June 2012
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Starting Monday we’ll be tweeting quotes in translation from the blog of Eric #Chevillard, author of PREHISTORIC TIMES, out July 10!
— Archipelago Books (@archipelagobks) May 31, 2012
May 2012
14 posts
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“If sex is tricky, humour can be even more so.”
– Sam Taylor talks about becoming a translator in the Financial Times
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Pubbing today! The paperback of We, The Drowned by...
It begins: “Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen, who went up to Heaven and came down again, thanks to his boots…”
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Pages Worth Remembering: Cross out what you've... →
theliterarysnob:
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte Harry Potter series - JK Rowling To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee The Bible - Council of Nicea (lol at this being credited to the Council of Nicea though. Was “various”…
“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and...”
– Carson Mccullers (via rushofgold)
“There is no such thing as identical twinship between two versions of a...”
– In the New Yorker, Judith Thurman on translation and becoming a writer
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“There’s that famous and damning statistic: translated works make up just three...”
– Confessions of a Literary Jingoist by Elizabeth Minkel (via millionsmillions)
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"Translation is sexy!" →
Loving this… via Granta
An Oldie But Goodie: Paris Review Interview with... →
In this interview his novels Small Memories and Manual of Painting and Calligraphy - both publishing this month on Mariner - are mentioned!
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Two New Books in Translation by Jose Saramago Pub...
“Each book I write is a conversation with my reader.” - Jose Saramago
Announcing the paperback publications of Manual of Painting and Calligraphy and Small Memories, both by Jose Saramago and translated by Giovanni Pontiero and Margaret Jull Costa, respectively.
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Stephen Sparks, Young Bookseller Profile
Shelf Awareness is back with their second posting in the series Young Bookseller Focus, where the prerequisite seems to be previous employment at Dalkey Archive Press (and therefore an interest in international literature?). This time they talk to Stephen Sparks at Green Apple Books in San Francisco.
April 2012
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Jeff Waxman, Young Bookseller Profile
Shelf Awareness profiles Jeff Waxman, a bookseller at the Seminary Co-op’s 57th Street Books in Chicago and an advocate for literature in translation.
You’re involved with the Best Translated Book Award and you do publicity and marketing for Seagull Books, among others. What started your interest in literature in translation? The short answer is this: I got started in publishing...
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“I judge genre UNTIL it becomes foreign genre and then all of a sudden I’m like...”
– Kit Steinkellner, on genre snobbery
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2012 Best Translated Book Award Finalists
The finalists for the 2012 Best Translated Book Awards were announced on Tuesday evening. Full list below. Read all about it at Three Percent.
Fiction Finalists (in alphabetical order):
Lightning by Jean Echenoz Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New Press)
Upstaged by Jacques Jouet Translated from the French by Leland de la Durantaye (Dalkey Archive Press)
Kornél Esti by Dezső...
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Salman Rushdie responds to Israel’s ban of Günter Grass, via the New York Times.
OK to dislike, even be disgusted by #GünterGrass poem, but to ban him is infantile pique. The answer to words must always be other words.
— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) April 9, 2012
Let’s not forget that #GünterGrass is the author of the greatest literary responses to Nazism, The Tin Drum, Cat and...
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At Granta, Jaspreet Singh writes about his mother translating his stories from English to Punjabi, about becoming a writer, about translation as healing.
Here’s just a few lines:
Next day during lunch Mother asked again if I had already read the sample. I said it was very good.
‘How did you do it?’
She emphasized the usefulness of a dictionary. She recalled discussing a few translation...
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Maria Tatar's translation of "King Goldenlocks" →
Maria Tatar translates one of the recently discovered Bavarian fairy tales, via Bookslut.
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The Big Think talks to translator Christian Wiman on the publication of Stolen Air by Osip Mandelstam, who died at 47 in a Siberian work camp during the Stalin regime.
BT: In your afterword you call these poems “versions” rather than “translations.” Could you explain the distinction and describe your process in working with Mandelstam’s poetry, including your...
March 2012
22 posts
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Nobel Laureate Donating 30,000 Books to Hometown →
Happy belated birthday to Mario Vargas Llosa, who is donating 30,000 books from his personal collection to his hometown of Arequipa, Peru. The first installment arrives on his birthday next year.
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A Different Stripe: Pub day for Nescio's... →
nyrbclassics:
We are thrilled to be publishing Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories, translated into English from the Dutch for the first time by Damion Searls. Nescio, Latin for “I don’t know,” was the pen name for J.H.F. Grönloh, a businessman with the Holland-Bombay Trading Company and father of four. No…
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Yale University Press has launched a web site for its translation line, the Margellos World Republic of Letters. Lots to read and discover and the Resources page alone makes it worth a visit. From the press release:
At www.worldrepublicofletters.org, readers will find:
expanded excerpts of previously published titles, available for free download;
original content, including Yves Bonnefoy’s...
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Philip Pullman Retelling Grimm's Fairytales
I’m not sure this counts as translation, but Philip Pullman is retelling his favorite Grimm fairytales “in his own voice,” due to publish this September. Preordering….now.
César Aira, Varamo
booksinthekitchen:
I’m hesitant to say that Varamo is objectively the best of the three books of Aira’s I’ve read so far. But it’s definitely the one I responded to the strongest … like a space shuttle shedding its booster rockets, Varamo keeps getting propelled toward bigger and better things.
The Edmonton Journal let me review César Aira, and it was good.
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Congratulations to Michael Hofman, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation. Hoffman has translated over sixty books from the German and is also a poet.
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Part 1 of Jose Saramago's Story "Things" on... →
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Wislawa Szymborska Nominated for Sentence of the... →
The New York Times Magazine’s four nominees for Sentence of the Month included Wislawa Szymborska (though, sadly, she didn’t win):
“As far as you’ve come/can’t be undone.” (Wislawa Szymborska, “On Death, Without Exaggeration,” translated by Baranczak & Cavanagh)
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Novel Banned In China On Longlist For Independent... →
The novel, Dream of Ding Village, was banned in China in 2005.
The longlist also includes The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (translated by Richard Dixon), 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (translated by Jay Rubin), Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz (translated by Nicholas De Lange), Professor Anderson’s Night by Dag Solstad (translated by Agnes Scott Langeland), and eleven others.
A shortlist...
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The Paris Review on Nabokov's Obsession with... →
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Though it remains a commonplace to deplore the state of contemporary literature, too infrequently is proper debt paid to the insurgence of first-rate translations and the tireless, sometimes unrecognized labors of translators and editors alike. Far too frequently, poets, novelists, and critics forget that translation, if not exactly a genre, when it’s worth a damn, is as riveting and revivifying...
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Publishers Weekly reviews Saramago’s Manual of Painting and Calligraphy as its “Pick of the Week!”
After publication of the late Nobel Prize winner’s final novel, Cain, along comes the first English-language translation of his first book. The first-person narrative centers on H., a disgruntled artist who paints flattering yet vapid portraits for wealthy clients while living in...
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The Lost Saramago Novel, Finally Published →
“He called it the book that was lost and found in time,” del Rio said. “He told us he did not want it published during his lifetime but that those who were left behind after he died could do what they thought best with it. We all knew, I think Saramago as well, that it would be best to publish it.”