608 The Encyclopedia of the Dog (with Jose Vergara) | My Last Book with Gareth Russell

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

Arts, History, Books

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

First published in 1980, Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov is one of the most acclaimed Russian novels of the twentieth century. But the book, with its dazzling wordplay, shifting-sand narration, and other literary pyrotechnics, has been tough for English-speaking audiences to appreciate. In this episode, Jacke talks to Jose Vergara about his new project, The Encyclopedia of the Dog, an online bilingual digital version of Sokolov's novel, which seeks to make a literary masterwork accessible to new audiences. Then Jacke talks to Gareth Russell (The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of British History at Hampton Court) about his choice for the last book he will ever read. Find Encyclopedia of the Dog at https://encyclopediaofthedog.com/. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	Hello, it is one of the most fascinating books of the 20th century, a Russian novel by a writer with an uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union and Russia.
0:20.0	The uneasiness continues into the prose and the book structure and perhaps the mind of the reader.
0:26.5	Sasha Sokolov is the author and the novel is called Between dog and wolf.
0:33.0	Of it, an onlooker says,
0:35.0	quote, it can be easy to feel like you're wrestling with a beast.
0:39.0	Everything keeps shifting.
0:41.0	Characters blend names and identities, temporal and geographic settings
0:46.5	unexpectedly slide away. Everything taken as a whole resembles an animal resisting comprehension, end quote, an animal resisting comprehension.
0:57.6	That's a book we're talking about.
0:58.7	Well, we have books like that in English too by authors like Thomas Pynchen and James Joyce.
1:04.3	We're used to tackling books like that carefully, attuned to the language, perhaps with a companion
1:11.6	volume of annotations by our side.
1:16.1	Put a novel like that into translation
1:18.4	and you multiply the complexity.
1:20.4	Just how are we supposed to approach let alone master a novel built on such shifting
1:27.3	sands when so much of the meaning derives from a language we might not know.
1:32.7	How do we catch the references?
1:34.7	How do we tease out the ambiguities?
1:37.1	How do we sift through irony?
1:40.4	We count on our translators to help and in this case of the case of between
1:46.0	dog and wolf we have an English translation which came out in 2017
	...

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