I’ve been occupied this week with assembling and testing a new translation system. It’s working very well, so well, in fact, that I’ve managed to successfully translate no less than eight hitherto untranslated works, seven from Japanese and one from Italian. All eight rate at a very high level, which is to say that while they don’t quite hit the William Weaver or Jay Rubin levels, they are rated higher than the translations you’re accustomed to reading from the average translated classic.William Weaver is the late translator of Umberto Eco’s novels, whose work arguably marks some of the best translations ever written. Jay Rubin is one of Haruki Murakami’s translators, and trying to get closer to his level is what has been preventing us from releasing Kenji Weaver’s translation of Natsume Soseki’s Sanshiro until now.But now that we have the system operating effectively and enough works are already finished to permit me to return to polishing the hundreds of waka required to complete the Genji Monogatari translation, we’re going to start publishing one ebook translated into English every week. Many of these will be works that have never been translated into English before, and some of them are unbelievably good. Most of them will be Japanese, initially, since that is the language with the strongest literary tradition that has the most untranslated works.Since I know a number of you will a) want to support this but b) really don’t want to buy ebooks from Amazon every week, what we’re going to do initially is use the Library substack as a de facto subscription for the weekly ebooks. We’ve raised the monthly price of that subscription by $2.49, so over the course of a year you’d save about $140 in the event you happened to buy all the ebooks, or $160 if you took out an annual subscription. Subscribers will also be permitted to vote on which projects they want us to tackle next; this is important because one reason some of these works are untranslated is because they are absolutely massive.And, of course, if you simply wish to buy whichever books happen to appeal to you as they are published, that would be great too. Some of these books will eventually be published and/or collected into print editions, a few may actually see leather editions if they merit them, and if the project is successful enough over time, it may even eventually grow into a separating publishing imprint.Castalia Library is committed to publishing the most beautiful books in the world. This is a potentially significant step toward Castalia House becoming the best publisher in the world.DISCUSS ON SGThe post A Library, Unlimited appeared first on Vox Popoli.