The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Will Evans on Carlos Busqued’s Under This Terrible Sun, from e-book publisher Frisch & Co.

Will Evans—known to many as The Apprentice of Summer 2012 here at Open Letter—is the publisher behind the still-relatively-new Deep Vellum, a translated literature press deep in the heart of Texas. In addition to being fueled by unlimited amounts of caffeine and the love for world lit, Will is undeniably one of the coolest people anyone can ever meet.

Here’s the beginning of his review:

Equal parts stoner pulp thriller and psycho-physiological horror story, a pervasive sense of dread mixes with a cloud of weed smoke to seep into every line of the disturbing, complex Under This Terrible Sun. Originally published by illustrious Spanish publishers Editorial Anagrama, Under This Terrible Sun is Argentine journalist-cum-novelist Carlos Busqued’s debut novel in both Spanish and now English.

I don’t read many gruesome novels, so I don’t know exactly which other books to compare this novel to, but the vibe of Under This Terrible Sun reminds me of the creeping evil that saturates the movie Se7en, and not in the least because most of the deadly sins crop up throughout Busqued’s novel in various guises. The plot of Under This Terrible Sun is comprised of a convoluted series of events, with only a few central characters around whom the action takes place, and most of the action itself is moved forward by a true old-fashioned villain, who, in the end, receives his comeuppance through a deus ex machina event that wraps up this fucked-up story of greed, sloth, and murder a little too nicely. But boy, let me tell you, the story that leads to the ending is worth reading. The first time I read it, I was disconcerted by how easily I was flying through the book, how easily my eyes and mind were gliding over the events taking place on the page, which were pretty gruesome. But then I went back through the novel a second time to prepare for this review and realized that this story had more going on than I realized at first—and that was the most stomach-churning part: our society has become so dehumanized that we’ve become immune to horrific images and reports of violence. Nothing shocks us anymore. This book didn’t shock me, and that’s the disturbing part. It should have.

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The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by P. T. Smith on Daniel Canty’s Wigrum, from Talonbooks.

Patrick, who is one of our regular reviewers, not only has a heightened interest in) and geographical proximity to) Montreal and its literature scene, but also shares the amusement and probable giggles at the sound of the book’s title. (I used the arrival of the galley as reason to continually creep around the office muttering “Wigrummm, WIIIGRUUUMMMM!”).

I can’t wait to finish Wigrum myself, and enjoy not only the encyclopedic aspect of it, but also the “who’s really who” games Canty plays. Several times throughout the entries, Canty lists initials (like S. W. and J. S.) that correspond to multiple possible names, giving the perfect balance of ambiguity and certainty—not too unlike books like Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels. And as you’ll see in Patrick’s review, the entries can be comical, sad, and at times pointless. And sometimes a little dirty, such as the “Arachnid Thimble,” in which one Baron Rudolf Drangstelzer has a pet Amazonian forest spider, Mother Salome, whose legs are tipped in rubber thimbles to protect humans from its venom—“an aphrodisiac with deadly properties, inducing in its victim a copulatory madness that eventually depletes them of all their bodily fluids . . .” And though things don’t end so well for Drangstelzer, he does go out with a happy ending.

Anyway! On to Patrick’s review:

From the start, Daniel Canty’s Wigrum, published by Canadian press Talonbooks, is obviously a novel of form. Known also as a graphic designer in Quebec, Canty takes those skills and puts them towards this “novel of inventory” and creates a framework from which to hang the inventories. We get a table of contents, where oddly, the preface follows the only chapter, we are given a set of “Instructions to the Reader” and the whole work ends with an index. The bulk of the book is the collection, the objects ostensibly found by the collector Wigrum, the man behind these collections (though the book throws this into doubt; there are other collectors, other writers). They are arranged alphabetically, all with an illustration in the margin, a touch that gives them more weight, rather than letting the story dominate the scale. It is a nice graphic touch, and eventually becomes part of how the book complicates itself. Novels where form dominates, and ones where the graphic design element is strong, can be exciting, but they are also easily met with a challenge—do you have more to offer me or are you just a pretty object, a chair that looks nice in the corner, but not recommended as a reading chair?

Besides risking form over substance, Wigrum is also immediately quirky—a culturally-loaded term that for some is ever-appealing, for others, an easy and lazy dismissal (the fear that it is simply a gimmick), with the middle ground needing the full context of the book or film. We aren’t in Wes Anderson territory here, but Canty does want to charm the reader with fantasy, with claims of authenticity that no one is falling for or being confused by.

For the rest of the review—and for more reasons to read this book—go here.

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Last week I had the opportunity to interview Can Xue as part of the Reykjavik International Literary Festival. We ended up writing out our interview ahead of time, so I thought I would share it here. Enjoy!

Born in China, where her parents were persecuted as being “ultra-rightists” by the Anti-rightest Movement of 1957. As a result, her father was jailed, her mother and two brothers were sent to the countryside for “re-education.” Can Xue was raised by her grandmother, suffered from tuberculosis, and faced a series of hardships.

In 1983, she began writing, and here first short story was published in 1985. After that, there’s been no looking back, and, according to Wikipedia, as of 2009 she’s written three novels, fifty novellas, 120 short stories, and six book-length commentaries. Of these, six books have appeared in English translation—Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, The Enbroidered Shoes, Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, Five Spice Street, and Vertical Motion—with Yale University Press publishing another novel next year, and a critical piece on Kafka.

Can Xue’s prose has attracted a lot of attention from writers and critics, including such great American writers as Robert Coover and Bradford Morrow, the editor of Conjunctions magazine, which has published a number of Can Xue’s stories—the first two people to mention Can Xue’s work to me. Her reputation has continued to grow, recently attracting high praise from The Mountain Goats frontman, John Darnielle, and being the featured author in the forthcoming issue of Music and Literature.

Frequently characterized as “avant-garde,” Can Xue’s writing operates under its own logic, a unique overlapping of images that explode “conventional” storytelling approaches, instead creating a sort of shifting landscape that forces the reader to engage closely with the text.

For example, here’s a bit from “Vertical Motion,” the title story of the collection that we published:

We are little critters who live in the black earth beneath the desert. The people on Mother Earth can’t imagine such a large expanse of fertile humus lying dozens of meters beneath the boundless desert. Our race has lived here for generations. We have neither eyes nor any olfactory sense. In this large nursery, such apparatus is useless. Our lives are simple, for we merely use our long beaks to dig the earth, eat the nutritious soil, and then excrete it. We live in happiness and harmony because we have abundant resources in our hometown. Thus, we can all eat our fill without a dispute arising. At any rate, I’ve never heard of one.

The mixture of Can Xue’s beautifully strange prose with such complex structures is the main reason so many writers and critics are intrigued, and frequently obsessed with, her works.

Chad W. Post: I want to talk more about Can Xue’s aesthetic beliefs in a bit, but for now I thought I’d start off with a few simple, scene-setting questions. First off, what made you decide to become a writer?

Can Xue:I decided to become a writer when I was thirty years old. But I think before that I had been preparing for this, actually, since I was three years old. I still remember those things which happened when I was three and four years old. At that time I always made stories up in my heart about people, about animals, about plants around me—simple stories, happy stories, exciting stories, even horrible stories. But all these stories had good ending. Sometimes these stories lasted several days, even longer. And in all these stories, I was a leading role. I loved to make up my own stories. But I didn’t get any chance to publish any thing until I was thirty, when my preparation was complete. After the situation in China changed, all the literary things happened to me naturally. I have been like an erupting volcano ever since.

Another factor made me decide to become a writer, I think, was because of the circumstances in China. I was born in fifties, that was an idealistic time—people in China were very poor then, almost no one could pursue material wealth. My parents were firm communists, their hearts were very pure. So, in my family, the only thing that children could pursue were spiritual things. I remember the most enjoyable thing in my life was reading. I read and read, never stopping until today.

CWP: I could make some pretty good guesses about this, but what authors to do see as influences on your work?

CX: In my younger years (from thirteen to twenty-five), I loved Chinese writer Lu Xun and Red Chamber, the ancient novel. And I also loved Russian writers—Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and so on. In the late seventies, I got ahold of some western classics, and I was so deeply engrossed by them! I think the authors I loved most are these: Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Kafka, Goethe, Borges, Calvino, Bruno Schulz, and Rilke’s poetry.

CWP: Over the past thirty years you’ve generated quite a number of pieces, ranging from critical essays to novels to novellas to short stories—how are you able to produce so much? Or, more to the point, what is your writing process like? (I read the interview in Asymptote, and the bit about not editing your work, and your amazing output, reminds me of Cesar Aira.)

CX: Maybe my writing process is unique. Everyday I write a page. I just get my pen and a notebook, sit down and write for an hour. Then I leave it as it is. I never have a structure in my mind beforehand, and I never revise my fictions—both short ones and long ones. This is how I write my fiction. For thirty years, I write almost every day, even during festivals. I had never been to a festival. That’s why I have produced so many works.

CWP: For a lot of readers your works can seem “challenging,” at least at first glance. Do you have advice for readers who are first approaching your work?

CX: Yes, I always give advice for readers when I publish my works. In my mind, my ideal readers are these: those who have read some works by the modernist writers, and who love metaphysical thinking and material thinking—both capabilities are needed for the reading of Can Xue.

CWP: Before getting more deeply into your aesthetic beliefs, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the literary scene in China. From an American perspective, it’s always been a bit difficult to get a handle on what’s going on in contemporary literature, although with Mo Yan being awarded the Nobel Prize, and websites like Paper-Republic starting up, that’s starting to change. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered another Chinese writer writing anything like you do. What is the writing scene like in China these days? How has it changed over the past thirty years?

CX: A good question. I also think that the Chinese know much more about America and the West than you know about China. In China, in the early eighties, a group of young writers studied western literature quite deeply, and these western classics opened their field of vision. They produced quite a number of good works. Can Xue was one among them. The group are all born in fifties or sixties—a very idealistic group. That was a literary era full of hope. But since the nineties, almost everybody in this group has changed their mind. They felt that they had had enough the West, and now want to return to their own tradition, which is much greater than the Western tradition. So their works, except a very few writers, have become more and more traditional, more and more readable. People welcomed this great regression. But I think this returning is the death of a language and a soul. Because our own cultural tradition has not got enough strength to support a new writing, the only way to develop it is by blood transfusion. I think as a Chinese writer, I should criticize my culture severely, only having done so, I get the possibility to develop it.

As for my own writing, the readers in China think that I’m very difficult but unique among Chinese writers. I dare say, no fiction writers in China has studied the Western literature and Western philosophy so exhaustively like Can Xue.

CWP: Although there are a lot of pieces of yours that have yet to be translated into English, you are one of the most translated Chinese writers, with books published by Northwestern, New Directions, Yale University Press, and Open Letter. How did you first get translated, and what has this process been like for you?

CX: That’s a long story. In 1986 in Shanghai, a student gave two of Can Xue’s stories to Ron Jansson, my earliest translator. He read the stories and decided immediately to translate them into English. He did the work with a Chinese colleague, Zhang Jian, and got more stories and two novellas published—three books altogether.

In the mid 1990s, Ron Jansson got very ill, so my English versions weren’t published in the United States continuously. Then Karen Gernant found Can Xue and she got in touch with me. Karen, along with Chen Zeping, have done a lot of work—also three books, including Vertical Motion from Open Letter and Five Spice Street, a novel published by Yale Press. Also a libretto for an opera performed in Germany, and some essays. They are continuing their translating now. I think Karen is a talented translator, and she and I have a lot common topics in literature.

Recently, Yale Press has found a new translator for Can Xue—Annelise, a young woman. She’s translating my new novel—The Last Lover. I’m very happy to get these precious friends in the United States!

CWP: Do you work closely with your translators? I believe that your forthcoming Yale book is being translated by Annelise Finnegan, a young, extremely talented translator—how did she end up working with you?

CX: Yes, I work closely with Karen, Chen Zeping, and now, Annelise, I read their translations, and give my comments. Yes, I also think Annelise has a high talent for languages. Sometimes her English translation is better than my Chinese original!

CWP: OK, this a very long intro into a slightly different part of the conversation, so bear with me. I want to first read a bit from your afterword to Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories:

The particular characteristics of my stories have now been acknowledged. Nevertheless, when someone asks me directly, “What is really going on in your stories? How do you write them?,” I’m profoundly afraid of being misunderstood, so all I can say is, “I don’t know.” From any earthly perspective, in truth I do not know. When I write, I intentionally erase any knowledge from my mind.
I believe in the grandness of the original power. The only thing I can do is to devoutly, bring it into play in a manmade, blind atmosphere. Thus, I can break loose from the fetters of platitudes and conventions, and allow the mighty logos to melt into the omnipresent suggestions that inspire and urge me to keep going ahead. I don’t know what I will write tomorrow, or even in the next few minutes. Nor do I know what is most related to the “inspiration” that has produced my works in an unending stream for more than two decades. But I know one thing with certainty: no matter what hardships I face, I must preserve the spiritual quality of my life. For if I were to lose it, I would lose my entire foundation. [. . .]

Some people say that my stories aren’t useful: they can’t change anything, nor do people understand them. As time goes by, I’ve become increasingly confident about this. First, the production of twenty years’ worth of stories has changed me to the core. I’ve spoken of this above. Next, from my reading experience, this kind of story, which indeed isn’t very “useful,” that not all people can read—for those few very sensitive readers, there is a decisive impact. Perhaps this wasn’t at all the writer’s original intent. I think what this kind of story must change is the soul instead of something superficial. There will always be some readers who will respond—those readers who are especially interested in the strengthening force of art and exploring the soul. With its unusual style, this kind of story will communicate with those readers, stimulating them and calling to them, spurring them on to join in the exploration of the soul.

Since writing this, has your approach, or thinking about your aesthetic changed at all?

CX: Basically, my stance, my way, and my thinking is always the same. But I’ve developed a lot since that time. My new thinking is that my experimental fictions have the same core as Western Philosophy. And in a sense, these kind of works are a new development to Classical Philosophy. Now I’m trying hard to open up a road for Western Philosophy, which has come to a standstill for many years.

CWP: In reading the recent Asymptote magazine interview a few things struck me, namely that when you talk about your aesthetic or the reasons you write the way you write, or the way that readers can only properly “understand” your stories is by struggling to understand them, your focus seems to be mostly on the process of creating and the creative process of reading. For me, this ties in with a comment you made about your fiction being “a performance.” In what way do you see your fiction as a performance? How does this relate to your view of yourself as an “experimental” writer?

CX: Yes, I think that you are absolutely right! You understand Can Xue very well. In the nineties when I studied Western literature, I found a metaphysical structure in these writers’ works: Borges, Kafka, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Calvino, and so on, even in the Bible. According to this structure, you can read their works as the process of creating and reading. Very few writers have this talent. Meanwhile, I found that Can Xue’s works had the same structure as these writers. And I felt that it was not painstaking, it’s an natural thing like giving birth. But why do all these first-rate writers have a same structure? After a hard and long period of studying, I have understood that the structure is just the structure of Great Nature, of course, it is also the structure of humanity. I expect that for great times to come to us, we artists should give performances, waking up people’s souls, I feel it’s a very urgent thing to do. This kind of literature actually means that one stands out, acting one’s own being. That’s why I said it was a performance.

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The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Dan Vitale on Amos Oz’s Between Friends, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and which incidentally comes out today.

Dan is a contributing reviewer of ours who is making his first appearance in a while on Three Percent—and with a piece on an author I understand to be one of his favorites. Dan also wrote for us about Amos Oz’s Scenes from Village Life.

Here’s an excerpt from Dan’s review:

hroughout his career—in fact from his very first book, Where the Jackals Howl (1965)—the renowned Israeli writer Amos Oz has set much of his fiction on the kibbutz, collective communities he portrays as bastions of social cohesion and stultifying conformity in equal measure. In his latest book, which like Where the Jackals Howl is a collection of eight short stories, the scales feel tipped toward the latter: to judge from Between Friends, if you set out to create a society plagued by gossip and spite, you could hardly do better than to establish a kibbutz.

Most of the protagonists of these linked stories about the fictitious, roughly 1950s-era Kibbutz Yekhat are in one way or another victims of peer pressure or ideological rigidity: Zvi and Luna, quiet, middle-aged platonic friends, are the subject of leering talk in the dining hall; Moshe, 16, a kind of foster member of the kibbutz, is treated harshly for wanting to visit his father, who is hospitalized off site; Martin, a shoemaker with emphysema, is pressured by the kibbutz leadership to quit his job because of his poor health.

For the rest of the review, go here.

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Sarah Gerard is a writer and a bookseller at McNally Jackson Books. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, and other publications. She holds an MFA from The New School and lives in Brooklyn.

I’m only going to talk about one book in this first BTBA blog post. Okay, maybe two. Okay, maybe three. But first, the one: Christa Wolf’s City of Angels (FSG). Oh my God (as it were). This book. This book, you guys.

Not that I’m surprised. Admittedly, I’ve only read one of Wolf’s other books, Cassandra, a retelling of the Fall of Troy in the first-person from the point of view of Cassandra, the cursed soothsayer. It’s completely devastating and oh-so-complex, grappling with issues of patriarchy and violence, and language and…well, anyway. Highly recommended, but that should go without saying because Wolf, I’ve come to realize, is (was, R.I.P.) a complete genius.

I’ve read a lot of great books this year, but City of Angels is by far the most rewarding. I’m halfway through and the marginal notes are getting a bit out of hand. Wolf’s ability to create layers of meaning in a peripatetic structure across three, sometimes four, different time periods is astounding. Set in Los Angeles around the time of Clinton’s first election, she manages weave in the Holocaust, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the LA. riots, architectural and anatomic metaphors, particle physics, Communism, Capitalism, Buddhism, Greek mythology and so much more in order to investigate the further themes of loss, grief, surveillance, secrecy, self-examination and identity, translation, documentation, etc. I could go on. I really could. And she does this with utmost grace and fluidity.

Speaking of translation, Damion Searls has done a knockout job here. The prose is lovely but invisible in the reading, which is exactly what it should be. Wolf often hints at subtle connections between events by ordering them back-to-back, but never (never, this would be a sin to her, I think) states the connections overtly. Searls knows, though. He’s on it, and he’s done his job deftly. Systems of meaning rise to the surface like bubbles in a glass. So refreshing.

My favorite part of this book so far is the connection Wolf draws between political bureaucracy and architecture, using anatomical language to describe states of sickness or health as they occur in a population living under a functional or dysfunctional government, and the way architecture changes under those systems, directing bodies. The Berlin Wall is probably the biggest example of this. Again, Searls has handled this beautifully.

Wolf’s use of pronouns (I & you, most particularly) is also absolutely brilliant and I applaud Searls’s very elegant handling of them, but I would need a lot more room if I were going to talk about that in-depth. One blog post is not enough. I suggest you just go out and buy the book already.

But hey, there are other books, right? Firefly by Severo Sarduy – this is definitely another longlist contender for me. The book is a bildungsroman following the namesake young man through a series of sad and hilarious encounters with quasi-fabulist doctors and officials, the owner of an orphanage, and a young woman whose fate is bittersweet to say the least. Sarduy’s language is colorful and shapely, and his ability to frame tragedy in a humorous context is definitely one of his many strengths. Likewise, Mark Fried’s ability to relate Sarduy’s complex meanings in a way that remains childlike and playful is very impressive, and makes reading Firefly at once a fun and intellectually stimulating experience.

The last book I’ll mention is maybe not (or maybe is, we’ll see) a longlist contender for me, but I really think it merits attention because its story is so interesting and because (who knew?) Ursula K. Le Guin translated it. Squaring the Circle by Gheorghe Săsărman (Aqueduct Press) is “a book of brief descriptions of imaginary cities.” Sound familiar? It’s basically the Romanian Invisible Cities, and was published roughly around the same time, although the introduction to this edition suggests that Calvino and Săsărman were unaware of each others’ work. Calvino’s enjoyed greater success largely because Săsărman’s book was banned while Calvino’s had wide distribution. If I can speak honestly here, I actually have no preference for one over the other – I was completely enraptured by Squaring the Circle and would only, maybe, not suggest it for the longlist because I have mixed feelings about the translation. Maybe I’ll write more about this in a later post. In the meantime, I must say that, in spite of these mixed feelings, I really loved this book and think you should, too.

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Entitled Translation in a Global Community: Theory and Practice, the 2013 Clifford Symposium at Middlebury College kicks off tomorrow, runs through Saturday evening, and features a number of interesting talks and discussions about translation.

Here’s the Middlebury summary:

You’re translating right now. We all do it every day —usually unconsciously—from written to oral, from images to text. Even with people we know who share our language and culture, our brains constantly finesse ways to make ourselves understood and to understand. Our increasingly interconnected planet scales up our reliance on translated messages exponentially. Whether it’s negotiating peace at a diplomatic table, reading a novel in a foreign tongue, or learning how to change a spark plug from a car owner’s manual, translators are there, building a bridge.

The 2013 Clifford Symposium invites students, faculty, staff, and the community to explore many forms of translation, and to show how translation and translators contribute to a complex cultural environment. The Symposium will feature faculty members from Middlebury College and the Monterey Institute of International Studies, authors, linguists, and artists.

Click here to see the full line-up of events, but just to give you a taste, here are a few of the highlights:

“Making Maigret New,” Keynote Address by David Bellos
Thursday, September 26, 4:30 p.m., MCA Concert Hall

(Bellos is one of my heroes, and thanks to his invitation, I’m actually going to Princeton next Monday to speak as part of their lunchtime lecture series. And if you haven’t read it yet, you must read Is That a Fish in Your Ear?.)

Translation Studies: An (Inter)Discipline Comes of Age
Thursday, September 26, 8-9:30 p.m., MCA Concert Hall

Translation Studies emerged as an (inter)discipline some 40 years ago, actively embracing various fields of knowledge and creating a multifaceted area of study. Panelists Rosemary Arrojo, Professor of Comparative Literature, SUNY Binghamton; María Sierra Córdoba Serrano, Assistant Professor, MIIS; Beverley Curran, Professor of Translation Studies, International Christian University, Tokyo; Minhua Liu, Associate Professor, MIIS; and Paul Losensky, Associate Professor of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University will talk about their specific areas of research, including literature, gender and postcolonial studies, media, graphic novel, and legal translation, translation sociology, and interpreting studies. Moderated by Karin Hanta (Middlebury College)

Translation as a Career: Experiences in the Field
Friday, September 27, 9:30-11 a.m., MCA Dance Theater

Professional translators, editors, publishers of translations, and interpreters discuss how they have transformed their passion into a career. The panel will include Susan Harris, editorial director of Words without Borders; Stephen Jensen, Japanese-English technical translator in sustainability; Julie Johnson, professor of interpreting at MIIS; and Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books, University of Rochester. Moderated by Barry Slaughter Olsen, Assistant Professor, Translation and Conference Interpretation (MIIS).

“Lexilalia: On Translating a Dictionary of Untranslatable Terms,” Keynote Address by Emily Apter
Friday, September 27, 12-1 p.m., MCA Concert Hall

Emily Apter is the author of Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (1993), The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), and Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013).

The “Mystery” of Translation: Global Cultural Flows
Friday, September 27, 1:30-3 p.m., MCA Concert Hall

Translations bridge time and space, connecting peoples and cultures and altering them in unexpected ways. This panel considers the role of translation in mediating cultural exchange across diverse fissures and boundaries. Panelists include Nehad Heliel, literary translator and director of the Middlebury School in Alexandria, Egypt; Carrie Reed, translator of classical Chinese literature and professor of Chinese at Middlebury; and Yumiko Yanagisawa, Swedish-Japanese and English-Japanese translator and feminist activist. This panel will be moderated by Stephen Snyder, Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies, Middlebury College.

Feminist Translation: A Political Act
Friday, September 27, 5:30-7 p.m., Chellis House

As feminist translation scholar Suzanne Lotbinière-Harwood noted, translation is an inevitably political practice without which texts would not “live” in other cultures and times. Objectivity and neutrality in translation are fallacies since the translators, as social agents, are involved in a process of constant negotiation with the social system in which they produce texts. Join us for a dinner conversation with translation studies scholars and activists Rosemary Arrojo, Emily Apter, and Yumiko Yanagisawa to discuss feminist perspectives on translation.

(Re)Writers: Translating Poetry and Fiction
Friday, September 27, 8:00-9:30 p.m., MCA Concert Hall

Literary translators occupy an anomalous position as “creative imitators.” Publishers and reading practices often mask their existence, preferring an illusion of direct contact between foreign writer and domestic reader. Yet the mediation of translation and the work of translators are crucial in shaping individual works and literary canons. This panel brings together working literary translators to discuss their experiences and attitudes toward their practice, including Middlebury faculty Ahmad Almallha, Timothy Billings, Michael Katz, Stephen Snyder and Paul Losensky (Indiana University). Moderated by Nina Wieda, Assistant Professor of Russian, Middlebury College.

Hope to see some of you there . . .

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The New York Times has a nice overview article on a new literary festival launching in Paris later this week, and run in part by Caro Llewellyn who directed the PEN World Voices Festival a few years back:

Paris is reaching out to recapture its place as a center of literature with a new festival of international writers that was set to begin Friday.

“There’s a sense in America that France is a country of culture, but when you are looking from the inside, a lot of people have been complaining that France needs to find its beating heart again,” said Lila Azam Zanganeh, a French-Iranian writer who now lives in New York and is one of the writers participating in the festival, Écrivains du Monde. [. . .]

The Écrivains du Monde festival may not, on its own, recreate the vibrant sense of literary experimentation and adventure of the first half of the 20th century, when Paris was home to the likes of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, but it marks a new appreciation of the primacy of international writing, in a country that despite a complex relationship with outsiders, has always embraced their contribution to the arts. [. . .]

The inaugural festival draws together some 28 writers from at least 18 countries. Most are not French themselves, but they have been translated into French and have a French following. The authors, who are speaking for small stipends, include some of the best-known fiction writers at work today: Salman Rushdie, John Banville, Richard Ford, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Grossman, Ma Jian and Michael Ondaatje. Also attending are several authors who write in French although not all of them are from France, including two from Lebanon and a Canadian-Haitian. The writers, who are coming for three days to Paris, with a few going on to spend two days in Lyon on Sept. 23 and 24, will hold intimate — and sometimes not so intimate — talks with their readers and literary enthusiasts. Panel discussions will take on topics like the challenges of translation, identity and conflict, literature and war.

For more information, check out the official website and the official program.

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So, Vitamin Water decided to run a contest in Canada that included random words under the bottle cap—one in English and one in French. Supposedly Coca-Cola reviewed all the words in the contest, but seemed to miss out on a few crucial words that mean one thing in French and another in English . . . From Huffington Post Alberta:

Blake Loates was shocked to find the words “YOU RETARD” printed inside the cap of a Vitamin Water bottle while out for dinner with her husband Tuesday night.

“We immediately thought ‘You have got to be kidding me,’” she told the Huffington Post Alberta.

“We thought it might have been a disgruntled employee or someone in a (bottling) plant playing a joke.”

Her father, Doug, was equally shocked at the message, considering his younger daughter Fiona has cerebral palsy and autism. [. . .]

Retard in French translates to “late” or “delayed.”

“Coke told us they reviewed the words before the contest, so we’re still a bit confused about why, after sitting down and looking at the word list, they would decide to keep it. It’s English meaning is offensive and they should have realized that,” said Blake.

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With Tom back from his relaxing vacation, we decided to catch up and talk about the books we read recently, including Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s mystery series, Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Sound of Things Falling, and Rafael Bernal’s The Mongolian Conspiracy, among others. We also talk about Amazon’s MatchBook program, making things as easy as possible for readers, and baseball. Because, baseball.

This week’s music is Pink Wonton, from Man Man’s new album On Oni Pond.

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This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and tweets.

So here are some things that I’ve reviewed, will review, or will do something with in some way at some point that I think are strong contenders for the 2013 BTBA.

First up: The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell by Carlos Rojas. Yep, that’s the title, and it’s a damn good book. It’s very hard to summarize what this book does—or how it does it—so I’m going to encourage you to just read the review. Suffice to say, I like fiction that appropriates historical characters and/or incidents in interesting ways, and that’s just what Rojas does here.

Hypothermia by Álvaro Enrigue. I have a review of this one in this week’s Times Literary Supplement. Enrigue was someone whom I first discovered in Dalkey Archive’s Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction. His “On the Death of the Author” was the best thing in the book (which, I’m pretty sure, I wrote in my review of that book). Hypothermia was the book from which it came, and I’ve been eager to read it ever since. Well, now I have, and it’s a very strong book.

Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. I’ll have a review of this publishing soon. It’s my frontrunner at the moment for the BTBA. That’s kind of a bold thing to say since we gave Krasznahorkai the award last year, but, god damn, this book is incredible. It’s not fair. Maybe we should ban him for a few years if he takes the award two years running.

The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente. I first found out about this book when Ethan Nosowsky of McSweeney’s Press (and now back to Graywolf) asked me to write a report on it. I recommended it without reservation, and it’s one of the best books I’ve ever reported on. These four long stories (or maybe they’re novellas) have a little of a Javier Marías thing going, a little Joseph Conrad, a little Henry James. They’re remarkable. On Oct 22 I’m going to be discussing just how great they are with their translator, the incredible Katie Silver at City Lights in San Francisco.

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