Return Trip Tango and Other Stories from Abroad [Paperback]

Frank MacShane (Editor), Lori M. Carlos (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Columbia Collection | Publication Date: November 15, 1992

Return Trip Tango is a veritable cornucopia of contemporary world fiction that brings together a number of renowned authors including Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kobo Abe, Marguerite Duras, Jorge Luis Borges, and Samuel Beckett, as well as the work of lesser known talents such as He Liwei, Haroldo Conti, Bob den Uyl, and Yasunari Kawabata.

This striking array of stories also showcases our very finest translators - Barbara Bray, William Weaver, Gregory Rabassa, and Miriam Cooke - operating at the peak of their powers. The result is a unique assortment of spectacular writing that opens our eyes to new realities, provides us with unexpected pleasures, and sustains cross-lingual understanding.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Departures, fleeting encounters at way stations, homecomings--these and other incidents of travel occasion some of the most intriguing pieces in this collection of foreign short stories and novel excerpts reprinted from Translation magazine. In a brief sketch of an embarkation, Portuguese writer Agustina Bessa Luis reveals through descriptions of simple physical gestures and facial expressions nothing less than her characters' means of resisting "the horror of existence." More fantastic, Turkish writer Orhan Duru's tale concerns a marooned space creature who crosses paths with a 15th-century Genoese mariner. The mariner--an amateur cartographer--helps the creature recover his spaceship and in return receives a glimpse of a complete globe of Earth. While one of the collection's strengths lies in presenting lesser known writers such as these, it also includes by-now familiar work by Kobo Abe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gyorgy Konrad whose novel excerpt depicts a visit to a family graveyard as a homecoming. Describing buried relatives, Konrad writes that they face "eastward in their long white gowns, and, with pebbles on their eyelids, rest buried like raisins in the braided Sabbath loaf." Ivan Sanders's translation here is emblematic of the high quality of the translations throughout the volume--which collectively attest to the worthiness of Translation 's enterprise. The editors are associated with Columbia University's Translation Center.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

A remarkable collection which attests not only to the brilliance of the short story from around the world, but to the skill of translators in bringing them to us.

(George Plimpton )

This collection of stories -- long overdue -- is a delightful and entertaining anthology of tales, culled from the works of some of the finest international authors writing today. Mr. Burgess' elegant and provocative preface, and such works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, and Ingeborg Bachmann will remind the reader of what literature should do -- enchant.

(Oscar Hijuelos )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 255 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (November 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231079931
• ISBN-13: 978-0231079938
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,019,375 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)