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2013 Finnegan’s List

Bridging cultures, crossing languagesThe European Society of Authors« «

The European Society of Authors – created in the spring of 2008 – is a

network open to all authors, publishers, translators and cultural actors

who wish to participate in the creation of an intellectual community in a

multilingual and multicultural Europe.

Placing translation at the heart of our projects and our thoughts, we

favour an approach that takes on differences in terms of sharing and

dialogue.

The European Society of Authors proposes an annual list of under-

translated or forgotten works called Finnegan’s List – the personal

choices of a committee of 10 eminent authors from different countries.

Each writer selects three titles that make up the committee’s “elective

affinities”. With this project, the European Society of Authors strives to

revive a literary canon encompassing all languages spoken and written

in Europe and beyond.

Each author has explained his or her reasons for choosing the books

they have in brief articles.

Excerpts of these texts can be found in the brochure but we also invite

you to visit our website, www.seua.org – which will be redesigned in

the coming months – to discover all of them and to find out more about

Finnegan’s List and our other projects.

If you wish to participate, to contribute or to support our projects,

please contact us at: membership@seua.org

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Finnegan’s Listby Adam Thirlwell

It may be that the ideal of literature is Weltliteratur. But it’s also true that however

much the world may be the ideal, the medium of literature is language. And

language is a sadly nationalist medium for an art that aspires to the gigantically

global. Which is why, perhaps, although writers and readers may have wanted to

believe in the ideal of Weltliteratur, there have been very few projects in its history

to remedy the fact that literature is, very much so, often limited in its geography.

There have been very few projects, in other words, devoted to making translations

comprehensive.

For translation is literature’s antidote to the problem that every language has its

own policed borders. And yet the history of translation is a very strange history.

It is full of gaps and zigzags, where one might have expected comprehensive

flatness – like the ideal set of waves approaching on the horizon for the ideal

surfer. Its history is oddly marked by time delays, and absences.

And while it might seem that a digital era would offer the perfect conditions to

make translations comprehensive, in fact the problem seems no closer to being

solved.

This is why a project like Finnegan’s List seems to me to be so important. It

replaces the usual melancholy with the fizzing excitement of a possible ideal: a

total geography. But also – and this is the true beauty of the project – it doesn’t

aim for a blanket comprehensiveness. No, its beauty is in its use of writers as

selectors, its insistence that translation must proceed, in the end, work by work.

For literature might well have the world as its ideal, but this grand ideal will only

be formed by the specific unique values of particular works of art.

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Alberto Manguel

Alberto Manguel (born in 1948 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a

writer, translator, and editor. At the age of sixteen, while working

at the Pygmalion bookshop in Buenos Aires, he was asked by the

blind Jorge Luis Borges to read aloud to him at his home. The

relationship was pivotal for Manguel’s future literary career. He is

the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary

of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980),

A History of Reading (1996) and The Library at Night (2007);

as well as novels such as News from a Foreign Country Came

(1991). Manguel has edited a number of literary anthologies on

a variety of themes and genres ranging from erotica and gay

stories to fantastic literature and mysteries. Today, he resides

in a renovated medieval presbytery in France together with his

30,000 books.

Ilma Rakusa

Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota (Slovakia)

to Hungarian-Slovenian parents. She lived in Budapest, Trieste,

and Ljubljana before her family’s move to Zurich, Switzerland.

Ilma Rakusa read Slavic and Romance studies in Zurich, Paris,

and St. Petersburg. She made her literary debut in 1977 with the

poetry collection Wie Winter (As Winter). She is also a renowned

translator from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, and French

into German (including authors such as Imre Kertész, Danilo

Kiš, Péter Nádas, and Marina Tsvetaeva). She has won numerous

prizes such as the 2009 Swiss Book Prize for her own literary

oeuvre (poetry collections, essays, short prose) as well as for her

translations and her work as an editor of literary anthologies.

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Finnegan’s List committee 2013

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Samar Yazbek

Samar Yazbek (born in 1970) is a Syrian writer and journalist.

She studied Arabic literature and is the author of novels, poetry

collections, short stories, and film scripts. In her first novel,

Tiflat as-Sama (Heavenly Girl), she questioned various taboos

in Syrian society. Samar Yazbek is a prominent voice in support

of human rights in Syria. In 2010, Yazbek was selected as a

member of Beirut 39 (39 of the best-known writers of modern

Arab literature). She was the editor of Women of Syria, a website

dedicated to the rights of women. Samar Yazbek fled Syria in July

2011 and lives now in exile in France. Her latest work, A Woman

in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, won the English

PEN Writers in Translation award.

Etgar Keret

Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Etgar Keret is one of today’s most

popular Israeli writers. His work has been published in The New

Yorker, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Paris

Review and Zoetrope. At present, Keret lectures at Ben-Gurion

University of the Negev. He has received the Prime Minister’s

Literature Prize, the Ministry of Culture’s Cinema Prize, the Jewish

Quarterly Wingate Prize (UK, 2008) and the St. Petersburg Public

Library’s Foreign Favorite Award (2010). In 2007, Keret and Shira

Gefen won the Cannes Film Festival’s “Camera d’Or” Award for

their movie Jellyfish as well as the Best Director Award of the

French Artists and Writers’ Guild. In 2010, Keret was honored in

France as Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His books

have been published abroad in over 31 languages.

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Finnegan’s List committee 2013

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Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali (born in 1943 in Lahore) is a British Pakistani writer

and filmmaker. He studied politics and philosophy at Oxford

University and in 1968 became an editor of the New Left Review.

Tariq Ali has written books on world history and politics,

novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as

scripts for the stage and screen. For Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Ali is

a “border crosser between the West and East, he understands

better than anyone else the conflicts and histories of both

sides.” After the publication of his first novel Redemption

(1991), he started working on a five-volume cycle of novels

about Islam. The first tome of the quintet, Shadows of the

Pomegranate Tree, represents his literary breakthrough. Tariq Ali

regularly contributes articles on current politics to numerous

international newspapers.

Oksana Zabuzhko

Oksana Zabuzhko (born in 1960) is a contemporary Ukrainian

writer, poet, and essayist. She graduated from the department

of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD

in philosophy of arts, and has worked as a research associate

for the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy

of Sciences. Since the publication of her novel Field Work in

Ukrainian Sex (1996), which in 2006 was named “the most

influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence”,

she has been working as a free-lance author.

Zabuzhko’s books have been translated into numerous

languages, including one of her latest novels The Museum of

Abandoned Secrets (2009), and were awarded many literary

prizes.

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Arnon Grunberg

Arnon Grunberg (born in 1971 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch novelist

and reporter. His first novel Blue Mondays (1994) became a

bestseller in Europe and won the Anton Wachter Prize. Another

success of Grunberg’s is Tirza, published in September 2006, for

which he received a number of prestigious literary prizes. His

work is translated into twenty-five languages. Arnon Grunberg

also lectures at different universities and writes regular columns

for diverse international newspapers and literary magazines. He

lives and works in New York. His blog: www.arnongrunberg.com.

Georgi Gospodinov

Georgi Gospodinov (born in 1968) is a poet, writer and

playwright, and one of the most translated Bulgarian authors

after 1989. Four of his poetry collections have been awarded

national literary prizes. His Natural Novel was published in 19

languages abroad, including German, English, French, Spanish,

and Italian. The novel was praised by The New Yorker, The

Guardian, The Times, and Village Voice, the critics qualified it as a

“small and elegant masterpiece” and a “machine for stories”. And

Other Stories (2001), Gospodinov’s collection of short pieces,

came out in German, French, English, and other languages. His

story “And All Turned Moon” is included in the anthology Best

European Fiction 2010 (Dalkey Archive, USA). Gospodinov’s latest

book is the novel Physics of Sorrow (2012).

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Gabriela Adameşteanu

Gabriela Adameşteanu (born in 1942) is a contemporary

Romanian novelist, essayist, journalist, and translator. After

graduating from the University of Bucharest’s faculty of

letters, she made her debut with a short prose piece. She

has written for many literary magazines and worked as an

editor for the publisher Cartea Românească and later for the

magazine 22. Adameşteanu’s books have been translated

into many languages, and she has been awarded numerous

national and international literary prizes. Her most famous

works are the novels The Equal Way of Every Day (1975) as

well as Wasted Morning (1983), which was adapted for the

stage. Gabriela Adameşteanu has translated works of Guy de

Maupassant and Hector Bianciotti into Romanian.

Jaroslav Rudiš

Jaroslav Rudiš (born in 1972) is a contemporary Czech author

of novels, graphic novels, short stories and plays for the

stage and radio. After his studies (in German and history)

in Liberec, Prague and Zurich, a journalism scholarship

allowed him to move to Berlin where he wrote one of his

best-known books, the novel Nebe pod Berlínem (The Sky

under Berlin) for which he received the Jiří Orten Award for

young writers in 2002. Rudiš has worked as a teacher, as a DJ

and as a journalist for the newspaper Právo. The Alois Nebel

graphic novel trilogy (co-authored with Jaromír 99) was

recently adapted into a film. His books are translated into

numerous languages, including his latest novel Konec punku

v Helsinkách (The End of Punk in Helsinki, 2010). Jaroslav

Rudiš, who also writes in German, lives and works in Lomnice

nad Popelkou (Czech Republic), Prague and Leipzig.

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Alberto Manguel

Eduardo Berti, Todos los Funes (All of the Funes), Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama,

2004.

Translated into French.

Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers,

Random House, UK, 1994/Rogers, Coleridge & White.

Translated into Portuguese (Brazil).

Amparo Dávila, Cuentos Reunidos (Collected Short Stories), Mexico, D. F.: Fondo de

Cultura Económica, 2009.

No translations.

Ilma Rakusa

Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-1937), Poems.

Various poems translated into Croatian, Czech, English, Polish and Russian.

Miroslav Krleža, Izlet u Rusiju (Voyage to Russia), Zagreb: Narodna knjižnica, 1926/

Croatian Academy of Sciences and Art.

Translated into Russian.

Radomir Konstantinović, Filosofija palanke (Philosophy of a Backwater Town),

Belgrade: Magazine Treći program, 1969/Otkrovenje, 2010.

Translated into Hungarian and Macedonian.

Samar Yazbek

Mamdūh Azzām, , (Ascension to Death), Damascus: Dar al-Ahāli, 1989.

No translations.

Mustafa Khalifa, , (The Shell), Beirut: Dar al-Adāb, 2008.

Translated into French.

Hānī al-Rāhib, , (The Epidemic), Beirut: Dar al-Adāb, 1981/1988.

No translations.

Finnegan’s List 2013

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Etgar Keret

Orly Castel-Bloom, דולי סיטי, (Dolly City), Tel Aviv: Kinneret Zmora Bitan, 1992.

Translated into Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Swedish.

Gadi Taub, אלנבי, (Allenby Street), Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth/Chemed, 2009.

No translations.

Hila Blum, הביקור, (The Visit), Tel Aviv: Kinneret Zmora Bitan/Deborah Harris

Agency, 2011.

No translations.

Tariq Ali

Eka Kurniawan, Cantik itu Luka (Beautiful, a Wound), Edisi Penerbit Jendela dan

Akademi Kebudayaan Yogyakarta, 2002 & Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2004.

Translated into Japanese and Malaysian.

Andreas Embiricos, Ο Μέγας Ανατολικός (The Great Eastern), Agra, Athens, 2002.

No translations.

Saadat Hasan Manto, Collections of Short Stories.

Various stories translated into Bengali, English, French, German, Gujarati, Hindi,

Sinhala and Swedish.

Oksana Zabuzhko

Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913), Drama: Камінний господар (Stone Master),

Кассандра (Cassandra), Руфін і Прісцілла (Ruphinus and Priscilla).

The Stone Master translated into English, Russian and French, Cassandra translated

into English and Russian, Ruphinus and Priscilla, no translations.

Mykola Kulish (1892-1937), Народний Малахій (The People’s Malachy), Kiev: Les

Taniuk/ Dnipro Publishers, 1990.

No translations.

Yury Dombrovsky, Факультет ненужных вещей (Faculty of Useless Knowledge),

Paris: Imka Press, 1978/ Moscow: Russian Book Chamber, 1990.

Translated into English, French and German.

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Arnon Grunberg

Otto Weininger (1880-1903), Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character).

Translated into Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Italian,

Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian and Spanish.

Marek Hłasko, Drugie zabicie psa (Killing the Second Dog), Paris: Kultura, 1965/

Warsaw: Da Capo, 1993.

Translated into Dutch, English and German.

Frans Kellendonk, Mystiek lichaam (Mystical Body), Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak

& Van Gennep, 1986.

Translated into French and Italian.

Georgi Gospodinov

Vera Mutafchieva, Летопис на смутното време (Chronicle of the Time of

Unrest), First publication 1965-66/Plovdiv: Janet 45, 2008.

No translations.

Ivan Teofilov, Инфинитив (Infinitive), Plovdiv: Janet 45, 2004.

No translations.

Ani Ilkov, Изворът на грознохубавите (The Spring of the Ugly-Beautiful), Sofia:

Anubis, 1994.

No translations.

Gabriela Adameşteanu

Camil Petrescu, Patul lui Procust (The Bed of Procustes), Bucarest: 1933, Editura

Nationala-Ciornei/ Camil Petrescu Cultural Foundation.

Translated into German (out of print), English, French, Hungarian, Norwegian and

Spanish.

Jan Koneffke, Eine Liebe am Tiber (A Love on the Tiber), Cologne: DuMont, 2004.

Translated into Chinese and Romanian.

Lídia Jorge, O Vale da Paixão (The Valley of Passion), Alfragide: Publicações Dom

Quixote, 1998.

Translated into English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian,

Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

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Jaroslav Rudiš

Jiří Hájíček, Rybí krev (Fish Blood), Brno: Host/Dana Blatná Literary Agency, 2012.

No translations.

Gregor Sander, Winterfisch (Winterfish), Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011.

No translations.

Dora Čechova, Nechtěl jsem být Leninem (I Didn’t Want to be Lenin), Prague:

Labyrint, 2011.

No translations.

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Alberto Manguel

Eduardo Berti’s sophisticated, quietly humorous style serves him perfectly in

telling the story of an academic congress on South American literature in which

one of the members puts forward a revolutionary thesis: the overwhelming

presence of the name “Funes” among the characters of Latin-American fiction.

This curious circumstance leads to the gradual realisation that the world is a

nightmarish place ruled by haphazard laws whose true meaning escapes us, but

in which we are caught like flies in a web.

Marina Warner has always been interested in the relationship between the

features of a given culture and its mythological or narrative roots. Warner’s interest

(like that of the Barthes of Mythologies) lies in the common details of everyday

life, in the significance of elements such as “hair” or “carpet” or “wood” and how

they change meaning and symbolic function. Never heavy-handed or merely

theoretical, her books are among the finest examples of creative thinking on

cultural themes in our time.

Most of Amparo Dávila’s stories and poems were published in the fifties and

sixties, and her collected work consists of only two volumes, but they occupy a

fundamental place in twentieth-century Spanish literature. She seems to chronicle

small events, minor accidents of fate, which turn out to be major catastrophes in

a universal context. Dávila herself has given few interviews and rarely speaks of

her work. She did once, however, describe the world of her fiction as “a night from

which there is no escape, but in which we must pretend to be happy.”

Ilma Rakusa

Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-1937) is considered the genius poète maudit of

Ukrainian modernism. In his poems, this son of a Greek-Catholic priest transforms

nature in glowing metaphors and the city into an apocalyptic scenario. In

his novel Twelve Rings, the writer Yuri Andrukhovych created a monument

to Antonych, who died at a young age. However, translations of the latter’s

extraordinary literary oeuvre have yet to be completed.

The authors of the Finnegan’s List committee on the books they recommend

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Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981), a classic author in modern Croatian literature, was

not only a significant novelist, storyteller, and playwright, but also a brilliant

essay writer and an important travel writer. In the autumn of 1924 he embarked

on a private journey to Russia. In his 350-page travelogue, Krleža ties sensual

impressions with reflections, not only brilliantly observing, but also evaluating in

a style absent of dogmatism. Precisely because he relies on impressions and not

on statistics and propaganda phrases, Krleža’s depictions become tremendously

vibrant.

In the former Yugoslavia, Radomir Konstantinović’s Filosofija palanke (Philosophy

of a Backwater Town) was a cult book, a reference for the liberal opposition

intelligentsia under Milošević. In it, the Serbian writer and philosopher (1928-

2011) analyzes the anti-modern mentality of the province (his own), its tendency

toward infantilism, banality, lethargy, and resignation, but also its nationalism and

its mystical glorification of ethnicity.

Etgar Keret

In her shocking novel, Dolly City, Orly Castel-Bloom writes: “Madness is a ripe

orange, and therefore it should be wrapped up and sent to Europe in crates

stamped with the word Jaffa.” In more than one sense, this is what Castel-Bloom

does in this book: she takes all the fears and aggressions of one of the most

violent regions on this blue planet, wraps it up in an incredible and uniquely

imaginative plot, and the result is literally breathtaking. What Castel-Bloom wrote

in Dolly City as a warning is slowly proving to be a sad and dark prediction of a

probable and extremely threatening future.

One could talk extensively about the plot of Gadi Taub’s Allenby Street. It is, after

all, a sexy, moving, action-packed tale filled with unpredictable twists. But the

hard-hitting story isn’t half as complex and unique as its protagonists. Through

the bar stools of one joint in Tel Aviv’s semi-sleazy Allenby Street, Taub introduces

his readers to a hive of impressively-crafted characters: strippers, bouncers, bar

owners and patrons share their yearnings and their drinks in Taub’s masterly-

constructed Dickensian world.

Describing the plot of Hila Blum’s debut novel feels a bit like describing the way in

which a jazz musician is dressed: both are integral parts of the artistic experience,

but such minor and almost redundant ones. The main engines in Blum’s moving

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and impressive novel are the unique and complex voices she is able to create,

voices that describe, with a very light and confident hand, a heart-shattering and

anxiety-filled world in which not much actually happens, but where the emotional

resonance is not weaker than in many great epic novels.

Tariq Ali

Eka Kurniawan is one of the finest writers to emerge since Pramoedya Ananta

Toer. His two novels, Cantik itu Luka (Beautiful, a Wound) and Lelaki Harimau

(Man Tiger), reflect the nightmarish past of his country, but his imagination and

the elegant prose that accompanies it gives one hope even if the characters

themselves are hopeless types. Eka has to deal with the trauma of the massacres

that disfigured his country during the Cold War when in 1965 a brutal military

coup wiped out a million people (at least) who were members of leftist parties,

including many intellectuals.

Andreas Embiricos, the Greek surrealist writer who died in 1975 in Athens, left

behind an eight-volume masterpiece: The Great Eastern, the labour of 25 years.

A 900-page version is being prepared by Agra, the publishers of the eight

volumes. A mixture of James Joyce, Freud and André Breton, the narrative is an

astonishing account of life, sexuality, hope, despair... Given the state of Greece at

the moment it might be an act of empathy to translate this work into the main

languages.

Saadat Hasan Manto was one of the most gifted short-story writers of South Asia.

He wrote in Urdu, and died in Lahore in 1955 at the premature age of forty-three.

Manto’s battles with the literary establishment of his time are a central feature

of his biography. Charged with obscenity and brought to trial on a number of

occasions, he remained defiant and unapologetic.

Oksana Zabuzhko

The Stone Master by Lesya Ukrainka, a five-act drama, is a brilliant feminist version

of the Don Juan story that discusses the nature of power with regard to gender.

Rather than Don Juan, “the Great Seducer”, the protagonists of the play are, in

fact, two women “seduced” by him, Dolores and Anna, each presenting one of

two types of female power accessible within the patriarchy, spiritual (Dolores) and

sexual (Anna). This play deserves to be included in all the anthologies of women

writings as an exemplary deconstruction of one of the major literary myths.

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Mykola Kulish (1892-1937) is the most innovative playwright of the Ukrainian

vanguard theatre of the 1920s, who, like most Ukrainian writers of his generation,

died in the Gulag. In his bitter and grotesque plays of the late 1920s, Kulish

foresaw the world turning into a combined brothel and lunatic asylum, and his

masterpiece The People’s Malachy (1926) was banned from the stage shortly after

its premiere.

Yury Dombrovsky’s Faculty of Useless Knowledge is one of the best Russian

novels of the 20th century, a Dostoyevskian masterpiece that explores the nature

of totalitarianism on the most intimate human level. Thus the book earns its

timelessness. It tells the story of a flesh and blood Winston Smith, who, unlike the

Orwellian character, manages to win over the system that tries to destroy him.

Arnon Grunberg

Mystical Body by Frans Kellendonk is probably one of the best Dutch postwar

novels. The novel is about history, art and trade, Jews, sex as an obsessive-

compulsive disorder, and death. Both Kellendonk and Otto Weininger describe

death as a way to enter reality. Kellendonk coined the phrase “to feign sincerely”

(“oprecht veinzen”, in Dutch) as an attempt to deal with religion and reality. Some

critics consider Mystical Body an ironical novel, but I believe that the novel is

beyond all irony.

Killing the Second Dog is a novel set in Israel in the fifties. Two Polish emigrants try

to seduce elderly, rich American ladies on the beaches of Tel Aviv. Marek Hłasko

reveals the ugly truth behind most love. It is rarely a gift, more often a transaction

and role play, and every couple needs an audience. Although I didn’t grow up in

Poland in the fifties but in Amsterdam in the seventies, where universal tolerance

and free love were promoted as cornerstones of the paradise to come, I identified

strongly with Hłasko’s black humor, his despair, his hyperboles and his suppressed

sentimentality.

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Georgi Gospodinov

This historical novel (Chronicle of the Time of Unrest) about the turbulent late 18th

and early 19th centuries in the Balkans goes against the grain of the established

‘great narratives’, challenging stereotyped notions of upsurge and disgrace. This

remarkably full, alive, non-hierarchic and non-nationalistic story is based on

author Vera Mutafchieva’s work as a professional historian; Mutafchieva (1929-

2009) was one of the most original thinkers and researchers of the Ottoman

Empire and the Balkans.

Ivan Teofilov (born in 1931) is a Bulgarian poet, translator and playwright. His

poetry bears a Mediterranean scent and possesses a specific light, I would say, of

the antiquity. He is a careful master of language with a sharp eye for detail, for the

magical in everyday life. A poem like “On the Stoicism of the Children” from this

book deserves its place in even the most rigorous selection of achievements in

European poetry.

Ani Ilkov (born in 1957) is a contemporary poet who overturns the poetical

tradition, radicalizes language and the notion of lyrical in Bulgarian poetry after

1989. Ilkov’s is exactly the type of poetry that became the language of protest, the

most powerful genre in the first decade after the fall of the communist regime.

The Spring of the Ugly-Beautiful is the poet’s most famous collection, a real literary

phenomenon. It brings together the political and the personal, combining the

anger and the sorrow of a generation that went through its biographical and

poetical youth in the narrow and locked-up space of late socialism.

Gabriela Adameşteanu

This book has been re-issued in Romania many times and is studied in schools,

universities, etc. Camil Petrescu is one of the Romanian authors who made a

mark on me during my literary training. The Bed of Procustes has not aged at all

and remains remarkably modern today. The book, polyphonic, deals with the

irrationality of love in a world where obstinate journalists, fighting against corrupt

politicians, end up defeated. The writing is very authentic, and the narrative

ingeniously told.

I read Jan Koneffke’s book in Romanian translation. Set in the city of Rome –

described in a way I would like to paint it myself – the novel tells the story of a

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strange family drama. Ludwig Wieland is a former glider pilot, a sophisticated

lover of music and poetry who accidentally killed two adolescents during the war.

The Valley of Passion by Lídia Jorge tells the story of a traditional Portuguese

family in the hands of its authoritarian father, Francisco Dias, who continuously

purchases plots of land and pitilessly exploits the labour of his children to

cultivate it. The wave of Portuguese immigration set off by the country’s social

issues will end up breaking the Dias family apart. Jorge’s writing is richly poetical

but also very precise and concrete.

Jaroslav Rudiš

Everyone knows Prague. But what’s life like in the rural parts of the Czech

Republic? Jiří Hájíček (born in 1967) comes from České Budějovice and has made

the beautiful and lonesome South Bohemia his field of play. It is here that he

locates his slow, deep, melancholic, and fantastic novel Rybí krev – Fish Blood.

Great short stories about and from the Baltic Sea. The Berlin author Gregor

Sander (born in 1968) is an excellent and precise observer. His writing feels like so

many quiet but simultaneously deep waves.

Dora Čechova (born in 1971) has Czech-Russian roots, and lives between Prague

and Moscow, which is also where her very sophisticatedly constructed and

tragicomic-melancholic short stories play out. A fabulous debut.

To read all texts at full length, please visit our website: www.seua.org.

2013 marks the three-year anniversary of the Finnegan’s List – an occasion to

reflect back on the work we’ve done.

Each year, the Finnegan’s Lists grow more and more recognized both in the

editorial world and among individual readers. With the events we organize

regularly in various European cities – always in the presence of authors from the

List juries – we hope to reach an even larger audience as time goes on.

As far as connections with publishers are concerned, each list so far has led to one

new publication per year. We hope this number will increase in the years to come.

In 2011, the French publishing house Actes Sud discovered German author

Bettina Gundermann (recommended by Juli Zeh), and diaphanes editions,

in Germany/Switzerland, will soon take on the German translation of Louis

Calaferte’s Requiem des innocents, recommended by Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt

in 2012. Several other proposals have strongly piqued the interest of publishers

across the world.

And so we advance, strongly but surely, in our unfinished mission, always

remembering that the legendary James Joyce novel, Finnegans Wake, from

whose language-melding polyphony the List was inspired, was first published in

segments by the literary journal transition, under the title Work in Progress.

A number of partnerships (grants for translation, event organization) have

developed over the course of the last two years, including work with the Goethe

Institute, the Institut français, Pro Helvetia and Schwob, an initiative of the

Nederlands Letterenfonds.

The European Society of Authors would like to thank the Michalski Foundation

and the Île-de-France Region for their confidence and renewed support. Thanks

also to the Allianz Kulturstiftung, which will help to fund numerous events in

2013.

Finally, we would like to thank all former Finnegan’s List committee members

whose proposals we continue to put forth: Oya Baydar, Erri De Luca, Margriet de

Moor, Mathias Énard, Jens Christian Grøndahl, Lídia Jorge, Andreï Kurkov, Javier

Marías, Adam Zagajewski, Juli Zeh, Hoda Barakat, György Dragomán, Georges-

Arthur Goldschmidt, Vassili Golovanov, Juan Goytisolo, Yannis Kiourtsakis, Terézia

Mora, Sofi Oksanen, Roman Simić and Adam Thirlwell.

In the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, who “imagined Paradise as a kind of library”,

the European Society of Authors is proud that once again authors from diverse

linguistic horizons have agreed to participate in this brand-new Finnegan’s List.

«

For further information about the books of the List or translation funding,

please contact the European Society of Authors:

katrin.thomaneck@seua.org

katia.flouest-sell@seua.org

If any of these books are translated with the help of the List, please mention as follows

on the copyright page:

“Recommended by Finnegan’s List 2013

and supported by the European Society of Authors”

THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY OF AUTHORS

www.seua.org

One of our international partners in supporting the publication of world literature is a

project of the Dutch Foundation for Literature:

Schwob – Translation of Forgotten Modern Classics

www.schwob.nl

Photographs: Alberto Manguel © C. Bjarne Riesto, Ilma Rakusa © Simon M. Ingold, Samar Yazbek © Manaf Azzam,

Etgar Keret © Yanai Yechiel, Tariq Ali © Nina Subin, Oksana Zabuzhko © Ivan Put, Arnon Grunberg © Eva Pel,

Georgi Gospodinov © Dobrin Kashavelov, Gabriela Adameşteanu © Louis Monier, Jaroslav Rudiš © Jan Rasch

Finnegan’s List Editors: Katrin Thomaneck & Katia Flouest-Sell

Translators: Jill McCoy & Bradley Schmidt

Design: Soledad Muñoz Gouet

With the support of In collaboration with