Category Archives: The Great Untranslated

The Great Untranslated: Ostatnia powieść (The Last Novel) by Teodor Parnicki

Posted on October 8, 2018 by

In world literature there is a special category: the Great Unfinished Novel. It comprises such early-20th century classics as Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and, from more recent times:  Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting … Continue reading →

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The Great Untranslated: Jernalderdrøm (Iron Age Dream) by Steinar Løding

Posted on June 2, 2018 by

                 Jernalderdrøm (Iron Age Dream) is a giant literary project undertaken by Norwegian author Steinar Løding, about whose existence, most probably, you will learn only from this post. Do not be surprised. I myself discovered this writer … Continue reading →

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The Great Untranslated: Pałuba by Karol Irzykowski

Posted on March 19, 2018 by

In his introduction to Celina Wieniewska’s translation of Bruno Schulz’s short-story collection The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, literary scholar and translator David A. Goldfarb dwells on the difficulties posed by the polysemy of the Polish word pałuba and mentions in … Continue reading →

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The Great Untranslated: To Mythistorima tis Kyrias Ersis (The Novel of Mrs Ersi) by Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis

Posted on January 21, 2018 by

When asked about the great literary events that happened in 1922, you will immediately come up with the most renowned products of the annus mirabilis: T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland , Virgina Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Most likely, … Continue reading →

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The Great Untranslated: Myrbråtenfortellingene by Thure Erik Lund

Posted on December 16, 2017 by

Let’s talk about Norwegian literature. No, we’re not going to talk about Karl Ove Knausgaard; we’re going to quote him: You wouldn’t have read him, there’s a Norwegian writer, Thure Erik Lund, he’s the greatest prose writer in my generation. … Continue reading →

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The Great Untranslated: Raadsels van het rund (Enigmas of the Cow) by Jacq Firmin Vogelaar

Posted on June 11, 2017 by

The 1970s were the miraculous decade of American literary postmodernism when some of the wildest and most daring novels were published: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father (1975) Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), John Barth’s … Continue reading →

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The Great Untranslated: Days of Ziklag by S. Yizhar

Posted on May 21, 2017 by

 Days of Ziklag is the longest novel in Hebrew literature. Its collective protagonist is a commando unit of Israeli soldiers fighting against the Egyptian troops for the possession of a strategic hilltop during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Most of the novel is … Continue reading →

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The Great Untranslated: Rondo by Gösta Oswald

Posted on October 7, 2016 by

Gösta Oswald was a prodigy of the Swedish modernist scene, publishing his first collection of poetry at the age of nineteen. His tragic death in a drowning accident in 1950, when he was just twenty-four years old, cut short a formidable … Continue reading →

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The Great Untranslated: Volter Kilpi’s Alastalon salissa

Posted on December 19, 2015 by

If you are the kind of person who would find fascinating a 70-page account of a character walking across the room to choose a pipe from the mantelpiece, then Volter Kilpi’s novel Alastalon salissa (In Alastalo’s Parlour)  is up your alley. The book was published in … Continue reading →

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The Great Untranslated: Tutunamayanlar by Oğuz Atay

Posted on March 27, 2015 by

When it comes to Turkish literature, we are lamentably deprived. The gaping lacuna is what is considered by many to be the greatest 20th-century literary achievement in Turkey: Oğuz Atay’s experimental, linguistically complex novel of ideas Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected). It has been … Continue reading →

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