{"id":2668,"date":"2023-03-05T18:30:25","date_gmt":"2023-03-05T18:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=2668"},"modified":"2023-03-05T18:30:59","modified_gmt":"2023-03-05T18:30:59","slug":"guiding-readers-the-hard-task-of-writing-a-reference-book-for-a-literary-genre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2023\/03\/05\/guiding-readers-the-hard-task-of-writing-a-reference-book-for-a-literary-genre\/","title":{"rendered":"GUIDING READERS: THE HARD TASK OF WRITING A REFERENCE BOOK FOR A LITERARY GENRE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This post was going to be a formal review of a recent book for the SFRA Review<\/em>. However, I eventually decided that I could not submit a text of this nature without fully reading the book in question, a task I found impossible to fulfil. Not because the book was not good enough (it is in fact very good<\/em>) but because I felt overwhelmed. I refer to Rachel S. Cordasco\u2019s Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium<\/a><\/em> (University of Illinois Press, 2021).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Cordasco, a US-Italian reviewer and translator, has been running the website Speculative Fiction in Translation<\/a> since 2016 because \u201cSpeculative fiction offers us a unique perspective on the different peoples who call this planet home, and translation is itself a way of turning the alien into the familiar\u201d. Her website continues the work done by Israeli SF author Lavie Tidhar in the World SF blog<\/a><\/strong> (2009-2013), which he started \u201cpartly as an excuse to promote my then-forthcoming anthology of international speculative fiction, The Apex Book of World SF<\/a>\u2014but mostly out of what can only be described as an ideological drive, a desire to highlight and promote voices seldom heard in genre fiction\u201d. The impact of English-language original SF is overwhelming (in this and in most genres), and both Cordasco and Tidhar set out to try to offer a more panoramic vision. Cordasco\u2019s website has reviews, interviews, and, most interestingly the section \u2018SFT Source Language Lists<\/a>\u2019, which offers constantly updated bibliographies of SF translated into English from 57 languages. This is a truly formidable task and I marvel that a woman alone can carry it out, even assuming she has collaborators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The lists are the origin of the book Out of This World<\/em>, which offers chapters for 14 of these 57 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. These are the languages with a minimum of ten volume-length texts translated into English. In the Introduction Cordasco herself presents her volume as a reference volume and a guide, and warns that she is extending the field covered in her website to speculative fiction (rather than only SF), fantasy and horror. Each chapter has an introduction by a guest writer from the linguistic area introduced, who briefly surveys the history of SF, fantasy and horror in their language. This is followed by a second survey by Cordasco of the texts translated into English, briefly describing their contents. Finally, each chapter offers a bibliography of translated primary sources in chronological order by original publication date, notes and a bibliography of secondary sources. I managed to read in full about five chapters, underlining interesting passages in the introduction, until I gave up in despair, unable to go on absorbing so much information. I did read all the introductions, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Cordasco\u2019s volume, I insist, is a gem, and I cannot praise it sufficiently. But at the same time I don\u2019t know what to do with it. To begin with, I had doubts about whether her online SFT Source Language Lists<\/a> fulfil the same purpose better. They don\u2019t because the lists don\u2019t have an introduction or comments on each of the texts like the chapters in her book, being pure bibliography. Yet, whenever I come across a reference volume I am mystified by our persistence to publish as print or digital books what should be online resources, perhaps databases. Cordasco insists that her purpose is to help and guide Anglophone readers curious about how their favourite genres work in other languages, though, of course, she is also helping non-native readers of English to reach other SF traditions. In the end, however, I did not add any volumes presented in her book to my reading wish lists because, as I have mentioned, I felt overwhelmed. I suppose that Cordasco wants us to check her volume whenever we feel like reading something different rather than read the book from beginning to end, just as nobody (or almost) reads dictionaries. In that case, though, I just prefer a website, it seems to me more user-friendly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            I\u2019m writing this post at a time when I am considering with my UAB colleague V\u00edctor Mart\u00ednez-Gil how to produce a history and guide for Catalan speculative fiction. There are countless reviews and a magnificent bibliography by Antoni Munn\u00e9-Jord\u00e0, but not really a history. The volume by journalist Sebasti\u00e0 Roig El futur dels nostres avis<\/em> (2012) covers the birth of the genre in Catalan and its history until 1939, when Franco\u2019s appalling regime essentially banned all publications in Catalan (which timidly resurfaced about one decade later). V\u00edctor and I edited last year a monographic issue for the Catalan Review<\/em> (36.1) aimed at guiding interested readers into the work by a few outstanding contemporary SF Catalan authors: Munn\u00e9-Jord\u00e0 himself, Jordi de Manuel, Montserrat Gal\u00edcia, Juan Llu\u00eds Llu\u00eds, Carme Torras, Marc Pastor, and Enric Herce. We took the chance then to write the introductory article \u201cPresent i futur de la ci\u00e8ncia ficci\u00f3 catalana\u201d (45-57), which should be a draft of the volume we want to see published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Yet, the moment V\u00edctor has started organizing a possible structure for that volume we have seen the many difficulties that lie in our path, from the lack of sufficient academic contributors to the problem of how to turn a history\/guide into an engaging, readable book. It might seem that the solution lies at some point between David Pringle\u2019s popular Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels<\/em>, a Bible for many neophyte readers (like Miquel Barcel\u00f3\u2019s Ciencia ficci\u00f3n: gu\u00eda de lectura<\/a><\/em>), and Historia de la ciencia ficci\u00f3n en la cultura espa\u00f1ola<\/a><\/em>, coordinated by Teresa L\u00f3pez-Pellisa, another book I found both fascinating and overwhelming like Cordasco\u2019s. The problem, I insist, is that reference books are not reader-friendly and, arguably, cannot be so because of their very nature. In that sense, I find very interesting what the website Worlds without End<\/em> has done with Pringle\u2019s book, turning it into the source for a truly user-friendly webpage within the enormous website. Take a look here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            I\u2019ll acknowledge that perhaps the problem is that I am no longer doing the homework that reference books involve, though the degree of difficulty they require varies. I don\u2019t know how this works for you but although I keep a list of books to be read I have discovered that it needs to be emptied by the time it reaches at most 15 books. Whenever it gets any longer, I lose interest, start procrastinating and end up reading none of the books. In Pringle\u2019s case, for instance, I subdivided the 100 books recommended in subsets: I would read five, then months later another five and so on. I have not covered the whole list, but even though it has taken me many years I have possibly read 80% of the books he highlighted. Cordasco\u2019s volume, in contrast, mentions hundreds of books. I could, for instance, pick one book from each of the 14 languages studied but that would be such a tiny sample that it feels ridiculous, particularly because at no point does she or her contributors indicate where to begin. Everything seems equally enticing and this is why I felt overwhelmed.             The inevitable conclusion is that reference and guides need to be reconsidered if they are to offer valuable information without overwhelming the readers they are supposed to help. Taking tiny steps seems better than gobbling up hundreds of pages with countless allusions to supposedly indispensable books. I don\u2019t know in the end how my friend V\u00edctor and I should proceed, but at least I know the pitfalls to avoid. As for Cordasco\u2019s book, I hope it finds the readers it aims at, and I wish I could meet them, for they must be a fearless bunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post was going to be a formal review of a recent book for the SFRA Review. However, I eventually decided that I could not submit a text of this nature without fully reading the book in question, a task I found impossible to fulfil. Not because the book was not good enough (it is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[878,876,875,877],"class_list":["post-2668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categoria","tag-book-guides","tag-out-of-this-world","tag-rachel-cordasco","tag-reference-works"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2669,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2668\/revisions\/2669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}