A Little Lost in Translation?
Hey, what are you going to do — it’s a different language. Stuff falls through the cracks.
The Dutch version of my novel, which strangely has an English title — but not my title — is about to be published in Holland. They’re calling it Up & Down, which makes no sense to me, and it’s being classified as “chick noir,” apparently a new genre of literary fiction. HarperCollins, my US publisher, has the foreign rights to the book and sold the Dutch rights without retaining any control over title (supposedly this is typical in the business) so my vigorous protests went unheeded.
In any case, the publishing house, Truth & Dare, has done great publicity for the book so far, and I think the chick noir thing is kind of fun, though I’d probably prefer something like “dame noir” or “broad noir,” since I’ve never thought calling women “chicks” was very flattering or progressive.
The daily Dutch newspaper, De Pers (The Press) ran an interview with me on Tuesday. The very friendly reporter did a nice job with the piece, though he called my book “chick lit” — the fault of the publicity materials, no doubt — and he also said my favorite teacher was John Irving, though John Irving was never my teacher. I did mention, however that Irving had come to give a special seminar and workshop at Iowa, which was very inspiring. To be fair, the reporter gave me a chance to fix the errors, but I wasn’t able to check the Dutch translation in time. The main gist of the story is that I like to get feedback from other writers while I’m working on a book, which was certainly true for my first novel. I haven’t shown my new book to too many people, but I am looking to organize a writing group in Amsterdam for the support and feedback. The headline for the piece, Ik Heb Enthousiaste Meeleezers, means essentially, “I need to have enthusiastic readers.”