2010 Subscriptions to Ugly Duckling Presse are now available. They limit the total number of subscribers to 200 and usually sell out pretty quickly, so act fast. There are three levels of subscriber/donors:

At the BASIC SUBSCRIBER level ($150) you receive more than 20 books throughout the year, sent directly to your home, including new works of poetry, essays, and artist books by emerging and established writers and artists; and these books are all uniquely designed, with frequent use of letterpress, hand-sewn binding, and more, demonstrating “a philosophical curiosity about what makes a book a book” (Michael Miller, Time Out New York); and you get all this at COST, meaning the most affordable possible rate available to mankind today for providing you with great books.

At the SUPPORTING SUBSCRIBER level ($250), you receive the full subscription package described above, plus an invitation to a special UDP authors reception, to be held in Spring 2010, a unique opportunity to meet the writers, editors, designers, and board members who contribute their talents; and you receive credit for your meaningful contribution on our online list of supporters.

At the COLLECTOR’S CIRCLE level ($1,000), all of the above benefits, plus a new benefit for our highest level supporters: a one-of-a-kind book, designed and written by the UDP collective, printed and assembled at the UDP workshop, and personalized for the recipient; donors at this level are also credited on the acknowledgments page in the UDP print catalogue.

UDP does some excellent works of poetry in translation, and overall has really excellent production values. Definitely worth at least $150 . . .

Seems ironically fitting to follow the first Making the Translator Visible post with this bit from Conversational Reading about a recent interview with Cesar Aira (whose Ghosts is—to steal a line from a New York Times article—so good it’s in need of adjectives yet invented that would be written in italics and all caps) in Letras Libres and Aira’s feeling about translators:

A una corrección sobre todo. Pero yo siempre a la traducción la tomé como un oficio del que viví. Ahí sí lo vi con todo pragmatismo, hasta tal punto que me especialicé en literatura mala. Porque los editores pagan lo mismo por la mala que por la buena, y la buena es mucho más difícil de traducir. Entonces terminé especializándome, bah, más bien tomando estos bestsellers norteamericanos, que son facilísimos de traducir porque están escritos en una prosa estereotipada.

Essentially: any pragmatic translator would prefer to translate bestsellers, because they sell more and the prose is so bad that they’re much easier to translate.

Here’s to hoping literary translators always remain quirky and as unpragmatic as wealthy independent publishers.

So after the first ALTA panel—on the “subversive” translator and the idea of making the translator “visible” without interfering too much with the original text—Megan McDowell (pictured above) and I came up with a project idea. (Or what some may call a gimmick.) We thought that we could help literally make translators visible by posting pictures of ALTA attendees and asking a few questions. We thought it would be a cool way of letting non-translation world people get to know who these “invisible” translators are, while pointing out how cool the ALTA conference attendees are, and getting some good book recommendations along the way.

I think we did about 25 profiles, which I’ll be posting over the next couple weeks. I’ll include everyone’s answers, maybe another anecdote or two, and possibly some additional information about these people. (Translators tend to be pretty humble people and not very good at self-promotion . . .)

Anyway, re: Megan—I first met her ages ago, when she was a fellow at Dalkey Archive’s short-lived Chicago office. She was one of the best fellows we ever had. Very energetic, and very bright. Post-Dalkey, she spent some time in Chile, attended the University of Texas-Dallas where she studied translation, and got heavily involved with ALTA. (She was at the conference as the official photographer, making her the perfect partner for this project, and a good reason to feature her first.)

On with the questions with my comments in italics below:

Favorite Word, in any language: murcielago, which is Spanish for “bat.”

Weirdly, another translator picked this word as well . . . I’ll point this out again when I feature her, but not only did Robin Myers try and choose “murcielago,” but her other favorite word happens to be Megan’s second choice. It’s like translator telepathy.

Best Translation You’ve Done to Date: The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra.

Which will be published by Open Letter this May . . . And in the meantime I HIGHLY recommend checking out Zambra’s Bonsai, which Melville House did last year, and which was a 2009 Best Translated Book finalist.

Book that Needs to be Published in English Translation: Ayer by Juan Emar.

We actually have this on submission . . . I have a feeling I’ll be able to repeat that a number of times over the course of this project, usually followed by “for the past eighteen months.” Which is not so cool. But seriously, Emar sounds very interesting and was featured in RCF a couple years back.

FILI just announced the finalists for this year’s Finlandia Prize—a 30,000 euro award given every year to the best Finnish works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature.

Personally, I’m most interested in the fiction, so here’s the complete list with descriptions of each title from FILI:

Turkka Hautala: Salo (Gummerus)

The theme of Turkka Hautala’s debut novel is one of human destiny. One by one the residents of Salo take their turns speaking, in a chain-like structure. The spectrum of viewpoints extends from the anguish of a factory manager to the everyday compassion of the seller at a sausage kiosk, but the personalities merge into a cohesive whole. Hautala takes ordinary people as his characters and he knows how to see the humorous side of their actions. The novel is written in supple language using different registers and dialects. Salo builds a mosaic portrait of the declining Finland of today, and the author’s gaze is sharp and fresh.

Kari Hotakainen: Ihmisen osa (The Human Lot, Siltala)

At a bookfair, a writer meets a button seller who sells him her life story for 7,000 euros. Along with the sale, the reader receives a large slice of Finnish life and the history of entrepreneurship. The small business owner’s grind is replaced nowadays by endless meetings and imagination for sale. Like its characters, broken under the blows of an unrestricted market economy, Kari Hotakainen’s novel is customer-oriented but strongly resistant to change, critical of society, warm and intelligent.

Antti Hyry: Uuni (The Oven, Otava)

In Hyry’s novel, the reader’s interest is not directed to a plot or character portraits. There are no dramatic turning points in this description of the construction of a baking oven. On the surface, Hyry’s writing is reminiscent of the kinds of modernists who build their texts on simple perceptions of the world of objects in order to emphasize incompleteness in their sketches of the world. Instead, the person in Hyry’s book is taking concrete steps to establish a home in the world. His tasks gain their significance from the meaningful places of life in its entirety. This portrait of everyday life thus opens out into a cosmos where the central character is living the life he was meant to live.

Marko Kilpi: Kadotetut (The Lost Ones, Gummerus)

Kilpi’s work explodes the conventions of the detective genre, because attention is focused not on the intellectual puzzle of solving a crime or understanding a criminal’s motivation. Instead, crime is taken seriously as a psychological, humanistic moral and societal phenomenon. The violent criminal is seen as psychologically abnormal, while at the same time his activities provide the impetus for the popular media’s pursuit of simple labeling of our society. The police are shown as psychologically stressed due to their experiences of the human suffering and cruelty inherent in violent crime, and the victims of crime are examined not only in the narrow terms of rescue or death – rather, the possibility that those “rescued” are so psychologically wounded that they may never be able to live a normal life is seriously considered. Kilpi’s book reveals how deeply traumatic violent crime is for everyone it touches.

Merete Mazzarella: Ingen saknad, ingen sorg (No regret, no sorrow, Söderströms / Atlantis)

Merete Mazzarella’s novel is a nuanced and empathetic description of a day in the life of 79-year-old Zacharias Topelius, at the same time viewing Topelius as tied to his own time, giving the portrayal a delicate irony. On the one hand, the novel is a study of old age with all that it entails: memory, renunciation, loss, emotion, the reevaluation of perceptions, even doubts about one’s past deeds and thoughts. On the other hand, the book is a study of the Finnish mentality of the 1800s through the contemplation one who would in future be a central cultural figure. In a Topelius family circle made up for the most part of women, women’s issues in various historical eras gain particular significance.

Tommi Melender: Ranskalainen ystävä (The French Friend, WSOY)

Tommi Melender’s novel is about friendship in a world where friendship is a diminishing resource. At the beginning of the novel, a well-known academic, identifying with Gustave Flaubert’s disgust with modern life, leaves his job and escapes to a small town in France, where he encounters certain darker aspects of contemporary European reality. The novel’s skillful composition combines a contemporary portrait of the European literary heritage with the bleak and pessimistic tones of a reluctance to believe in solidarity between people, or the possibility of friendship, or love itself.

Looking these over, I’m surprised (somewhat) by how literary, how experimental these books sound. (“There are no dramatic turning points in this description of the construction of a baking oven.” Being one Nouveau Romanish sounding example.) A “chain narrative,” a book that toys with conventions of the detective genre . . . All sound pretty promising. I might (hopefully) be going on an editor’s trip to Helsinki next August, so I’ll be able to find out a lot more about what’s going on in Finnish literature . . .

In terms of the other categories, here are the titles and very brief descriptions of the children’s book finalists:

Siiri Enoranta: Omenmean vallanhaltija (The Ruler of Omenmea, Robustos)

In Siiri Enoranta’s novel, two girls, Ninir and Nezsandra, have a trouble-free friendship, until Ninir falls into quicksand in the Death Wilderness and is paralysed.

Antti Halme: Metalliveljet (Metal Brothers, Otava)\

“What do you think about going to Norway for the summer, Harri-berry? Sounds pretty rad, eh?” Harri put his head in his hands. Dad’s street lingo was from the last millennium, way before rap – months before the invention of the folk dance, in fact.

Juba: Minerva, Jääkarhun sydän (Minerva: The Polar Bear’s Heart, Otava)

Juba’s Minerva has given Finnish children’s comics an active, energetic girl hero. In Minerva’s flying rocking chair we travel to the North Pole, where elephant seals are making their living as oil magnates. To win the love of an elephant seal girl, the hapless suitor Yrjänä must bring her the heart of the last polar bear.

Mari Kujanpää: Minä ja Muro (Muro and Me, Illustrated by Aino-Maija Metsola, Otava)

“There are two kinds of adults: dentist-adults and teacher-adults. Dentist-adults talk adult language among themselves as if there were no kids listening. Teacher-adults try to be funny and ask a lot of questions.”

Paula Noronen: Emilian päiväkirja. Supermarsu pelastaa silakat. (Emilia’s Diary: Superguinea Rescues the Herring, Illustrated by Pauliina Mäkelä, Gummerus)

What should you do when your school is infested with mould, the Baltic is polluted, and there are many other problems in society? Call Emilia, aka Superguinea, of course. You need super powers to get all the herring into a bathtub and all the lake water to Venus. Otherwise adults will never understand that saving the environment is really important. The only place super powers don’t help is in family life, when Emilia’s mother takes up with a boyfriend who has the worst table manners in East Helsinki.

Maria Turtschaninoff: Arra. Legender från Lavora (Arra: Legends of Lavora, Söderströms)

Maria Turtschaninoff’s book is the story of a girl named Arra, born and raised in hopelessness, rejected and despised by her family. Arra doesn’t learn to talk like other children, because no one takes any notice of her or speaks to her. Speech has no meaning for her.

And the nonfiction:

Hollmén, Roope: Juuret Karjalassa (Roots in Karelia, Facto)

Roope Hollmén presents a basic work on Karelia, Karelian history and Karelians that is multi-faceted and thorough. The book is a modern one, written with up-to-date information for today’s reader. It is an accessible work for those who do not have ties of their own to the province.

Laurell Seppo (primary author): Valo merellä. Suomen majakat 1753-1906 (Light on the Sea: Finnish Lighthouses 1753-1906, with photography by Petri Porkola, Swedish translation by Pär-Henrik Sjöström, John Nurmisen Säätiö)

Seppo Laurell and the other editors of Valo merellä have collected an authoritative and very handsome defining work on Finnish lighthouses. With its text, pictures, and previously unknown original blueprints, the book is a comprehensive compendium of the lighthouses themselves, as well as their history and architecture.

Maasola, Juha: Kirves (The Axe, Maahenki)

Juha Massola uses a particular, indispensable object to write about living cultural history. Through descriptions of the labour inextricably connected with the axe, the feelings associated with it, and the meanings arising from it, he sheds light on the entire way of life dictated by our geographical and environmental circumstances.

Parpola, Antti – Åberg, Veijo: Metsävaltio. Metsähallitus ja Suomi 1859-2009 (A Forest Nation: The Finnish Forest and Park Service, 1859-2009, Edita)

Antti Parpola and Veijo Åberg have written a work that belongs at the pinnacle of corporate and institutional histories. The forest is one of the central themes of Finnish life, both as a means of livelihood and as a source of recreation.

Tandefelt, Henrika: _Borgå 1809. Ceremoni och fest. SLS.
Porvoo 1809. Juhlamenoja ja tanssiaisia_ (Porvoo 1809: Festivals and Balls, SKS, Finnish translation by Jussi T. Lappalainen)

Henrika Tandefelt’s work deals with well-known historical events, but it succeeds in shedding new light on them. Events surrounding the birth of a nation in Porvoo 200 years ago are brought to life with close-up descriptions seen through the eyes of participants and observers of these events.

Ylikangas, Mikko: Unileipää, kuolonvettä, spiidiä. Huumeet Suomessa 1800-1950 (Sleepbread, Deathwater, Speed: Drugs in Finland, 1800-1950, Atena)

Mikko Ylikangas’ book offers a new and surprising compendium of a little-examined aspect of our history. Drugs are a global threat usually understood as a product of contemporary society and globalisation. Ylikangas brings a historic point of view of Finland’s history of recreational drugs and drug addiction that is unknown to many readers.

More information on all these books can be found here. And I’ll definitely post about the winners as soon as they are announced.

Just received this reminder from Emma Archer:

The Florence Gould Foundation and the French-American Foundation are currently accepting submissions for their Annual Translation Prizes.

DEADLINE: DECEMBER 31, 2009

This year the foundation will present a $10 000 cash award for the best English translation of French in both fiction and non-fiction.

Translations for consideration must have been published for the first time in the United States between January 1 and December 31, 2009 and must be submitted, accompanied by the French original work by December 31, 2009 (one French copy and one English copy).

All categories of work are eligible in fiction and nonfiction, with the exception of technical, scientific and reference works, and children’s literature. The prizes will be announced and presented in the spring of 2010.

All submissions should be sent to:

The French-American Foundation
Translation Prizes
28 West 44th Street, Suite 1420
New York, New York 10036

Each submission must be sent with the corresponding submission form.This form should include required contact information for both French and American publishers (editorial and publicity departments) and for the translator.

Submissions will not be considered without duly filled submission form.

For inquiries, please contact earcher [at] frenchamerican [dot] org.

As if it isn’t obvious from my earlier posts about ALTA, I’m a huge fan of the conference, the people, the panels.

(To riff on the nature of the panels for a second: these are almost anti-MLA type events. It’s an unwritten—or maybe even written—rule that you don’t read a paper on an ALTA panel. You talk. You expound. You discuss and share. And you use concrete examples. Which is why these talks are so interesting. Russell Valentino gave one of my favorites of this conference when he talked about the tricky business of translating dialogue. About when to use “he said” and how frequently, and how never to use “he exclaimed” and how these sorts of writerly guidelines are different in different languages and it’s up to the translator to sort it all out according to English conventions.)

That all said, there’s still the possibility of letdown. And for me, that came in the form of Ilan Stavans’s speech about the “future of language.” There’s so much about his presentation that bugged me—not to mention the fact that he basically just flew in to give this speech and took off almost immediately afterward—that I’m not even sure where to start.

To be honest, I’m not even sure I can really encapsulate what it was he was going on about. He started by making a fairly-dubious connection between the fact that you never really use the future tense in Spanish and the lack of Latin American science fiction. Seriously.

I can’t say that I’ve read a lot of international science fiction, but it took all of a minute to uncover Cosmos Latinos, an anthology of Latin American and Spanish sci-fi that includes works from as early as 1862 and quite a few from the “First Wave” of sci-fi writers who were working in the 60s and 70s. (And even found a review in case anyone is interested.)

It’s not terribly surprising that Stavans didn’t mention this (or might not even know about it), since he seemed only able to reference the most predictable of all writers and books in the most unsurprising of manners. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Carlos Fuentes. Borges. And in terms of Latino/Latina authors, we heard about Junot Diaz (and oh how we heard about Junot Diaz) and Sandra Cisneros. It was like being back in Freshman Comp! He even managed to work in Saul Bellow as an example of a writer whose new books would be read by everyone as soon as they came out—back in the days when people still cared about books. Putting aside the possibility that literary tastes have simply moved on, it’s not unusual in a time of rapidly proliferating choices—even the crappiest of B&Ns has a selection that dwarfs what you would’ve found in Lima, Ohio’s best bookstore back in the days when we were still “cultured”—that people would choose to read different things.

The most mental of statements though was when Stavans said that he “didn’t agree that we were writing less.” Writing less? Who thinks that? We all know (and here I am pulling that same Gladwellian “we” . . . ) that there are way too many books being written, published, and packed on bookshelves. You can debate whether we’re reading less these days or just reading different, but I don’t think there’s much support that writing is on the decline . . .

From this swirl of confusion came Stavans grand conclusion about the role of Spanglish in the future of language. Which is totally fine and probably true . . . until he went on about the Great Spanglish Work that would have to be translated into both English and Spanish. What sense does this make? That language and culture will be more bifurcated and isolated in the future? If so, that’s kind of stupid, right?

Ah well, whatever. I should say that other people at the conference really liked this (he even drew some spontaneous ovations during his speech), so I might be on my own here. It just reminded me a bit too much of Malcolm Gladwell’s style. The odd proclamation at the start, the dubious assertions, the grandiose conclusions, the somewhat contrarian conclusions, etc. Since I think Gladwell is a danger to society, I’m feel like it’s a public service to link to a few anti-Gladwell commentaries from Deadspin, The Nation, the New York Times, and Three Quarks.

There. I’m done screeding for the day and can get back to all things happy. Like mailing out copies of The Golden Calf and finishing our Spring/Summer Catalog . . .

Not sure how long this has been available online, but you can now download a lot of the presentations from the inaugural Tools of Change Frankfurt conference.

Lot of interesting ones, including:

• Sara Lloyd, Pan Macmillan: Revisiting a Publishing Manifesto: What Does the Future Look Like for Publishers?

• Ann Betts, Nielsen Book: Consumer Consumption: Present and Future

• Ramy Habeeb, Kotobarabia: The State of Arab Publishing

• Kassia Krozser, Booksquare.com: Starting from Scratch

• Richard Nash, Cursor: The Deconglomerated Publisher & the End of the Supply Chain

• and, Virginie Clayssen, Editis: Books on the Cloud along with many others.

The latest addition to our Reviews section is Rhea Lyons’s piece on David Unger’s Ni chicha, ni limonada, which came out in Spanish earlier this year.

I’m always glad when we can review a book that has yet to find a U.S. publisher, and especially when it’s from someone as interesting and influential as David. If you’re at all connected to the publishing world, you probably know David as the guy who organizes the U.S. collective stand at the Guadalajara Book Festival (a.k.a., FIL). (Yeah, he’s the one with the good tequila.) (And to digress on a digression, here’s a link to an article I wrote for Publishing Perspectives on this year’s Guadalajara Book Festival. Everyone should attend. This year and every year in the future. It really is an amazing experience, where authors are treated like rock stars and you can learn more about Spanish-language publishing in one day than you can in fifteen gringo years.)

In addition to working with FIL, David is a successful translator, reviewer, and author. His earlier book—_Life in the Damn Tropics,_ which is available in English—is definitely worth checking out.

Rhea was a former Open Letter intern who now works at Random House (which, you know, isn’t quite OL, but still), and is very committed to the promotion of international literature. Here’s the opening of her review:

The innovative works of legends like Borges and Cortázar not only defined a literary movement, they created an exotic and well-known image of Latin America and its people. A key element of works in the tradition of the magical realism is that the characters react to the fantastical in the same way they do the mundane. However, in his latest collection of short stories, Ni chicha, ni limonada, David Unger’s portrayal of Guatemala is nothing like Garcia Marquez’s provincial yet fantastical Macondo. The characters are instead caught between both belonging to and being alienated from their homeland.

Chicha is a Latin American drink that’s traditionally made from (but not limited to) fermented maize, and limonada is good old lemonade. The phrase “ni chicha ni limonada” is an idiom used to describe something that isn’t one thing or the other—English equivalent could be “neither fish nor foul.” This is the perfect title for Unger’s collection of short stories, which all have a common theme of being caught between truly belonging to one place, culture, or family.

Click here for the full review.

OK, so I may have cocked up the title of yesterday’s ALTA post—my typing/hearing skills are pretty suspect . . . It should’ve read “Short Stop Only While Getting It Off,” although “short drop” might be a bit more, um, dirty—but I’m positive I have today’s right.

It actually came from John Nathan’s plenary lecture “Translating Style,” which was an extremely interesting and engaging presentation about the difficulties of capturing the author’s voice when translating Japanese literature. Anyway, the title of the first Mishima book that Nathan translated can be literally translated as “Tugging in the Afternoon,” but the Japanese word for “glory” is homonym for “tugging,” a bit of word play that would totally be lost in English. So instead, Nathan suggested “Glory Is a Drag,” which didn’t go over too well . . . Eventually—thanks to Mishima’s ability to come up with dozens of great titles—the book came to be known as The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.

Anyone who reads this blog or thinks about/is involved with literary translation knows that this sort of bold departure is rather common. Translators are always faced with difficult choices—whether to cling to the original or cut and compensate in the target language, how to translate dialects, etc.—and it’s the way that great translators solve these questions through their great skill, imagination, and understanding of the literary art that makes them Great Translators in the first place.

Suzanne Jill Levine’s The Subversive Scribe is dedicated to exactly this. The first event I attended at ALTA was a special session in honor of Dalkey Archive’s recent reissue of this collection. (Unfortunately, none of the editors from Dalkey attended ALTA, although I did have a chance to meet the very cool Jamie Richards, who is one of the current translation fellows.) A lot of interesting things came up on this panel that sort of highlight what it is that I really love about translators and ALTA as a whole.

A lot of the discussion revolved around the idea that the translator is responsible for “recreating the reader’s relationship with the text.” In contrast to more academic activities and papers in which the professor tries to enact a fake sort of “critical distance” from the text they’re discussing, Jill (and translators as a whole) are much more personally engaged with the book. Aside from those instances in which loaded independent publishers use our enormous wealth to convince a translator to take on a project they’re not interested in (something that happens, well, like, never), translators work on books that they love. And they translate because they want to share that love with others who can’t experience the pleasure of reading the book in its original language.

One of the more fruitful metaphors to apply to the process of translation is to talk about it as a performance. That the original text is like a musical score and the translator the musician who jazzily reproduces the original in a new form. Obviously, there are many valid ways to “play” a text, and the art of the translator is being able to nail those verbal runs and bring the new set of readers into the author’s amazing world.

Which means that a translator has to be pretty damn creative. (Not to mention extremely talented. That’s why I’m just as in awe of great translators as I am of great authors.) And that’s sort of what Jill was getting at with her use of the word “subversive.” It’s not that she was sowing the seeds of revolution (although why not?) but pointing to the fact that translation is a creative process. That subversion = creativity. (Leading to an awesome quote about her relationship with the person who translated The Subversive Scribe into Spanish: “I was subverting him while he was subverting me.”)

(Sidenote for all who were there: I totally agree with the very awesome Erica Mena who objected to the comment that young translators have to spend a couple decades—couple decades?—practicing before they perform in this way. It’s always good to try these things with a partner, but it’s important for young translators to approach this as an enjoyable, playful, creative act. And that they should mature in the tradition of translation as jazz performance—it’ll only pay of bigger dividends in the long run.)

One of the more disheartening stories of ALTA revolved around Jose Lezama Lima’s Oppiano Licario. On a panel about Cuba, Pam Carmell—who received a NEA Translation Fellowship for her work on this translation—talked about why she translated Lezama Lima’s baroque masterpiece in the way that she did. That she made very conscious decisions to retain the baroque, stuffed, labyrinthine sentence structure of the original, instead of simplifying and boiling the book down to its basic plot structure. What I’ve seen of her translation is beautiful, and as a fan of Paradiso, I’d LOVE to read this . . . but, alas, the publisher didn’t quite agree with Pam’s approach and apparently this book is either never coming out, or is being retranslated into something that’s “easier” to understand. . . . And yes, I do know more about this particular situation, but I honestly can’t write about it here . . .

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll write a bit about Ilan Stavan’s plenary speech, which irritated me in the way that Malcolm Gladwell irritates me . . .

Although it seems (to me at least) like we just had the 2009 Best Translated Book Award ceremony a couple months ago, it’s getting to be that time again . . .

For the 2010 award, our group of nine fiction panelists (more on them below and more on the poetry people next week), all original translations published between December 1, 2008 and November 30, 2009 will be eligible. By “original” we mean books that have never before been translated or published in America. This can get a bit tricky (especially in terms of Russian books that were previously published in censored versions), but the point is to honor the best books that have never before, in any form, been available to English-readers.

And the emphasis is on the book as a whole, not just the translation. This has been a bit confusing to people in the past, so it deserves a bit more explanation. What we want to honor with this award is an excellent work of art in a brilliant translation that was well published. This is slightly different than a typical translation award that focuses on the intricacies of the translation itself. Our view is that this is part and parcel: a great book will only be as great in English as its translation. And although it’s honorable to promote a boring book that was deftly translated, we want to praise a fantastic work of fiction that a publisher believed in, that a translator artfully rendered in English, and that should be read by as wide an audience as possible.

Actually, Irina kind of put it best in the comments last year:

I gather that this is a prize for a novel that has been translated into English and thereby become accessible to a broader range of readers than the original language would have made possible, and then the book is judged on its merits as a novel read in the English language. If that is the case, I applaud it, since I for one am interested in a guide such as this as to what good writers there are out there writing in languages other than English.

Our group of judges has been reading eligible books all year, and will continue for the next couple months. In terms of timing, we will be announcing the 25-title fiction longlist on Tuesday, January 5th, and will announce the 10 finalists (both fiction and poetry) on Tuesday, February 16th. And the 2010 BTB Award Ceremony will take place in March (date still TBD).

And as we did last year, we will highlight a book a day between the longlist announcement and the release of the fiction finalists, and after the announcement of the poetry finalists, we’ll feature each of those books as well. We’ll also do some fun stuff like listing some notable retranslations, featured translators, etc.

Although the judges have been reading books all year, if you’re a publisher and want to make sure that your works are being considered, feel free to contact any and all of the panelists. Click here for a pdf with complete contact information, and just so that everything is transparent, here are this year’s judges:

Monica Carter, Skylight Books and Salonica;

Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading and Center for the Art of Translation;

Susan Harris, Words Without Borders;

Annie Janusch, Center for the Art of Translation;

Brandon Kennedy, Spoonbill & Sugartown;

Bill Marx, PRI’s The World: World Books;

Michael Orthofer, Complete Review;

Chad W. Post, Open Letter and Three Percent; and

Jeff Waxman, Seminary Co-Op and The Front Table.

Next week I’ll post more info about the poetry judges, etc., and hopefully I’ll have some more info in the not-too-distant future about some BTB sponsorships . . .