- Open Letter Books
- Three Percent Problem
- Translated Book Award
- Translation Studies
- Translation Database
Tomorrow kicks off a killer 11-day trip for me: first to NYC to pick up a rental car and three authors/transltors (Bragi Olafsson, Margaret Carson, and Sergio Chejfec) and drive them to Scranton, PA, then from there to Frankfurt, and then back in Rochester on October 11th . . . I’ll still be posting on occasion (mostly about TOC Frankfurt, and other Frankfurt goings on), but while I’m loopy drunk exhausted, so we’ll have to see how coherent these posts are . . .
But the main point of this post is to tell you about the Pages & Places Festival taken place in Scranton, PA this Saturday. I don’t know too much about the festival itself, except to say that novelist Joanna Scott participated a few years ago and loved it, and the line-up of events looks really solid.
I’ll be there with the above named authors/translators and translator Steve Dolph to kick off the festival with a 9am panel entitled “The World on our Bookshelves: The Import of Literature in Translation.” We’ll be talking about a few books—_The Ambassador_, Sixty-Five Years of Washington, and My Two Worlds—and also about the process of translating, publishing a translation, and promoting international literature as a whole. So if anyone’s in Scranton, I hope you come by and say hi. Should be a fun panel . . .
The full list of panels can be found here. I’m particularly excited about “The Brain & Culture: How Advances in Neuroscience are Changing the Way We Imagine Ourselves,” but they all look really interesting.
Reviewed by Will Evans
Paul Klee’s Boat, Anzhelina Polonskaya’s newest bilingual collection of poems available in English, is an emotional journey through the bleakest seasons of the human soul, translated with great nuance by Andrew Wachtel. A former professional ice dancer(!), Polonskaya left the. . .
Reviewed by P.T. Smith
In Seiobo There Below, Lázló Krasznahorkai is able to succeed at a task at which many writers fail: to dedicate an entire novel to a single message, to express an idea over and over again without falling into repetition or. . .
Reviewed by George Carroll
There are curious similarities in three Italian mystery series, written by Maurizio de Giovanni, Andrea Camilleri, and Donna Leon.1
They’re all police procedurals, and all set in Italy: Naples, Sicily, Venice.
The three protagonists are Commissarios: Luigi Ricciardi, Salvo. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
Poetry always has the feel of mysticism and mystery, or maybe this feeling is a stereotype left over from high school literature class. It is generally the result of confusion, lack of time committed to consuming the poetry, and the. . .
Reviewed by J.T. Mahany
Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic is not only a translation, but a transformation. It is a translation of Jean Genet’s novel Notre Dame des Fleurs, transmuted from prose to poetry. Originally written in prison as a masturbatory aid (Sartre. . .
Reviewed by Will Evans
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. . .
Reviewed by P. T. Smith
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. . .
