Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Isaac Bashevis Singer, 80, used to change translators with the seasons, arguing over every article and preposition as his stories went from Yiddish to English. But recently the novelist has professed "great compassion" for the workers he once abused. "Since every language contains its own unique truths," he now believes, "translation is the very spirit of civilization." Then he adds, "In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women; lately I'm dreaming of a harem full of translators." -By Patricia Blake
...becomes the protagonist. His most recent novel. If on a winter's night a traveler... is written in the second person, describing how "you," the reader, search for the lost ending of the novel If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. More than any other novelist since Nabokov, Calvino breaks down the barriers between the novel and real life, not by making the story seem realistic, but by making reality seem like a book...
Mario Vargas Llosa, 48, on the paradox of being a Latin American novelist: "Because you know how to read and write, you have an audience, you are respected-even by people who repress you and sometimes put you in prison or even kill you. In fact, if you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know...
...Fukuzawa, an important figure in the Westernization of Japan in the 19th century. On 5,000 yen bills, where Shotoku had also ruled, goes Inazo Nitobe, an official in the old League of Nations. The new face on a 1 ,000 yen note is that of a newspaperman and novelist, Soseki Natsume, who died...
Perhaps ambiguity was quite appropriate here, for Seifert is a man who has opposed both Nazism and Communism in the past, and yet is now tolerated by the Communist regime. Says Emigré Czech Novelist Josef Skvorecky (The Engineer of Human Souls): "He is a poet of the people. The government hates him, but he is so revered, so old and ill; he is too famous to be touched." And if the poet laureate...