Hotel translated into two more languages
Foreign book sales are like visits from the Tooth Fairy (or Tooth Mouse). They just seem to miraculously happen overnight. This week I found the sale of Finnish rights and Spanish rights beneath my pillow.
That means there will soon be eleven versions of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: Norwegian, German, Dutch, Italian, Complex Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Turkish, Portuguese, Finnish, Spanish, and English.
Still holding out for Klingon. Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam!
32,000 miles. That’s a lot of airline peanuts.
My spring book tour was a blur of airports, but this fall tour is amazing—like a grand experiment in sleep deprivation. I’ll be traveling to twenty-four cities (at last count), over six weeks. And after spending the last few months chained to my writing desk, I’m thrilled to be out visiting bookstores again. Especially since this tour will include a visit to Norway!
Needless to say, I’m eager to meet the fantastic folks at Pantagruel, but also bookstore owners, retailers and other kindly folks—especially readers.
So much to do. So much to pack. I’m counting the days…
Hello Norway!
Ah, even as I type this I’m resisting the urge to look up a clever greeting on google.com/translate. Instead, I’ll just opt for “hello” and “thanks”––thanks for popping by this site, and thanks for all the amazing interest in my debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which has now been translated into a veritable United Nations of languages. It’s been an amazing and humbling experience.
Speaking of foreign tongues, one of my favorite authors, Orson Scott Card, once said that the sign of a good literary novel is its ability to be translated into other languages––that the story and its themes are large enough, and transcendent enough, to resonate even through the lens of a different culture. Or it needs a lot of vampires. (Okay, I added the vampire part, but that seems to work too).
And never was that more evident than during a recent speaking engagement at a college in Seattle, where I had the opportunity to visit with an ESL class (English as Second Language) that was reading the book. My main characters in Hotel are Japanese and Chinese, so I’d imagined the class made up of Asian students. Instead I was surprised to find the class primarily comprised of students from Sudan, Malaysian, Kenya, Oman, Thailand––students from everywhere! Clearly there were themes at work in the novel, beyond the assortment of written words on the page, and beyond the cultural borders depicted in the book. The book it seems, has taken on a life of its own. I’m just along for the ride.
With that in mind, I hope you enjoy my debut novel––in your native Norwegian, or the language of your choosing. And I hope you have questions, thoughts and comments.
After all, our time together is much more enjoyable when spent as a dialogue instead of a monologue.
Don’t be shy. We’ll talk more soon…
Jamie
