Untranslated Russian novels that should be

[Marian Schwartz]

Dear All,

In 1991, Houghton Mifflin published Bernard Meares's translation of
TRAVELING COMPANIONS.  At the time I heard that the book did so poorly,
Gorenstein became unpublishable here.

This is a situation I come across fairly frequently.  If a foreign author's
first book doesn't do well, other publishers are reluctant to touch anything
else.  In this case, I think part of the problem was the choice of book,
which, unlike other works by Gorenstein I've read, is largely talking heads.
 Pity the poor translator expected to make something marketable of that.

I have no idea who made the decision to publish that particular book, but I
suspect this was simply the one that was brought to the publisher's
attention.

Marian Schwartz

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Howard Turner <howard_s_turner at yahoo.co.uk
> wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> Many thanks for your advice on this.  There seemed to be no
> consensus--there
> weren't any books mentioned more than once.  The subject of Dmitri Bykov
> caused
> some disagreement, not for the first time.  Of course, he and (I presume)
> his
> rights were at the London Book Fair earlier this year, so hardly an unknown
> quantity.  But I've passed your responses on to the publisher anyway.
>
> My own candidate would be Psalom(1975) by Fridrikh Gorenshtein, which in my
> opinion is a wonderful book--among other things a reply to Dostoevsky (and
> Bulgakov) from a Jewish standpoint  and a cosmic drama projected onto the
> author's own experiences as a hungry and  abandoned child.  I've shared
> some
> further thoughts about it with the Internet at  http://wp.me/pBfTB-GI .
>
>
> I also have a couple of questions about the book that SEELANGS may know the
> answer to:
>
> --is there any obvious reason it was never translated into English?  (There
> are
> French and German translations.)
> --I have the  feeling I read something about a translation into Hebrew, but
> can't find any trace of one.  Does anyone know if there is one?
>
> Thanks again for your help
>
>  Howard Turner
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Howard Turner <howard_s_turner at YAHOO.CO.UK>
> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
> Sent: Sat, 2 July, 2011 13:18:39
> Subject: [SEELANGS] Untranslated Russian novels that should be
>
> A couple of months ago I was at a discussion organised
> Dear SEELANGS,
>
> A couple of months ago I was at a discussion organised by some publishers
> here
> in London who were looking for books (novels, perhaps fiction in general)
> for
> translation from Russian, among a number of other languages.
>
>
> I wonder if SEELANGERs have some ideas to put forward?  It's not a question
> for
> prolonged research, but something at the level of 'I wish *that* was
> translated
> so I could give it to my family and friends'; 'I've never understood why
> *that*
> hasn't been translated'  [etc]
>
> If any consensus emerges I'll pass it on.  Meanwhile I have my own
> candidate,
> and I may well be seeking the expert advice of SEELANGers about it in the
> near
> future.
>
> Thanks for your attention,
>
> Howard Turner
>
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