose was Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, and the theme Unreliable Narrators. The podcasts are free, not tied to any particular course, and not intended to sell you something. While they are principally aimed at new writers, my hope is that hearing authors talk about what they have worked out about their craft will also be of interest to readers. In this first podcast, among the things we touch on are: keeping a writer’s notebook, reading with a novelist’s eye, self-delusion, John Le …

German novelist Eugen Ruge on ‘In Times of Fading Light’

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In Times of Fading Light is Eugen Ruge‘s debut novel, a bestseller in Germany, and the winner of the 2011 German Book prize, awarded to the best German-language novel of the year. A multi-generational story spanning well over half a century (and drawing to a certain extent on Ruge’s own family history), it charts the impact of wider historical events on the lives of the Umlitzer family, who once belonged to the Communist elite but whose socialist utopia has long-since vanished by the time the book opens in 2001. Through four generations, Ruge presents different perspectives of life under changing political regimes and the restrictions they imposed – we move from Fascism, to Communism and post-Communism, finishing with hyper-Capitalism. We witness characters’ lives that still have their fair share of mundane chores, problems and domestic disputes, but which appear extraordinary set against backdrops that are hard now to imagine. Eugen Ruge was born in 1954 in the Urals in the former Soviet Union, where his German communist father Wolfgang had fled from the Nazis in …

Inventing Ruritania – Vesna Goldsworthy

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I recently interviewed Serbian-born, London-based writer, poet, and academic Vesna Goldsworthy, whose books include a  collection of poetry, The Angel of Salonika, and a memoir entitled Chernobyl Strawberries, which one reviewer described as “suffused with a longing complicated and deepened by the eradication of the Yugoslav state”. I met Vesna to discuss Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, another book which contemplates the identity of South Eastern Europe, in this case the construction of the Balkans in the British literary imaginary – “a gently ridiculous proxy” as Vesna calls it  (typified by the fictional kingdom of Ruritania) for the real Balkans; a repository for the qualities of a region which by turn attracted, fascinated and repelled the British; a place that could be turned into farce and pastiche, or depicted as a place of potential menace, where European identify dissolved into something irredeemably alien and eastern. To listen to the podcast [22:45], click here. To find out more about the book, visit Vesna’s publisher’s site here.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on Becoming Dickens

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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s biography of the first three decades of Dickens’ life is published by Harvard University Press next month. It’s a terrifically readable, refreshing look at his life story which rescues Dickens from a sense of inevitability, that the only fate reserved for him was to become the greatest novelist of his day. From the very first page of the book, Robert embraces the counter-factual to jolt us out of our complacency and shows how often Dickens’ life could have branched off in another direction entirely. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on Becoming Dickens from George Miller on Vimeo.

Discoveries: Sarah Bakewell on Irmgard Keun

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I interviewed Sarah Bakewell last month about her biography of Montaigne for the new Interview of the Month slot on the Blackwell Online website (that interview will be available there very soon). Visiting her website recently I saw her post about Irmgard Keun, a writer I had never heard of. It turned out that Sarah had never heard of her either until she stumbled on one of her books in My Back Pages in Balham.  That gave me an idea for a new series of guest posts, featuring readers on writers or books they have recently discovered.  Sarah has very kindly allowed me to republish her post, the first in a series of what I am unsurprisingly going to call Discoveries. If you would like to contribute, email me at george [at] podularity.com. When I’m working from home there usually comes a point where I have to get up from my desk and rush out into the air, usually on the pretext of going to the supermarket or post office. But sometimes, once I get …