Susan Bernofsky's Blog, page 27

Translation on Tap, March 1 – 31, 2017

Is it spring yet? Anyhow, there’s translation in the air. Here’s what’s coming up.

Wednesday, March 1:

Currently & Emotion: launch event for a new anthology presenting contemporary practices of translation. Event features translator/poet Uljana Wolf joined by the book’s editor, Sophie Collins, and Valeria Luiselli. Admission fee $5. More information here. Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, 7:00 p.m.

Also Wednesday, March 1:

Revisiting Eastern Europe: The Politics of Translation: translators Philip Boehm, Bela Shayevich, and Matvei Yankelevich discuss the social and political implications of their craft and how their latest projects fit into the international literary landscape. Moderated by Charity Scribner, introduced by Esther Allen. More information here. CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Skylight Room (Rm. 9100), 6:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 4:

Translation at the Margins: part of the 2017 Festival Neue Literatur, this event is devoted to the importance of translating LGBTQ voices, voices of people of color, voices of women, and voices of writers from countries recently affected by the U.S. immigration ban, featuring translators John Keene, Sara Khalili, Translationista in conversation with Rivka Galchen, Michel Moushabeck, John Freeman, and Valeria Luiselli, moderated by translator Tess Lewis. RSVP strongly recommended. More information here. Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, 12:00 p.m.

Sunday, March 5:

Launch event for Sigfried Krakauer’s Georg with the book’s translator, Carl Skoggard, joined by translator Ian Dreiblatt. More information here. Wendy’s Subway, 379 Bushwick Ave, Brooklyn, 7:00 p.m.

Monday, March 6:

Dance on The Volcano – launch event: Translator Kaiama L. Glover will be joined by Edwidge Danticat to present and discuss Glover’s translation of Dance on the Volcano by Haitian novelist Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Albertine Books, 972 Fifth Ave. (78th/79th Sts.), 7:00 p.m.

Wednesday, March 8:

Drums for a Lost Song  – launch event: – Translator Rob Gunther will present his translation of Jorge Velasco Mackenzie’s Drums for a Lost Song. More information here. Godwin-Ternback Museum, Klapper Hall, Queens College (CUNY),  65-30 Kissena Blvd., Flushing (Queens), 6:30 p.m.

Tuesday, March 14:

Launch event for The Little Typewriter by Siegfried Krakauer, with translators Meghan Forbes, Alex Zucker, and Jennifer Zoble. More information here. Book Culture, 536 W. 112th St., 7:00 p.m.

Saturday, March 18:

Subsisters: translator-poet Uljana Wolf joins her translator Sophie Seita to read from their forthcoming book (Belladonna* 2017), also with Lisa Robertson, Segue Reading Series, more information here. Zinc Bar 82 W 3rd St., 4:30 p.m.

Tuesday, March 21:

Launch event for Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, featuring the book’s editor, translator Karen Van Dyck, joined by Maria Margaronis, Hiva Panahi, Gazmend Kapllani, and Yusef Komunyakaa. More information here. McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince St., 7:00 p.m.

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Translation on Tap, March 1 – 15, 2017

Is it spring yet? Anyhow, there’s translation in the air. Here’s what’s coming up.

Saturday, March 4:

Translation at the Margins: part of the 2017 Festival Neue Literatur, this event is devoted to the importance of translating LGBTQ voices, voices of people of color, voices of women, and voices of writers from countries recently affected by the U.S. immigration ban, featuring translators John Keene, Sara Khalili, Translationista in conversation with Rivka Galchen, Michel Moushabeck, John Freeman, and Valeria Luiselli, moderated by translator Tess Lewis. RSVP strongly recommended. More information here. Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, 12:00 p.m.

Tuesday, March 14:

Launch event for The Little Typewriter by Siegfried Krakauer, with translators Meghan Forbes, Alex Zucker, and Jennifer Zoble. More information here. Book Culture, 536 W. 112th St., 7:00 p.m.

Tuesday, March 21:

Launch event for Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, featuring the book’s editor, translator Karen van Dyck, joined by Maria Margarin’s, Hiva Panahi, Gazmend Kapllani, and Yusef Komunyakaa. More information here. McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince St., 7:00 p.m.

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Festival Neue Literatur 2017

Festival Neue Literatur has been rolling around every winter (just when we most need cheering up) for eight years now. It’s a great little festival that brings 6 fantastic but not-well-known-in-English German-language writers from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland to New York for a great series of events. I curated or co-curated the festival for three of its eight years, so can attest to how much more relaxing it is to just sit in the audience and listen to the great stories that other people have scrambled to find and put on stage for your entertainment. This year’s curator is Grove editor Peter Blackstock, who certainly knows his way around a German-language book, and this year’s theme is Queer as Volk – so there’s a focus on writing that celebrates the diversity of LGBTQ experiences. What’s more, the entire festival is held in English (the point being to make these great authors accessible to a NYC audience), and you can catch them in various configurations. I hope you’ll check it out! This year’s authors are Jürgen Bauer and Marlen Schachinger from Austria, Fabian Hischmann and Antje Rávic Strubel from Germany, and Zora del Buono and Simon Froehling from Switzerland. A reader containing English-language excerpts from all their books can be found on the festival website. They’ll be joined in the course of the festival by Darryl Pinckney, Francine Prose, John Freeman, Rivka Galchen, Sara Khalili, John Keene, Valeria Luiselli, Michel S. Moushabeck, Eileen Myles, and Translationista (talking translation, of course). For a complete listing of events, please visit the Festival Neue Literatur website, and note that while all the events in the festival are free and open to the public, some of them are sure to book up in advance (esp. Friday night and the midday events on Saturday and Sunday, which are in limited-size venues), so I highly recommend that you reserve your seats now to make sure you’ll get in. See you there!

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2017 PEN Translation Prizes Announced

This year’s PEN Translation Prizes have just been announced.

The PEN Translation Prize for a book-length translation of prose into English goes to Tess Lewis for her translation of Angel of Oblivion by Maya Haderlap (a 2014 Festival Neue Literatur author from one of the years the festival was curated by Lewis – glad to see her good taste backed up by the PEN jury). Published by Archipelago.

The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation goes to Simon Armitrage for his translation of Pearl from the Middle English, a work believed to be by the same anonymous author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which Armitrage previously translated). Published by W.W. Norton.

Congratulations to all this year’s winning and shortlisted translators!

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Submit Now for 2017 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts

Lunch Ticket, the literary journal run by the MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles, is currently accepting submissions for its Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts (Gabo was Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s nickname). This year’s prize will be judged by translator-poet Carolyn L. Tipton. No submission fee, $200 prize and publication for the winner (just publication for runners-up). You’ll find the submission details on the Lunch Ticket website. I’m rather taken aback by the contest’s language around securing rights for the translated works; apparently if you want to publish in Lunch Ticket, they’ll want you to purchase translation rights on their behalf, and if you have questions about this they refer you to the ALTA website, which contains no information on this topic. Recently I wrote up a little introduction to how translation rights work because of all the misconceptions floating around out there. In the case of the current contest, unless you’re translating something clearly in the public domain, or something for which you know for a fact that the original publisher will give the rights for free, or something for which the translation rights have already been purchased by a publisher who’s hiring you to do the translation and will consent to this pre-publication serial appearance of the work, this one might not be for you. Deadline for submissions is Feb. 28, 2017.

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Translation on Tap in NYC, Feb. 15 – 28, 2017

It’s February, it’s cold, don’t you want to be sitting indoors in the warmth somewhere at a great translation event? Here’s what’s on offer:

Thursday, Feb. 16:

Understanding the Long Tail of Linguistic Diversity in New York City​, a lecture by Daniel Kauffman of the Endangered Languages Alliance and Queens College. This one isn’t strictly speaking a translation event, but I think it’ll be of interest to translators. Kauffman is a linguist who in 2008 founded the Urban Fieldstation for Linguistic Research with the purpose of initiating long-term language projects in cooperation with immigrant communities in NYC and local linguistics students. He’ll be speaking out this work as part of the Conflict Urbanism: Language Justice lecture series. More information here. Columbia University, Ware Lounge, Avery Hall, 6:30 p.m.

Saturday, Feb. 18:

Ugly Duckling Presse Winter Books Party: celebrating new books by writer/translators Mónica de la Torre and Sho Sugita, among others. More information here. Pierogi, 155 Suffolk St., 7:30 p.m.

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Apply Now for the 6th Biennial Graduate Translation Conference

The Sixth Biennial Graduate Translation Conference will be hosted this year at the University of Texas at Dallas from May 26 through May 28, 2017. This student-organized conference was originally held at UCLA in 2004 and has since been hosted by the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and University of Michigan (the host of last year’s conference). This year, according to the announcement just sent around by the 2017 organizers, the conference “aims to highlight the ways in which translation impacts the humanities and society at large in the 21st century.” There will be two keynote speakers, Esther Allen and Breon Mitchell, both key figures in the U.S. translation scene, and workshops will be offered, along with readings/performances and panels at which participants will be invited to speak about their projects. The $50 registration fee includes meals and lodging. I’ve uploaded the call for papers with full application details. The deadline for the receipt of applications is March 1, 2017. If you have questions, please email the conference organizers.

And please note that this is one of two graduate student conferences on offer this spring. The other one is the Graduate Student Conference on Translation and Translation Studies being held up north at Binghamton University.

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Translation Events at AWP 2017

In the past I’ve sat down and combed through the AWP Conference schedule to find all the translation events, but since ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) is now doing this labor, let me just link to

***ALTA’s Helpful List of Translation Events***

at the 2017 AWP conference this week in Washington D.C. There are over 40 events on the list, which makes me so happy – this means that literary translation has really established itself as any area of interest for AWP conference-goers. I’ll be participating in two of these events myself (both on Saturday), and will surely be sitting in the audience for others, so do say hello! And if you’ll be visiting AWP’s cornucopia-like book fair, why not play ALTA Bookfair Bingo? If you’re diligent and also lucky, you can take home a stack of 13 hot-off-the-presses translated books lovingly selected for inclusion in this jackpot by their publishers – and there are four jackpots up for grabs his year, awarded for bingo prowess on Thursday, Friday noon, Friday afternoon, and Saturday. For instructions, see the Bookstore Bingo page of the ALTA blog. Travel safe to D.C., everyone. And keep in mind that while some of the current residents of this city are dangerous and unsavory, only 4.1% of D.C. denizens voted for them, so you’ll mostly be among friends.

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2017 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Winners

This is the 14th year of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants, made possible by a generous donation from translator Michael Henry Heim and his wife, Priscilla Heim, and there was yet again a record number of applications this year: 224! From having served on the Fund’s Advisory Board for several years back when the number of applications received was still under 100, I salute this year’s particularly hard-working judges, Tynan Kogane, Fiona McCrae, Canaan Morse, Idra Novey, Allison Markin Powell, Antonio Romani, Chip Rossetti, Shabnam Nadiya, Ross Ufberg, and this year’s chair Edna McCown. This year, as was announced today, 15 projects were selected for grants, translated from 13 different languages including Arabic, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Nepali. Each of these translators will receive a $3,870 grant to aid them in completing their translations-in-progress.

Here are this year’s grant recipients:

Nick Admussen for his translation of Floral Mutter, a collection of poems by the contemporary Sichuanese poet Ya Shi (Forthcoming from Zephyr Press.)

Polly Barton for her translation of Cowards Who Looked to the Sky by Misumi Kubo.

Elizabeth Bryer for her translation from the Spanish of The Palimpsests by Aleksandra Lun, a novelist who lives in Spain but grew up in Poland.

Vitaly Chernetsky for his translation of Ukranian writer Sophia Andrukhovych’s novel Felix Austria.

Iain Galbraith for his compilation and translation from the German of Raoul Schrott: Selected Poems.

Michelle Gil-Montero for her translations of the work of Mexican poet, translator, and visual artist, Valerie Meyer Caso.

Sophie Hughes for her translation from the Spanish of The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán,

Elisabeth Jaquette for her translation from Arabic of the 2009 short story collection Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author, journalist, and activist Rania Mamoun.

Kira Josefsson for her translation from the Swedish of the novel The Arab by Pooneh Rohi,

Adam Morris for his translation of I Didn’t Talk, a novel by Brazilian author Beatriz Bracher. (Forthcoming from New Directions.)

Kaitlin Rees for her translation from the Vietnamese of Nhã Thuyên’s poetry collection A Parade.

Dayla Rogers for her translation of Wûf, a work of fiction by Kemal Varol, a Turkish author of Kurdish ethnicity.

Christopher Tamigi for his translation from the Italian of In Your Name by Mauro Covacich.

Manjushree Thapa for her translation from the Nepali of There’s a Carnival Today by Indra Bahadur Rai. (Forthcoming from Speaking Tiger Publishing.)

Joyce Zonana for her translation from the French of the novel This Land That Is Like You by Tobie Nathan.

In addition to these 15 awards, there’s a new additional one administered within the PEN/Heim Translation Fund that’s being made this year for the first time, the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature, which awards a translator $5,000 to complete a translation of a work from the Italian. The inaugural award goes to:

Douglas Grant Heise for his translation of the metafictional novel Ithaca Forever, by Luigi Malerba.

The Advisory Board also nominates applicants for funding from the New York State Council for the Arts. This year’s nominees are:

Sean Gasper Bye, Hazem Jamjoum, Julia Sanches, and Jennifer Zoble.

Unless otherwise indicated, all the works listed above are available for publication – editors and publishers take note! For more information about the translators and their books, see the PEN American Center website.

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Getting the Rights to Translate a Work: A How-To Guide

Since there are still so many misconceptions circulating about translation rights and their acquisition, let me put together a thumbnail sketch of how it all works. Translation rights can be assigned (sold or given away for free) only by the person or entity who holds copyright in the original work. In many cases, this is not actually the author. I’ve just pulled a book off my shelf: Bruno by Gerhard Falkner, a terrific novella about a writer who gets obsessed with a wild bear that’s been terrorizing livestock in the Alps near where he’s doing a writing residency. Have a look at the book’s copyright page (below), and you’ll see that the work has been copyrighted not in the name of the author but by the publisher. This means that in Falkner’s original contract with his publisher, Berlin Verlag, he sold his copyright in the work, which means that it is no longer his to sell or give away. Now, if you happen to make friends with Gerhard Falkner and convince him that you’re the right person to translate his book, he can then turn to his publisher and ask them to assign the translation rights (usually for a fee – that’s a matter of negotiation) to whatever publisher will be printing your translation. The rights can’t be sold or given to you, because translation rights can only be held by publishing houses (or magazines). But authors don’t always fully comprehend that by selling their copyright they’ve also given up the right to assign translation rights to their work, so it may indeed happen that you ask a foreign-language author for permission to translate their book and they cheerfully provide you with a document to that effect. But unless they hold the copyright in their work, this document is legally meaningless, at least until such time as the actual copyright holder makes a deal with the would-be publisher of your translation. Sometimes, of course, authors do retain copyright in their work, and in these cases they are indeed the ones in a position to grant translation rights – though even so, the bureaucracy of the rights negotiations is often handled by their publishers or agents and the rights can still only be formally acquired by whoever publishes your work. (Note that in any of these cases, you still can and should retain the copyright for your own translation – there’s no advantage to you in assigning it to your publisher, though many publishers may still ask you to.)

So what do you do when you want to submit a sample to a publisher or for a competition and the submission guidelines ask you to demonstrate you have “permission to translate the work”? Well, you’re being asked to do the impossible – this just means that whoever wrote these instructions doesn’t really understand the legal status of translation rights. In cases like these, I recommend that you supply documentation that the rights are available and assure whomever you’re submitting the work to that you’re happy to be of assistance in negotiating the rights. To acquire that documentation, write to the holder of the rights (check the copyright notice inside the book to see who it is) and ask simply whether the translation rights for English are available. And since the holders of the copyright in a work are generally eager to sell translation rights, you should get a response. If it’s a publishing house that holds the rights, you should be able to find contact information online, and if the rights are held by the author, you can usually write to the author care of the publishing house, and the letter or email will be forwarded. Sometimes a follow-up phone call is needed. If you don’t get a response in several weeks and are about to miss the deadline for the contest etc. and have thoroughly checked to see that no previous English-language translation of the work in question has been published, you can always, as a last resort, include a note indicating who owns the copyright, saying that to the best of your knowledge and research the translation rights are available, but that you’ve been unable to get formal confirmation of this despite queries sent on [indicate dates]. Not ideal, but better than nothing, and if you’re lucky, it’ll be enough to keep you from getting kicked out of a competition for lack of documentation. In the case of Falkner’s novella, an online search for the book reveals that the original publisher, Berlin Verlag, is now part of the German publishing conglomerate Piper, which provides contact information for the staff of its foreign rights division on its website (in English, the international language of publishing), so that’s where you’d direct your query. You can write in English or, as a courtesy and to demonstrate your fluency, in the language in question. It’s not actually all that difficult once you get the hang of it. And the moment you introduce yourself as a translator interested in translating a particular work that hasn’t yet been sold to an English-language publisher, most foreign-language publishing houses will see you as an ally in their mission to get their authors’ works distributed around the world.

And now for a few last nitty-gritty details. Generally English-language publishers who buy translation rights purchase what’s known as “world English rights,” which means that a publisher then has sole permission to print and distribute a translation of this work anywhere in the world. Sometimes, though, the rights are carved up by region or even country, and in this case it might be possible for U.S. translation rights to a work to still be available even if the U.K. rights aren’t. If a book has been published in the U.K. but not in the U.S., and you’d like to do a new translation, it’s worth inquiring. And if a book you’d like to retranslate has been out of print in English for a while, it may be that the rights are now again available, so here too it may be worth inquiring. A work old enough to be out of copyright in the original (i.e. in the “public domain“) can be translated and published by anyone – terms vary by country; in the case of Germany, for example, works remain in copyright until 70 years after the death of the author. Finally, keep in mind that you need no one’s permission to translate anything you like – translating is always legal – it’s only publishing your translation that requires permission.

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