Starting tomorrow night:
The Sound of Literature: New voices from Austria, Germany, and the United States. A series of conversations and readings with the authors, moderated by Klaus Nüchtern. Tomorrow night’s program features Justin Courter, Benjamin Lebert, Tao Lin, and Verena Rossbacher, and Thursday features Christian Hawkey, Steffen Popp, Clemens Setz, and Darin Strauss
Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street, NYC. 6:30pm. Free Admission Full details here.
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Thursday (reminder):
Our March installment of the Conversations on Great Contemporary Literature series, featuring the work of Etgar Keret. We’ll be hosting an online book club and are looking for readers to tell us their favorite Etgar Keret story (send submissions to blog@wordswithoutborders.org). The event will feature internationally acclaimed Hebrew translator Miriam Shlesinger in conversation with Phillip Lopate, one of America’s most influential literary voices.
March 5th 7pm at Idlewild Books. Full details here.
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Mahfouz’s Metamorphoses: Bringing the Egyptian World to the English Language
A conversation among writers and translators of Arabic and English about journeys and adventures across the gaps between two global languages. Co-sponsored by the Office of Government and Community Affairs, as part of The Big Read: Egypt, and by the Center for Literary Translation and the Middle East Institute. Moderated by Robyn Creswell, with Miral El-Tahawy, Sonallah Ibrahim, Iman Mersal, and Anna Swank.
March 12, 2009, 6:00 p.m. Columbia University Deutches Haus, 420 W. 116th St. More info here.
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New anthology out this past week, Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive), containing C.M. Mayo’s translation of Alvaro Enrigue’s short story íOn the Death of the Author.ë We published Suzanne Jill Levine and Anna Kushner’s translation of the story.
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Yoko Ogawa’s ingenious new novel, The Housekeeper and the Professor (Picador, translated by Stephen Snyder), was featured in this week’s NYTBR. Based on a professor who can only remember things for 80 minutes (including this fact itself), the book was a bestseller in Japan and already made into a film there.
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Later in the month:
The Queens College MFA Program in Creative and Literary Translation is proud to host From Ghazal to Zuihitsu: A Conference on Translating Asian Languages and Cultures. This event—from Thursday, March 26-Saturday March 28—features panels on translators of East and South Asian languages, translation in performance, cultural variance between American and Asian literatures, creative writing workshops on forms from different poetic traditions, translation pedagogy in the writing classroom, and presentations of translation projects from Queens College MFA students. The acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee will deliver the keynote reading.
Full details here.