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how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion
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luke.lewandowski
Posted 2007-09-19 2:56 PM (#1048)
Subject: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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As good as WWE seems to as an idea I - being a non-native English speaker - resent the fact, that no 'foreign' will get included in the list under the current assumptions. As good as contemporary English language SF is, this isn't the only SF out there (although its sheer momentum and mass give it a massive head start).

I know that there is no simple way to add foreign literature, since there is no single, coherent 'Non-English SF&F" award in existence. Adding many particular country-specific awards to the system seems like too mach hassle.

BUT how will this system ever be complete without such titles:

"Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky [Russian]
"Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem [Polish]
"War with the Newts" by Karel Capek [Czech]

?

I'm sure that even native English speakers must have heard about at least one of the above.

Maybe an additional 'Others' list based on a certain independent sources? What those source could be beats my at the moment. Perhaps someone has any ideas?
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Administrator
Posted 2007-09-19 7:26 PM (#1050 - in reply to #1048)
Subject: RE: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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luke,

let me address the points you've made:

luke.lewandowski - 2007-09-19 2:56 PM As good as WWE seems to as an idea I - being a non-native English speaker - resent the fact, that no 'foreign' will get included in the list under the current assumptions. As good as contemporary English language SF is, this isn't the only SF out there (although its sheer momentum and mass give it a massive head start).

the lack of foreign language works is not meant as any kind of slight.  we speak english so the content is in english.  simple as that.  we're aware that there is great SF/F fiction beyond our borders but it's not accessable to us unless it gets translated.  the scope of the site just does not allow for foreign language works at this time.  will it grow to include foreign language works in the future?  probably, but that's a long way down the road from where we're sitting.  we've got our work cut out for us as is.

BUT how will this system ever be complete without such titles: "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky [Russian] "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem [Polish] "War with the Newts" by Karel Capek [Czech] ?

if you do a search you will find that we have: Roadside Picnic and Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco and i'm sure other translated works so we're not bereft of foreign stars altogether.  you will note we did not excise them from the database for being "foreign"

I'm sure that even native English speakers must have heard about at least one of the above. Maybe an additional 'Others' list based on a certain independent sources? What those source could be beats my at the moment. Perhaps someone has any ideas?

the forum is there for you to discuss whatever aspects of SF/F you want to.  i'd suggest you start a thread about foreign language works.  i'm sure you'll generate some interest.

as far as having an additional list of foreign language books, that's outside of our plan for now.  (again, thats something you can start a thread on.)  our goal is to cover the awards we have on the site now very thoroughly before we move on.  after that we'll be covering other books by the authors currently in our database and then some time after that we'll open up to all works of SF/F outside of the awards we cover.  we plan on adding some additional awards to the database but alas, they will be anglo-centric as well.

please keep in mind that the site is only a few days old.  it will continue to grow and evolve but i doubt it will ever be everything to everyone.  i hope your resentment won't keep you from participating.

thanks for your feedback! 

- dave

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luke.lewandowski
Posted 2007-09-19 8:17 PM (#1051 - in reply to #1050)
Subject: Re: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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Dave,

I had NO IDEA that translations qualify(ied) for Campbells or Clarks! What a relief!

I'm pretty sure though (correct me if I'm wrong) that neither Hugos nor Nebulas give awards for foreing language literature. Given the size, scope and reach of the awards - I've always found it a pitty. They could have a category similar to that of the Academy Awards: Best Foreign Picture.

Nevertheless, I'm probably getting too excited about the site before it's really caught on.

And truth be told: I'm mostly into English language literature anyway (with some brief exceptions for German or Polish).

The reason is that the amount of publicity is directly proportional to the numbers of potential readers and since we live in an English speaking world... Oh well - even I knew this year's nominees for Hugos and Nebulas far earlier than anything else. I'd even forgotten to check any Polish polls and awards before they were given.

The Polish equivalent of Nebula is called Zajdel [zay:dell];

One can look it up here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_A._Zajdel_Award

Alas, I am only aware of one anthology of short Polish SF&F stories (most of them awarded with Zajdel) that was published in the UK last year.

Oddly enough, it isn't because other stories are not noteworthy. Polish authors are heavily translated and published in Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany and sometimes France. And it also works the other way: lots of books and stories from those markets reach Poland.

Anyway, again, cool idea for the site and hopefully it's gonna grow.
- Luke
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icowrich
Posted 2007-09-19 9:30 PM (#1054 - in reply to #1048)
Subject: RE: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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I can tell you that the Hugo Awards were held in Japan this year specifically to be more inclusive. Many, in fact, expected Japanese authors to get nominated because so many more potential judges would be Japanese. That didn't happen, as it turns out, but it does remind us that Worldcon is a global convention, and anyone can be nominated or win.

Any translated work that wins any of the eight major awards will be on our site. Go out and join your local club or con and vote!

-Rico
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Administrator
Posted 2007-09-19 9:36 PM (#1055 - in reply to #1048)
Subject: Re: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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luke,
all the awards have a different slant to them. different eligability rules, selction criteria etc. it would be interesting to note which books in the databse were not originally written in english. we have a place to note nationality for the authors on the author page tho that content is very scant at present. as we get better and more complete data we'll add search features that will let you search authors by nationality.

this is all great stuff. i really appreciate your enthusiasm! i hope we can build this site into something really great.

- dave

p.s. you've got me wondering about this Lem fellow now. i have added Fiasco to my reading list.
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luke.lewandowski
Posted 2007-09-19 10:08 PM (#1056 - in reply to #1048)
Subject: Re: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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'This Lem fellow' was (until he died 2 years ago) on of the most serious candidate for the Nobel Prize (that would have been the 5th Polish author to win it) - but he never actually got it. Pitty. Plus he was an honorary member of th American Panclub and Science Fiction Writers of America, as far as I remember.

Instead of Fiasco I would REALLY recommend SOLARIS. If you've seen the Sodherbeg movie with George Clooney and didn't like it - don't worry. The book is much more extensive and asks completely different questions than the film. If I were to recommend anything else by him (and most of his works are available in English), I'd also probably recommend RETURN FROM THE STARS.

Check the wikipedia entry on him here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Lem and read the SFWA controversy section.

There is also a funny anecdote that Philip K. Dick in his paranoid interpretation of reality, never believed that Lem actually existed - he considered his works too versatile and too original to be a work of a single author. As far as I remember, Dick's solution to the problem was that LEM was a Soviet-inspired organization established to establish mind control Polish society and even oficiall informed FBI about his musings... I may be wrong about some details, but the overall story is supposedly true, as I've kept seeing references to it now and then.

Another interesting 'factoid' is that Lem, being a man of extremly high IQ, 'invented' differential mechanism (gears) during his studies at the University of Lwow (before WW 2), not knowing that such mechanism had actually been invented a century earlier.

-luke
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Administrator
Posted 2007-09-19 10:58 PM (#1059 - in reply to #1056)
Subject: Re: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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luke,
i'll take your recommendation to heart and start with Solaris. i did see the movie and rather liked it but that may be because i have not yet read the book. the leap to film is, more often than not, a failure for good SF especially in Hollywood.

great story about Lem and the SFWA. i'd heard that before but not the part about PKD and the FBI. funny!

- dave
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TreverT
Posted 2007-09-20 5:56 AM (#1061 - in reply to #1048)
Subject: RE: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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As an aside to the above, I too (coming from the US) had an English-myopic view of SF fiction. I wrote a blog entry some time back called "The One Way Culture Door" about how odd it seemed that so much English language media from OUTSIDE comes into France (where I now live), and yet how little French media seems to go out. At last year's Utopiales convention I ended up talking for a bit with a French SF writer who's a full-time author and bestseller here, yet has never had any of his books translated. He had a table full of novels,not one of which was available in English.

(On a similar note, there's a popular mystery writer out here in Brittany who has written "Breton murder mysteries" for something like twenty years now, and has one of those typical mystery "series" going with regular characters. Out of somewhere around twenty books, ONE just got translated into English this year, and it was something like #18 of the series)

I don't know how to suggest incorporating this stuff into the site, though. It's an English language site, so I expect the content to be predominantly English. I guess my best suggestion is to simply have a subcategory of some sort for "foreign language SF" and see if it grows. Odds are, it will remain a niche area of the site, but you never know. If WWEnd starts getting tons of international visitors and the foreign language section really starts growing by leaps and bounds, you can always go in and extend/reorganize it later.
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icowrich
Posted 2007-09-20 6:10 AM (#1062 - in reply to #1061)
Subject: RE: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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Our main issue is the language barrier, of course. We may, at some point, incorporate foreign language materials, but that will require volunteer moderators who speak that language making rather solid commitments. I'm guessing that will happen, actually, but it will take some time and quit a bit of work.
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luke.lewandowski
Posted 2007-09-20 7:14 AM (#1064 - in reply to #1062)
Subject: Re: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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I totally agree with TreverT. Of all non-English SF&F French is one of the best. I lived in Paris for 3 years (what a pitty I have had to trade it for Zurich...) and I fell in love with French storytelling. Granted, my fascination was more comic-book oriented (the best artistic comic book series comes from France and Belgium, no doubt about that), but then I discovered a couple of gems here and there; yet they hardly ever break through.

It is hard to tell if it some sort of prejudice among Americans / Britons (or Anglosaxons in general) - I have never seen a live example, even though I have plenty of friends from the other side of the pond. I would rather suspect that if there is any prejudice it's most likely on the publishing / business side of things. Taking a significant risk by introducing an unknow, foreign author is usually not optimal, and publishers DON'T do it. Why does it work the other way then (US -> rest of the world).?

There are many reasons for overall cultural dominance of the US, but it is also a matter of sheer scope, economies of scale and risk diversification. American market is huge. It introduces and gives a market test to hundreds of new authors a year. If something catches on - it gets exported and becomes a rather riskless investment for foreign publishers, too. Publishers pay a premium to Americans for the right to published a tested book, but they save themselves the trouble. I have also observed it for years in the Polish market. There is simply a big disproportion of creators vs. readers, and editors are less experienced too (less raw materials - less experience - worse results). Since readers are intellectually demanding all over the civilized world - imports have to fill in the gap.

And a digression: I recently had a wonderful opportunity to taste French SF and see how it works, even if transported. It was not a book, but a computer game marketed as "interactive movie". It's called Fahrenheti (or: Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy, look it up if you wish, watch a trailer or simply BUY), it takes place in New York, it's 100% English language, yet the whole team who worked on this true marvel of interactive SF was French. The game is a wonderful melange of spectacular technology, a thriller and pure SF story at the same time.

One day WWE would undoubtedly need a category for those types of media, too.

Cheers,
Luke

Edited by luke.lewandowski 2007-09-20 7:15 AM
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Administrator
Posted 2007-09-20 8:41 AM (#1066 - in reply to #1048)
Subject: Re: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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i think what it comes down to is that we, as fans, just want great SF/F books period. i don't care at all where they come from or what the original language was and i suspect most people feel the same way. i don't think it's a cultural bias on the part of the fans though i may be wrong on that. nationalism is alive and well everywhere.

i've never picked a book because the writer was american or brittish. there are just too many meaningful ways to select my next book to bother with that. most of the time i'm oblivious to the authors nationality. take Stanislaw Lem. pretty obviously a Polish name but i was never really aware his works were originally in polish. he could be an american of polish descent for all i knew.

i think luke has hit it on the head. it usually comes down to money. the publishers have got to keep churning it out and as long as what they're doing continues to make money they're not likely to take many risks. consequently we get a tiny trickle of stuff from overseas. in reverse, if a book sells millions of copies in the US it would probably be a pretty easy financial decision for a french publisher to put it out.

so how do we get our hands on more foreign language translations? we've seen that some of them make it into the awards but there's no award for books "originally published in a foreign language" that i'm aware of. i wonder if we could start something like that?

- dave
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luke.lewandowski
Posted 2007-09-20 8:48 AM (#1067 - in reply to #1048)
Subject: Re: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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One could start a 'foreign language award' but then - one would always have to make an initial selection. I guess we'd find out whether nationalisms still persist soon thereafter

I would make a mental note to try it someday if I were the WWE admin, but - even though I started this discussion - I'd probably stick to what we've got for the time being.
- Luke
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icowrich
Posted 2007-09-20 7:42 PM (#1071 - in reply to #1067)
Subject: Re: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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We do have Jules Verne in the ebooks section. He was French, of course, and is considered the father of science fiction by many (moi included).

As for why US books make it abroad while the reverse is less common, I think it has something to do with the marketing machine that American and British publishers have that other countries lack. There are also cultural differences. France, for instance, doesn't engage the world in dialogue the way the US does. Translation from anything French to any non-French language (especially English) is looked down upon there. There are also issues with translation itself. Many a great book in Russian gets butchered in English. If an author writes with poetic style, it may not translate. Think Shakespeare in translation...it just doesn't work unless the translator is as brilliant as Shakespeare himself! If he is that brilliant, than he should be writing his own stuff.

I recently read The Fatal Eggs, by Mikhail Bulgakov. While I could see glimpses of brilliance in the work, the translation was often distracting and sometimes dull. I don't know how much of that was the translator's fault, but, as my old Greek professor used to say "all translations are lies". I'm sure it was much better in Russian.

I'm sure it would work better with authors who are more story-oriented and less prosaic. I, however, want the prose. I love a good turn of phrase, and would begrudge any translator his unvarnished view. I think that may be part of the reason why people prefer not to read translations, all else being equal.

Am I making sense?

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luke.lewandowski
Posted 2007-09-20 8:45 PM (#1073 - in reply to #1048)
Subject: Re: how to make WWE a complete SF&F 'canon' companion



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icowrich,

Pretty much so. Same reason why I prefer to read English literature in English (I hereby thank my dad for financing my private English classes for 15+ years...). 90% of translations are rubbish. The French - as you noted - officially consider translations inferior, and therefore they hardly talk about any foreign literature at school.

Sometimes if a particular translation (esp. of a classic) 'sinks in' the readership would never accept a new one.

I remember a sad attempt at an introduction of a 'new' translation of an already well-established book, made by somewhat too brave publishing house in Poland. They decided to reintroduce Lord of the Rings in a completely new version, after the first (and a fairly good one for that matter) had already been on the market since the first print (i.e. for ca. 20 years).
Even though the new translation closely followed guidelines left by master Tolkien himself (and we all know that he was an 'uberlinguist', it was riddiculed - not for being bad, but merely for being 'new' - and as far as I remember 100k+ printed volumes ended up as rolls of toilet paper. This is the most extreme case of translation going awry.

On the positive side: English speakers are lucky in certain cases. It is certainly true for English issues of Stanislaw Lem. His works were all translated by an American, Michael Kandel (also an editor for many Ursula Le Guin books as far as I remember), under close supervision and guidance from the author himself.
Out of pure curiosity I read some of those translations and compared them to originals. I have to tell you that I was very impressed. Sometimes it looked/read/sounded better than the original.

To sum up - there is no hard rule. Miracles happen but don't count on them.

Have you read Master and Margaret? Some say - the best by Mikhail Bulkhakov. I can't read or understand Russian, but at least in this case - since Polish and Russian are very similar - I'm sure that my translation was pretty acurate. Brilliance was written all over it The dark humour of this novel has become a cultural thing even in Poland. There are three pubs in my hometown (Poznan, Poland), each named after different character from this particular novel... (Berlioz, Woland, Behemot) Btw. Do you know of any such 'fantastic' pub / bar names anywhere in the US? 'Rick Deckard's Sushi Bar' for instance?

- luke

P.S.
I remember reading Hamlet in Polish once, back in high school, and your comment intrigued me. I checked. The 'classic' translation was indeed made by a famous Polish poet. As soon as I find some time, I will try to compare a couple of passages and see how it worked. I'm only afraid that I may not understand Shakespeare's English in its entirety...
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