Giovane Holden in any other language…

Book titles don’t always translate well from English to other languages. J.D. Salinger’s novel ”Catcher in the Rye,” for example, is called ”Il giovane Holden” in Italian — or ”Young Holden.” On the other hand, Ernest Hemingway’s ”For Whom the Bell Tolls” works out to be almost identical: ”Per chi suona la campana.”

In more local terms (local being Spokane, not the Italian Riviera where I am typing this), Ursula Hegi’s novel ”Stones From the River” is called pretty much that, ”Come pietre nei fiume” (which to me is more similar to ”Like Stones in the River,” but then I’m hardly a linguist).

For Sherman Alexie’s novel ”The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” the Italians (according to a nice young woman in a Florentine bookstore) unaccountably dropped one of the pugilists to come up with ”Lone Ranger fa a pugni in Paradiso.”

Finally, Spokane’s own Jess Walter came up with a mouthful of a title for his first novel ”Over Tumbled Graves.” Walter, a former Spokesman-Review reporter, works hard to write literature and not just pulp fiction. But the Italians apparently don’t know that. If their translation of the novel doesn’t indicate how they feel — ”Il fiume dei cadaveri,” or ”River of Corpses” — then the word that is stamped on the cover certainly does: ”Thriller.”

At least they didn’t call it a ”Giovane thriller.” If they had, Chris Crutcher might have gotten jealous.