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McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #42
McSweeney's Issue 42: Multiples
With the help of guest editor Adam Thirlwell (author of Kapow!,Visual Editions), Issue 42 is a monumental experiment in translated literature—twelve stories taken through six translators apiece, weaving into English and then back out again, gaining new twists and textures each time, just as you'd expect a Kierkegaard story brought into English by Clancy Martin and then sent into Dutch by Cees Nooteboom before being made into English again by J. M. Coetzee to do. With original texts by Kafka and Kharms and Kenji Miyazawa, and translations by Lydia Davis and David Mitchell and Zadie Smith (along with others by John Banville and Tom McCarthy and Javier Marías, and even more by Shteyngart and Eugenides and A. S. Byatt), this will be an issue unlike anything you've seen before—altered, echoing narratives in the hands of the finest writers of our time, brought to you in a book that looks like nothing else we’ve ever done.
- GenresFictionShort Stories
300 pages, Paperback
First published July 10, 2012
4 people are currently reading
103 people want to read
About the author
Adam Thirlwell
37 books92 followersAdam Thirlwell was born in 1978 and grew up in North London. He is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and assistant editor of Areté magazine.
His first novel, 'Politics', a love story with digressions, was published in 2003, and his second book, 'Miss Herbert: A Book of Novels, Romances & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes', in 2007. 'Miss Herbert' won a 2008 Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel is 'The Escape' (2009).
In 2003, Adam Thirlwell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British novelists'. He lives in Oxford.
His first novel, 'Politics', a love story with digressions, was published in 2003, and his second book, 'Miss Herbert: A Book of Novels, Romances & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes', in 2007. 'Miss Herbert' won a 2008 Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel is 'The Escape' (2009).
In 2003, Adam Thirlwell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British novelists'. He lives in Oxford.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
February 4, 2017
Perhaps the most pretentious thing I've read all year.
This year I endeavored to read more books from international authors, excluding books from the UK, Canada, and US. There’s a good TED talk that touches on our tendencies to stock our shelves full of Western authors and how that can limit our view of world literature. In any case, my personal challenge has been going rather well. I’ve read books this year from Jamaica, China, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Colombia this year and each has been a drastically different reading experience from what I’m used to with my usual reading.
But I’d never given much thought to the act of translation itself. Is the translator’s duty to neither add nor subtract from the author’s text? Or perhaps it is more important to capture the essence of the story, to translate the message at the expense of the author’s original words. So, McSweeney’s #42 gave me a good excuse to delve deeper into these thoughts with it’s fairly pretentious, kind-of-gimmicky concept.
McSweeney’s #42 collects a series of 12 stories written in languages other than English, subsequently translated by authors you’ve probably read. Rather than stopping at a single translation, the initial translations are subsequently translated into another foreign language before being re-translated from the second foreign language back into English.
So, the cover, depicting different generations of phones, each layer of the cover not flush with the last, makes a bit more sense. That is, this book is a giant literary game of telephone.
A Brief Aside on the Pretentious Employment of the Cover
The cover is pretty eye-catching at first, but actually makes for a bit of an uncomfortable book to hold. It strikes me as the type of book that one might buy and leave on a coffee table laying in wait. One day, when esteemed guests join them for wine, cheese, and feigned pleasantries, they will take note of the book. They’ll first be drawn in by its complex physical structure, then been impressed and daunted by its concept. They’ll conclude that this person is extremely well read and will perhaps make comment to the owner on their challenging reading choices. The owner will then simulate having read the book, and strike a delicate balance between insult and nonchalance as he asks in a voice of condescension, “Why, haven’t you read it?” End Aside
But, the question you are likely asking is, well is it any good? Certainly a three-star rating could go either way. I won’t lie to you fellow goodreadians: I did not read multiple versions of every story in this book. The concept, at first appealing, became monotonous after the first two stories. The variations were minor, and though it is a pretty neat/overly pretentious concept, I never felt as if the stories took a drastic turn from the other version I had just read. So, instead, I treated this book like I would any short story collection and just read one version of each story. For the most part, I read the authors with whom I was familiar when possible, and tried out new authors when I knew no name on the list.
Interestingly, this book makes for a pretty good short story collection if you were to just cut out the literary masturbation that is the act of perpetual translation. I got to read stories from Russia, Italy, and many other countries whose authors I had never read. The perspective, tone, and style that each story was able to convey made for a unique reading experience with every tale. Some of the stories are quite short, while others go on for pages. I didn’t love each one, but I loved the unique flavor that each offered.
All the same, I would have been just as happy for the book to have a few more stories from different parts of the world instead of all the translations.
In Transition
This morning I dropped off the book at a local coffee shop that doubles as a community library. There are stacks of books in a makeshift library that are all free, and the owners ask only that when you wish to divest yourself of books, you drop them off at their shop. It seemed only fitting that a book so consumed with translation from the writers’ side could add a layer of transition from the readers’ end. In one of the flaps of that ostentatious cover, I’ve left a note for the next reader.
Put simply: take from this book only the stories, leave nothing but writing and food-related stains, and once you are done, leave the book for someone you’ve never met to find.
I’ve been bemoaning the pretentious nature of the book throughout the entire review, but this act of meta-telephone is perhaps the most pretentious of all.
This year I endeavored to read more books from international authors, excluding books from the UK, Canada, and US. There’s a good TED talk that touches on our tendencies to stock our shelves full of Western authors and how that can limit our view of world literature. In any case, my personal challenge has been going rather well. I’ve read books this year from Jamaica, China, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Colombia this year and each has been a drastically different reading experience from what I’m used to with my usual reading.
But I’d never given much thought to the act of translation itself. Is the translator’s duty to neither add nor subtract from the author’s text? Or perhaps it is more important to capture the essence of the story, to translate the message at the expense of the author’s original words. So, McSweeney’s #42 gave me a good excuse to delve deeper into these thoughts with it’s fairly pretentious, kind-of-gimmicky concept.
McSweeney’s #42 collects a series of 12 stories written in languages other than English, subsequently translated by authors you’ve probably read. Rather than stopping at a single translation, the initial translations are subsequently translated into another foreign language before being re-translated from the second foreign language back into English.
So, the cover, depicting different generations of phones, each layer of the cover not flush with the last, makes a bit more sense. That is, this book is a giant literary game of telephone.
A Brief Aside on the Pretentious Employment of the Cover
The cover is pretty eye-catching at first, but actually makes for a bit of an uncomfortable book to hold. It strikes me as the type of book that one might buy and leave on a coffee table laying in wait. One day, when esteemed guests join them for wine, cheese, and feigned pleasantries, they will take note of the book. They’ll first be drawn in by its complex physical structure, then been impressed and daunted by its concept. They’ll conclude that this person is extremely well read and will perhaps make comment to the owner on their challenging reading choices. The owner will then simulate having read the book, and strike a delicate balance between insult and nonchalance as he asks in a voice of condescension, “Why, haven’t you read it?” End Aside
But, the question you are likely asking is, well is it any good? Certainly a three-star rating could go either way. I won’t lie to you fellow goodreadians: I did not read multiple versions of every story in this book. The concept, at first appealing, became monotonous after the first two stories. The variations were minor, and though it is a pretty neat/overly pretentious concept, I never felt as if the stories took a drastic turn from the other version I had just read. So, instead, I treated this book like I would any short story collection and just read one version of each story. For the most part, I read the authors with whom I was familiar when possible, and tried out new authors when I knew no name on the list.
Interestingly, this book makes for a pretty good short story collection if you were to just cut out the literary masturbation that is the act of perpetual translation. I got to read stories from Russia, Italy, and many other countries whose authors I had never read. The perspective, tone, and style that each story was able to convey made for a unique reading experience with every tale. Some of the stories are quite short, while others go on for pages. I didn’t love each one, but I loved the unique flavor that each offered.
All the same, I would have been just as happy for the book to have a few more stories from different parts of the world instead of all the translations.
In Transition
This morning I dropped off the book at a local coffee shop that doubles as a community library. There are stacks of books in a makeshift library that are all free, and the owners ask only that when you wish to divest yourself of books, you drop them off at their shop. It seemed only fitting that a book so consumed with translation from the writers’ side could add a layer of transition from the readers’ end. In one of the flaps of that ostentatious cover, I’ve left a note for the next reader.
Put simply: take from this book only the stories, leave nothing but writing and food-related stains, and once you are done, leave the book for someone you’ve never met to find.
I’ve been bemoaning the pretentious nature of the book throughout the entire review, but this act of meta-telephone is perhaps the most pretentious of all.
August 24, 2025
While I did not totally love this volume of McSweeney's, I love McSweeney's for doing the wild experiment that it is. Most magazines dread the idea of being "uneven" from issue to issue, but McSweeney's embraces risk and experiment.
Now a moment of honesty here. I told Goodreads that I read this issue, but in fact I only read the English, French, Italian, and Icelandic translations.
These games of translation telephone would make for an excellent academic exercise, and that was the mindset with which I approached the issue. The writers, however, were not instructed to be strict in their translations, and not all of them were competent in the language they were translating to or from. The result is some jarring shifts caused by changing the setting, changing the story, using Google Translate as the first draft, and other weirdnesses.
My spirit rebels at someone using GT to do actual translation, even if revised later, but by the end of the issue I decided that half the point of the project was to run it off the rails in a variety of ways, in an exploration of creativity rather than of strict translation. The two pieces that made this clear were Vendela Vida's "Four Seasons, Two Summers" and Ivan Vladisavić's "Tango." And the point was dramatically brought home by the Coda piece, translated by the editor and Francesco Pacifico - "The Fire on Chance Street" - which is excellent as the closing piece.
It took me a Long Time to get through this volume, almost two years, and the low star ranking reflects this problem. I was reading the same stories over and over again, and the variations in the prose were mildly interesting but often didn't make up for the repetition. I'd read a couple of versions, and put the book aside for weeks. Or months. The absence of the original texts also diminished the point of the exercise, and I do count that as a problem.
So, very mixed result as a reading experience, though the writing is of a high order throughout. Mixed result as an intellectual exercise. But while the treason/translation problem is well-known and inescapable, this exercise pushed the question farther than I expected. Even the translations by folks who are shaky in the languages, spurred ideas. [And yes, I've been involved in translation projects where I was not familiar with one of the languages involved. I get it. I get it.]
Full points to Adam Thirlwell for pushing and producing this product. Full points to McSweeney's for putting it out there. And yes, college instructors, this would be a useful textbook.
Now a moment of honesty here. I told Goodreads that I read this issue, but in fact I only read the English, French, Italian, and Icelandic translations.
These games of translation telephone would make for an excellent academic exercise, and that was the mindset with which I approached the issue. The writers, however, were not instructed to be strict in their translations, and not all of them were competent in the language they were translating to or from. The result is some jarring shifts caused by changing the setting, changing the story, using Google Translate as the first draft, and other weirdnesses.
My spirit rebels at someone using GT to do actual translation, even if revised later, but by the end of the issue I decided that half the point of the project was to run it off the rails in a variety of ways, in an exploration of creativity rather than of strict translation. The two pieces that made this clear were Vendela Vida's "Four Seasons, Two Summers" and Ivan Vladisavić's "Tango." And the point was dramatically brought home by the Coda piece, translated by the editor and Francesco Pacifico - "The Fire on Chance Street" - which is excellent as the closing piece.
It took me a Long Time to get through this volume, almost two years, and the low star ranking reflects this problem. I was reading the same stories over and over again, and the variations in the prose were mildly interesting but often didn't make up for the repetition. I'd read a couple of versions, and put the book aside for weeks. Or months. The absence of the original texts also diminished the point of the exercise, and I do count that as a problem.
So, very mixed result as a reading experience, though the writing is of a high order throughout. Mixed result as an intellectual exercise. But while the treason/translation problem is well-known and inescapable, this exercise pushed the question farther than I expected. Even the translations by folks who are shaky in the languages, spurred ideas. [And yes, I've been involved in translation projects where I was not familiar with one of the languages involved. I get it. I get it.]
Full points to Adam Thirlwell for pushing and producing this product. Full points to McSweeney's for putting it out there. And yes, college instructors, this would be a useful textbook.
January 30, 2013
This issue of McSweeney’s is an outstanding tribute to the power of storytelling (although I found it to be more a catalog of experiments than masterpieces of short fiction).
The premise of the experiment was to take a story and have it translated it into another language, then translate the result into yet another language, again, and again.
The introduction describes the parameters: each translator received only the piece immediately preceding; the entire series was not available to the translators until the end. The instruction was to preserve the story’s style, “to provide an accurate copy that was also a live story.” What exactly that meant, however, ended up varying widely. Did specific words get translated? Usually. But what about the story, the tone, the ambiance, the sound, the feel? Yes, no, sometimes. The various translators added and subtracted photographs, footnotes, chapter numbers, locations, and characters’ names. Editor Adam Thirlwell wrote: “The ethics of the novelist-translator may well be different from the ethics of the translator-translator.” As translator Dave Eggers said in his followup note: “I took some liberties.”
Just reading the titles, I saw things morph. The most striking examples: The Four Seasons, Without a Summer turned into Four Seasons with Two Summers; the story titled Umberto Buti was reborn as Tian Huaiyi (and these from the original Italian Incontrarsi, which appears not to be the character’s name at all).
Several of the stories seemed to be selected because of their strong cultural underpinnings, as a challenge the translators to test the limits of the transformation. The story sets I enjoyed the most were the ones that ended up in parallel universes. I could see the previously mentioned Tian Huaiyi was the psychic twin of Umberto Buti, transported to a different time and place. My favorite was translated by David Mitchell, who (because of his familiarity with Japanese culture) was able to transform a story written by Kenji Miyazawa into English while retaining its basic plot elements and melancholy tone.
The translators’ notes added greatly to the reading experience.
--Péter Esterházy: “I wanted to make it obvious that this was a translation.”
--Laurent Binet: “I believe translating is rewriting. My own voice has to be there.”
--John Wray: “Translation is a creative act.”
The physical book is itself a creative act. The layered flaps on the covers are an integrated part of the design, the interior text appears in two colors of ink, and two versions of each story appear side by side. The non-Latin typefaces included Urdu, Hebrew, and Chinese.
Highly recommended, particularly if you are fluent in another language!
The premise of the experiment was to take a story and have it translated it into another language, then translate the result into yet another language, again, and again.
The introduction describes the parameters: each translator received only the piece immediately preceding; the entire series was not available to the translators until the end. The instruction was to preserve the story’s style, “to provide an accurate copy that was also a live story.” What exactly that meant, however, ended up varying widely. Did specific words get translated? Usually. But what about the story, the tone, the ambiance, the sound, the feel? Yes, no, sometimes. The various translators added and subtracted photographs, footnotes, chapter numbers, locations, and characters’ names. Editor Adam Thirlwell wrote: “The ethics of the novelist-translator may well be different from the ethics of the translator-translator.” As translator Dave Eggers said in his followup note: “I took some liberties.”
Just reading the titles, I saw things morph. The most striking examples: The Four Seasons, Without a Summer turned into Four Seasons with Two Summers; the story titled Umberto Buti was reborn as Tian Huaiyi (and these from the original Italian Incontrarsi, which appears not to be the character’s name at all).
Several of the stories seemed to be selected because of their strong cultural underpinnings, as a challenge the translators to test the limits of the transformation. The story sets I enjoyed the most were the ones that ended up in parallel universes. I could see the previously mentioned Tian Huaiyi was the psychic twin of Umberto Buti, transported to a different time and place. My favorite was translated by David Mitchell, who (because of his familiarity with Japanese culture) was able to transform a story written by Kenji Miyazawa into English while retaining its basic plot elements and melancholy tone.
The translators’ notes added greatly to the reading experience.
--Péter Esterházy: “I wanted to make it obvious that this was a translation.”
--Laurent Binet: “I believe translating is rewriting. My own voice has to be there.”
--John Wray: “Translation is a creative act.”
The physical book is itself a creative act. The layered flaps on the covers are an integrated part of the design, the interior text appears in two colors of ink, and two versions of each story appear side by side. The non-Latin typefaces included Urdu, Hebrew, and Chinese.
Highly recommended, particularly if you are fluent in another language!
January 1, 2023
This collection was crafted with irreverent joy, kinda like reading out a telestration reveal after everyone is done if instead of drawings/words it's translations. Of course the funniest ones are always the ones that veered so completely from the original and then trying to piece together where did it all fall apart.
Probably the most interesting ones for me were incontrarsi and symphony no 2. I'm also very curious about Carlo emilio Gadda now
Probably the most interesting ones for me were incontrarsi and symphony no 2. I'm also very curious about Carlo emilio Gadda now
April 18, 2018
Interesting concept but I didn't love the source material
April 6, 2013
this was perhaps more a conceptual experience than a compelling read. 12 stories, all of them obscure works from mostly famous authors. but the concept here is translations - each story is translated 4 to 6 times, through a wide range of languages and with an even wider range of translation philosophies. some are rigorous and careful, some are deliberately perpendicular, and some are purely concept, such as the translation to icelandic that involved the translator asking his son to read the story and summarize it and then transcribing the summary. lots of translations from writers who did not have a strong grasp of the source language. almost all translations from authors rather than professional translators.
it was definitely interesting to read multiple versions of the same story in line like that. also got a chance to try out my french reading skills (pretty passable) and spanish reading skills (not passable at all). some of the stories were quite enjoyable, some of them weren't so much. in fact i think every story had at least one translation that i enjoyed.
an unusual read, i wouldn't seek out more like it but i enjoyed the experience.
it was definitely interesting to read multiple versions of the same story in line like that. also got a chance to try out my french reading skills (pretty passable) and spanish reading skills (not passable at all). some of the stories were quite enjoyable, some of them weren't so much. in fact i think every story had at least one translation that i enjoyed.
an unusual read, i wouldn't seek out more like it but i enjoyed the experience.
January 19, 2013
Clever premise.
Before i started, my thoughts were the translations would simply not work as proposed.
When you read a foreign language story in the authors native language, your vocabulary might not recall every definition. But like reading in your native language you can perceive the authors meaning without recalling the definition of every word.
However in a translation, the synonym selected can deliver an entirely different feel and meaning to the reader. Which is the difference between the creative art and the xeroxing of the story.
i gave this a 4 star for several reasons. First the literature is good and a majority of the stories i enjoyed. While a thick journal, it is a quick read since most of the stories are non english translations. And of course the translation experiment. Who but McSweeney's would take on such a project.
Is #42 worth reading. Absolutely. McSweeney's is a must read.
Before i started, my thoughts were the translations would simply not work as proposed.
When you read a foreign language story in the authors native language, your vocabulary might not recall every definition. But like reading in your native language you can perceive the authors meaning without recalling the definition of every word.
However in a translation, the synonym selected can deliver an entirely different feel and meaning to the reader. Which is the difference between the creative art and the xeroxing of the story.
i gave this a 4 star for several reasons. First the literature is good and a majority of the stories i enjoyed. While a thick journal, it is a quick read since most of the stories are non english translations. And of course the translation experiment. Who but McSweeney's would take on such a project.
Is #42 worth reading. Absolutely. McSweeney's is a must read.
June 1, 2013
Another fine issue of what has to be the most interesting literary journal being published today. As others have noted, the theme of this issue is translation, as a series of stories are translated into a number of languages, with each translator only getting the translation that came immediately before it--like a children's game of telephone. The results are pretty fascinating, even if I could only read the English versions ( I limped my way through a couple of the Spanish variations). While it was interesting to see how some of the writers really pushed their translations more toward adaptations, it was even more fascinating to see two English writers produce very similar translations even though each had received the story in a different language than what the other was working from.
April 18, 2014
The 42nd issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is a fascinating experiment in the art of translation. Taking twelve pieces of short fiction and sending them through various translations (English to French to English to Chinese to English again - for one example) shows how much art and license must be taken for a translation to be faithful, not just to the meaning of a story, but to the effect on its readers. Really outstanding issue.
January 23, 2013
Great.
Twelve rare stories each translated 4-6 times. 2-3 English versions of each story. Cruelly, the original of the story is never published.
Many of the stories seem like lost masterpieces. Some of the translations are a bit dry but there's always a different version of the same story you can read.
Twelve rare stories each translated 4-6 times. 2-3 English versions of each story. Cruelly, the original of the story is never published.
Many of the stories seem like lost masterpieces. Some of the translations are a bit dry but there's always a different version of the same story you can read.
March 16, 2013
I was kind of disappointed in this volume of McSweeney's, which has chains of writers translating the same stories into and out of English. The concept is an excellent one, but many of the stories are too philosophical, and kind of dry, for this to really work properly. There are some bright spots though...
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April 8, 2013I'm a big fan of McSweeney's in general, and I gave it my best shot, but I'm giving up on this issue. It sounds like a neat premise - original translations of short stories in and out of English & other languages. There are 6 versions of each short story, each translated by a different author. But I just can't motivate myself to read the different versions, I find it exhausting.
February 6, 2016
An interesting idea, but somewhat difficult to read all the way through. This issue of McSweeney's is a translation project where non-English works are translated multiple times from English to another language and back to English. The idea is to hear how much voice comes from a translator and how much resides in the original work. It was a fun exploration, but at times it became tedious.
March 22, 2013
Stories translated from one language to another six times over - interesting premise, and and even more interesting final result. Revealing just how much leeway a translator can have in interpreting another author's work, it makes you wonder if we can ever really read a book as the author intended without it being in their native language.
June 6, 2013
Interesting concept, but a whole book of it gets rather tedious. I'd have probably enjoyed it more had I not read the whole thing straight through (I mean, the languages I can read at least, which are all of two). My biggest gripe abou this is: Why did the book not include the ORIGINAL stories? That's a big fat glaring gap.
November 15, 2014
This edition of McSweeney's is very interesting. The idea to submit each story to multiple translations by authors who are not experts in their language yields interesting results. Often the sections after the translations are more compelling. This edition would rate higher for a reader if they were conversant in more than a few languages. That is the only glaring deficiency I found.
July 9, 2015
This was probably the most difficult time I've ever had getting into an issue of McSweeney's. I love the concept of this issue, but some of the translations were just so similar to each other and the stories weren't always that interesting to begin with that I didn't want to read them twice. So it took me a long time to finish this issue.
March 22, 2014
Remarkably ambitious and interesting, if only half-readable (unless you speak half a dozen languages). The idea of translating and blindly re-translating a story, while encouraging creativity in the often untrained translators results in some fresh voices, or stolidly similar narratives, depending.
February 8, 2013
This is just about the most interesting thing I've ever read. So many different languages.
March 18, 2015
Oh my god, where do I even start with this one?
April 23, 2013
I liked this a lot better in theory than in execution.
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June 4, 2013Coll.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews