Oh, hello June July. Thanks for reminding me that Boston is glorious in the early days of summer. Breezy, sunny, and not so humid that you’d prefer breathing in a dog’s armpit. Ahem.
Back to business. This Week in Translation: Oh, Hello Summer Edition:
Love Europa Editions? Prove it by taking part in the Europa Challenge that Marie and Liberty have created. The challenge starts July 1! Read the guidelines here.
Agency to watch: Marleen Seegers (Editions Stock) and Derek Dodds (Krishnamurti Publications) have formed 2 Seas Agency, a foreign rights and scouting agency that is offering services to traditional publishers as well as self-published authors. I’m interested to see how self-published authors will fare in the international market. Will they go digital-only? How will they stand out in a crowded marketplace? (VIA Publishing Perspectives)
Why do I love reading Aira? Well, his books are incredibly immediate. We get the sense (and we’re right on the money) that Aira is writing these events on the fly, as if he’s watching the events occur as he dramatically narrates them to us. There’s so much energy behind his scenes. I’ve mentioned it here before, but it’s worth remembering Aira’s writing process. He sits down in a cafe in the morning and writes whatever comes to mind, even allowing the events in the cafe to invade the story (like a fly, or a drunk man). In this way, his story is not only a story but also a record of its own production. He’ writes himself into puzzles and then writes himself out of them the next day, refusing to make things easy on himself by allowing extensive revision.
César Aira #2: Over at The Awl, Alicia Kennedy talks to Rosalie Knecht, who translated The Seamstress and the Wind. Knecht mentions Aira’s “flight forward” style of writing as mentioned above. She also talks about Aira’s publishing strategy (?) as well as what it was like working with him on this translation:
It’s hard to argue with that prediction when you know a little about Aira and his vast output of very short, exceptionally weird novels. The exact number he’s published since starting his career in 1975 is unknown—he purposely publishes them with tiny presses, forcing his readers to seek them out—but it’s probably around 70. The ones available in English are also among the most original books you could hope to pick up.
…
The last time I saw him I came prepared with a list of the knottiest problems in the book, the ones I had been trying to solve for months, and he went over them and explained them, except for one. I showed him a sentence from the third or fourth chapter of the book and said, “What does this mean?” And he looked at it for a minute and said, “I have no idea.”
I’ll end this post with Splitscreen: A Love Story, which won the Nokia Shorts competition this year. Can you believe that this was all shot on a Nokia N8 phone?!
Dans la forêt du paresseux by Sophie Strady, illust. by Anouck Boisrobert and Louis Rigaud†
You thought this feature went into a corner to shrivel up and die, didn’t ya? So did I but there were too many links for me not to share:
Publisher’s Weekly did a Q&A with Anthea Bell, translator of Cornelia Funke, the Asterix series, and a new-to-me YA fantasy series by Kersten Gier, and talked about her translation process, how she handles metaphors, jokes, puns, and how she got into translation as a career. I especially liked her answer to these questions:
PW: You’ve translated both adult and young adult fiction, but seem more drawn to young adult…
AB: I am, yes. I’ve got twin granddaughters – they’re not far off the young adult readership and I’m looking forward to when they get there!
PW: Are there differences in the work required?
AB: I don’t approach them any differently, it’s finding the voice from each book. I do think you should never, ever write down to children, let alone translate down to them.
Publishing Trends ran an interesting piece about the methods and measures that foreign publishers take to pitch their books to US publishers and the potentials (and hazards) of using e-books and digital-only literary sites to reach a larger audience. The piece also mentions Restless Books, a digital-only publisher of literature in translation, which Joshua Ellison and Ilan Stavans will be launching.
Ron Slate blogged about Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean, a book that I now have on my radar. Here’s the first line from his review:
In his electric and endearing fictional memoir, Never Any End to Paris, Enrique Vila-Matas repeats Andre Gide’s advice about autobiography: “An artist shouldn’t recount his life exactly as he’s lived it, but rather live it exactly as he is going to recount it.” But this sage-like counsel turns out to be practically useless to the wily Vila-Matas (b. 1948 in Barcelona), one of Spain’s greatest contemporary novelists.
Susan Bernofsky, translator of Jenny Erpenbech’s much-lauded Visitation, posted about two translation awards a few weeks back. I have to say that Ms. Bernofsky’s blog, Translationista, has become one of my favorites in the last few months.
Bored at work? Biblioz has a fun search engine which allows you to find out which books hit the bestseller lists the week you were born! Topping the charts the year of my birth? Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Play here.
The Paris Review offers advice to those who seek it. This week, a reader asked an important question: which translation of Proust should one read? In short, “For Swann’s Way, you can’t really go wrong. All of those translations are wonderful.” (via)
There has been a lot of coverage of the Costa Book Awards, “one of the most prestigious and popular literary prizes in the UK and recognises some of the most enjoyable books of the year by writers based in the UK and Ireland” so I will point you to The Guardian‘s discussion of the winners of the five categories and guesses as to who will win the big shebang. (podcast)
Also from The Guardian, a list of the top 10 talking animals in literature. Snowy/Milou FTW.
Erm, one of my literary resolutions showed up in Jacket Copy, the LA Times book blog. [Update: Here's the link to the post.] Squee! I’m in great company: Chad Post, David L. Ulin, Emma Straub, not to mention Zohar who blogs at Man of La Book and Frances Evangelista of Nonsuch Book.
Over at Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito and Charlotte Mandell discuss ZONE. Note to self: read this book. (via)
Called DisQuiet, Dzanc’s international literary program offers workshops in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and photography and visual storytelling. All participants will also participate in a literary and cultural program that features contemporary Portuguese writers and critics, in various locations around the city. (via)
Wrapping up our week in translation is an article about literary translators in Austin Texas:
As the rest of the world is flooded with the American influence, Americans have become increasingly isolated, to the point that we have a very limited ability to appreciate the foreign point of view,” Schwartz said via e-mail. ”Domestically, the lack of translation leaves us with an entirely unnuanced understanding of immigration issues. Literature in translation is a door to foreign cultures, mindsets, and sensibilities. (via)
Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us. When the great white whale buries Captain Ahab in the sea, the hearts of readers take fright in exactly the same way in Tokyo, Lima, or Timbuctu. When Emma Bovary swallows arsenic, Anna Karenina throws herself in front of the train, and Julien Sorel climbs to the scaffold, and when, in “El sur,” the urban doctor Juan Dahlmann walks out of that tavern on the pampa to face a thug’s knife, or we realize that all the residents of Comala, Pedro Páramo’s village, are dead, the shudder is the same in the reader who worships Buddha, Confucius, Christ, Allah, or is an agnostic, wears a jacket and tie, a jalaba, a kimono, or bombachas. Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity.
The New York Times ran a piece “Translations as Literary Ambassador” to which some responded with enthusiasm or with a “meh,” the sound of indifference. My take? Glad that Three Percent, Dalkey Archive Press, and Words Without Borders were given a nod, but I would’ve preferred a few more paragraphs dedicated to the aforementioned champions of literature in translation (their forthcoming titles, translators to watch out for, editorial trips abroad) rather than to the controversy surrounding Amazon, its contributions to Best Translated Book Awards, and its own forays in publishing.
Kalen Landow and Ann Kingman are launching a War & Peace read-along, which will commence in February 2011. The official translation will be the recently-published Pevear and Volokhonsky version. Details on Facebook.
A number of bookish gift guides have cropped up ’round the blogosphere, notably:
Salonica’s Holiday Guide: Monica Carter, Curator of Salonica, has created a holiday guide for lovers of international literature. Get thee to her site!
Lastly, a fragment of a Leonardo da Vinci manuscript has been discovered in a Nantes library where it has been in storage for the past century and a half! On a semi-related note, are you all familiar with the show Pawn Stars? It’s amazing how much stuff of varying value that people find in their attics, at garage sales, and in the homes of recently-deceased relatives. The lesson here, folks? Keep on hoarding. You never know when or where you’ll find the next priceless artifact.
Peruvian writer and teacher Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature.
Amazon.com awarded the University of Rochester/Three Percent with a $25,000 grant for the winners of the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards.
The much-anticipated translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was met with disappointment. One might say that much was lost in translation. (Couldn’t help myself there). via The Guardian
Speaking of classics, Ruth Franklin took the NYTBR to task for this “weird piece” on Madame Bovary. via The New Republic (and The Quarterly Conversation for pointing its readers to Ruth Franklin’s piece in the first place)
And today, after having been considered for the prize twice before, Michel Houellebecq won le Prix Goncourt for his novel La carte et le territoire. Third time’s a charm, hein? via The Guardian
More like last week in translation. I’m a little behind schedule but the good news is that I’m actually finding my reading mojo. I finished FAME by David Kehlmann and translated by Carole Janeway, courtesy of the German Book Office. If I were the type of person to describe something as delightful, I would use it here. FAME was a refreshing and surprising novel. I hope to have a write-up in the next day or so.
Last week was exciting because Per Petterson came to town for a reading at the Brookline Booksmith. He did not disappoint. Expect more on the event later this week.
So, back to last week’s news:
MediaBistro reported last week that Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport formally opened the world’s first airport library. This was a collaboration between the Schipol Group and the Dutch Public Libraries. I wish this library had existed in 2004, when I had a 10+ hour layover and passed the time by sleeping on the floor near Lufthansa Airlines. Yes, I was one of those people.
I shut my mouth. I know my country wishes that I will shut my mouth forever like the people at the bottom of society in my book, who have been deprived, trampled upon, and violated, but cannot make a sound—or if they do, no one will listen. Even if people did listen, everyone would advise that you resign to fate and follow the unspoken rule of “Everyone is shameless, so why can’t you be shameless too?” Yes, yes, my country hopes that I will be like the vast majority of state-supported writers, who have been deprived, trampled upon, and violated in their thoughts and bodies, who still strive to forget, still express gratitude numbly, and say that this is necessary to look good. Just like a prostitute, after being violated by a client—as long as the client pays up, and says a few words of consolation like, “The market will be bigger in the future and the sales will be better”—would say thank you, and would say that this is necessary to look good.
At this time, all of Liao’s books are banned in his native China. On a related topic, next week is Banned Books Week. Take a gander at bannedbooksweek.org, where you’ll find, among other things, a map of book censorship that allows you to see which books were banned in the US.
I am writing this in a fit of jealousy as the publishing world (or at least the part of the publishing world that I follow on Twitter) has migrated to New York for the Brooklyn Book Festival, where I hear there will be food trucks and writers aplenty. *flails* All the more reason to show support for the Boston Book Fest on October 16!
Quercus and Sterling, a subsidiary of B&N, will be partnering to create a new North American imprint called Silver Oak, which will launch in 2011 with Three Seconds by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellström. Quercus was the UK publisher of The Millenium Series by Stieg Larsson. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? via PW and MediaBistro
I’ve mentioned Art Talk before, but it’s becoming one of my favorite blog features. This week’s interview was with Esther Allen, translator and one of the recipients of NEA’s 2011 Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects.
And if you’re wondering about this week’s image, it’s from Alain Delorme’s Totem series. Incredible. About the series:
french photographer alain delorme‘s newest series of photographs is entitled ‘totems’.
the images were captured during two art residencies (supported by ailing foundation) de lorme participated in shanghai throughout 2009 and 2010. fascinated by migrants’ loads, he has photographed piles of stacked ‘made in china’ products which form unusual sculptures, symbols of a form of fetishization of the objects themselves.
the verticality of these formations echoes the incessant expansion of the urban area, constantly under construction. here, de lorme gives a new vision full of humor and poetry of those porters – both super heroes and ants with impressive loads of tires, water containers, office chairs, flowers… distanced from the typical photos of china portraying immense crowds, he has focused on the individuality of these workers, as opposed to all those identical and interchangeable objects. via designboom
It is already a major Russian bestseller with over 80,000 copies sold to date in hardcover. Twilight Forever Rising is what happens when Anne Rice meets The Sopranos: a vampire-human love story in the midst of a brutal struggle among powerful aristocratic and everyday vampire families. Full of fascinating new vampire mythology as only a Russian can create with a contemporary story, complex characters, and wonderful prose, Twilight Forever Rising is an enthralling story of morality, friendship, power, and love.” (via SFScope.com)
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s short story collection There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales(Penguin 2009)has been nominated for a World Fantasy Award. The collection was translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers. This has been on my list of books to read if I weren’t scared of scary stories. I might give it a try during the day when I’m surrounded by people. Yes, I scare easily.
This has already made the rounds, but the National Endowment for the Arts has a series of interviews with artists called Art Talk. One of the interviewees this week was translator Charlotte Mandell, who translated the much-anticipated Zone by Mathias Énard.
Translating a 500-page sentence combines the creativity of translating poetry with the challenge of translating difficult prose. Zone is narrated on a train, and it has the rhythmic, slightly lulling feeling of being on a train, but it also has a sense of urgency and inevitability in French that I wanted to recreate in English. I loved the continuity and flow of the text, and I really loved the experience of translating it—I was always mid-sentence, no matter where I stopped for the day! I never read ahead when I translate, so I was always wondering what was going to happen next in the story. Translating Zone was one of the most enjoyable translation experiences I’ve ever had.
By way of MediaBistro/Galleycat: Casagrande, a Chilean art collective, bombed Berlin with 100,000+ bookmarks. This is part of their Poetry Bomb project which started in 2001. They’ve targeted other cities, including Guernica and Warsaw.
The most interesting tidbit from this lecture was about ‘sample stock’. In Finland, every publisher sends one copy of each book they publish to every bookstore. The bookstores agree to keep that book in their store for one or two years. If that copy is sold, they agree to order a replacement copy and so on. If it isn’t sold in that time, they return it to the publisher. This is a fantastic, if not universally exportable, idea.
And now, Singapore’s tallest slide…in Chiang-Mai airport.
Photo by cobalt123, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
I yapped all last week about Lydia Davis and her new translation of Madame Bovary (forthcoming from Viking on September 23). Since she’s out promoting the translation and has a number of interviews to show for it, I am hoping to have a dedicated post up in a few days. So please enjoy this inaugural Week in Translation link roundup, sans Flaubert.
Words Without Borders (@wwborders) tweeted a link to Telephone, a translation journal. After some clicking around on Telephone’s site, I stumbled upon Emily Dickinson’s poem “Four Trees–opon a solitary Acre–” translated from English to German and back to English.Most amusing.About Telephone:
The journal is called Telephone, like the children’s game in which phrases change as you whisper them from one person to the next. We are featuring four to five poems from one foreign poet in each issue, which are then translated roughly ten times by multiple different poets and translators. There are no rules about how each poem should be translated and we are soliciting a variety of interpretations.
Speaking of interpretation of a single work, M. Lynx Qualey at Arabic Literature (in English) posted about dueling translations of Yusuf Idris. She’s posted translated excerpts by C. Lindley Cross and Denys Johnson-Davies, noted translator of Mahmoud Darwish and Naguib Mafouz, among others. Which do you prefer? I’m partial to Johnson-Davies’ because it doesn’t feel as fragmented, but the responsible thing would be to read the story in total.
This has made the rounds on Twitter, but I’ll post it here just in case you missed it. The Bookseller announced the launch of the Man Booker Prize app where you can access the chronology of the prize, past and current shortlisted authors as well as winners of the award. The app was created in partnership with T-Mobile and was developed by Vexed Digital. More information about the Man Booker here. I’m filing this under “too cool for school” because this is the first app developed by and for a literary prize. I’m hoping to see other literary prizes follow suit, preferably timed to launch upon announcement of their shortlists.
Publishers Weekly has a list of potential sleeper hits which includes two French translations: from Open Letter, Zone by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandelland and from Europa Editions, A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé, translated by Alison Anderson.
Last but not least, Stu of Winston’s Dad will be hosting the Translation Blog Awards this December. I think this is a wonderful idea since it will give other bloggers who are focused on translated books a chance to share their best/favorite reviews with the rest of us. I’m looking forward to adding even more blogs to my feed reader.
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