Category:
Walser’s Berlin Stories: Primer for a Singular Landscape
In 1933, the posthumously acclaimed Swiss writer Robert Walser was living at the sanatorium he had entered four years earlier with severe depression, hallucinations, and writers’ block. Then in his early fifties, Walser had published several novels and many essays, stories, and poems—albeit,…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Festival Neue Literatur This Week in New York
The Festival Neue Literatur has been around since 2010. This festival of new writing from the German-speaking countries (Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) is put on in New York every year, in February, by a consortium of cultural institutes. It takes place over a long weekend and consists…...read more »
Category:
A New Series: Literary Journeys Through Catalonia
Throughout history writers have, again and again, undertaken journeys—journeys of the mind and actual journeys, traveling across their respective homelands as well as exploring more distant, foreign territories. They have traveled, one could argue, to feel captivated and reinvigorated by a sense…...read more »
Category: From the Translator
From the Translator: The Eternonaut
I discovered El Eternauta while translating a poem. Until recently I considered myself to be primarily a translator of poetry. I’d made a few forays into prose, but poetry is always where I’ve situated myself as a writer, and following the conventional wisdom that one must be a poet in order…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Homeless Rats: A Parable for Postrevolution Libya
Libyan writer and diplomat Ahmed Ibrahim Fagih’s Homeless Rats is a quasi-fantastic historical novel that offers considerable insight into Libyan culture and geography, in particular that of the Western Jebel Nafusa, which played a key role in Gaddafi’s ouster. The plot revolves around…...read more »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In London with Esther Freud
Part of the Special City Series/London If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
Category: Dispatches
MuXin, 1927–2011
Chinese writer and painter MuXin died December 21. MuXin was born in 1927 in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, to an wealthy, aristocratic family. Like most intellectuals in the late 1940s, he rallied around Mao Zedong’s vision for a new China, but he quickly became disillusioned. Between the Communist…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
On North Korea: Leaders Great and Dear, and Literature
The opacity that his obituaries attribute to Kim Jong-il extends to North Korean literary culture. WWB has published a fair amount of writing from the country, starting with our second issue in September 2003, Writing from North Korea, and continuing with our anthology Literature from the "Axis of Evil":…...read more »
Category:
The Thing We Mean is Love
According to his own account, David Bellos’s recent book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, began as a diatribe in response to a comment made by a parent of a student at Princeton University, where he teaches. When Bellos said he was a translator, the parent…...read more »
Category:
Crime Scene: The Festival of New Literature from Europe
Scene: Wednesday, November 16 A hard, cold rain. Trenchcoats. New York’s diamond district. Interior: The Center for Fiction, one of several hosts to New Literature from Europe, an annual festival brought together by eight European cultural organizations in New York that focuses this year on innovations…...read more »
Category:
Illustrating Conflict: Perspectives from FIBDA
Under the heading "Algiers, Bubbles without Frontiers," this year's International Comics Festival of Algiers (Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Alger, or FIBDA) provides an important space for discussions and works around history, war, and conflict. I previously wrote about…...read more »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In Kabul with Bashir Sakharwaz
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Kabul as you feel/see it? Kabul…...read more »
Category:
From the Translator: Nancy Naomi Carlson on Translating Suzanne Dracius’s “Women’s Fantasies”
Translating Suzanne Dracius’s “Women’s Fantasies,” my first translation of her work, opened a portal to an exotic Caribbean culture surviving . . . no, living in the shadow of Mount Pelée, one of the deadliest volcanoes on Earth, located in Martinique, in the Lesser Antilles.…...read more »
Category:
From the Translator: David Iaconangelo on Translating Johan Moya Ramis
Early on in “The Other Day After the Rain,” in describing the decaying building in which he lives, the narrator identifies it as being in the “residual phase”, a phrase which puts the structure’s decline in unusual terms: not that of an arc which would account for movement…...read more »
Category:
From the Translator: David Homel on Translating Dany Laferrière’s “Tout bouge autour de moi”
Toward the end of his chronicle of the January 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake and its aftermath, called Tout bouge autour de moi, Dany Laferrière entitles one of his sections “La notion de l’utilité”—the idea of being useful. That’s the dilemma that illuminates…...read more »
Category:
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 »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In Dubai with Nujoom Al-Ghanim
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Dubai as you feel/see it? Today, Dubai is a very busy…...read more »
Category: Teaching in Translation
Teaching in Translation: Teaching the Sagas
I started teaching the Icelandic Sagas just over twenty years ago. I had read some of them as a student, and though they didn’t feature in my research when I did my doctoral thesis, I was glad to get back to them as a teacher. A colleague asked me to teach his Icelandic course for him while he…...read more »
Category:
A Closer Look at FIBDA: the Renaissance of Algerian Comics
Last week I shared an overview of this year’s International Comics Festival of Algiers—FIBDA. In this next installment I take a closer look at the origins of the creative energy in Algeria today and the current state of comics in the country. Festivals have always played a key role in encouraging…...read more »
Category:
Argos Books: A New Form for Translation
The Other Music: Selected Poems from the 1970s, by Francisca Aguirre, translated by Montana Ray If I Were Born in Prague: Poems of Guy Jean, versions by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky Argos Books, established last year by three poets and translators, has already built an impressive catalogue, with chapbooks,…...read more »
Category:
A Dispatch from FIDBA, the International Comics Festival of Algeria
The fourth International Comics Festival of Algiers (Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Alger, FIBDA) took place between October 5 and 8, 2011, featuring a wide range of activities, from exhibitions to panel discussions, ending in an awards ceremony. Here’s a first look…...read more »
Category:
Private Acts: An Interview with Guadalupe Nettel
Born in Mexico City in 1973, Guadalupe Nettel had already won Radio France Internationale’s award for best French-language short story from outside the Francophone world by the time she was nineteen. Since then she has published—among other things—a novel and numerous short story collections,…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The Black Hat: On Self-Translation and Freedom
There is a lively interest in literature in Iceland, although the foreigner tends to see this in a somewhat romantic light. Although there are Viking festivals each summer and the foreigner might be under the impression that most Icelanders are widely read in the sagas, this is far from true. Most…...read more »
Category:
Roussel, Dreamer of Infinite Space
New Impressions of Africa, by Raymond Roussel, translated by Mark Ford (Princeton, 2011) Impressions of Africa, by Raymond Roussel, translated by Mark Polizzotti (Dalkey Archive, 2011) Of Raymond Roussel’s two books with the word Africa in the title (both of which appeared this year in excellent…...read more »
Category: From the Translator
From the Translator: Yu Jian and the German Enlightenment
Living on “Ilha Formosa” and being one of those translators who likes to get to know his authors before he represents them overseas, I don’t often translate poetry from mainland China, but I couldn’t resist translating Yu Jian's "Beethoven Chronology" and "Immanuel Kant."…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature: It’s Tomas Tranströmer
The Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Sweden's great Tomas Tranströmer. The Swedish Academy said it recognized the eighty-year-old poet "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." From his "Prelude," translated for us by Rika Lesser: In the first…...read more »
Category: Teaching in Translation
Teaching in Translation: These Pines
With this post we launch our new series on teaching in translation. Whether teaching in their areas of specialization or shouldering introductory world literature courses, teachers at all levels face questions about how to frame foreign literature for their students. How can instructors make foreign…...read more »
Category:
There Is No Escape from Hope: A Memoir of Reading Naguib Mahfouz
The Coffeehouse by Naguib Mahfouz. Translated by Raymond Stock. American University in Cairo Press, 145pp, £16.99 April 2011, ISBN 9789774163517 Reading Naguib Mahfouz in my teenage years was a singular education. I had read a few of his most popular titles—Children of the Alley (1959), The…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature: Countdown!
News flash: The usually coy Swedish Academy has announced that the Nobel will be awarded Thursday. In the home stretch, Ladbrokes keeps Adonis and Tranströmer to win and place, while Murakami moves into show; Unibet has Murakami leading, with Adonis passing Vijay dan Detha into second and Les Murray…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
After the Revolution: Tunisia, September
The improbable woman was dressed in black Her diverse shadow and her hallucinations were there only to redefine the furtive with appropriate optimism, I could not elude her —Slaheddine Haddad,"A carters’ tea" September still feels like summer in Tunisia, even more so after a revolution. The…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature: Round Two
Resuming last week's conversation, the speculation continues. Britain's suspiciously accurate Ladbrokes bets on Adonis at 4:1, followed by Tomas Transtromer at 9:2 and Peter Nadas at 10:1. Thomas Pynchon and Assia Dejebar are at 12:1, with Ko Un in sixth position at 14:1. Any number of…...read more »
Category: Interviews
The City and the Writer: In Portland with Flávia Rocha
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
Category:
Beyond the Limits of Genre: An Interview with Muharem Bazdulj
Muharem Bazdulj lives in Sarajevo, works as a journalist for Oslobodjenje daily, and has published more than ten books (novels, short stories, essays, poetry). His books have been translated into English, German and Polish, and his short stories and essays into a dozen more foreign languages. He has…...read more »
Category:
Translating the Invisible with Tahar Ben Jelloun
Literature, claims the director of this year's International Literature Festival in Berlin, Ulrich Schreiber, can be our society's political and moral compass. Since 2001, the Festival has given some of the world's most influential writers a place to come together. The Festival…...read more »
Category: On Being Translated
On Being Translated from English to English, by Way of Spanish
I was born into Spanish but grew up in English. I was born in Guatemala and lived there until we moved to South Florida with my family, the day of my tenth birthday, in August of 1981, and I immediately fell into this new sound, into this new identity, called English. I grew up in English. Discovered…...read more »
Category:
“The Truth About Marie” by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
“The good, the admirable reader,” said Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature, “identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.” Perhaps he was anticipating that current sacred cow of American…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature: Our Office Pool
Between the World Cup and the World Series comes high season for world literature: time to place your bets on this year's candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. You can read two of the usual suspects, Adonis and Ko Un, right here, as well as laureates Herta Müller, J. M. G. Le Clézio,…...read more »
Category:
Virginia Woolf on the River Plate
I arrived in Montevideo on the first full day of winter in the southern hemisphere. The dark, muddy winter light was a shock after the bright, metallic air of New York on the eve of summer. Montevideo is not a particularly beautiful city. Too much of the old art-deco architecture was torn down in the…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
A Berlin Diary, in Memory of September 11
I spent the academic year 2001–2 in Berlin. This was a year bracketed by tragedies that took place in my absence—one huge and life-changing for millions of people, one small and life-changing for just a few. The year began with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Layers of Dust and Debris
Another year and its layers of dust and debris. Ten years gone by and the pictures, the words still as sharp and vivid. Glass you dare not touch with your fingers. It all happened across the Atlantic, very far away. The horror reverberating around the planet in a matter of minutes. It has never stopped…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
“I Still Belong to My Country”: An Interview with Ali Al Jallawi
Poet Ali Al Jallawi fled Bahrain in April of this year, one of many political activists, journalists, and writers who left the country rather than risk arrest during a crackdown against pro-democracy protests. In the 1990s Al Jallawi had been imprisoned twice, and tortured, as described in his memoir…...read more »
Category: On Being Translated
On Being Translated: To Be Written in English
There he was. The Main Character. The description of him. All the words, verbs, nouns, pronouns, syllables. I knew them all. Already. But only in Danish. Not this way around. Because here he was, The Main Character, in English. So much the same. But still so different. In some ways much more classy—but…...read more »
Category:
Reimagining Hölderlin: A Discussion between Writers and Translators
In a courtyard gathering at NYU’s Deutches Haus, Martin Rauchbauer and Deike Benjoya sat down with Ross Benjamin, Alfed Goubran, and Richard Sieburth last month to discuss the life and work of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). The idyllic setting of trees, birds, food, wine, and of course,…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The Graffiti of Benghazi
Six months after the February uprising, there are several major differences in the physical appearance of Benghazi, Libya’s rebel capital. The city is unmistakably cleaner, the result of a few pre-uprising civic works (including the cleaning of Benghazi’s putrid central lake) as well as the…...read more »
Category: WWB to Book
From WWB to Book: Success Stories, III
Continuing our series on WWB authors who've sold English-language rights to their work as a result of appearing in WWB, we're delighted to announce the publication of Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? The novel tells the story of the quiet gardener…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
PEN Translation Prizes Announced
PEN has just announced its literary awards for 2011. The award for poetry in translation went to Khaled Mattawa for Adonis: Selected Poems by Adonis (Yale University Press, The Margellos World Republic of Letters Series), and for prose to Ibrahim Muhawi for Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Najati Tayyara, Still Imprisoned
On May 11, 2011, Al Jazeera conducted a phone interview with my friend the writer and Syrian rights activist Najati Tayyara. In that interview, my friend spoke with complete candor about the brutal, bloody practices of the Syrian regime’s apparatuses against peaceful protestors demanding…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Mistral, One Hundred Years Ago
My father-in-law, Walther Franke-Ruta, was born in 1890 in Leipzig, Germany, into a family of furriers and musicians. He became a poet, a prolific novelist, and a popular radio playwright and social satirist, although the satire, first to last, was gentle, without acid or bitterness, as if the…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
How Long It Is, This Arab Spring
It's now seven months since Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire and ignited the Arab Spring. As we wrap up the first of two issues of writing from the uprisings, it's instructive to look back at Dispatches filed as events were unfolding. At the end of January, Chip Rossetti considered the "rumbling…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
NEA Translation Awards Announced
The NEA has announced this year's fellowships for translation projects, and we're very happy to see so many WWB translators among the recipients. Congratulations to Eric Abrahamsen, Ross Benjamin (you can read an extract from his project here), Peter Constantine, Kristin Dykstra, Michelle…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Rise and Fall of an Algerian Warlord
Translator's note: Kamel Daoud's novel O Pharaon (Editions Dar el Gharb, Oran, 2004) describes the rise and fall of a warlord in one unhappy town in Western Algeria during the 1990s civil war. Read from today’s perspective, the novel offers a microcosm of events in the rebelling countries…...read more »
Category: From the Translator
On William Carlos Williams’s Translation of Ernesto Mejía Sánchez’s “Vigils”
What influence can Spanish have on us who speak a derivative of English in North America? To shake us free for a reconsideration of the poetic line. . . . It looks as though our salvation may come not from within ourselves but from the outside. —William Carlos Williams in his talk on poetic form…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Flipping Out
Oswald de Andrade would have loved FLIP. So confirmed Antonio Candido, Brazil’s most revered literary critic, in his opening talk at the ninth annual International Literary Festival in Parati, more widely known by its playful Portuguese acronym (from Festa Literária Internacional de Parati),…...read more »
Category:
How to write about Africa, revisited
I am currently editing an anthology of memoirs from the continent of Africa, so I was excited to see that the long-awaited memoir by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina is scheduled to appear this summer. One Day I Will Write About This Place grew from the essay "Discovering Home," Wainaina's first…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Singing Lands of Freedom
Echchaâb yurid isqât ennidhâm! The people want the fall of the regime! Each word rhythmically chanted by the crowd. A slogan ringing in Tunis in January, now resounding in cities all over Syria, as protesters bravely face snipers and security forces every day, every evening. Echchaâb…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
An Algerian Self-Immolates, the Desert Spreads
He sells fruit and vegetables from a pushcart. The heat is intense and so is the poverty. A cop ambles over and gives him a shove. The vegetable vendor is humiliated. He goes off and comes back with a can of gasoline, and sets himself afire. They take him to the hospital, where he dies. Sounds like the…...read more »
Category: WWB to Book
From WWB to Book: Success Stories, II
Continuing our series on WWB authors who've sold English-language rights to their work as a result of appearing in WWB, we're delighted to announce the publication of the graphic novel Farm 54, written by Galit Seliktar and illustrated by Gilad Seliktar, now available from Fanfare/Ponent Mon.…...read more »
Category:
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 »
Category:
Literature is a Dangerous Game: Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses
Roberto Bolaño was the kind of writer who belonged to a species that is hopefully not as endangered as appearances suggest: writers who read more than they write. Bolaño read a lot, and he loved that Borges boasted about the books he read instead of the books he wrote. In his own fiction,…...read more »
Category: Interviews
The City and the Writer: In Athens with Dimitris Athinakis
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
Category: Dispatches
LGBT Korea on Film: Anonymity and Representation
In recent years, gay male characters have been featured in South Korean television and cinema—and even in a commercial or two. Movies like The King and The Clown and A Frozen Flower and the television shows Coffee Prince and Life is Beautiful have proven popular with audiences, even as the social…...read more »
Category:
Edward Gauvin Wins Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award
We're thrilled to report that our magnifique translator Edward Gauvin has won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award for his rendering of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's Life on Paper: Stories. The collection was also short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. Edward published…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Moacyr Scliar, 1939–2011
On 27 February 2011, the Brazilian Academy of Letters lost one of its most internationally renowned and widely translated members, Moacyr Scliar. Whatever the vagaries of literary fashion to come, Scliar’s place in the annals of Brazilian history seems assured, as the first author to give Jews…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The Bolaño Guide to WWB
If you're compiling a reading list from Roberto Bolaño's Between Parentheses, you can find many of his recommended authors right here at WWB. Looking for "the best woman writer in Mexico"? That would be Carmen Boullosa. Is César Aira "mainly just boring," or "one of the three or…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Eduardo Halfon Awarded Guggenheim
We're delighted to report that Eduardo Halfon has been awarded a Guggenheim Latin American and Caribbean Fellowship. In "The Polish Boxer," from our July 2009 Memory and Lies issue, Halfon gives voice to his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, whose revision of the past has enabled him to live into…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Teachers’ Pets, and Fools for Love
Marco Di Marco's "Moving Like Geckos" has a fraternal twin in last year's queer issue. Polish writer Eva Schilling's "Fool" also features a teacher-student pairing; in this case, though, the characters are female, and the classroom is not in an urban university, but in a provincial…...read more »
Category: Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine
Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine. An Interview with Raji Bathish
In her latest dispatch for our Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine series, Azareen Van der Vliet speaks to Raji Bathish, a Palestinian poet, novelist, screenplay writer and cultural activist born in Nazareth. Bathish’s work has been widely published across the Arab and Israeli-Palestinian worlds. He…...read more »
Category:
Intuitive Translation and Experimental Writing: Ashbery and Rimbaud
When a translator and author are well-paired, we have what Joy Williams has called John Ashbery’s new translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, “a marriage divine.” Ashbery, now eighty-four, holds a laundry list of literary awards and honors—Pulitzer, National Book…...read more »
Category:
“Mr. Pamuk, did all this really happen to you?”
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, translated from the Turkish by Nazim Dikba, is based on a series of lectures delivered at Harvard by Orhan Pamuk as part of the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lecture series. Pamuk seems to have had a good time writing this book: In 2009, after air flights in…...read more »
Category: On Being Translated
Through the Looking Glass, and What the Author Saw after Being Translated
Until I was published, I viewed my stories as my own, personal things, extensions of my mind that could be compared to an article of clothing, changed according to the day and season; or, perhaps, some easily alterable part of my anatomy, like my nails, or hair, things we do, let grow, and that even…...read more »
Category:
Beyond the Physical World: An Interview with David Albahari
In honor of the seventh annual PEN World Voices Festival and the release of Leeches (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), Words Without Borders sat down with Serbian writer and translator David Albahari for a chat. Speaking with WWB contributor E.C. Belli, Albahari touched on everything from postmodernism…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
“Help Us Be Good Again”: Literacy in Afghanistan
The day Osama Bin Laden was killed, I was extolling the benefits of education in western Afghanistan. It was the first week of school for the Dari and Pashto adult literacy program that I managed and, like any good principal, I was making the rounds. I walked into a classroom packed with students. …...read more »
Category:
A tale from the Ebony Coast
Fama is a handsome prince of the Malinké people, but he spends his days in the capital city, far from his people, wandering from one funeral to the next as an uninvited, sometimes unwanted orator. Salimata, his beautiful wife, supports her angry and frustrated husband by selling porridge and cooked…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
From the Publisher: Publishing in Malta
Everyone has an opinion about publishing. Who we should publish. What we should publish. How we should publish it. One practically pines for the good ol’ days of the publishers’ gentlemen’s club, where the grand elders decided the fate of authors, and forged the taste of readers, in…...read more »
Category: PEN World Voices Festival
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.
Category: PEN World Voices Festival
PEN World Voices 2011: Amelié Nothomb in conversation with Buket Uzuner, Friday April 29th
Here’s a tip for writers eager to cultivate a rarified air of eccentricity: regardless of the weather, wear a big hat! According to Amelié Nothomb, whose outré headgear is her trademark—today, at La Maison Française’s panel discussion with Turkish novelist and travel…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Best Translated Book Awards Go to Aleš Šteger/Brian Henry, Tove Jansson/Thomas Teal
The winning titles and translators for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards were announced Friday evening at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. BTBA co-founder Chad Post kicked off the event, then turned over the microphone to Lorin Stein, who announced the winners…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Ernesto Sábato, 1911–2011
Argentine writer and human rights hero Ernesto Sábato has died at the age of ninety-nine. Sábato was the author of The Tunnel (1948), On Heroes and Tombs (1961), and The Angel of Darkness (1974), and winner of the most prestigious Hispanic literary awards, when in 1983 he was appointed…...read more »
Category:
PEN World Voices 2011: The Launch of Carlos Franz’s “The Absent Sea”
A book launch at the Americas Society, on Park Avenue, has a sort of Old World gravitas to it. With its ornate cornices, vaulted ceilings and sparkling chandeliers, the space exerts an Oz-like pull on authors from across the Spanish-speaking world. Or at least that’s what Carlos Franz, the Chilean…...read more »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In Copenhagen with Niels Hav
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo…...read more »
Category: Poetry
The Poetry Forum: International Women Poets
April brings both Poetry Month and the first anniversary of the publication of our Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. In his introduction to the anthology, editor Ilya Kaminsky lamented the shortage of translations of international women poets and pledged to address the issue in WWB. In addition,…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Of Books and Roses: Sant Jordi’s Day in Catalunya
The bustling, cosmopolitan port city of Barcelona, favored by travelers the world over for its Mediterranean climate, innovative architecture, and avant-garde cuisine, also happens to be the publishing capital for the Spanish-speaking world of some 500 million people. It is home to the big players in…...read more »
Category: On Reviewing Translations
On Reviewing Translations: Scott Esposito
To my mind, the problem is simple: reviewing literary translations is full of thorny issues and difficult questions, and I am as suspicious of anyone who claims to have answered them as I am of someone who tells me they know what art is. But! Which reader of Words Without Borders would say that right…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
New MLA Guidelines on Evaluating Translations
The Modern Language Association has posted new guidelines for evaluating translations as scholarship for tenure review. Building on previous publications by ALTA and PEN, and drawing on the report of the academic working group at the Salzburg Global Seminar 461, the document offers guidelines for…...read more »
Category:
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 »
Category:
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 »
Category:
From the London Book Fair—Translations and Liquidity: Crises and Capital
The first day of the Literary Translation Center at the London Book Fair has first and foremost been about asking questions. This is because one of the organizing themes of the day—and a refrain among the handful of panels held—has turned on one of the biggest issues facing literature…...read more »
Category:
2011: Year of Milosz!
Over the past few weeks, New York has begun to celebrate the centenary of one of Poland’s—and maybe the world’s—greatest poets, Czeslaw Milosz,as the “Year of Milosz” kicks off. With nationwide and worldwidereadings, remembrances, and exhibits, the year is meant…...read more »
Category: On Reviewing Translations
On Reviewing Translations: Suzanne Jill Levine tells us what the “Subversive Scribe” might add:
Throwing one’s hat into this ring can be a two-edged plume, mark my mixed-up metaphor. If we, wearing our translator hats (though not many of us can afford hats), tell reviewers that any adjective, from “brilliant” to “clunky,” unjustified by examples, just won’t…...read more »
Category: On Reviewing Translations
On Reviewing Translations: Confessions of a Book Reviewer (of works in translation)
There is an anecdote about translation—which, fittingly, I´ve only come across second-hand—that involves an enthusiastic Ernest Hemingway gushing to a friend that finally, with a new translation of War and Peace, he can get through the whole novel. His friend then says, of the…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
From Saigon to Quebec: Kim Thuy
Kim Thuy was born into privilege in Saigon in 1968 and fled ten years later with her family. After a harrowing crossing in the hold of a fishing boat and a miserable stay in a Malaysian refugee camp, the family settled in Quebec. Thuy's Ru, from our May 2010 issue, recounts these experiences in poetic,…...read more »
Category:
This
This poem is dedicated to my friend and colleague Juliano Mer Khamis, born in Nazareth in 1958 and Artistic Director of the Jenin Freedom Theater. He was tragically shot by unknown assailants in Jenin yesterday as he was leaving the theater. His two-year-old son was in the car with him. Juliano was the…...read more »
Category: On Reviewing Translations
On Reviewing Translations: Rigoberto González
With so few titles getting translated into English, it seems ludicrous to impose too many conditions in terms of matching a book reviewer to a translated project, or even in terms of determining whether a translated project is worth reviewing. The sad fact is that those of us reviewing books already…...read more »
Category: Book Reviews
The Explosion of the Radiator Hose by Jean Rolin
The connection that a reader forges with a first-person narrator varies tremendously from book to book, depending on the degree of intimacy or detachment elicited, on how convincing or charming or grating we find the voice, on how seduced, manipulated, or outraged we find ourselves. Sometimes, all too…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Baseball Springs Eternal
It was afternoon on Friday, March 11, 2011. I was in the office at my home in Sendai, working on a manuscript I had just started. Spring is the season of new beginnings. In Japan, graduation ceremonies in March are followed by matriculation ceremonies in April. For students it…...read more »
Category: On Reviewing Translations
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 »
Category:
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 »
Category:
Getting Personal and Universal in Joseph Roth’s Job
As translator Ross Benjamin said during his discussion with The New Republic‘s senior editor Ruth Franklin this past February at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Job: The Story of a Simple Man was “a turning point for Joseph Roth.” Not only did Job lead up to his masterpiece…...read more »
Category: On Reviewing Translations
On Reviewing Translations: Tess Lewis
Being on the receiving as well as the dealing end of reviewing literature in translation, I’m particularly sensitive to the issues involved. More than three quarters of the reviews and essays I’ve written over the past decade have been about translations, a number of them from languages that…...read more »
Category: Podcast
Poeboes Podcast with Daniel Hahn
Daniel Hahn (1973 - ) is a British writer, editor and translator from the Portuguese and Spanish. His translations include works by José Eduardo Agualusa, José Luís Peixoto and José Saramago. In 2007, his translation of Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons was awarded the…...read more »