Susan Bernofsky's Blog, page 37

2016 Cliff Becker Prize Announced

Cliff Becker, NEA Literature Director 1999-2005

The Cliff Becker Book Prize, for an as-yet-unpublished book-length collection of poetry in translation, comes with a $1000 purse and publication by White Pine Press. This year’s prize – the fourth in its history – has been awarded to Carolyn Tipton for her translation of Returnings: Poems of Love and Distance by Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. Christopher Merrill judged this year’s prize. The runners-up are Unexpected Development by Klaus Merz, translated from the Swiss German by Marc Vincenz, and Cat & Mouse: Selected Poems by Inna Kabysh, translated from the Russian by Katherine Young. You’ll find more information, including the judge’s statement about the book, here.

Tipton’s translations of Alberti’s poems will be published in time for the ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) conference, which will be held this October in San Francisco.

Congratulations to Carolyn Tipton and her fellow finalists!

 

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Apply Now for 2016 Translation Lab at Ledig House

I’ve blogged about Ledig House’s Translation Lab before, and am delighted to blog it again. The program allows four pairs of translators and their authors to work together on the beautiful grounds of Art Omi for 12 days of intense collaboration. This year’s Lab is scheduled for Nov. 9 – 20 2016.

DW Gibson, Director of Writers Omi writes:

All residencies are fully funded, including airfare and local transport from New York City to the Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, NY. Please note: accepted applicants must be available for the duration of the Translation Lab (November 9-20, 2016). Late arrivals and early departures are not possible. Please do not submit a proposal unless both parties involved (translator and writer) are available for all dates.

Each proposal should be no more than three pages in length and provide the following information:

• Brief biographical sketches for the translator and writer associated with each project

• Publishing status for proposed projects (projects that do not yet have a publisher are still eligible)

• A description of the proposed project

• Contact information (physical address, email, and phone)

For more information, see the Writers Omi website.

All proposals and inquires should be sent by e-mail to DW Gibson at Ledig House. Proposals will be accepted until July 15, 2016.

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Apply Now for the 2016 French-American Foundation Translation Prize

The French-American Foundation’s Translation Prize has been around since 1986 and offers one of the largest awards around ($10,000) for an outstanding translation from the French. The Foundation’s stated intention behind giving the prize is to promote French literature in the U.S., increase the visibility of translators and their craft, and support publishers of translated literature. Eligible projects for the 2016 competition are works of prose (fiction or non-fiction) published in the U.S. in 2015. Here’s this year’s excellent jury. More details and instructions for submission here. If you have questions about the application process, contact Ilana Adleson in the French-American Foundation offices. The deadline is coming right up: Friday, February 15.

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Apply Now To Translate in Banff This Summer

Every year I sing the song of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and why you should apply to go there next June to work on your translations and interact with other translators (and stroll up mountains). It’s one of the prettiest places you’ll ever see and a fantastic program. You’ll find lots of information (including the application form) here. Scholarships and travel stipends are available. The deadline this year is Feb. 10, 2016.

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Translation on Tap in NYC, Jan. 1 – 31, 2016

As far as I know, the entire world is fast asleep and no one has planned any translation events until nearly the end of this month. I look forward to being informed otherwise (if so), and will update this post accordingly. For now, the only event I know about is the one I’m in.

Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016

Translationista joins novelist Rachel Cantor to discuss Cantor’s new novel, Good on Paper, the protagonist of which is a literary translator from the Italian with a past history of obsession with Dante’s Vita nuova. Always happy to see a work of fiction taking on and thematizing questions of translations, so I’m hoping for an interesting discussion. More information here. Book Culture, 450 Columbus (@ 82nd St), 7:00 p.m.

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Translation on Tap in NYC, Dec. 16 – 31, 2015

©Alan Wilson

So listen, if you wanted to go to some nice translation events this month, you should have gone to some of the half-zillion excellent events that were on offer for the first half of December. As far as I know, that’s all she wrote for the rest of the year, so you’ll just have to close your eyes and hold your breath until New Year’s, when with any luck we’ll soon have some nice translationistic offerings to save us all from holiday despair. Hang in there! And I hope you have a happy solstice and whatever else you may be celebrating this month.

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PEN Translation Awards: 2016 Longlists Announced

One of the books longlisted this year

This week the PEN American Center announced the longlists for the PEN Translation Prize (for a book-length translation of prose, judged this year by Urayoán Noel) and the PEN Poetry in Translation Award (judged by Elisabeth Jaquette, Aviya Kushner, Ronald Meyer, Sara Nović, and Jeffrey Zuckerman). The shortlists will be announced on Feb. 2, and the winners on March 1. Meanwhile these might be good books to keep in mind if you’re the sort of person who has holiday gift shopping to do (or if you need a good read to help you forget the holidays are happening):

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation Longlist:

The Country of Planks by Raúl Zurita (Action Books), translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky

Oxen Rage by Juan Gelman (co-im-press), translated from the Spanish by Lisa Rose Bradford

The School of Solitude: Collected Poems by Luis Hernández (Swan Isle Press), translated from the Spanish by Anthony Geist

The Late Poems of Wang An-shih (New Directions), translated from the Chinese by David Hinton

Twelve Stations by Tomasz Różycki (Zephyr Press), translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston

Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas (Phoneme Media) translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan

I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev

The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu

Silvina Ocampo (New York Review Books Poets), translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss

Uyghurland, the Furthest Exile by Ahmatjan Osman (Phoneme Media), translated from the Uyghur and Arabic by Jeffrey Yang with the author

 

PEN Translation Prize Longlist:

The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company), translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu

The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (New Directions), translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson

The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell

Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah (AmazonCrossing), translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

The Game for Real by Richard Weiner (Two Lines Press), translated from the Czech by Benjamin Paloff

Sphinx by Anne Garréta (Deep Vellum Publishing), translated from the French by Emma Ramadan

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Penguin Classic), translated from the Russian by Oliver Ready

The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov (Open Letter Books), translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

Hollow Heart by Viola Di Grado (Europa Editions), translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar

Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano (Yale University Press/Margellos World Republic of Letters),

translated from the French by Phoebe Weston-Evans

 

Sounds like plenty of fine reading to dive into! The finalists for both these awards will be announced on Feb. 2 and the winners on March 1.

 

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2015 MLA Translation Awards Announced

No, I don’t actually know any translators who are dogs. This just happens to be a literary basset hound who enjoys prize-winning Turkish novels in translation.

The MLA (Modern Language Association) gives out several translation awards, and it can be difficult to keep track of them because they all seem to be awarded in alternate years and consider works published in the two years previous. In any case, two awards were just announced for 2015, and here are the recipients:

The Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work went to Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, for their translation from the Turkish of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (Penguin 2014), with honorable mentions to Robert Chandler & Elizabeth Chandler for their translation from the Russian of The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin (New York Review Books 2014), and to Aaron Poochigian for his translation from the ancient Greek of Jason and the Argonauts by Apollonius of Rhodes (Penguin 2014).

The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature was split this year between two recipients: Jane O. Newman for her translation from the German of Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton Univ. Press 2014) and Michael Nylan for his translation from the Chinese of Exemplary Figures / Fayan by Yang Xiong (Univ. of Washington Press 2013).

Congratulations to all the translators recognized for their work!

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Remembering Christopher Middleton

Christopher Middleton (June 10, 1926 – Nov. 29, 2015), the great English poet and literary translator who spent most of his adult life in Austin, TX, is the one who made me want to start translating in the first place. I’ll never forget sitting as a teenager on the hot pavement of the tiny enclosed patio at 6744 Milne Blvd. in New Orleans – now a vacant lot thanks to Hurricane Katrina – reading Middleton’s translations of stories by Robert Walser and trying to figure out how he did it. My own first attempts at turning sentences written in German (a language I was just learning) into English prose were not going well. “The songbird songs heard already such a long, long time ago by human beings!” I wrote, trying clumsily to approximate the flourish with which Walser ended his “Biedermeier Story”: “Die Singvögellieder, die vor schon so langer, langer Zeit von Menschen vernommen worden sind!” Middleton’s version of this sentence was lyrical, offhandedly elegant: “All the songs of singing birds heard by people such a long, long time ago!” Check out the assonance of “birds” and “heard” that gives this line its artful caesura, rhythmically setting up the reader to place another well-timed (if more muted) caesura after “people.” The line sings, it’s translation-by-poet. I’ve told this story before.

I first met Christopher at a Walser conference at the Swiss Institute in New York in 1994 and liked him as much as his translations. He was incredibly kind, incredibly supportive, and over the years often invited me out for a glass of wine, a walk, and a chat in Berlin when we intersected there, which we did most summers. He was a regular fixture at the wonderful old now-defunct bookstore autorenbuchhandlung on Carmerstrasse near Savignyplatz. (There’s a new bookstore by that name at Savignyplatz now – a good one, but nothing like the old rabbit warren of densely packed shelves where Christopher and his friends would sit for hours talking literature and drinking more coffee than is good for a person.)

Christopher’s translations of Robert Walser were seminal and ground-breaking. His Jakob von Gunten and Selected Stories of Robert Walser were for a long time all the Walser available in English – and the translations are so superb I don’t think they’ll ever lose their charm. His other Walser translations include Thirty Poems and Speaking to the Rose. He translated lots of other things as well, and not just from German. Lots of poetry of course. That great anthology he co-edited with Michael Hamburger, Modern German Poetry 1910-1960 (terminally out of print, it seems) is full of his beautiful translations. He also worked his magic on Christa Wolf, Gert Hofmann, Nietzsche, Canetti, Trakl, Benn, Hölderlin, his friend Lars Gustafsson (from Swedish!), and countless poets translated from French, Spanish, and probably Turkish as well (at least I know he spoke some Turkish and spent a lot of time in that country).

He was an important poet too, of the English/Texan variety, raised on Greek and Latin long before being transplanted to Austin. He wrote many incredible volumes of poems that all display his special mix of playfulness and erudition – as well as his undying love for formal verse (the odder the form the better). If you don’t know his poetry, I strongly recommend you check it out. To get you started, here’s a really excellent appreciation of his work by fellow poet John Yao, with lots of quotes. I also recommend you look for a copy of the Spring 2005 Chicago Review, which contains a number of tributes to Christopher curated by W. Martin, who studied with him in Austin. Christopher was a wonderful essayist too, and his essay on translating Robert Walser, “Translation as a Species of Mime” (published in 1989 in Rosanna Warren’s anthology The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field), is one of my favorites. And there was another genre he specialized in too: He loved writing and receiving nice long letters, such that all his friends who entered into correspondence with him were certain to receive some of the most memorable ones you’ve ever seen.

I’ll close by quoting a couple of paragraphs from a letter he sent me on March 26, 1994, in which he refers to the above-mentioned essay on Walser translation. He also mentions meeting Werner Morlang, the great Walser scholar and co-microscript-decipherer – who passed away, far too young, just 11 days before Christopher, on Nov. 18. I’d been meaning to call Christopher all last week – I’d taken to calling him every couple of months instead of writing, out of concern that the letter-writing taxed him (heart disease was making him weak, though he remained as mentally sharp as ever at age 89). My reluctance to share the news of Werner’s death made me put off this call until it was too late to talk to Christopher again. I hope he didn’t hear that Werner (who was only 66) had died before him – the news would have made him sad. But here’s part of a letter from back when everyone was alive and well:

That tall German journalist Klaus-Michael Hinze […] is planning a radio talk on my “theory” of translating Walser, which isn’t a theory at all, just a few ideas. He got me to read/record a passage from that essay, & I forgot to introduce it properly: you see, what I was thinking about is that the activity of translating is seldom discussed, only the “product” thereof, & I was asking myself what kind of activity it might be, when one goes dancing through German with Walser. The answer: mime. But dammit I forgot to remind Hinz that the activity as such is under discussion. I wonder if it makes much difference. Discussing translations bores me. But a veritably stylish analsis of the nature of the activity might be a new departure? – I recorded the bit about the temple-dancers miming the manifestations of their god, in India, and about the hyperbole that is peculiar to mime.

Had some pleasant talk with Werner Morlang, too. What an interesting person he is. A great bibliophile. He was combing practically all the bookstores in N.Y.C. All I found, to my surprise, was one of the last books of poems by the strange Lesbian poet Renée Vivien, who was writing around 1900. She died of anorexia & alcohol in about 1909, & was for a time the lover of Natalie Barney. Her books are terribly scarce, hardly to be found in Paris. I got my book for $10.00. (Renée is almost too plaintive to read, but she was relatively outspoken; Colette knew her, among that weird throng of Sapphos she consorted with, near the Bois de Boulogne, around 1900, after quitting her horrid “Willy”!) It’s odd that Rilke doesn’t mention her, but her kind of loving was right up his street. I wonder if he did know of her, but shunned her & her work, on account of her narcissistic “inversion”? Poor Renée. She even had a partly imaginary affair with a forlorn wife in Istanbul – mythified the whole thing, only to be eventually disillusioned by the wife’s insatiable appetite for candies! Here’s a clerihew I just thought up: Renée Vivien / Was sexually amphibian / But in Istanbul took flight / From a Sappho stuffed with Turkish delight! Apologies…!

Dear Christopher, thank you for your letter, it made me smile. Much love and safe travels, Susan

 

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Translation on Tap in NYC, Dec. 1 – 15, 2015

So 2015 is on its way out, but there’s still a little time left to get your translation on and plenty to go to, including several events being presented as part of Read Russia’s Russian Literature Week 2015. Here’s what’s on tap before the holidays:

Tuesday, Dec. 1:

Seductions of Surveillance: The Writings of Wolfgang Hilbig, featuring the translator of two new books by Hilbig (the collection of stories The Sleep of the Righteous and his novel I), Isabel Fargo Cole. She will be joined by Joshua Cohen. More information here. Goethe Institut, 30 Irving Place, 6:30 p.m.

Also Tuesday, Dec. 1:

The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook: Translator Eve Jochnowitz talks about translating this legendary cookbook by Fania Lewando, who owned a restaurant back in Lithuania whose customers included Marc Chagall. Don’t come hungry. Martin E. Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., 6:30 p.m.

Wednesday, Dec. 2:

Nomad Crossings: Algerian Poetry Now: Translators Pierre Joris, Omar Berrada, and Anna Moschavakis join Algerian poet Samira Negrouche (visiting from Algiers) for a reading and conversation on Negrouche’s work and the contemporary poetic landscape in Algeria and the Maghreb. More information here. Columbia University Maison Française, East Gallery, Buell Hall, 6:00 p.m.

Monday, Dec. 7:

Read Russia: Translator Oliver Ready in conversation with author Vladimir Sharov. More information here. Soho House, 29-35 Ninth Ave., 6:00 p.m.

Tuesday, Dec. 8:

The Bridge Series returns, this time with a translator/author pairing: Translator Lisa Hayden joins author Eugene Vodolazkin to discuss her translation of his novel Taurus. More information here. Book Court, 163 Court St., Brooklyn, 7:00 p.m.

Also Tuesday, Dec. 8:

Read Russia: The Real Story of Doctor Zhivago: Translator Marian Schwartz speaks with author and Washington Post National Security editor Peter Finn. More information here. Poets House, 10 River Terrace, 6:00 p.m.

Also Tuesday, Dec. 8:

Read Russia: Translator Lisa Hayden in conversation with author Eugene Vodolazkin. More information here. BookCourt, 163 Court St., Brooklyn, 7:00 p.m.

Thursday, Dec. 10:

Read Russia: Translator Lisa Hayden moderates a panel featuring authors Vladimir Sharov and Evgeny Vodolazkin and TV host/producer Dmitry Petrov. More information here. Dweck Center, Brooklyn Public Library/Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, 7:00 p.m.

Also Thursday, Dec. 10:

Read Russia: Solzhenitsyn: The Untranslated Oeuvre, featuring translators Marian Schwartz and Peter Constantine in conversation with other speakers TBA. More information here. Book Culture, 536 W. 112th St., 6:00 p.m.

Friday, Dec. 11:

Read Russia: The Russian Nobel Laureates: On the works of Ivan Bunin, Mikhail Sholokhov, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, and Svetlana Alexievitch, featuring translators Antonina W. Bouis and Peter Constantine joined by Solomon Volkov and Stephanie Sandler. More information here. The Grolier Club, 47 W. 60th St., 6:00 p.m.

Monday, Dec. 14:

Words without Borders launch event for its new Madagascar issue with translator (and issue editor) Allison Charette in conversation with Malagasy author Naivo, moderated by translator and WWB Editor Eric M. B. Becker. More information here. Free event, rsvp requested. Albertine Books, 972 Fifth Ave., 7:00 p.m.

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