Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I really like this series, but the slowness to release the English language titles and the order in which they're released is frustrating. The latest title, The Road to Ithaca, is fifth in the English language order but tenth in the Italian numbering. Though Italian, Pastor writes in English and then apparently someone else translates them into Italian. So the English language versions are there, but they're parceled out slowly and in a bizarre order.
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I actually think the English publication order kind of makes sense. #1-3 were the first three written, and apparently have been revised and expanded in the newer Italian reprint editions, while English #4-5 are among the two most newly-written by the author since Bitter Lemon Press started picking the series up, which they probably want to keep in sync with the latest international volumes. And they're not written in chronological order anyway, so trying to rearrange the series by that wouldn't really work, especially if the author has been revising her earlier work and keeps writing new installments as well.
I'm guessing that the next two to be available in English, if BLP keeps at it, will be #5 Italian,
The Dead in the Square, set in Italy of June 1944 following
A Dark Song of Blood (since that will be the next reprint volume out from Italian publisher Sellerio in May this year, skipping #4 which is the Spain 1937 adventure) and #11,
Little Fires, set in France of 1940, which was last year's new book.
At this rate, it's going to take them a while to get to the one I really want to read out of curiosity, #8,
Master of One Hundred Bones, set in Berlin 1939 and apparently involving a Japanese delegation. I'm starting to seriously consider breaking down and just plain learning to read Italian so I can give a try to the e-versions available via Kobo UK (and US, but bizarrely not Kobo CA, and Sellerio only seems to put the reprints of the older ones out every couple of years) since it doesn't look too far off from French and I can usually get around two paragraphs into an other-Romance-language Wikipedia article before giving up and running the rest through Google Translate, and it'll probably be a useful language to be able to read in any case. (I am probably being overly optimistic about the practicality of this.)
Anyway, also finished (okay, kind of skim-read since poetry isn't really my thing)
J. R. R. Tolkien's
The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun, edited by retired English professor Verlyn Flieger. This was on the library's New Books shelf and turns out to be one of Tolkien's fanfic versions of medieval verse (I was expecting it to be another one of his Middle-Earth shorts which have been getting illustrated editions in recent years), presenting a long poem he wrote in imitation of Breton lays, drawing upon some sort of local fairy tale tradition.
I skimmed the actual poetry, but this was a very nice annotated edition which presented facsimile copies of hand-written pages of the “originals”, alongside notes on the poetry (both footnotes for odd words, and longer endnote explanations for various literary references and stylistic attempts). Plus they included extra poems by Tolkien which are apparently preliminary side works and rough drafts for the finished poem, sandwiched by introductions and commentary by Flieger explaining how they tie together thematically and how the revisions indicate changes in Tolkien's storytelling decisions and the influence of various ancient works on his own eventual style, etc. which I found more interesting than Tolkien's actual writing.
It's pretty nice that HarperCollins is doing these annotated reprint editions of what's admittedly rather obscure work, even by a famous author, and making them available to interested persons, even if they kind of have to resort to a bunch of mentions of how this was a pre-cursor to Tolkien's ideas for
The Silmarillion and other Lord of the Rings tie in stuff, probably to increase the sales appeal.