This issue takes on two of McSweeney's obsessions: translations and antiquated literary forms and turns it into a game of phone tag. Easily one of the strangest issues they've ever done, the physical format is also unwieldy with a cover system that leaves nearly three inches of the interior pages uncovered so that they have curled over time. The issue is also so wide, it hangs out from the bookshelf.
The premise starts with twelve relatively obscure stories in eleven different languages. The next author translates the work, unusually into English, trying to maintain the original author's style. The next author works strictly from that translation into another language, the next translates that translation and so on. Each story can have up to six iterations. The end result isn't always in English, but often is.
While it's a clever exercise highlighting the importance and difficulty of translation, it doesn't always result in good writing. Unless you are able to read multiple languages, you won't be able to read much of the effort. Most interesting is the translator's notes and the fact that editor Adam Thirlwell was able to get so many big name international writers to join the game. ( )

I absolutely love the imagination that goes into some McSweeney's issues, and this one is definitely one of my favorites so far. Edited by Adam Thirlwell, this volume consists of 42 "Multiples," or twelve stories, appearing in up to six versions each. Sixty-one authors contributed, and the texts come in eighteen different languages. Say what now? Each of the twelve stories goes through a couple rounds of "translator telephone" (as one example, A.L. Snijders' story "Geluk" is translated from the original Dutch into English by Lydia Davis, then Davis' English text is translated into French by Yannick Haenel. Haenel's French text is translated back into English by Heidi Julavits, then Julavits' text into German by Peter Stamm, Stamm's into English by Jeffrey Eugenides, and finally Eugenides' English is translated into Icelandic by Sjón). Each translator can only see the version immediately preceding, and can't read the original text. This makes for some fascinating changes, interpretations, markedly different readings, &c.

Since I read only English fluently (plus a smattering of a few other languages) I mostly concentrated on comparing the different English versions, reading them closely (and sometimes multiples times) to see where the versions differed and where the changes originated. While occasionally the translators just struck out on their own right away, leaving very little of the previous reading in their own version, I was quite surprised at how closely a few of the stories resembled each other even after repeated re-translations, sometimes right down to the same very distinctive phrase passing through multiple languages but returning to the same English wording.

After the whole chain of translations had been finished all the contributors got to read the different versions, and their notes on the experience, which appear after each story, make for great reading. Sometimes they lay out their philosophy about translation in general or the process they used for this project in particular, often they highlight parts that were interesting or problematic for them as they worked, and frequently they discuss their version in the context of all the others.

Really enjoyable, both for the stories themselves and as a study of the translation process and its role in our perception of translated literature. ( )