October 2022 Author Cat - Authors in Translation

There have already been a couple of challenges with translations as a theme this year - Cat Woman in Feb, Mystery Kit in May, and a Bingo block too.

Books have been translated for thousands of years without any tracking. So, in talking about authors in translation, here are a few random facts:

UNESCO has a database of book translations which was established in 1932 by the League of Nations. The index counts translations of individual books so authors with many books and few translations can rank higher than authors with a few books with more translations.

The Bible is recognized as the most translated book in the world.

English is the original language of the most translated books and the top target language is German.
There has also been some controversary particularly about African literature. Because there are few publishing companies in Africa and few statistics, many African authors are published first in original languages that are not indigenous African languages.

The top ten authors who are translated are: (based on number of translations) (so says Wikipedia).

1. Agatha Christie
2. Jules Verne
3. William Shakespeare
4. Enid Blyton
5. Barbara Cartland
6. Danielle Steele
7. Vladimir Lenin
8. Hans Christian Anderson
9. Stephen King
10. Jacob Grimm

I found an interesting thread post in the Reading Globally group where they were looking at and reading Translation Award Winners in the last quarter of 2021. AnnieMod provided a lot of information and links to book lists in the first few posts, so I’m going to post a link to her thread here:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/335649#n7625889

And here’s a list from Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/translated

So - lots of places to find books to read.

Please tell us in your book choice/review what the original language is/was and in what language you’re reading. And let’s give a shout-out also to the translator, without whom most of us would not be able to read some of these books.

And let’s not forget to update the wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2022_AuthorCAT

I'm going to be reading The Snowman by Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett from Norwegian to English.

I am planning on reading Amok by Austrian author Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell.

October is going to start early on 30 September - International Translation Day. I will be reading The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura, translated into English from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter.

Later in the month I may read Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino, translated from the Japanese by Rebecca Copeland

I'm planning to read Peder Victorious by O. E. Rølvaag translated from the Norwegian by Nora O. Solum and the author. This is a sequel to the author's Giants in the Earth.

Translations are a bit tougher for me, but I would think I'd have something on my extensive tbr!

I will be reading The Last Wish, the beginning of the Witcher series, by Andrzej Sapkowski. Originally published in Polish, translated by Danusia Stok.

I'm thinking of reading Shizuko Natsuki's mystery The Third Lady, translated from Japanese into English by Robert B. Rohmer.

I found a couple:
Ruby Red / Kerstin Gier
Woman at 1000 Degrees / Hallgrimur Helgason

Happy International Translation Day everyone

COMPLETED The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura

My review:

After leaving his Yokohama high school, Yuki Hirano drifts along with no initiative or motivation until his parents enrol him in an apprenticeship programme and he is sent to Kamusari, a tiny mountain village in the back of beyond, to learn forestry.

Charming tale of city boy maturing and learning skills in the countryside.. Although I don't find forestry as interesting as lexicography, I learnt a lot from this possibly romanticised view of the Japanese forestry and timber industry. I will certainly keep an eye open for the sequel, but having watched the trailer on YouTube, I will probably give the film a miss.

I read YOTSUBA&!, Volume 2 by Kiyohiko Azuma, written in Japanese and translated to English.

Currently reading Before Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot

COMPLETED Before Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot

I read In the Eyes of the Cat selected by Demi and translated from Japanese by Tze-si Huang

I read Das gefrorene Licht by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir which was translated from Icelandic to German. It is also available in English (English title: "My Soul To Take"). This book is the second book in the Thóra Guðmundsdóttir series. I have now read the first three books of the series and I will definitely continue with it next year, but first I need a little break from it.

I read The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas, translated from French.
Vargas' eccentric detective, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is the main attraction in this novel, as well as the strange plot in which random discarded items have been circled with blue chalk on the streets of Paris. His investigation method is not one mystery readers - or his colleagues - are familiar with, as Adamsberg quietly considers each bizarre event, knowing instinctively that there is more to these strange things. Only when a body is found in a blue circle is the mystery taken seriously.

>17 VivienneR: A great series

>17 VivienneR: - Funny, I picked this up for the Alpha Kit. Finding it interesting.

Unusually, for an English speaker, I read a book that had been translated from English into German. Neues von Elmar und seinen Freunden is my first attempt at reading a book in a foreign language.

>19 dudes22: That's the fun thing about CATs, there are multiple choices sometimes.

Another one for this month: Angelica's Smile by Andrea Camilleri.
Montalbano is like a kid in a candy store when surrounded by beautiful women and the title makes it obvious that he has fallen in love again. Livia makes her regal appearance in this episode, although for the life of me I can't think of why either of them keep up this long distance relationship. There has been a rash of burglaries at seaside cottages where, among items stolen, keys to the main residence are taken too, allowing a second robbery. Camilleri's plots are a bonus, the fabulous characters alone can carry the book - to say nothing of the food.

ETA: This one could have been used for MysteryKIT this month, featuring food.

I'm reading Happiness, As Such by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. Thank you, Kay, for the Ginzburg reminder. I'd read a few of her books years ago when they were hard to find and I had to order ancient paperbacks from overseas, so am pleased to see that so many have recently been republished.

Woman at 1,000 Degrees / Hallgrimur Helgason
3.25 stars

80-year old Herra lives in Iceland in a garage by herself with her laptop, and she is waiting to die. She was told 18 years earlier that she had 3 months to live due to cancer… and here she still is. She does expect it will finally happen soon. She is thinking back on her life with a focus on when she was about 10-15 years old or so during WWII. When her father joined the German army to fight for Hitler, she and the rest of her family left for Denmark. The book goes back and forth in time.

There were a few amusing parts, I thought, including Herra calling the local crematorium to make an appointment for her own cremation! Initially I found her current day situation more interesting, but as things progressed during the war, I liked those parts better. She wasn’t a very likable woman, though that wasn’t necessarily the case when she was younger. Although she also wasn’t treated very well by her three sons nor their wives. Overall, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to rate it 3 stars (ok) or 3.5 (good), so going with the in-between.

Happiness, As Such by Natalia Ginzburg was really, really good.

I have re-read Der Tod des Iwan Iljitsch. Tolstoj is a bit hit and miss for me, loved War and Peace, Anna Karenina not so much. This novella is near-perfect, the way he packs a whole life into a mere eight pages is wonderful.

Now reading The Years by Annie Ernaux.

I have also finished Die Kreutzer-Sonate, not one of my favourites, to be honest.

And I have added the last stories in my collection, Der Teufel (no touchstone) and Vater Sergius. Frankly, there's too much male self-searching for my patience.

I've finished The Third Lady by Shizuko Natsuki, translated into English from the Japanese.

November's thread is up: https://www.librarything.com/topic/345137

The Lost Village / Camilla Sten
4 stars

Alice is a filmmaker still looking for her big break. Maybe this is it? Her grandmother grew up in a small isolated town in Sweden where something odd happened in 1959. Everyone disappeared. All almost-900 of them. (Alice’s grandmother had already moved to Stockholm by then.) There was one decomposing woman tied to a post in the town square and one baby still alive. 60 years later, Alice gets together five people to go film a promo to raise money to create an entire documentary trying to figure out what happened in this town all those years ago. But things go very very wrong...

The start of this book pulled me right in. It did go back and forth in time between Alice and her crew there for five days filming and back in time to the townspeople and what went on at the time. It did slow down for a while with some set-up, but it picked up again. Creepy… those isolated buildings just left with stuff still on the table, etc. It was all so sudden.

A lucky find on the library's new book shelf:

The Writer's Cats by Muriel Barbery Illustrated by Maria Guitart, Translated from French by Alison Anderson

From the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog a delightful picture book narrated by the author's cats. They are four Chartreux felines: Kirin, Petrus, Ocha, and Mizu, who protect, comfort, advise and inspire their writer. As self-proclaimed gourmands as well as being French cats, naturally food and drink is mentioned often. Any cat would be over the moon to have their ability, humour, and talents represented with such admiration. The playful illustrations are predominantly in the same colours as the cats who have grey fur, orange eyes. Beautiful as well as entertaining and a pretty accurate portrayal of what it's like to be a writer with four cats.

I have finished Der Wald der gehenkten Füchse, translated from Finnish. It's a bit weird, like most books of this author, but in a way that makes you laugh out loud sometimes.

I am reading the original version of Madame de Villeneuve's Original Beauty and the Beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, translated from French by J.R. Planche

I have completed Amok by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell. This is a very short novel but I was captivated by the story and will certainly be looking to read more by this author.

I have finished Der Nachbar a Brazilian mystery.

Adding Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie (tr. James Kirkup/Ros Schwartz) which was excellent.

I also read Dans med en ängel by Åke Edwardson. I read it in German (Tanz mit dem Engel), the English version is Death Angels. It was originally written in Swedish and is the first book of the Erik Winter series.

I read and finished in October; Our Lady of the Assassins by Fernando Vallejo, translated by Paul Hammond.