Articles Tagged “Translation ”
French/American and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize
The French American and Florence Gould Foundations have just announced their annual prize for translation. The prize (which comes with a 10,000-dollar bonus on the side) rewards a recent translation of a work of fiction or non-fiction from French into English. Excluded categories include children's literature,…...read more »
The Guardian on Translation
Richard Lea in the Guardian uses the Society of Authors' annual translation prize as a springboard to explore the current state of translation publishing.
The Year in Translation
The end of the year is upon us, and with it the end of year lists of the best of everything. What new translations did you read this year, and what did you like? Loathe? Long for? Cast your vote now.
Maxim Biller
A few weeks ago, I moderated an evening with Maxim Biller at the Goethe Institute in New York. Maxim Biller is a German author, although he was born in Prague and only moved to Germany when he was ten years old. He is definitely German. The Israeli newspaper H'aaretz published a profile on Biller earlier…...read more »
Old Labour, New Labour
For independents committed to discovering and showcasing new voices—be they home-grown or from foreign climes—2008 looms as a year of reckoning. In October 2007, Arts Council England's (ACE) popular and energetic literature director Gary McKeone, who greatly improved literature funding, was…...read more »
The A to Z of Literary Translation
Whilst writing about English PEN's "Writers in Translation" committee, of which I am a member—tapping into my experiences as an editor, agent and publicist—the idea of doing a fun, but far from definitive listing, the A to Z Of Literary Translation, came to mind. oOo Artistry and adaptation…...read more »
Lawrence Venuti Tells us Some More About the Business of Translation
Earlier this month, Words Without Borders featured a piece by Lawrence Venuti on the business side of publishing books in translation. Venuti's article was written for the Frankfurt Book Fair Panel on To Be Translated or Not to Be, the report by Esther Allen, the Ramon Llull Institute and various PEN…...read more »
The A to Z of Literary Translation: D to F
Dialogue and debate on issues surrounding literary translation at talks, workshops, summer schools and residence programmes—along with translation studies courses covering linguistic concepts, theories and practice—are crucial for professionals in the field to connect and keep up to date. Ego…...read more »
The A to Z of Literary Translation: G to I
Grants, awards and prizes such as the Nobel Prize in literature, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation, help put writers and their translators under the spotlight and boost sales. The TA's Translation…...read more »
And the Winners Are! (Publishers, sign these folks up…)
Hot off the presses...the winners of the 2008 PEN Translation Fund grants... PEN Translation Fund Announcement of 2008 Grant Recipients The PEN Translation Fund, now celebrating its fifth year of existence, is pleased to announce the winners of this year's competition. Out of a stellar field of 123 applicants,…...read more »
The A to Z of Literary Translation: J to L
Jerome of Stridonium is the patron saint of theological learning in the Roman Catholic Church and is also recognized as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church. Remembered in particular for his version of the Old Testament based on the Hebrew texts, he is credited for the principle of translating ísense…...read more »
The Literature of the Future
A couple of weeks ago on a cold night I walked to the Mercantile Library—for the first time in all these years that I have been living in Manhattan I have to admit—to listen to a discussion about literature in translation, organized by this excellent website. The space turned out a little bit…...read more »
The A to Z of Literary Translation: M to O
Market share of world literature is dominated by U.S. publishing conglomerates and literary agents who, together with their British counterparts, are increasingly promoting celebrities rather than professional writers in order to maximize revenue and profits. Thanks to the former British empire and today's…...read more »
The A to Z of Literary Translation: P to R
Publishers in the independent sector are fundamental to ensure variety in the marketplace; they are surviving despite stiff competition and the discount war, (ref. Society of Authors, The Future of Independent Publishing). Tired preconceptions continue to hamper the progress of translations in the UK…...read more »
The A to Z of Literary Translation: S to V
Schools of thought about the rights and wrongs of translation are summarized by Susan Sontag as follows: íI suppose that the two opposed schools of translators are those who feel, like Nabokov, that a good translation has to be a literal transcription of the original, no matter how flat or awkward,…...read more »
London Calling
The wilderness years are over for Arabic writers in translation it seems, as they were in the spotlight this week in London's Earls Court. Arabia Books was launched in the run up to the London Book Fair—the agenda being to publish the best contemporary fiction from the Arabic World. The venture…...read more »
The A to Z of Literary Translation: W, X, Y & Z
Worldwide web development and the long-tail phenomenon offer new opportunities for the visibility of literary translation. Electronic translation software is to be avoided. Postcolonial and new immigrant writing benefit from cross-frontier digital exchange. And lesser known cultures and languages can…...read more »
Dutch Translation Workshops in Italy
For the last 10 days I have been touring through Italy giving workshops at universities where Dutch is being taught. I was surprised to hear that there are five Italian cities where you can study Dutch: Naples, Rome, Bologna, Padua and Trieste. I have been to all of these cities the last 10 days, with…...read more »
2009 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation
Translators under 30, this is for you: The Susan Sontag Foundation has announced its annual prize for translation, with a cash award of $5,000. This year the call is for work translated from Spanish into English. You can find more details on applying at the website, and look at the winners of last year's…...read more »
Dispatches: Creativity through Constraint
It is easy to think of translation in terms of confinement, especially when it comes to the translation of poetry. But there are have been literal renderings (Nabokov's Eugene Onegin), out-and-out rewrites (Lowell's Imitations), and even translations by those who aren't familiar with the source language…...read more »
Dispatches: Translator/Author Complexity
In working through my own ideas of how I approach texts to be translated, a persistent issue that may never be resolved is that of the author's role. As much as I tell myself that I should have a clear idea of my position — or at least know what I think — the more I'm convinced that there…...read more »
Online Book Club for “The Diving Pool” by Yoko Ogawa
This January, we kick off the year in book clubs with an online discussion of Yoko Ogawa's Diving Pool. Ogawa is one of contemporary Japan's most celebrated authors, and her collection of meticulously crafted, dark and troubling novellas provides a glimpse into the subtle, twisted drama of everyday life.…...read more »
An Introduction to “The Diving Pool” by Yoko Ogawa
Amber Qureshi jumpstarts the discussion of Yoko Ogawa's Diving Pool with an introduction to the author, her work and contemporary Japanese literature. Amber will be posting her impressions of The Diving Pool on a weekly basis throughout January and we hope all of our readers, and the attendees of our…...read more »
Stephen Snyder talks about “The Diving Pool
In the second installment in our Diving Pool book club, Stephen Snyder, the translator of the book and of Ogawa's Housekeeper and the Professor (forthcoming from Picador), speaks to Amber Qureshi about the Japanese literary scene, the author's fixation on rotting food and the difficulties of marketing…...read more »
Plumbing the Haunted Imagination of Yoko Ogawa
Austin Woerner reports on the discussion between Stephen Snyder and Allison Powell at the Idlewild bookstore last Thursday, January 8, in New York City. You can find the video from the event at the Words Without Borders Youtube channel—Editors As a translator of a language very different from my…...read more »
Ogawa Book Club Post—“Pregnancy Diary”
In her second post for our Diving Pool-discussion, Amber Qureshi discusses "Pregnancy Diary,"one of the novellas from the book and poses questions for our readers. You can find links to previous posts in the discussion at the bottom of the page, and we encourage you to read them and to join in the discussion.—Editors…...read more »
We’re In This Together, Individually: Report from a Roundtable Discussion on “The World of the Trans
Poet Jorie Graham once said, "It is the poet's dream to communicate. To say what we're really saying." And if you think about how hard it is to truly come clean in your own sentence, your own work's paragraph, and then turn that into distilling another poet's communication, from another time, and another…...read more »
Allison Powell on “The Diving Pool”
In an essay that was originally featured in the companion booklet to her and Stephen Snyder's discussion of The Diving Pool at the Idlewild bookstore in New York City, Allison Powell talks about Ogawa, the themes of the author's work and speculates about the riveting and twisted imagery and obsessions…...read more »
From the Symposium: Studying the Arab World in Western Universities
Last month I attended the symposium "The Study of the Arab World in Western Universities," sponsored by ALESCO, the Arab League Educational and Scientific Organization, and hosted by the Arabic department of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, aka SOAS. The four-day…...read more »
From Ghazal to Zuihitsu: A Conference on Translating Asian Languages and Cultures
This recently came in from Roger Sedarat at Queens College: The Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation hosts a translation conference from March 26-March 28, 2009, with panels on translation pedagogy, Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literatures, translation in…...read more »
Best Translated Book of 2008: Fiction and Poetry Finalists
Chad Post of Open Letter Books just announced the ten fiction and ten poetry finalists for the 2008 Best Translated Book of the Year award. The goal of the award is to help bring attention to great works of literature published in the United States over the past year. The award will culminate with the…...read more »
“The Diving Pool” Blog Post
In her blog post on the titular story from Yoko Ogawa's collection of novellas, Amber Qureshi discusses the author's unique use of rhythm and imagery and posits some questions for discussion. For links to other essays in this book club series, go to the bottom of the page, and do feel free to join in…...read more »
Translated Around the Web
If you're reading 2666 yet not interested in the gossip columns on Roberto Bolaño, you may enjoy the thoughtful conversation going on about the book in this "bolaño-l" discussion group, hosted by the person who has a blog devoted to the author, "Las obras de Roberto Bolaño." There's…...read more »
Updike and Foreign Fiction
In May 1998 I opened the New Yorker to discover a review, by John Updike, of Péter Esterházy's She Loves Me, which I'd published in my Hydra imprint in late 1997. The review was not a rave. Updike compared the book unfavorably to Calvino, tsk-tsked at the breakneck pace of the narrative,…...read more »
Dispatches: Neither Here nor There
One of the issues I’ve always had in being bicultural—especially now that I call Colombia my home (although I’m in England at the moment)—is the dilemma of loving a country…and yet not being able to represent it. Maybe the problem is the word “represent”—because…...read more »
Amber Qureshi Discusses Yoko Ogawa’s “Dormitory”
In her final post for the Ogawa book club, moderator Amber Qureshi talks about the third novella in The Diving Pool and the author's cinematic use of light and shadow in her writing. Thanks to all for reading along and we hope that if you have a thought on this or any other post in the series, you'll…...read more »
Blogging about Graphics in February
As part of our third annual Graphic Novels issue, we'll be featuring blog posts on the art, inspiration, histories and technical details behind the most exciting graphic narratives out there. All this February, we're joined by Edward Gauvin, Yani Mentzas, Heinz Insu Fenkl and others, in a discussion…...read more »
Translated Fiction: Immensely Popular in the U.S.!
In his first post for our Graphic Novels blog line-up, Yani Mentzas, Editorial Director of Vertical, Inc., the publisher of—among other great work—Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack series, talks about contemporary Japanese literature, video games and one way to get U.S. readers to consume mass quantities…...read more »
Manga Translation: Only Poets Need Apply (Part I)
In his second post for our blog series on graphic novels this month, Yani Mentzas talks about ensuring quality in manga—in images and in words—and about the very physical constraints of translating for manga.—Editors A work of manga can be translated in a cavalier fashion with near…...read more »
Manga Translation: Only Poets Need Apply (Part II)
The Japanese language employs a mixture of phonetic scripts and ideograms. These latter, the Chinese or kanji characters, invariably take up more space than the original single glyph when rendered into English. There are other facets of the Japanese language that contribute to the tendency for the average…...read more »
“With me, those who seem to be the last come first.”: Meira Eliot on Bohumil Hrabal
Walking into the rather cramped room, you will see among other items on the heavy desk, a much used Consul typewriter, an opened, slightly crumpled pack of cheap cigarettes, a couple of pencils, a coffee mug, and an opened hardback book. Behind the desk in the simply furnished room, on bare floorboards,…...read more »
Manga Translation: Only Poets Need Apply (Part III)
In manga translation, the English rendition of the original Japanese has to fit back into a bubble, and the spatial constraints can be formidable given that one language reads top-down and the other left-right. Not only the bubble's size but its shape comes into play, favoring the use of shorter words…...read more »
Dispatches: Merely Literary?
At The Reading Experience this past December, Dan Green defended the way in which he reads to analyze literature for its aesthetic aspects and “to open up the text in order to make its palpable qualities more accessible.” His declaration is clear and forthright: The formal and stylistic accomplishments…...read more »
Etgar Keret in Context
In conjunction with our live Etgar Keret discussion on March 5th at the Idlewild bookstore in New York, Adam Rovner, writer, scholar and translations editor of Zeek, will be moderating an online discussion on Etgar Keret's Girl on the Fridge. Adam will be posting weekly about reading The Girl on…...read more »
On the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Longlist
Real food to enrich the intellect and the soul, or fast food publishing: which will survive in hard times? As the economic downturn hits home it makes sense to publish fewer, well-written books rather than splash out the cash on the latest "sensational" celebrity memoir. Clever companies perceive not…...read more »
Words Without Borders and the Idea of Indonesian Literature
I want to explore how the idea of "words without borders" might relate to the concept of "Indonesian literature." "Borders" can be political, cultural, social and perhaps, practical. A border is a construct, rather than something natural and self-evident. They are expressed politically and through culture…...read more »
Brutal Banality in Keret’s “An Exclusive”
At nearly nine pages, "An Exclusive" is the lengthiest story in Etgar Keret's Girl on the Fridge. Perhaps because it's the longest, it's one of my favorites. Keret is known as a stylist of economy, of idiom, and of the manipulation of powerful cultural allusion. "An Exclusive" demonstrates…...read more »
Saying Big Things: The Art of Etgar Keret
In the latest dispatch for our Etgar Keret discussion, Todd Hasak-Lowy, author of Captives and The Task of this Translator, talks about Keret and the art of saying big things —Editors Etgar Keret says very big things about very small worlds. There is an irony in this, because to say big things,…...read more »
Reading Keret: Translating the Funhouse
"Hat Trick" first appeared in Missing Kissinger (1994), and has since proved one of Etgar Keret's most popular stories. In 1998, artist Batia Kolton of the Actus Tragicus comics collective adapted the story into a graphic and disturbing tale. You can find it in English as "HaTrick" in Jetlag: Five…...read more »
Teaching in Translation
The general membership meeting of the American Literary Translators Association's annual conference in October of this year went smoothly until the final item of business. The members present were sharply divided over the newly imposed rule stipulating that only books with the translator's name…...read more »
Raising The Dead
It is not everyday a person has the pleasure of seeing Mark Harman, Richard Howard and Sarah Ruden together in one place. Mark Harman, responsible for Kafka's Amerika and many other Kafka translations, Sarah Ruden for Virgil's Aeneid, and Richard Howard of course for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. Brought…...read more »
Talking Translation at the London Book Fair
Having only one day free for attending the London Book Fair, the panel discussion involving Chad Post, Mark Thwaite, Bob Stein, Lance Fensterman, and Abby Blachly had been the one I’d been looking forward to the most. “Marketing Translations and Other ‘Difficult’ Books”…...read more »
Tanikawa Shuntaro, The Greatest Living Poet You’ve Never Heard Of
In her dispatch for this month's issue on Japanese literature, Juliet Grames directs her attention to the post-war poet Tanikawa Shuntaro and his verse— lyrical, unusual, and largely unheard of in the U.S. —Editors There's nothing quite as exciting and frustrating as finding a piece of extremely…...read more »
Translation and Proficiency Language Teaching
In a previous post, I suggested that the covers of books make for rather poor soil in which to cultivate an appreciation for translated contemporary literature among the general English-reading public. Of course the essential work of translators should be recognized whenever possible, on covers and title…...read more »
New Writers Explore the Dark Side of Japanese Literature
Book sales are generally down in Japan, and for that matter, they've been down for more than a decade. Sure, you've heard of the rise of keitai shosetsu, novels written and read on the ubiquitous cell phones, but it's no Kindle and no one's getting royalties there. Excuse the pun, but it's something…...read more »
Translating “The Tale of Genji”, the World’s First Novel
In her second blog post for our issue of Japanese literature, Juliet Grames explores the roots of contemporary writing by discussing the now 1,000-year-old Tale of Genji. —Editors You may have heard the exciting news: it's the 1000th-anniversary of The Tale of Genji, the Japanese epic commonly…...read more »
The Author’s Voice and the Translator’s
Recently, I traveled to Paris to assist my publisher there with the promotion of one of my novels that had been translated into French. Any excuse to visit Paris is a good excuse. It's easy to forget the hardship of the publicist. The publicist has to promote books that other people decided were…...read more »
Today in International Lit
The Nobel Prize With the announcement of Herta Müller as Nobel Prize winner for literature comes the continued sense that the Nobel committee is challenging the English-speaking world to be more aware of what is happening in Europe. Friday's Guardian piece responded positively, while Lev Grossman,…...read more »
Poeboes Podcast with Jamie McKendrick
In the latest in his Poeboes podcast series for Words without Borders, André Naffis speaks to poet and translator from the Italian Jamie McKendrick. Jamie McKendrick (1955 - ) lives in Oxford and has published five collections of poetry. He edited The Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poems in…...read more »
Interview with Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s “The Romantic Dogs”
This interview with Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño's poetry, is part of our month long look at international poetry and celebration of the release of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry by the editors of Words Without Borders. This interview was a collaboration…...read more »
On Poetry in Translation
The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry has been out for a couple of weeks now, and as we await the critical response, I think of the most satisfying poetry review I read last year: Jon Stallworthy, writing in the TLS of December 4, 2009, on Clare Cavanagh's translation of Adam Zagajewski's…...read more »
News from the Paris Book Fair
The Paris Book Fair (March 26-31, 2010) celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year. The organizers invited 90 writers for the occasion, (60 of them from France and 30 from all over the world) to discuss the topic "Telling the World." Among the discussions were "Writers Exploring an Unknown Land"…...read more »
From the Translator: Elizabeth Harris on Translating Chess in “The Revenge of Capablanca”
In a special piece for Dispatches, Elizabeth Harris, translator of Fabio Stassi's piece The Revenge of Capablanca in this month's issue, talks about the ins and outs of translating Stassi. I’m delighted that the editor of Words Without Borders asked me to talk a bit about the challenges…...read more »
One Poem, Two Translations: A Three-Way Conversation
When I was starting out as a translator in the late 1980s, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei had caused a stir in American poetry and translation circles. Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz had taken a four-line Chinese poem, over a millennium old, and presented it together with nineteen very different…...read more »
MFA in Translation: Queens College
According to the New York Times, New York’s borough of Queens is one of the most linguistically diverse urban areas in the country—its inhabitants listed 138 different languages on their census forms this year—making it a perfect place to study translation. And indeed, in 2007…...read more »
A Dispatch from European Literature Days
I’ve just returned from the tiny town of Spitz on the River Danube in Austria’s picturesque wine-growing region of Wachau. I was attending the European Literature Days festival, organized to encourage cross-cultural dialogue about literature with a particularly European slant. The festival…...read more »
From the Translator: Andrea Rosenberg on Translating Silvina Ocampo’s “The Golden Hare”
In an essay for WWB, Andrea Rosenberg speaks about her translation of Silvina Ocampo's lyrical fable, "The Golden Hare," from this month's issue of the magazine. You can read the story in its entirety over here. I knew I had to translate “The Golden Hare,” Silvina Ocampo’s mysterious…...read more »
From the Translator: Lydia Beyoud on Fouad Laroui’s “My Father’s Antenna”
Rich with comic and descriptive juxtapositions of traditional Moroccan culture with the exotic and intriguing technology and terminology of the Western world, My Father’s Antenna makes for a comic and bittersweet story of the changes that propel an individual, a family, and a village in Morocco…...read more »
From the Translator: Andrea G. Labinger on Guillermo Martínez’s “Dance at the Marcone”
The prolific and talented Guillermo Martínez is well-known beyond the borders of his native Argentina. Indeed, Martínez is one of the most-translated of contemporary Argentine writers. His 2003 mystery novel, Crímenes imperceptibles (translated into English by Sonia Soto as…...read more »
New Series: On Reviewing Translations
This week, we are launching a series to explore the ways that book reviews handle translations. Reviewers and translators each have varied opinions on how translations should be discussed, and on who should be doing the discussing. At a recent panel on the future of book reviewing, review editors stressed…...read more »
Fragments of Sappho
The Greek poet Sappho, who lived on the island of Lesbos from around 630 BC, was a singer and songwriter who wrote nine volumes of verse lyrics. Of all this work, only one poem has survived intact. Yet she is remembered more than two millennia later. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sapphois a handsomely…...read more »
On Reviewing Translations: Lorraine Adams
Like many American-born English speakers, I have an unhappy story to tell about my ignorance of the rest of the world’s languages. It begins in my youth when I spent eight years studying Latin. This rendered me well-versed in Vergil, Horace and Catullus, but unfit for modern literature, conversation…...read more »
From the London Book Fair: Myths and Myth-busting
Some welcome myth-busting about translation today at day two of the Literary Translation Center. During the opening session, called “Translation Intelligence: Surveys, Reports, Statistics—What’s the Story Behind Them?,” Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, plugged…...read more »
From the London Book Fair, Day 3
In a morning session at today’s London Book Fair, Daniel Hahn asked a group of translators and translation advocates what it is exactly that makes a good translator. An “open-ended and impossible” question, he hastened to add, but one that at least needed to be considered by the panel,…...read more »
Writing in a Majority/Minority Cultural Context: Local Identity vs. a Broader Nation
PEN created this video of the panel our editorial director, Susan Harris, moderated (and we co-sponsored) as part of the PEN World Voices Festival, with Nadine Bismuth, Nicolas Dickner, Dominique Fortier, Mykola Riabchuk, and Teresa Solana.
From the Translator: Elizabeth Harris on Translating Marco di Marco
In this installment of "From the translator," Elizabeth Harris weighs in on dialogue, scene, exposition, and the fascinating process behind rendering Marco Di Marco's Moving Like Geckos for Words without Borders. You can read the piece in our June 2011 issue over here. I'm very pleased…...read more »
The Narrator Never Dies: An Interview with Dany Laferrière
On October 28, the Haitian-born author Dany Laferrière appeared on a panel presented by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and UnionDocs, with the support of the Villa Gillet and France’s Conseil de la Création Artistique. The subject was Featuring Disaster: How We Picture…...read more »
Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist Announced
Three Percent, the resource for international literature based at the University of Rochester, has announced the fiction longlist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Awards. The twenty-five nominees include books by WWB authors David Albahari, Sergio Chejfec, Johan Harstad, Dany Laferrière, Inka…...read more »
Teaching in Translation: Poet as Translator
Editor's note: This essay was delivered at the panel "Teaching Translation in the Workshop," organized by Douglas Unger and with presentations by Jason Grunebaum, Becka McKay, Malena Morling, and Douglas Unger, at the Associated Writing Programs conference, March 2, 2012. Other panelists' presentations…...read more »
From the Translator: On Translating Fabrizio Mejía Madrid
It’s funny the paths one is led down by what one gets to translate. After having translated Juan Pablo Villalobos’s stunning debut, Down the Rabbit Hole, last year, I now seem, somewhat bewilderingly to me at least, to be considered by some as practically an expert on Mexico and Mexican literature—something…...read more »
Teaching in Translation: The Translation Workshop
I was hired in 2009 to teach translation in Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program—something that had never been offered in the MFA curriculum. To encourage as many students as possible to register for the translation workshop, I decided that I would not require that they know a second…...read more »
From the Translator: Working with the Author
Editor's note: Translator Samantha Schnee worked closely with author Carmen Boullosa throughout the translation of the latter's "Sleepless Homeland." The following exchange, with its multiple rounds of drafts, queries, and responses, provides an instructive glimpse of the process. Did we lose…...read more »
From the Translator: Titling “Tana”
I’m very grateful to the editors of Words Without Borders for letting me discuss my translation of Giulio Mozzi’s “Tana.” This gives me the chance to discuss my failure. Several years back, when I first met with Mozzi in Padua about his collection Questo è il giardino (This…...read more »
Day Two at the London Book Fair
The London Book Fair runs from April 16-April 18, and WWB brings it to you from the Literary Translation Centre, a seminar dedicated to all aspects of literary translation. Follow us each day on Twitter--@WWBorders---and on our Dispatches blog, where we'll be posting daily round-ups with…...read more »
Day Three at the London Book Fair
The highlight of the third and final day at the Literary Translation Center was a conversation among poets, editors, and translators about an exciting new book of contemporary Chinese poetry. The book is called Jade Ladder—and the panelists discussing it, and related subjects, sounded like…...read more »
How “To Algeria, with Love” became “La Repubblica di Wally”
Einaudi bought the Italian rights to my novel before it had an English language publisher, editor, or even a title. Work on the translation began last summer, around the time the book was published in the UK by Virago as To Algeria, with Love. As luck would have it, my husband and I were in southern…...read more »
The Decline and Fall of a Translator’s Brain
Just when you think you’ve figured out what is going on in the Toh Enjoe story “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire,” you trip on another oblique reference to some bit of the outside world. It’s a story that bears up to—and in fact, requires—multiple…...read more »
From the Archives: Ghosts on the Bridge
As a transition between the two parts of our double issue of Japanese writing, you might want to revisit Michael Emmerich’s essay "Beyond Between: Translations, Ghosts, Metaphors," from our May 2009 issue. Michael details the multitude of possible Japanese renderings for the word "translation,"…...read more »