CNQ's Website Gets a Makeover

Canadian Notes and Queries' online presence has just gotten a whole lot prettier.

A new redesigned website has been launched for the feisty literary print tri-annual, featuring select articles from back issues, exclusive online content, and pithy blog posts regularly updated by editor Alex Good. We've also renewed our commitments to the Twittersphere. To keep up with some of the most lively and combative discussions on contemporary Canadian lit and culture, follow us here. 

And as an aside to all you subscribers: be on the lookout for CNQ 92, which will shipped and hitting the newsstands in the 2nd or 3rd week of February. It's a doozy of an issue, with pieces by Stephen Henighan on Mavis Gallant's cross-dressing Romanian mother, Jennifer Franssen on a Latin renaissance in East Scarborough, Patricia Robertson on writing the necessary, Alex Good on the long, long shadow of CanLit's golden generation, JC Sutcliffe on translations of Inuit and Innu fiction, Kasper Hartman on the golden age of indie video games, and much more. If you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Save on the trip and the price of the newsstand and receive an exclusive collectible with each issue! 

“[CNQ]…may be the best literary journal in the land.” — John Fraser, National Post

Words Without Borders praises Ondjaki's Granma Nineteen

Over at the online world literature magazine Words Without Borders Amanda Calderon has fallen in love with Ondjaki's charming and graceful Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret:

It is no surprise that this energetic and endearing novel is the work of a writer of such stunning accomplishment as Ondjaki. He is incredibly prolific—the author of twenty books, and winner of over a dozen Portuguese-language literary prizes, including the prestigious José Saramago Prize for Literature in 2013. He is only thirty-six.

Just as the dust whipped up by the Luanda Bay breeze drifts across the neighborhood in a wave, settling on front steps and in chicken coops, getting into everything through windows and eyes, the world of Granma Nineteen is in constant motion. We have only to read the first lines to know this: “The explosion woke up even the birds asleep in the trees and the dozy fish in the sea. Colours came out that had never been seen before: yellow mixed with red pretending to be orange in a bluish green, flares that mimicked the strength of the stars reclining in the sky and a warlike rumbling of the kind made by MiG planes.” Ondjaki is at his best when he is writing the frenetic wonderment of children, even as they contend with the deadly realities of war and political power. The result is ebullient, cinematic, and downright magical.

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/ondjakis-granma-nineteen-and-the-soviets-secret#ixzz3CXlB04s9

Presenting Ondjaki and Granma Nineteen

Next week we're delighted to announce that Ondjaki, one of Angola's best-known and most beloved authors, will embark on a cross-country Canadian tour. Are you in Ottawa? Toronto? Montreal? Windsor? Vancouver? Come out and hear the voice that has captured over a dozen international prizes and earned praise around the globe. For his complete tour schedule, read on! We'll have more about Granma Nineteen in the coming days.

1. Ottawa Writers Fest, OTTAWA

Tuesday, April 29 – 8:30pm 

"Another Word for Nothing Left" 

with Padma Viswanathan, Ondjaki and Nadia Bozak

hosted by CBC's Adrian Harewood 

(location: Knox Presbyterian Church, 120 Lisgar Street at Elgin)

2. International Festival of Authors (IFOA), TORONTO

Wednesday, April 30 – 7:30pm

Reading with Ondjaki, Miriam Toews and Evie Wyld 

(location: York Quay Centre, Brigantine Room)

3. Blue Metropolis Festival, MONTREAL                        

                           Friday, May 2^nd – 7pm – 7:20pm

                            Book signing (location: Las Americas)

Saturday, May 3^rd – 3:30pm – 4:30pm 

“Memory, family lore and fiction” 

with Luis Alberto Urrea, David Homel, and Ondjaki

(location: Las Americas)

Saturday, May 3^rd – 5pm – 6pm

“Cara a Cara Com Ondjaki” Portuguese language event 

(location: Las Americas)

Saturday, May 3^rd – 8pm – 9:30pm

“Face to Face With Ondjaki” Interview

hosted by CBC's Paul Kennedy 

(location: Salle Godin)

4. Biblioasis Spring Fiction Launch, WINDSOR

Tuesday, May 6 – 7pm

Reading with Ray Robertson, C.P. Boyko, K.D. Miller and Ondjaki 

(location: Biblioasis bookshop)

5. Incite: Vancouver International Writers Fest, VANCOUVER

Wednesday, May 7 – 7:30pm

Reading with Ondjaki, Claire Battershill and Sean Michaels 

(location: Alice MacKay Room, Central Library)

The Other Word: Scott Esposito and Daniel Medin interview Stephen Henighan on Couto, Sebastian, Canadian translation, and more.

Stephen Henighan, Editor
Biblioasis International
Translation Series.

Earlier this week Scott Esposito and Daniel Medin featured Biblioasis's International Translation Series editor Stephen Henighan on their podcast "That Other Word," which they do periodically for the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco. They discuss what Henighan calls his “deeply-rooted rootlessness,” as well as "the Canadian relationship to English and translation, and the challenges of procuring and producing translations for the Canadian market ... Mia Couto’s “rural modernism,” his literary influences, and why the author travels well, despite being essentially “untranslatable” ... [and the] comical and haphazard story of how he came to learn Romanian, and describes the process of translating and trying to publish Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident." You can listen to the full podcast here, and you're of course formally invited to check out the International Translation Series website for a full list of titles. 

Introducing the Biblioasis International Translation Series Website

We're pleased to launch the new online home of the Biblioasis International Translation Series website and blog over at www.biblioasistranslation.com.  You can find excerpts, reviews and further information on all current and forthcoming Biblioasis translation series titles on this site, which is also accessible through the Biblioasis Press website.

We have also started a Translation series blog, which we hope can become a key resource for anyone interested in translation in Canada.  It will not be Biblioasis-title specific, but will cover translations from other presses as well, in addition to translation-related news, links, reviews, interviews, excerpts and general commentary.  We'll be bringing in a range of contributors for this blog from both inside and outside the press, so do check in from time to time to see what's new.

Forthcoming content over the next few weeks will include Sheila Fischman's short memoir 'A Life in Translation', an essay by Andrea Labinger on the translation of Liliana Heker's The End of the Story, Mike Barnes's fascinating 'A Spaceship from Across' (from the translation issue of CNQ), as well as contributions from Hugh Hazelton, Colin Carberry and many others.

We are also open to contributions from others: if interested, please email me at dwells@biblioasis.com.

This week's major offering is a talk by translation series editor Stephen Henighan, given at the University of Guelph October 27th, 2011.  Worth reading in its entirety, here is a taste:

On October 27, 2011 , writer Clark Blaise visited  the MacDonald-Stewart Art Gallery in Guelph, Ontario. As a nomadic bicultural author who has spent much of his life translating himself across boundaries (and who is also published by Biblioasis), Blaise provided an apt catalyst for talking about translation, and the Biblioasis International Translation Series.  Here's the talk I delivered at the time. 


                                            THE FALL OF TRANSLATION/ Stephen Henighan


Clark Blaise’s visit to Guelph is an ideal opportunity to talk about translation. There are at least two good reasons for this. The first is that although the translator’s word-by-word struggle is with the different ways in which languages carve up reality, the ultimate goal of literary translation is to carry one culture across a border while balancing it on your shoulders in a way that makes it visible to the culture on the other side of the frontier.   This is exactly what Clark Blaise does in  short stories such as “North,” “I’m Dreaming of Rocket Richard,” and dozens of others; one of the stories in his book Resident Alien is even called “Translation.”  Blaise’s short stories are full of characters who translate their names from Boisvert to Greenwood –  or from Blais to Blaise. 
   
The second reason to talk about translation today is that Mr. Blaise’s publisher, Biblioasis, is the home of the Biblioasis International Translation Series.
   
In 2006 Dan Wells asked me to help him set up and run a series of literary translations with an international flavour. Nobody had ever made a sustained attempt at doing anything like this in Canada.  Canadians were content to let New York and London and a few university presses in the U.S.  decide what got translated into English; to set the tone, the references and the language. This passivity was reinforced by the Canada Council. Where both the United Kingdom and the United States have granting agencies that fund incoming translations, the Canada Council funds English-French or French-English translations within Canada, but does not fund Canadian translations of writers from other countries. Nor does the publisher receive his usual grant to support book publication if the book’s author is not Canadian. In the absence of support for either translation or publication, and given the need to purchase English-language rights to the work from hard-nosed  literary agents in Frankfurt, the cost of publishing translations in Canada is inordinately high. It could be lowered by judicious policy making.  Yet in our desire to strengthen our culture, we have forgotten that in an era of accelerated globalization, strength flows not only from bolstering that which is ours, but also  from forging our own interpretations of the world. Committed to the idea that translations must come from the margins of linguistic cultures as well as from the power centres, the Biblioasis International Translation Series is dedicated to publishing world literature in English in Canada. We believe that translations are the lifeblood of literature, that a language that is not in touch with other linguistic traditions loses its creative vitality, and that the worldwide spread of English makes translation more urgent now than ever before.  
   
Above all, we were aware that there was a lot out there to translate because English is the most insular language in the world. From my own trans-linguistic reading, I was familiar with quantities of good writers whose works were available in half-a-dozen or more languages, yet not in English. Only Arabic-speaking cultures publish fewer translations than Anglophone societies, and the Arabs at least have the excuse that most of their citizens are poor and speak dialects as their mother tongues, which makes it difficult or impossible, without specialized training, for them to read the Classical Arabic in which books are published. English-speaking societies have no excuse for their disdain of the rest of the world’s literature. Many English-speaking countries are among the world’s most prosperous, most of our populations are reasonably well educated, and our literary language is only a heartbeat away from that spoken on the street.  Unfortunately, as the inheritors of the two empires that have dominated the world for the last two hundred years –Great Britain and the United States– speakers of English are infected with the bizarre notion, which prevails nowhere else on earth, that their mother tongue is all they need to know to understand the world.  Commentators invariably cite economics as the culprit for the paucity of translations in English, yet those same commentators tell us that in English-speaking countries economics is based on the market. If the market for translations in English is weak, this suggests the presence of certain innate characteristics in English-speaking culture, one of which is an ingrained disdain of foreigners and what passes for their culture.

For the rst of this talk please visit the blog here.  
   

Tne Quarterly Conversation Reviews The Accident

Over at The Quarterly Conversation, David Auerbach offers an in-depth and thoughtful consideration of the latest title in the Biblioasis International Translation Series, Mihail Sebastian's The Accident:

The Accident arrives as something of an appendix to the massiveJournal of Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945), a record of his life as a Romanian Jewish writer from 1935 to 1944. Though Sebastian is known in Romania for his plays and, to a lesser extent, his novels, to my knowledge nothing of his appeared in English until his Journal was published in 2000, chronicling the horrors and fears of life in Romania during World War II. The Accident is his first translated work of fiction.

Next to the immediacy of the Journal, The Accident initially disappoints. The novel begins promisingly with an evocative scene in which the intense, quixotic Nora falls while exiting a tram and is helped up by the downtrodden intellectual Paul. They tentatively embark on a rushed affair driven by Nora’s fixation on Paul, which frightens and liberates them. But the novel then loses its way in a flashback chronicling Paul’s earlier involvement with Ann, a dreary artist. Ann clearly represents the faux-bohemian life that has ensnared Paul, but both she and Paul remain too diffuse for this section to take hold as a picture of the limits of Paul’s life. Paul’s criticism of Ann’s paintings telegraphs the problem with their entire milieu: “There’s something gesticulating in your paintings. They’re too hearty, too talkative, too familiar at the first glance.” Ann replies: “I am talkative, I am frivolous.”

The greater import of The Accident reveals itself only against the background of Sebastian’s Journal, which described in some detail his writing of the novel. But the greater context is crucial as well. The Journal was not published until 1996 (it was translated into in English in 2000), when its portrayal of Romanian complicity in the Holocaust caused controversy. Over 300,000 Romanian Jews died during World War II, a large percentage by death squads set up by Romania’s own aggressively anti-Semitic government. Sebastian was fortunate to live in Bucharest, which was spared the worst of Romania’s policies, but he witnessed the virulent anti-Semitism and deportations and heard firsthand accounts of the government’s massacres carried out on the orders of Prime Minister Ion Antonescu. Sebastian sensitively, painfully chronicled details of the Holocaust as it was happening that many would not know until after the war. Sebastian survived the war, only to be killed in an auto accident in 1945.

To read the full review, please go here.

The Wall Street Journal reviews Mihail Sebastian's The Accident

In what was quite a weekend for Biblioasis reviews -- see below for the Star and Globe reviews of Blaise's Meagre Tarmac -- the Wall Street Journal reviewed the latest title in the Biblioasis International Translation Series. In a review titled "Tender and Tense," Sam Sacks writes of Mihail Sebastian's The Accident (in a translation by Stephen Henighan):

The Romanian-Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian (1907-45) came to the attention of the English-speaking world in 2000 with the publication of his incandescently angry and exacting World War II diaries. Yet during the war—as he survived in Bucharest, shunned by his Nazi-supporting former friends—he wrote "The Accident" (Biblioasis, 257 pages, $17.95), a captivating novel about a love affair.

"The Accident," translated by Stephen Henighan, would be a marvel of beauty and control under any circumstance; that it was written by a Jew in Romania in 1940 seems miraculous. ...The mountains provide an escape for Paul from his paralyzing lovesickness—just as the writing of the novel, we suspect, transported Sebastian from what he called in his diaries the "anti-Semitic dementia" of his daily surroundings. As in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," the snowbound fastnesses seem to warp the standard measurements of time. When Paul takes to the slopes—the skiing scenes are the best I've read since Mann's—time's passage thrillingly compresses and expands in his consciousness ...

To read the entire review, please go here.

Stephen Henighan on the Future of Books

Over at the Winnipeg Review, Biblioasis author and Translation series Editor Stephen Henighan answers a few questions on the future of books:

Stephen Henighan responded by email early in April to a standard set of five questions that TWR has posed to more than a dozen Canadian writers.

1) We all know that Dan Brown and his ilk can sell product in any form, ebook, pbook or otherwise. But what do you think will be the impact of ebooks on literary publishing in the near term?

The evidence we have so far suggests that as soon as you switch from paper to screen the gap between the star writer and the midlist or literary writer is amplified. Jonathan Franzen may sell 500,000 hardcovers versus the 7,000 or so sold by a well-reviewed midlist US literary writer. In ebook form, though, Franzen will sell 40,000 and the literary writer will sell two or maybe five units. In paper Franzen outsells the midlister by a factor of 70, but in ebook form this writer is outsold by a factor of 10,000 to 20,000 and ceases to have any readership at all.

There are a number of reasons for this. One may be that the ebook readership, overall, is less literarily sophisticated than the print readership. This could be a function of the transitional stage we're going through where techies have been the first to buy electronic reading devices. In that case, the sanguine view would be that it's only growing pains and will work its way out of the system as everyone acquires these devices. I suspect, though, that the problem is deeper than this, and is related to the kind of category-restricted, non-tactile browsing one does on the web, which is far more limiting than the browsing one can do in a good bookstore. It's also quite difficult for smaller presses to publicize ebooks in a way that enables browsers to be drawn to them in cyberspace, so the ebook world becomes like the movie world: if it's not big-budget, you're probably not going to hear about it. If Heather Reisman is correct that by 2016, ebooks will be forty per cent of the market, then one should anticipate a very substantially reduced market for literary fiction, essays and poetry.

2) How will your role as a writer change as a result of the increasing adoption of ebooks and ezines?

I will make less money. I don't live from my writing, but I certainly appreciate--in a spiritual as much as a financial sense--being paid for what I write and publish. The combination of feeble ebook sales for non-star-level writers and artificially depressed e-book prices is very bad news for writers' incomes. There is a widespread misconception that publishers can afford to sell ebooks for $9.95 because they don't have to pay for paper and glue. The truth is that a large part of the $20 cover price of a softcover novel, or the $30+ price of a hardcover is spent on people: acquisition editors, copy-editors, publicists. The publisher gets a very meagre cut on an ebook, and passes on the hardship to the author.

By definition, the ebook emerges in an environment in which print sales for most writers are declining. As a writer, you get shafted from both sides: minimal sales and very low royalties on ebooks, and declining sales in print. In theory, five of my ten books are now available as ebooks, yet only one of them has generated any income. That was the princely sum of $52.00 a year for three years from a library consortium that made the ebook available to several hundred thousand students and professors. Obviously, I would have made more money if only 30 or 40 of those students each year had been obliged to buy the physical book for the courses they were taking. This selling of e-rights to consortia reinforces the free-for-all mentality that raises young readers to assume that "content" is generated without meaningful exertion and can be disseminated without cost. This is extremely evident if you publish articles in online journals, or journals that post their content online. Not only do people link to the article on Twitter or Facebook, which can be flattering, but other online journals feel no compunction about "reprinting" your article in their journals without the slightest thought of any compensation other than posting your website address at the end of the article. In the early days of my career, when my short stories or articles were reprinted, a second cheque was always in the mail; in the online environment, the writer misses out on that second cheque. And on a lot of other cheques, as well!

For the rest of the interview please go here.

The Accident

One of our Spring titles is the next entry in the Biblioasis International Translation Series, Mihail Sebastian's The Accident, translated from the Romanian by Stephen Henighan. The first chapter of this novel has just been published on Douglas Glover's online magazine Numero Cinq, and can be found here.

Biblioasis Translation Series Launch Photos

It's been a bit of a busy time around these parts of late, and I've been meaning to post these photos for some time now. At Blue Met last month two of Biblioasis's Translation Series Authors were in attendance. From all received accounts Horacio Castellanos Moya, pictured above, was one of the hits of the festival, with three scheduled festival events in English and Spanish. Rumour has it that one of these sessions was recorded by CBC for playback at a later date. We'll try and find out when it will run and post a link when we do.
We also launched the latest title in our translation series, Mauricio Segura's Black Alley. A novel about Haitian and Latino gang violence in the Cotes-des-Neiges region of Montreal, it was quite a controversial novel when first published in French more than a decade ago, and it has lost none of its edge in Dawn Cornelio's translation. We're planning to do other events in support of this one. Stay tuned for further details ...

Pictured above, Translation Series Editor Stephen Henighan with Mauricio Segura.

Ondjaki's Good Morning Comrades

Good reviews keep coming in for backlist titles, as well as news that others are forthcoming -- including a review of our Kapuscinski in Rain Taxi. This time Australian Damian Kelleher, a prominent Australian blogger and reviewer, weighs in on Ondjaki's Good Morning Comrades, the second title in our Biblioasis translation series. This book did not get the attention it deserved, as we did not have the appropriate US distribution in place and had little reputation south of the border as a literary press. that has changed somewhat over the last 18 months, which has resulted, it seems in a few of our backlist titles getting a bit of additional attention.

Damian writes of Comrades:

Good Morning Comrades is short, and it refrains from seeking too much closure. Life goes on, though life has changed, and Ndalu accepts this, though he doesn't like it much. Much of the flippant, charmingly positive boy remains by the end of the novel, though his personality has now become tempered with the truths he has realised. Stephen Henighan, who translated Good Morning Comrades from the Portuguese, provides a brief overview of Angola's troubled history since gaining independence, which provides an excellent postscript to Ondjaki's novel. On a second read-through, many of Ndalu's offhand comments become clearer, and the sad shape of Angola begins to coalesce.

Ondjaki's debut novel is very strong, thanks in large part to the charisma of its narrator. Ndalu is very much the sort of young boy you would expect to become a writer, or reporter, or academic, or even politician. He is, in short, an intellectual, a curious boy who will, we hope, become an even more curious man. Ondjaki himself is an astonishingly productive author, having written nine novels and directed a documentary about Luanda, his home city, the capital of Angola, and the setting of Good Morning Comrades – and this all from a man barely into his thirties. Good Morning Comrades is a charming novel, subtle in its examination of the political difficulties of a small, poorly known African nation. Well recommended.

For the whole review, please go here.

Biblioasis Event Calendar

More to follow shortly regarding events, including a Cynthia Flood Toronto appearance, but I thought I should get this up for now.

Biblioasis 2009 Event Listings

May 5^th, 7PM: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening: St. Luke’s Parish Hall, Burlington, Ontario (with Sandra Sabatini and Kim Echlin)

May 9^th-10^th: Stephen Henighan, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, Pacific Festival of the Book, #110-2750 Quadra St, Victoria BC

May 11^th, 7: 30 PM: Stephen Hengihan, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, Oakridge Library, 1–650 West 41st Street, Vancouver, B.C

May 12^th, 7:30 pm: Stephen Henighan, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, Central Library, 350 West Georgia Street, Victoria, B.C.

May 13^th, 7:30 pm: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening: Landon Branch Library, 167 Wortley Rd, London, Ontario.

May 14^th, 7-9 pm, Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, Bistro Bar at the Sylvia hotel, 1154 Gilford St, Vancouver, BC.

May 21^st, 12 pm: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening: Callan Books, 15 York St., Stratford, Ontario (SIGNING)

May 23^rd, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening, The Manx Pub Plann 99 Reading Series, 370 Elgin St, Ottawa, Ontario

May 26^th, Hans Eichner, Kahn & Engelmann (read by Kari Grimstad), Harbourfront Reading Series, Toronto.

June 1^st, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening, McNally-Robinson, Toronto (with Vicki Delaney)

June 6^th, TBA, Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, The Manx Pub Plann 99 Reading Series, 370 Elgin St, Ottawa, Ontario

June 8^th, 7:30 pm: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening & Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, Wordsworth Books, 100 King st., South Waterloo, Ontario

June 9^th, 7:30 pm: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening & Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, Hans Eichner, Kahn & Engelmann (read by Kari Grimstad), The Bookshelf, 41 Quebec St, Guelph, Ontario

June 11^th, 7 pm: Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, TBA, Windsor, Ontario

July 5th, TBA, Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening, Bayfield.

June 15^th, TBA: Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, Langara College, Nanaimo, BC

July 24-26, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening, The Leacock Festival, Orillia, Ontario

September 20^th, All Day: Terry Griggs (Thought You Were Dead/Quickening), Grant Buday (Dragonflies), Hans Eichner (Kahn & Engelmann, read by Kari Grimstad) and Leon Rooke (Hitting the Charts), at The Eden Mills Writers Festival.

September 20^th-27^th, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening, at Winnipeg’s Thin Air Writers’ Festival

October 30-Nov.2^nd, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening, at Bookfest Windsor

November TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/ Quickening, Trent University, Peterborough

Bookfest Windsor

The Windsor Bookfest is on this weekend, and the big event for Biblioasis-o-philes is Saturday. It begins early, at 11 Am, when Stephen Henighan, Linda Leith, May Jane Maffini and Nino Ricci take part in a panel on literature and criticism in the Wilkinson Room (Main Floor). At 1 pm Mike Barnes will be talking about his memoir about bi-polar disorder, The Lily Pond (I heard a version of this talk a few weeks ago in Hamilton, and it is one of the best author talks I've heard. ), to be held in the Valiant/Rodzick Room on the 3rd floor. Between 3:30 - 5:30 Stephen Henighan will be part of a panel called Writing with Attitude alongside Nino Ricci, Diane Schoemperlen and David French, again in the Wilkinson room on the main floor. And between 8-10 pm David Hickey will participate in a poetry panel on the Wired, Wired Word alongside Di Brandt, Alanna Bondar, Karl Jirgens, M. Nourbese Philip and Steven R. Smith.

I'm very disappointed to hear I'll be missing Mary Swan tonight. But t'is Halloween, and I'll be guiding my Batman and Vampire-Knight around the neighbourhood. I can take some solace in the fact that I'll have the comapny of Mike Barnes, his wife (and wonderful artist) Heather Simcoe and David Hickey's company for the evening.

Henighan's Desk Space

Over on Evie Christie's Desk Space, a short interview with Stephen Henighan on where he writes, which can be found here:

desk-space.blogspot.com/2008/09/stephen-henighan.html

Globe Symposium on Henighan's Report on the Afterlife of Culture

The back page of the Saturday Globe -- welcome back! -- contained a Symposium on Henighan's A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. At issue: Nigel Beale's (yes, the very same who believes Burnett a better writer than Hood or Levine. Around the bibliomanse last week we were trying out his name as a expletive, but couldn't decide whether to nige or to beale made the best curse, so eventually gave up. {All in good fun, of course: to pull a Wells, in some circles, is as low as you can go, and I've learned to live with it.} ) review a few weeks past in the Globe of said Report.

You can read the original review on the blog. But as the Globe has a tendency to make these thinks pay to read, we'll just cut and paste the whole thing below.

Again, there's not much to say about Beale's response here. I'm always leery when a person asks us to trust him in the way Beale has. Sort of like being in a used car lot, and being told not to bother kicking the tires, no matter how threadbare they may look. But it seems at least that the Syposium has people talking: I received an email from a bookseller who said a well known writer rushed into the shop at 10 am looking for the book, and he overheard at least three individual conversations about it in his bookshop Saturday. So, as he said, hooray for critical reviewing! Here's to hoping the the Globe contains more of it as we embark on the fall book season.

SYMPOSIUM: THE ART AND CRAFT OF ESSAY WRITING

As Beale's review demonstrates, crustiness combined with historical inaccuracies, questionable summaries and turgid prose soon becomes unconvincing

STEPHEN HENIGHAN

August 30, 2008

By quoting Dr. Johnson at the beginning and end of his review of my A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, Nigel Beale strikes the pose of a crusty fellow who's not going to put up with any nonsense - particularly, as his disparaging references to Susan Sontag and Naomi Klein make clear, leftist nonsense.

But in order to pull off the crustiness act you need to get your facts straight. As Beale's review demonstrates, crustiness combined with historical inaccuracies, questionable summaries and turgid prose soon becomes unconvincing. When Beale announced on his personal website on June 22 that he was giving my book a bad review in The Globe and Mail, he wrote of the title essay, which particularly irked him, that it "inhabits about a third of the whole [book]." In fact, this essay, which occupies 62 of the 339 pages, inhabits less than one-fifth of the book.

Beale's problems in summarizing what he reads begin here. He describes the essay's closing section as "rambling accusations that Ian McEwan manipulates history." This line refers to one paragraph of a 20-page section; the section's central theme is how, in Atonement, McEwan repudiates Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, arguing for the innate superiority of commercial fiction over that which creates complex artistic effects.

Maybe Beale doesn't get the subject of this essay right because he dislikes what it says. It is very revealing that when he scorns my call for a literary cosmopolitanism rooted in local detail, rejecting the examples of The Tin Drum, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight's Children, he is unable to offer contemporary novelistic counter-examples. Instead, he floats the canard that these works aren't relevant to Canadians because they don't focus primarily on immigrants (although all describe marginalized communities and include forms of immigrant experience).

Print Edition - Section Front

Enlarge Image

Beale then reverts to ideological type, claiming there's "a compelling case for the marketplace determining [literary] quality." So the great novelists of our time are Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling?

Rather than follow this argument through, Beale hides behind a bust of Shakespeare. Leaving aside the vast differences of context between Renaissance drama and contemporary novels, Beale's claim that Shakespeare is great because he is, apparently, a private-sector hero who "went with whatever he could find that would appeal to audiences," sees him once again tailoring history to suit his ideology. The historical Shakespeare belonged to the King's Players, who lived on "the royal patent," the equivalent of a long-term Canada Council Grant. Some private sector!

Beale lapses again when he inaccurately "corrects" me on the translation of Latin American literature in general and Roberto Bolaño in particular. In fact, U.S. publishers do translate less Latin American literature than they used to. The big names of past decades - Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende - continue to appear, but subsequent generations of Latin American writers are less widely translated into English than into European languages. I document this, and the shift has been the subject of academic studies; Beale was obviously too busy writing "B.S." in the margins, as he claims he did frequently, to notice these details.

The first Bolaño novel translated into English, By Night in Chile, was published by Harvill U.K. in February,2003, in a translation by Australian Chris Andrews. In the view of Andrews, and other observers, two articles (one of them mine and included in my book) on Bolaño's untranslated fiction in the London Times Literary Supplement in late 2004 were important to selling U.S. rights to Bolaño's two longest novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666, to Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2005.

Bolaño's work arrived in English via the Barcelona-London-Melbourne-New York axis. Yet Beale, clinging to American centrality, decrees such contemporary complication of "translation routes" to be impossible. Beale's ideology becomes hostile not merely to the facts contained in my book, but to the factual world. When he claims that racists in East London are simply showing "pride in Englishness," it's time to take a hard look at the moral foundations of his pose of crusty skepticism.

THE RESPONSE

I dislike many of Henighan's essays because they are poorly argued and sloppily constructed

BY NIGEL BEALE

I've never embraced an eel, but after wrestling over several days with Stephen Henighan's slippery rebuttal, I think I have a pretty good idea of what it might feel like.

His complaint is that I don't get my facts straight. Given space limitations, I can only respond to several of his challenges. However, I assure you that all of them are wholly unsubstantiated: The King's Players were established by King James in 1603, after Shakespeare had written many of his greatest plays, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra; taken significant financial risks; wowed many raucous audiences, and weathered judgment by rotten tomato.

Shakespeare retired a wealthy man. One does not get rich on government arts money, Canada Council grants or otherwise.

Philip Larkin, James Shapiro (in his book 1599) and many others have acknowledged Shakespeare's debt to the free market. C. J. Sisson, for example, in his essay The Theatres and Companies (in A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Cambridge, 1934), says the necessity of appealing to the pit "saved the Elizabethan drama from becoming over educated and urbanized, and preserved its strength and universality, despite theorizers [and] men of wit and fashion."

Henighan's TLS claim is reminiscent of Al Gore declaring that he invented the Internet. Here's Scott Esposito, a close observer of the Latin American literary scene: "It's simply naive to insist that an essay published in the London Times carried greater force with FSG than the years of work New Directions (an American publisher) did to establish Bolaño in publications like The New Yorker. The fact is that if FSG hadn't published The Savage Detective and 2666, both Dalkey and ND would have gladly taken up either or both."

I do not "disparage" Susan Sontag or Naomi Klein, rather I accuse Henighan of rehashing their original ideas.

Finally, there is no ideology at work in my hostility toward Henighan's book. I dislike a good many of its essays for the simple reason that they are poorly argued and sloppily constructed.

AT ISSUE

Nigel Beale felt that many of the subjects under discussion in Stephen Henighan's book of essays, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, deserved to be aired. But he found the book unfocused and inconsistent, and ultimately unconvincing. Henighan feels that Beale's criticism was error-filled and ill-founded.

Two Review of Henighan's Report

Two reviews appeared this weekend of Stephen Henighan's A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. The first, in the Globe & Mail, was, err, negative. It can be found here:

www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080726.BKHENI26/TPStory/Entertainment/Books

Though it may be poor form to weigh in on this, as Nigel is obviously completely at his liberty to dislike this book, a few of his criticism were, I think, at the very least debatable. I think he misses the point on the discussion of Ian McEwan; it was the British who were responsible the interest in Robert Bolano (beating American publishers to the punch by a few years); it's pretty well documented that American interest in Latin American writing has been rather stagnate for quite some time (this is one of the reasons why a press like Biblioasis can afford to go after some of the best Latin American writers in the world: there's just not that many places, on either side of the Atlantic, interested in bringing Moya and company into english); good fiction may not be produced with foreign rights sales in mind, but a lot of the fiction agented by the big rep houses is; I could go on ... but ...

Thankfully, not all the coverage this weekend was quite so negative: the second review was by Alex Good in the Guelph Mercury. Here's the gist of this short capsule:

Whether in his sweeping, historical "Report" or in his appreciations of international authors, or commentary on the Canadian scene, Henighan is always worth reading. Disagreeing with his many controversial opinions is half the fun.

The whole thing can be found here:

news.guelphmercury.com/Life/article/360092

Good's longer review can be found on his website, here:

/www.goodreports.net/reviews/areportontheafterlifeofculture.htm

Cutting Down our Tall Poppies

An article in the Republic of East Vancouver has just been published about Stephen Henighan and his latest collection, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. You can read it here:

www.republic-news.org/archive/191-repub/191_sercombe.html

Here's a short excerpt:

A public intellectual on the cutting edge is lauded in most countries, but in Canada many literary types have not read Henighan or they bristle defensively at the name as though he doesn’t quite know how to behave around the Canlit table. Picture your favourite uncle who comes to Christmas dinner and pokes gentle fun at stuffy family habits.

Alex Good on Stephen Henighan's Report

Alex Good has come out of hiding and posted a review of Stephen Henighan's A Report on the Afterlife of Culture over at goodreports.net. The review can be found here:

www.goodreports.net/reviews/areportontheafterlifeofculture.htm

A short excerpt:

The "Report," which is the long essay that makes up the entire first part of this collection, is one of the most engaging and provocative pieces of critical writing I've read in years. And for those who enjoy seeing blood on the floor, well, you might want to go right to the final section and witness the flaying of Globe and Mail reviewer T. F. "Rave" Rigelhof. In the face of such a globe-trotting, erudite onslaught, caveats register like speed bumps. ... But disagreeing with a book like this -- and I disagreed a lot -- is the whole point. For jagged insight and provocative, anti-establishment rhetoric there's probably no other commentator on literary matters in Canada more worth reading. Or so much fun.