<p>In between Splice duties, I'll be spending March (and potentially beyond; it's a big book) reading Thomas Mann's 1901 debut novel <em>Buddenbrooks</em> in collaboration with Scott Esposito and Sacha Arnold, both of the superlative online literary review <a href="http://quarterlyconversation.com/" target="_blank">The Quarterly Conversation</a>. The discussion's going down at Scott's blog, <a href="http://www.conversationalreading.com/buddenbrooks/" target="_blank">Conversational Reading</a>.</p> <p>I've been a contributor to TQC for a little over a year now, but even if I weren't, I would read it for the consistently high quality of fiction and poetry coverage they offer every three months. In particular, TQC is part of a growing online community of literary reviews that put a special emphasis on translated work, partly in response to the larger print book reviews' resistance to this coverage.</p> <p>So far, in fact, our discussion has mainly focused on the different merits of the two widely-available <em>Buddenbrooks</em> translations. We've all settled on John E. Woods' 1993 version instead of the one by H.T. Lowe-Porter that appeared earlier in the 20th century, but Mann's use of vernacular and puns (both essential to his aims) raise the question of whether <em>any</em> translation can possibly capture these subtleties. So far, Sacha's <a href="http://www.conversationalreading.com/2009/03/buddenbrooks-why-woods.html" target="_blank">had reservations</a>, but I'm <a href="http://www.conversationalreading.com/2009/03/mann-und-englisch.html" target="_blank">more inclined</a> to the "Fuck it, dude; let's keep reading" mentality myself.</p> <p>It's a thick, meaty book, however, and the conversation is bound to fly all over the place as we progress. Please join us, or, if you've already read <em>Buddenbrooks</em>, add to the dialogue in the comments.</p> John Lingan writing, thomas mann buddenbrooks, conversational reading, quarterly conversation, literary blog, john lingan the-feed 2 2009-03-12T11:07:14-04:00 <p>This month, I'll be working with two other online book nerds to parse Thomas Mann's "Decline of a Family."</p> 7 4015 blogging-buddenbrooks 2009-03-12T11:36:01-04:00 true false false false false #<Image:0x2ab990692840> 2009-03-12T11:36:25-04:00 http://www.conversationalreading.com/ 12 0