so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

FIrst read that as "in Lemmy's voice"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99wSTVMRkIk

(6'53" if you don't want to sit through the whole thing)

Hmm...

"These masterpieces have come to Deep Vellum and to Lawton thanks to Andrei, a friend of the press and the founding steward of The Untranslated blog, the seminal reference for great books not yet available to English-speaking audiences. Andrei, a Russian-speaking book blogger from Eastern Europe, launched The Untranslated in 2013. He has described the idea for the blog as having come from reading Gravity’s Rainbow as an undergrad and wondering if there were similar works in other languages."

https://t.e2ma.net/webview/3ss14i/5ba151f32c3c2e783aa4db148566b1e7

First of all, its incredible for a blog to have that much of an impact. That the niche idea it promotes has been taken up is something.

I feel this is all a bit of a dead end. We'll see...while this stuff is still niche there will be a lot more focus on it. I have struggled with The Untranslated's writing on these books.

much as i love gigantic excessive (post)modernism there's something about seeing them all bunched together as a genre that leaves me a little eye-rolly maybe?

the thing that leaves me eye-rolly is that solenoid, while not without interest, was also very much not without boredom - tho i feel equivocal, as some aspects of it have stayed with me. it should be much much shorter tho.

i feel totally unequivocal tho about garden of seven twilights being just utter crap.

so, something’s off. big books doing lumpy or tangled things isn’t enough to justify reading or publication really imo, though fair play to the original blog for surfacing writing, it’s just they’ve all been amplified above their intrinsic power (someone will surely tell me that’s a bad metaphor - that not really being what amplification is but hopefully ykwim)

kinda breaks the veneer of sui generisity right

Feels like Biographical Entries for a Catalogue of Vast Untranslated and Unreadable Postmodern Novels is already its own fully realised metafictional exercise.

This is also, more than anything, another twitter-related production. All of the translators and Andrei are on there constantly tweeting about these things, so something was definitely brewing.

On twitter there was a big bust-up (its niche but you know) with some other people over the translation of this book.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutunamayanlar

Which I think was translated into English by his then partner. Could see them all trashing it one night. These boys are passionate! Which makes me pause, yes.

Atay's short stories are getting a translation. Which I am v much looking forward to.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/waiting-for-the-fear