Clive James on his new Dante

My translation of the Divine Comedy is here today because my wife, when we were together in Florence in the mid-1960s, a few years before we were married, taught me that the great secret of Dante’s masterpiece lay in the handling of the verse, which always moved forward even in the most intensely compressed of episodes. She proved this by answering my appeal to have the famous Paolo and Francesca episode in Inferno 5 explained to me from the original text. From various translators including Byron we can see what that passage says. But how did Dante say it? My wife said that the terza rima was only the outward sign of how the thing carried itself along, and that if you dug down into Dante’s expressiveness at the level of phonetic construction you would find an infinitely variable rhythmic pulse adaptable to anything he wanted to convey.

-- James, writing for Slate

WLT Notable Translations 2012

The editors of World Literature Today have released their first-ever 75 Notable Translations list. So many of these would make an excellent gift in this season of book-giving... as would a subscription to WLT itself!

The following books are but a third of the full list; to see the rest, visit the WLT website.

1. Zeina Abirached, A Game for Swallows, trans. Edward Gauvin
2. Roberto Ampuero, The Neruda Case, trans. Carolina De Robertis
3. Fabio Bartolomei, Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles, trans. Antony Shugaar
4. Marcel Beyer, Kaltenburg, trans. Alan Bance
5. Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, trans. ko ko thett, James Byrne et al.
6. Chico Buarque, Spilt Milk, trans. Alison Entrekin
7. Jacques Chessex, The Tyrant, trans. Martin Sokolinsky
8. Mouloud Feraoun, Land and Blood, trans. Patricia Geesey
9. Santiago Gamboa, Necropolis, trans. Howard Curtis
10. Viola Di Grado, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, trans. Michael Reynolds
11. Pia Juul, The Murder of Halland, trans. Martin Aitken
12. Liu Xiaobo, June Fourth Elegies, trans. Jeffrey Yang
13. Nicolas Mahler, Angelman, trans. Kim Thompson
14. Diego Marani, The Last of the Vostyachs, trans. Judith Landry
15. Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief, trans. Satoko Izumo & Stephen Coates
16. Harri Nykänen, Nights of Awe, trans. Kristian London
17. Kristín Ómarsdóttir, Children in Reindeer Woods, trans. Lytton Smith
18. Octavio Paz, The Poems of Octavio Paz, trans. Eliot Weinberger et al.
19. Adania Shibli, We Are All Equally Far from Love, trans. Paul Starkey
20. Nichita Stănescu, Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, trans. Sean Cotter
21. Benjamin Stein, The Canvas, trans. Brian Zumhagen
22. Abdellah Taïa, An Arab Melancholia, trans. Frank Stock
23. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling, trans. Anne McLean
24. Richard Weihe, Sea of Ink, trans. Jamie Bulloch
25. Samar Yazbek, A Woman in the Crossfire, trans. Max Weiss

New South Africa & Argentinian theater in translation

Proyecto 34ºS’s Theatre in Translation/Teatro en Traducción project, an artistic exchange between African and Latin American theatre, has recently released its first book: Theatre in Translation Vol 1, collecting five plays from South Africa and five from Argentina. The plays selected for the anthology – along with others not in the collection – can be downloaded for free from Proyecto 34ºS’s website in both English and Spanish. The book, according to the Argentina Independent, is available upon request.

South African literature blog Books LIVE, reporting on the book’s release, describes the process involved in translating the plays as challenging but rewarding:

At one point we thought about how to translate the name of a town that had a lot of meaning in Afrikaans, but that might lose its subtlety and humour when translated to Spanish for example,” [Proyecto 34ºS founder and director Nikki] Froneman told Books LIVE. “We had many discussions like that, where we were very careful to try not to lose the nuances of each language. With some plays we were translating from the Afrikaans, to English. And then from English to Spanish. It was quite a task, but we made it through and are so happy with the results.

We imagine readers of the plays are likely to be happy with the results, as well. - KA

Groundbreaking Spanish translations from Salt

Salt Publishing’s recent blog post draws our attention to its many recently published, never-before-translated poetry collections from Latin America, titles which encompass an eclectic crew of late twentieth-century poets:

• Blue Coyote with Guitar, Juan Bañuelos (Mexican); trans. Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. “ ... creates an alternative poetics that rejects individualism, defies nationalism, and opts for the alterity of the most marginalized social subjects in modern Mexico, the Indigenous population, whose cultures increasingly determine this poetry’s vision of the world.”
• Journal with No Subject, Juan Calzadilla (Venezuelan); trans. Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. “This poetry denounces the dehumanization of modernity, appropriates surrealistic language, questions identity and poetry itself, and dissolves the coherent, autonomous subject. Uniting political and aesthetic radicalism, Calzadilla ultimately reestablishes faith in poetry.”
• Friday in Jerusalem and Other Poems, Marco Antonio Campos (Mexican); trans. not listed. “[I]n Campos’s poems ... morality is given priority over politics, feeling over reason, plain style over experimentation. In his case, a displacement from time history and biography toward space city and home is carried out, and poetry becomes chronicle.”
• Reasons for Writing Poetry, Eduardo Chirinos (Peruvian); trans. G.J. Racz. “Chirinos’s poetry is marked by a wry tone and simple lyric eloquence. Accessible, ironic, and always entertaining, the poems in Reasons for Writing Poetry treat time and again Chirinos’s favourite subjects and themes: the return to childhood, the vagaries of memory, the alternative reality of dream, a fascination with animals, the utility of seeing and hearing, the writer’s place in poetic tradition, and the never-ending search for originality through innovative expression.”
• The Poems of Sidney West, Juan Gelman (Argentinean); trans. Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. Presented in both Spanish and English. “This translation offers to English readers for the first time the splendid verse of imaginary American author Sidney West, created by Juan Gelman, one of the greatest living poets of the Hispanic world. These laments question Western assumptions surrounding death, erase boundaries between poetry and narrative, privilege the magical as a vital aspect of reality and seek the transformation of the lyric persona.”
• The Bridges, Fayad Jamís (Cuban); trans. Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. Presented in both Spanish and English. “Jamís constructs a subject excluded from modernity who, once aware of his subordinate condition, becomes an agent of decolonization. His main task is nothing less than a conquest of the power of representation.... It is the result of an appropriation, the poet’s adaptation of the European avant-garde’s achievements to his own expressive needs. ... a poetry that is decolonizing in its content and decolonized in its form, by one of the great Cuban artists of the twentieth century.” 
• The Trees, Eugenio Montejo (Venezuelan); trans. Peter Boyle. Presented in both Spanish and English. “Covering Montejo’s work from the 1960s to 2004[,] this major selection deals with universal themes of loss, death, family and love as well as reflecting on humanity’s relationship to nature in an ever more materialistic and urbanized world. Montejo’s poetry would be of special interest to all readers of poetry as well as to those interested in understanding a Latin American perspective on modernization and globalization.” 
• Garden of Silica, Ida Vitale (Uruguayan); trans. Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. “Her work seeks a balance between subjectivity and objectivity, privileges intellectual capacity above that of sentimentality, and requires an active reader. Placing the intellectual subject at the forefront, Vitale's poetry offers one of the most provocative representations of women's subjectivity in the Spanish language.” 

- KA