Time to Say Good-Bye

Gerard ter Borch, Man on Horseback. Image Source

There is no better opportunity to announce the closing of The Untranslated than after climbing the K2 of world literature (i. e. Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca), for the place of Mount Everest will always be reserved for Finnegans Wake, while Zettel’s Traum is more like the Mariana Trench. If you have read my fifth-anniversary blog post, this announcement should not come as a complete surprise. Some of my readers have been genuinely puzzled about all the effort that comes into my reviews, and this realisation has finally caught up with me. I would like to find a different use for this energy, preferably more enjoyable and fulfilling for myself. I’ve realised that being a polyglot whizz kid who can read Ulysses-like books in multiple languages and write painstakingly detailed reviews of them is not a thing for me anymore. Especially considering the fact that I’m over forty now. Altogether, there is enough information here to keep busy scores of publishers and translators. I see no point in adding more titles that many of my readers are unlikely to read, and I do not fancy being a useful data collector and processor anymore. The moderate interest in my blog has shown that there is a gap in contemporary Anglophone literary magazines, which needs to be filled. I do not think that it is so difficult nowadays to commission reviews of significant foreign-language titles from scholars around the world. Many of them will be able to write in English, and if not, there are always translators. Knowledge exchange is as important for the humanities as it is for sciences: we shouldn’t be kept in the dark as to what is happening in other cultures and in other languages, for ignorance rarely leads to progress. This is not a job for one person, of course. What is required is a well-funded, institutionalised effort. My blog has just scratched the surface, but I hope that was enough to make my readers’ aware of what kinds treasures lie hidden in the enormous mountain of untranslated literature, which keeps growing every day.

For the time being, I am planning just to take a break. It is quite possible that I will start another blog with a more general theme, and chances are I may yet write about a couple of untranslated unreadable novels there, so the fans of those should not get utterly dejected. If I have a new blog, I will post the update here. Not much else is left to say. Thanks to all my subscribers and all my readers. If you haven’t read all my posts yet, perhaps now’s the time to browse the archives: I’m sure there will be something of interest for you there.