Between Parentheses, by Roberto Bolaño (New Directions)

Posted on June 23, 2011 by David

Literature is a Dangerous Game: Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses

By David Varno

Roberto Bolaño was the kind of writer who belonged to a species that is hopefully not as endangered as appearances suggest: writers who read more than they write. Bolaño read a lot, and he loved that Borges boasted about the books he read instead of the books he wrote. In his own fiction, poetry and nonfiction, Bolaño waved the books he loved in his reader’s face.

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via wordswithoutborders.org (continue)

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On Reviewing Translations (edited series)

Posted on April 22, 2011 by David

Here’s a summary of the two-month series I edited this spring for Words Without Borders:

New Series: On Reviewing Translations

by David Varno, March 16, 2011

This week, we are launching a series to explore the ways that book reviews handle translations. Reviewers and translators each have varied opinions on how translations should be discussed, and on who should be doing the discussing. At a recent panel on the future of book reviewing, review …

On Reviewing Translations: Daniel Hahn

by Daniel Hahn, March 16, 2011

I’m a translator, whose translations get reviewed regularly in the mainstream press; I’m also a reviewer who reviews translations regularly in the mainstream press. In probably more or less even numbers, I’d guess—for each one I get, I write one, give or take. …

On Reviewing Translations: Susan Bernofsky, Jonathan Cohen, and Edith Grossman

by David Varno, March 23, 2011

This document was submitted to Words Without Borders for our series On Reviewing Translations, based on a collaboration between the three contributors that had been initiated prior to solicitation. SOME THOUGHTS FOR REVIEWERS OF LITERARY TRANSLATIONS You ought to review a translation as …

On Reviewing Translations: Tess Lewis

by Tess Lewis, March 28, 2011

Being on the receiving as well as the dealing end of reviewing literature in translation, I’m particularly sensitive to the issues involved. More than three quarters of the reviews and essays I’ve written over the past decade have been about translations, a number of them from …

On Reviewing Translations: Lorraine Adams

by Lorraine Adams, March 31, 2011

Like many American-born English speakers, I have an unhappy story to tell about my ignorance of the rest of the world’s languages. It begins in my youth when I spent eight years studying Latin. This rendered me well-versed in Vergil, Horace and Catullus, but unfit for modern literature, …

On Reviewing Translations: Rigoberto González

by Rigoberto González, April 4, 2011

With so few titles getting translated into English, it seems ludicrous to impose too many conditions in terms of matching a book reviewer to a translated project, or even in terms of determining whether a translated project is worth reviewing. The sad fact is that those of us reviewing books …

On Reviewing Translations: Confessions of a Book Reviewer (of works in translation)

by Jonathan Blitzer, April 7, 2011

There is an anecdote about translation—which, fittingly, I´ve only come across second-hand—that involves an enthusiastic Ernest Hemingway gushing to a friend that finally, with a new translation of War and Peace, he can get through the whole novel.  His friend then …

On Reviewing Translations: Suzanne Jill Levine tells us what the “Subversive Scribe” might add:

by Suzanne Jill Levine, April 11, 2011

Throwing one’s hat into this ring can be a two-edged plume, mark my mixed-up metaphor.  If we, wearing our translator hats (though not many of us can afford hats), tell reviewers that any adjective, from “brilliant” to “clunky,” unjustified by examples, just …

On Reviewing Translations: Scott Esposito

by Scott Esposito, April 22, 2011

To my mind, the problem is simple: reviewing literary translations is full of thorny issues and difficult questions, and I am as suspicious of anyone who claims to have answered them as I am of someone who tells me they know what art is. But! Which reader of Words Without Borders would say …

 

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I Looked Alive, by Gary Lutz (Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions)

Posted on April 7, 2011 by David

LITERATURE 
I LOOKED ALIVE
by David Varno Apr 07, 2011
(Fiction, Book Review, BOMBlog)

I recently shared the opening story of I Looked Alive, Gary Lutz’s second collection, with a writing workshop I’ve been teaching. The response was divided. One student, sympathetic to the author’s project but concerned for its possible obscurity, asked, “How many copies get printed for a book like this?” I checked the book’s production specs for the answer: not many. So what is the obstacle for a writer this accomplished and adroit? Do readers who are only attuned to mainstream fiction feel, on encountering Lutz’s work, like his stories don’t aim to please? It’s not hard to reach the pleasure he shares in words, the endless possibilities of feeling and meaning in language. Is it the messy transgression, the deviance of characters with indeterminate or shifting genders? Still, a close read and an open ear should lead anyone to discover the writer’s generosity, courage, and pleasure in words.

(continue reading)

I Looked Alive is available now from The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions.

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On Argentina, On Mysticism, and Poems of the Night, by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Classics)

Posted on February 18, 2011 by David

Borges: Faith to See in the Dark

By David Varno

In 2010, as part of the Penguin Classics Series, five new Borges books were released in the states. Last October, three of the editors, Suzanne Jill Levine, Alfred Mac Adam, and Maria Kodama, gathered at the Americas Society in New York City to discuss the project. The books highlight specific aspects within and beyond the three definitive omnibuses that Penguin released around the new millennium (Collected Fictions, Selected Nonfictions, and Selected Poems).

In part, as general editor Suzanne Jill Levine acknowledged at the October panel, the books are “spinoffs.” There may be some truth to this, in that Penguin has published many short editions of Borges’s work from the larger anthologies, but at the very least,, the titles that contain new material (On Argentina, On Mysticism, and Poems of the Night) offer fresh insights and angles on Borges’s work to even his most devoted English-language readers Also included in the series are On Writing and The Sonnets.

According to Levine, who worked with a total of four other editors to complete the series, which combines well-known translations with new translations from herself, Mac Adam, and Kodama, the poetry and nonfiction have been more difficult to excise from the abovementioned anthologies . (Among the small editions of Borges’s fiction are Universal History of Iniquitiesand The Aleph and other Stories, and smaller pieces of the Collected can be downloaded as ebooks.) Part of what makes the new titles stand out is the weaving together of multiple genres, as Alfred Mac Adam, the editor for On Argentina, has done, placing an early essay on a card game next to the poem “Truco,” a variant on the same theme. Mac Adam bookends the collection with two legendary fictions: “Man on Pink Corner” and “The South,” and in between are Borges’s essays on Argentina from the 1920s. They have been unavailable in English, in part because Borges had repudiated them, embarrassed, as Mac Adam suggests in his note on the text, either by his youthful tendentiousness or stylistic excess.

The “spiky, hard-to-understand Spanish” (Mac Adam) that Borges produced for the early Argentina essays came as he was approaching the age that Joyce was when he published Dubliners. He was after the local color of Argentina, specifically the language of the criollo (or European-bred citizens). But in striving for authenticity, as well as to perfect a distinct, Argentinian form of ultraísmo, his writing became virtually impenetrable (even, as Mac Adam claims, to contemporary Argentinian readers). The intensely baroque language was “nearly impossible to translate,” he said at the Americas Society, to laughter from the English- and Spanish-speaking audience. Mac Adam confided that he and Levine agreed to approach the translation with a sense of “moderate infidelity”; many of the criollo words are left in the Spanish, with a glossary at the back of the book. Yet for all their disavowals, the text has been made very readable.

(continue reading)

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C, by Tom McCarthy (Knopf)

Posted on September 22, 2010 by David

LITERATURE
 JOYRIDES FROM THE DARKROOM OF HISTORY

by David Varno Sep 22, 2010

(Fiction, BOMBlog)

Tom McCarthy’s latest novel opens in slow, impressionistic time, with a guided view of scenes glimpsed through trees from a horse-drawn carriage. But the book’s time speeds up when Serge Carrefax, the central character, is old enough to build his own telegraph receiver. His mast, which takes time to build, reaches 500 meters, then 650 meters, within a single scene, as he picks up further-flung transmissions from across the seas. The novelistic conventions of 19th-Century realism, which Zadie Smith honored McCarthy for circumventing with his first novel, Remainder, in her landmark essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” are again turned on their heel.

(continue reading)

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More Reviews

Posted on September 13, 2010 by David
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Debut short story, published in the Brooklyn Rail

Posted on December 1, 2009 by David

VLAD

by David Varno

I met Vlad through a moving job I took at the beginning of my last summer in Brooklyn. I took the job because I was bored, heartbroken, and broke. There was an online classified ad with the headline QUICK MONEY FAST and a man named Max took my call. He sent me to a location in Flatbush early the next day and set me up with the man who worked the jobs.

“My friend, let me tell you something,” Vlad said, bouncing gently in the driver’s seat of the van. There were box cutters with the blades out, nude playing cards and the floor of the cab behind the seats had a hole wide enough to fit a body through. The space underneath was not the pavement but someplace dark and shadowy. Vlad’s neck twitched when he turned to me, it was full of muscles. “You not make money doing this,” he said. We were driving under light clouds over the Verrazano Bridge, on the way to a job in Staten Island—an apparently green swath of land where I had never been. As Vlad spoke, he gestured and looked at me more than he looked at the road. I wasn’t sure about him at first, but by lunchtime I found him charming, he insisted on buying me a sandwich and a beer.

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Fiction from the Brooklyn Rail (continue reading)


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Short-short on Fictionaut

Posted on October 26, 2009 by David

Catching Forks

by David Varno

Last night Jim taught me how to catch forks. Meaning, he taught me how to throw them. But he called it catching forks. It was late, and we were low down 3rd street, south of the Bay Bridge, the baseball stadium, all the people and cars, on top of a warehouse. There were a lot of forks up there. Good ones, too, stainless steel. It was all in the feet, according to Jim.

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via “Catching Forks” by David Varno → Fictionaut.

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Wells Tower

Posted on April 1, 2009 by David

AN INTERVIEW WITH WELLS TOWER

Wells Tower grew up near Chapel Hill, NC, in a rural region tempered by progressive, well-to-do townships that he refers to as the exburbs. Along with the swampy gulf coast of Florida, Wells recreates this region in his fiction with rich detail and an affection and yearning for home. Driving that strong feeling is a penetrating and occasionally hilarious awareness of hypocrisy and bad decision-making, tempered by empathy for human beings who run into bad luck.

Wells has been quietly publishing short stories over the past decade in several of the major venues, along with a good bit of magazine and newspaper writing. His first volume, Everything Ravaged and Everything Burned, is a powerful culmination of momentum that sheds light in multiple directions on the many themes and literary origins of his work so far. He is an old-fashioned short-story writer, hoping to keep the tradition alive.

We met in late March in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn at a place with a name that makes reference to Alice in Wonderland, and over cheap stout discussed the stories in the book, pietist hippies, M.F.A programs, Flannery O’Connor, and other topics.

 

Did growing up punk influence your writing at all? The freedom of imagination with zines, for example.

Like did punk rock change my life? (Laughs) The zines were fun. I did one with my bandmate Al that was kind of literary. It was review-based but not of records or anything; we did things like review surgeries people had, or car accidents; when I got into a wreck, we compared it to Camus’. We also did a lot of things on all the vegan people in the punk scene…

There’s a tension in your stories with hippies; they tend to be nemeses. Does that come from there at all?

That’s more with my parent’s generation. There were all these back-to-the-land types that moved down to this part of North Carolina before the region really blew up, back in the ’70s, and a lot of them are really just huge assholes. You know, really hypocritical. “Me me me…” A friend of mine just shared a name with me for these people out in San Francisco, you know, the ones in long beards and white pants with yoga mats who think they can yell at you because they eat so much yeast, or whatever. They’re called “snags.”

I first read your story “Down in the Valley” as an undergraduate when it was out in The Paris Review, and I’ve remembered it over the years. I noticed with the new version that you’ve sort of toned down Barry, the hippie who makes off with Ed’s wife.  He’s still an asshole, but less of one.

Yeah, it’s interesting that you notice that. I wanted to complicate that a little bit, sort of blur the moral line. There are no good guys in my stories, and I wanted Ed to dislike him for his own reasons.

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from Bookslut (continue reading)

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Rivka Galchen

Posted on June 13, 2008 by David

Rivka Galchen with David Varno

Rivka Galchen uses science in order to pursue the mysteries of love, mortality and spirituality found in literature. It’s an exciting project. In March of this year, the New Yorkerpublished her short story, “The Region of Unlikeliness,” which takes its name from the writings of St. Augustine, draws on time travel theorems and tells of a young engineering student’s rapture with a pair of aging uptown coffee-shop-patronizing, Deleuze-quoting pseudo-philosphers. The story has been well-noted as a departure from the New Yorker’s usual stuffiness, and serves as a perfect introduction to Galchen’s debut novel,Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). The book follows a middle-aged psychiatrist named Dr. Leo Leibenstein, who after becoming suddenly convinced that his wife is an imposter succumbs to the psychosis of one of his patients. But the book is about way more than a shrink who goes nuts. It’s about the elusiveness of love, and with Deleuze’s Proust and Signs as a guide, Galchen perfectly explicates the tragedy of time and the tendency to fall in love with those who are not from our world. The book is also about meteorology, a field in which the author’s late father, Tzvi Galchen, was eminent.

David Varno (The Brooklyn Rail): You began school at Princeton as an English student before heading straight to Mount Sinai, where you secured a medical degree in psychiatry, and then came to Columbia for your M.F.A. Have you had a duel interest in science and literature from the beginning?

Rivka Galchen: I was more interested in science at first because most of the books in my house growing up were in Hebrew, and most of the books my mom read were guidebooks on how to file your taxes, or stuff like that, so it wasn’t a bookish house. My creative life was always in science. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I thought, wow, literature is kind of exciting.

Rail: Where did you grow up after emigrating from Israel?

Galchen: Norman, Oklahoma. My dad was a professor of meteorology there, and my mom worked for the National Severe Storms Laboratory. Norman and Boulder are major storm centers so we lived back and forth between those two places. Did you ever see Twister? That’s my hometown. My mom was a computer programmer, so when there would be a severe storm we would drive out to the radar and she was the one who would send the data over to Channel 9 or whatever.

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From the Brooklyn Rail (read the rest)

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