Last week I sent out a brief message to our indie bookseller mailing list (which all booksellers can easily join by e-mailing me at chad.post [at] rochester.edu) about the Best Translated Book Award Finalists and how we’d be willing to run pictures of any displays that the stores put together for the award. (To be honest, this is mainly a means to gushing about the bookstores I love . . .)
The first to come back with pics was McNally Jackson, which one of my interns refers to as her “favorite bookstore in the world.” (I think one of the reasons she so loves McNally Jackson is because of the high propensity of Open Letter titles on display there. And really, who doesn’t love that? But seriously, it’s really cool for an intern to see something she worked on out on display in the “real world.” I’m still saving my over-the-top thrill for my subway moment: when I see someone on the subway reading one of our books, I’ll feel like we’ve really made it.) There are so many cool things about McNally Jackson that I made a list:
Anyway, here’s their BTBA display with the randomly fantastic sign advertising the University of Rochester:
Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
–(The Odyssey, Book I, line 10. Emily Wilson)
In literary translation of works from other eras, there are always two basic tasks that a translator needs. . .
I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio (trans. From the Spanish by Jeannine Marie Pitas) is a bilingual poetry volume in four parts, consisting of the poems “The History of Violets,” “Magnolia,” “The War of the Orchards,” and “The Native. . .
This review was originally published as a report on the book at New Spanish Books, and has been reprinted here with permission of the reviewer. The book was originally published in the Catalan by Anagrama as Joyce i les. . .
Hello and greetings in the 2017 holiday season!
For those of you still looking for something to gift a friend or family member this winter season, or if you’re on the lookout for something to gift in the. . .
Three generations of men—a storyteller, his father and his son—encompass this book’s world. . . . it is a world of historical confusion, illusion, and hope of three generations of Belgraders.
The first and last sentences of the first. . .
The Island of Point Nemo is a novel tour by plane, train, automobile, blimp, horse, and submarine through a world that I can only hope is what Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s psyche looks like, giant squids and all.
What. . .
Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), Uruguay’s most beloved writer, was a man who loved to bend the rules. He gave his haikus as many syllables as fit his mood, and wrote a play divided into sections instead of acts. In his country,. . .
Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, translated from the Korean by Jake Levine, is a wonderful absurdist poetry collection. It’s a mix of verse and prose poems, or even poems in the. . .
Yuri Herrera is overwhelming in the way that he sucks readers into his worlds, transporting them to a borderland that is at once mythical in its construction and powerfully recognizable as a reflection of its modern-day counterpart. Kingdom Cons, originally. . .
Imagine reading a work that suddenly and very accurately calls out you, the reader, for not providing your full attention to the act of reading. Imagine how embarrassing it is when you, the reader, believe that you are engrossed in. . .