Susan Bernofsky's Blog, page 41

2015 National Translation Award Longlists Announced

ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association, has just announced the longlists for the 2015 National Translation Award, which for the first time this year has been split into prose and poetry categories. I’m very delighted to see that my translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days made the cut. Lots of other great books translated by colleagues I revere on these lists as well. The shortlist will be published in September, and the winners announced in October at the annual ALTA Conference in Tuscon, AZ. Enjoy the lists! They come just in time to pack your beach bag with some pleasurable summer reading.

The 2015 NTA Longlist in Poetry

The Absolute Is a Round Die by Jose Acquelin (Canada)

Translated from the French by Hugh Hazelton (Guernica Editions)

Amnesia of the Movement of Clouds & Of Red and Black Verse by Maria Attanasio (Italy)

Translated from the Italian by Carla Billitteri (Litmus Press)

Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan (Romania)

Translated from the German by Pierre Joris (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

Nothing More to Lose by Najwan Darwish (Palestine)

Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (New York Review Books)

Lazy Suzie by Suzanne Doppelt (France)

Translated from the French by Cole Swensen (Litmus Press)

Guarding the Air: Selected Poems of Gunnar Harding by Gunnar Harding (Sweden)

Translated from the Swedish by Roger Greenwald (Black Widow Press)

Poems of Osip Mandelstam by Osip Mandelstam (Russia)

Translated from the Russian by Peter France (New Directions)

Wallless Space by Ernst Meister (Germany)

Translated from the German by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick (Wave Books)

Elsewhere on Earth by Emmanuel Merle (France)

Translated from the French by Peter Brown (Guernica Editions)

The Offense of Love: Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, and Tristia 2 by Ovid (Rome)

Translated from the Latin by Julia Dyson Hejduk (University of Wisconsin Press)

In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner by Tuvia Ruebner (Slovakia)

Translated from the Hebrew by Rachel Tzvia Back (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Sheds/Hangars by José-Flore Tappy (Switzerland)

Translated from the French by John Taylor (The Bitter Oleander Press)

The 2015 NTA Longlist in Prose

Conversations by Cesar Aira (Argentina)

Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions)

New Waw, Saharan Oasis by Ibrahim al-Koni (Libya)

Translated from the Arabic by William M. Hutchins (Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin)

Street of Thieves by Mathias Enard (France)

Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (Open Letter Books)

End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany)

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)

The Woman Who Borrowed Memories by Tove Jansson (Finland)

Translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal & Silvester Mazzarella (New York Review Books)

The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette (France)

Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York Review Books)

Why I Killed My Best Friend by Amanda Michalopoulou (Greece)

Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Open Letter Books)

This Is the Garden by Giulio Mozzi (Italy)

Translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris (Open Letter Books)

La Grande by Juan Jose Saer (Argentia)

Translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph (Open Letter Books)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Russia)

Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz (Yale University Press)

The Last Lover by Can Xue (China)

Translated from the Chinese by Annelise F. Wasmoen (Yale University Press)

Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen (China)

Translated from the Chinese by Eric Abrahamsen (Two Lines Press)

For more information about the longlisted books and the NTA itself, see the official poetry and prose longlists on the ALTA website.

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Translation on Tap in NYC, July 16 – 31, 2015

Revolution! A new reading series launches: Us & Them, featuring writers who are also translators and translators who are also writers, reading both translations and work written originally in English.

Friday July 17:

Us & Them: Translators Read Original Work & New Translations – Inaugural Reading – featuring: Poetry by Todd Portnowitz and his translations of Pierluigi Cappello (Italy); poetry by Laura Marris and her translations of Paol Keineg (Brittany); fiction by Sam Bett and his translations of Yukio Mishima (Japan); poetry by Eloisa Amezcua and her translations of Mario Meléndez (Chile); poetry by Christian Gullette and his translations of Jonas Modig (Sweden); and fiction by Allison Grimaldi-Donahue and her translations of Davide Orecchio (Italian). More information here. Molasses Books, 770 Hart St. (take the L to DeKalb), Brooklyn, 8:00 p.m.

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Translation on Tap in NYC July 1 – 15, 2015

I’m on the road so may have missed some upcoming events – here’s what I’ve heard about so far. If you have others, please tweet them at me @translationista, and I’ll add them to these listings if I’m able (no promises though, sorry).

Wednesday, July 1:

A Celebration of Anne Garreta’s Sphinx, with translator Emma Ramadan, joined by Ian Dreiblatt, & Sarah Gerard. This is a novel written entirely without gender pronouns, which must have been an interesting challenge for the translator as well as for the writer. More information here. Community Bookstore, 143 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn, 7:00 p.m.

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Translation on Tap in NYC, June 16 – 30, 2015

All of a sudden it’s the dog days of summer. We need more translation events to get us through, so if you hear of any I haven’t listed here, it means I don’t know about them yet, so please send them my way! Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve got on tap:

Thursday, June 18:

Launch event for The Mountain and the Wall by Alisa Ganieva, translated by Carol Apollonio and with an introduction by translator Ronald Meyer. Ganieva, who just made The Guardian’s list of influential young Russians, will be joined by Meyer to read from and talk about the book, more information here. Book Culture, 536 W. 112th St., 7:00 p.m.

Also Thursday, June 18:

Launch event for Innocence or Murder on Steep Street, a crime novel by noted Holocaust memoirist Heda Margolius Kovály, translated by PEN Translation Committee co-chair Alex Zucker, who will participate in the event. More information here. Czech Center, 321 East 73rd St., 7:00 p.m.

Thursday, June 25:

Launch event for The Game for Real by Richard Weiner, translated by Benjamin Paloff, who will be joined by Alex Zucker. More info here. Community Bookstore, 143 Seventh Ave., Brooklyn, 7:00 p.m.

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Apply Now for a 2015 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship

The American Literary Translators Association has just announced the creation of three translation mentorships for the 2015-2016 academic year, in Catalan, French, and Polish. This is the pilot year of a project that will gradually be expanded to include a range of languages and mentors. The ALTA mentorship program is modeled on a similar one that’s been run very successfully for several years now by the British Centre for Literary Translation in the U.K. (for which U.S. based translators are also allowed to apply, by the way), as well as the mentorship component of the Yiddish Book Center’s Translation Fellowships. The principle is the same: mentors are recruited to work one-on-one for a period of one year with emerging translators; they are paid an honorarium for doing so; and both mentors and mentees receive funding to attend the ALTA conference during the year in question. In short: for a translator new or newish to the field, a mentorship is an invaluable way both to get feedback on your work and to make the sorts of connections likely to help you get your career started. So check out the guidelines and get working on your application soon – the deadline is July 1, 2015.

And while you’re at it, why not also join ELTNA, the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network in America, an ALTA affiliate for early-in-their-career translators. The organizers of ELTNA were the driving force behind getting the ALTA mentorships established, and ELTNA continues to expand its offerings for emerging translators.

Hope to see you this October for the 2015 ALTA Conference in Tuscon!

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2015 Read Russia Prize Announced

The biennial Read Russia prize has been around since 2011 and still seems to be morphing a little every year. This year the prize has gone to a single translator, Oliver Ready, for his translation of Vladimir Sharov’s Before and During (Dedalus Books). This year, a pair of “special jury awards” also recognized the accomplishment of two other translators, both of whom turn out to have published new translations of Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina last year. Rosamund Bartlett’s translation was published by Oxford UP, and Marian Schwartz’s by Yale UP.

The Read Russia prize now comes with a $10,000 purse to be divided between translator and publisher at the discretion of the jury. For more information on the recipients of the awards, see the Read Russia website. Congratulations to all!

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2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Winners

I’m delighted to see what a wonderful-sounding list of projects the jury for the 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants have come up with. Each translator selected will receive a grant of $3100 to help with the completion of the project. The Fund was made possible by a generous donation from translator Michael Henry Heim and his wife, Priscilla Heim. For more information about the translators and their books, see the PEN American Center website.

2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Recipients

Allison M. Charette for her translation of Beyond the Rice Fields, by Naivo. Set in the early 1800s, this historical novel uses dual narrators—a slave boy and his first owner—to depict the era when Madagascar was ruled by a monarchy and first being settled by Europeans. In a prose teeming with color and energy, Charette brings to life the first novel from Madagascar ever to be translated into English. (Available for publication)

Jennifer Croft for The Books of Jacob, the twelfth novel by Olga Tokarczuk, one of Poland’s most highly acclaimed contemporary novelists. Jennifer Croft’s translation brings to life the historical figure of Jacob Frank, Messianic leader of a mysterious 18th-century Jewish splinter group that believed in “purification through transgression.” (Available for publication)

Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novická for their translation of The Absolute Gravedigger, the culmination of Vítězslav Nezval’s work as the leading poet of Czech surrealism. Published in 1937, this book of poems is not only a dark and prescient avant-garde document of Europe in crisis, but highlights Prague as the twin capital of surrealism with Paris. Delbos and Novická do us all a service with their devoted translation. (Forthcoming from Twisted Spoon Press)

Amanda DeMarco for her translation of New Inventions and the Latest Innovations by Gaston de Pawlowski. First published in French in 1916, Pawlowski’s book is a catalog of absurd imaginary gadgets and “improvements,” an early satire on consumer society and the cult of the inventor. DeMarco’s translation perfectly captures the humor of a work that has only grown more relevant with time. (Forthcoming from Wakefield Press)

Adriana X. Jacobs for her translation of The Truffle Eye, the 2013 debut collection of poems by Vaan Nguyen. Born in Israel to Vietnamese refugees, Nguyen, writing in Hebrew, explores points of contact and friction between her Vietnamese heritage and her native-born Israeli identity. As Jacobs notes, the truffle resists domestication, and she skillfully incorporates this resistance into her inspired translation. (Available for publication)

Roy Kesey for The Cousins, by Aurora Venturini. An Argentinean novelist praised by Enrique Vila-Matas and Alan Pauls, Venturini was not discovered until she was eighty-five. This novel tells the story of a dysfunctional lower-middle-class family in La Plata during the nineteen-forties, and is fabulously translated by Roy Kesey. (Available for publication)

Lee Klein for Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, by Horacio Castellanos Moya. In what Roberto Bolaño called his best work, Castellanos invokes Bernhard’s most characteristic mode: the electrifying tirade. Lee Klein’s sinuous English proves that this rant is for anyone who feels let down by their native culture. (Available for publication)

Dong Li for his translation of The Gleaner Song, by Chinese poet Song Lin. In pieces selected by the poet and translator from thirty years of published work, the poet has engaged the world, East and West, creating a landscape of his extensive travels. Varying in form from short lyrics to long, serial poems, Song has, in the words of his accomplished translator, produced a “personal anthropology of our migratory world.” (Available for publication)

Meg Matich for her exquisite translations of Cold Moons, a collection of deceptively simple ecopoetry by Icelandic poet Magnús Sigurðsson who was born in 1984. She has deftly rendered the prosody of the young poet’s short, highly cadenced, enjambed verse in lines of images drawn from nature, often in the context of incursions by the modern world into this sparsely populated land of poets and sagas. (Available for publication)

Jacob Moe for his translation of Part Time Dragons by Maria Mitsora. Since the 1970s, Mitsora has been publishing short stories which refract modern Greek life through the lens of its mythological past. Part Time Dragons collects sixteen short stories from across Mitsora’s forty-year career, rendered in a lucid translation that preserves their essential strangeness. (Forthcoming from Yale University Press)

Rajiv Mohabir for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s Holi Songs of Demerara. Published in 1916, Sharma’s collection of folksongs is the only known literary work to be written by an indentured Indo-Caribbean writer. One of hundreds of Indians indentured to work the sugarcane fields in Guyana, Sharma’s mesmerizing songs, in Mohabir’s deft and elegant translation, tell of life on the plantations, of labor, love, loss, and longing. (Available for publication)

Takami Nieda for his translation of GO, by Kazuki Kaneshiro. GO is a testament to the universality of teenage experience and a window into the life of a zainichi Korean student. Takami Nieda’s fluid translation captures Kaneshiro’s humor and social criticism, evoking a distinct compelling voice in the tradition of Salinger and Sherman Alexie. (Available for publication)

Zoë Perry for Opisanie Świata, the award-winning debut novel by Brazilian writer Veronica Stigger. With her exquisite translation, Perry introduces to the English-speaking world a stunning and tantalizing novel by a young writer on the cutting-edge of Brazilian literature. (Available for publication)

Schutt for The Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti. In his sparkling, playful and dynamic versions, Schutt introduces the English reader to the full sweep of Sanguineti’s protean oeuvre, from the neo-avantgardist of the early ’60s to the more introspective romantic poet of the later years. This is the first comprehensive English translation of one of post-war Italy’s most important poets. (Available for publication)

Sophie Seita for her translation of Subsisters: Selected Poems, by Uljana Wolf. Wolf’s globalized, border-crossing poetry seems uniquely disposed to translation while also presenting many challenges. Sophie Seita’s rendition remixes Wolf’s German-English mélange to create a translation that is at once new and yet also brilliantly reflects the original. (Forthcoming from Belladonna*)

Simon Wickhamsmith for The End of the Dark Era, by Mongolian poet Tseveendorjin Oidov. This book of about a hundred poems is one of the few avant-garde collections to come out of that region. Simon Wickhamsmith’s translations bring the poems across eloquently and beautifully. (Available for publication)

Congratulations too all the recipients! May all their projects get completed on schedule and find publishers.

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2015 Best Translated Book Award Winners

I’ve been tooling around England all week, so missed the chance to celebrate with and blog promptly about the winners of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award. So with no further ado, here are the winning books:

In Fiction: The Last Lover by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen.

In Poetry: Diorama by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong.

Each winning writer and translator will receive a cash award of $5000.

Given recent discussions about the relative paucity of female authors having their work selected for major translation prizes, I’m particularly delighted to see an all-women slate of winners this year. Big congratulations to Anna and Annelise!

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Translation on Tap in NYC, June 1 – 15, 2015

I’m on my way to London to participate with Jenny Erpenbeck in an event on Tuesday at the London Review Bookshop for finalists for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; the prize itself will be announced Wednesday evening U.K. time (wish me luck!) And when I get home I’ll be turning right around to travel to Vermont to teach in the first ever Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. So I figured I’d better get this posted before it got lost in the whirlwind. Hope I didn’t leave anything out. These are all the early-June events I’ve heard about to date. (Oh, and don’t forget about the late-May lineup – there’s tons going on as we speak.)

Tuesday, June 9:

Prize Ceremony, Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation. Here’s the list of finalists. required, more information . The Century Association of New York, 7 W. 43rd St., 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Sunday, June 14:

Release party for Sign Tongue by Enrique Winter, translated by David McLoghlin, winner of the 2014 Chapbook-in-Translation Contest from Menagerie. Winter and McLoghlin will be joined by Laura Sims. More info here. KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St., 7:00 p.m.

 

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2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Shortlist

To my delight, my translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days has been named a finalist for the 2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. This annual prize honors the art of translation and is awarded during a day of workshops and talks called Oxford Translation Day – to be held June 13 this year (program here). Last year’s winner was Susan Wicks for her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s Talking Vrouz.

So here’s the full list of finalists for the 2015 award:

Susan Bernofsky for Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (Portobello Books)

Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia for André Neuman’s Talking to Ourselves (Pushkin Press)

Euan Cameron for Jean-Michel Guenassia’s The Incorrigible Optimists Club (Atlantic Books)

Will Firth for Aleksandar Gatalica’s The Great War (Istros Books)

Anne Stokes for Sarah Kirsch’s Ice Roses (Carcanet Press)

Geoffrey Strachan for Jérôme Ferrari’s The Sermon on the Fall of Rome (MacLehose Press)

Stefan Tobler for Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (Penguin Books)

Paul Vincent for Erwin Mortier’s While the Gods were Sleeping (Pushkin Press)

For more information on the books and the prize, see the website of St Anne’s College, Oxford.

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