Latest Review: Two or Three Years Later
Our latest review is of Ror Wolf’s Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions by Hannah Johnson. Hannah works at the German Book Office and runs the blog Literary Rapture. And she’s a big fan of Lost. Aside from the fantastically odd sample that Schoffling & Co. sent us, I’m intrigued by the fact ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Part II
Following up on my earlier post I want to summarize the statistics that Esther Allen cites in her essay “Translation, Globalization, and English” that open the To Be Translated or Not To Be report from PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull. One of the things worth pointing out is how shoddy all the data is for ...
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Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions
Two or Three Years Later is a unique collection of short stories, many only half a page long. Each sentence has been distilled down to only the essential words, yet Wolf’s stories retain a very conversational quality. He often speaks directly to the reader, saying he is sure that the reader is curious to hear this or that ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Part I
At Frankfurt last year, PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull released a report entitled To Be Translated or Not To Be regarding the “international situation of literary translation.” This report (which is downloadable in pdf format by clicking the link above) has gotten some decent attention online and is one of the ...
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January/February Translations: Fiction
I’ve got a lot of January and February books to catch up on in these roundups, so I’m going to try and post two or three summaries this week, including an overview of the poetry books coming out this month and next (there are quite few). As always, the current list of all translated fiction and poetry can be found ...
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Ilf & Petrov's Road Trip
Last Friday, the Literary Saloon wrote about a documentary recreating Ilf & Petrov’s trip across America. From The Moscow Times“: In 1935, satirical writers Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov drove from New York to the Mexican border and back in a Ford. They spoke only schoolboy English and couldn’t drive, but ...
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Reading the World 2008
(Today is a day in which I list things . . . ) Hopefully most of you are aware of Reading the World, a unique collaborations between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translations throughout the month of June. This program came out of a series of discussions at BookExpo America five (?!) years ...
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