Sunday, August 13, 2017

Novelist as a Vocation out in Polish Next Week

Haruki Murakami's book of essays on writing, titled in Japanese Shokugyō to shite no shōsetsuka (which some refer to as "advice for young writers), is coming out in Polish next week from Muza S.A. in my translation. 

In English, I believe only one of the eleven essays, titled, "So What Shall I Write About?" has been published so far, appearing in Volume 5 of Monkey Business (2015) in a translation by Ted Goossen. 
You can read a short fragment of the essay here:
https://longreads.com/2017/06/08/haruki-murakamis-advice-to-young-writers/
or you can buy the issue here:
http://monkeybusinessmag.tumblr.com/store

On the webpage of Curtis-Brown, Murakami's European agent, it says that the US publication of the entire book is planned for 2019. 

In terms of translation into European languages, the book has already appeared in German, Italian (both of which I have announced on this blog earlier), and also in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Czech.

The Spanish edition, translated by Fernando Cordobés and Yoko Ogihara, came out in April 2017 from Tusquets. Interestingly, the Spanish title is De qué hablo cuando hablo de scriber, or, "What I talk about when I talk about writing," which plays on the title of another book by Murakami, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running.  This in turn, of course, played on the title of a Raymond Carver story, "What We Talk about When We Talk about Love." The Catalan edition used the same trick in the title, De què parlo quan parole d'escriure, which was translated by Jordi Mas López and published by Editorial Empúries in April 2017. 

The Brazilian translation, by Eunice Suenaga, also came out in April 2017 under the title, Romancista como vocação, from Editora Objectiva/Alfaguara. The Czech version, by Tomáš Jurkovič, came out in April this year as well from Odeon, and was titled, Spisovatel jako povolání. Both titles seem to use words close to the English word "vocation" for the Japanese shokugyō.  The Swedish translation, by Yukiko Duke, will come out from Norstedts in October of this year.