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

Spectacular "square stories" from Louis Jensen

Children's book illustrator Bob Kolar's take on one of Jensen's stories (more at Kolar's site)

A can’t-miss feature in the Spring 2012 issue of Iowa Review is "Five Square Stories" by Danish author Louis Jensen, translated by Lise Kildegaard. Something like poems and something like very short short stories, these five fairy tale-esque works, typeset in neat square blocks, are merely a taste of the hundreds of square stories (firkantede historier) that Jensen has written. Each of the stories, collected in seven volumes at last count, begins with a play on "once upon a time" to mark its number (e.g., "A one hundred and thirty-second time" or "A three hundred and fourteenth time"), with Jensen’s aim being to write 1,001 in total. The tone of Jensen’s square stories ranges from macabre to whimsical, but every one of them is simple, surreal and entertaining. An example, translated by Kildegaard:

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In general, we don’t think very much about Danish literature in translation; it would be difficult for most of us to name a Danish author who has been widely translated into English, other than Hans Christian Andersen. But as a quick glance at a literary journal like Passage (Issue 52 of which included an article on Jensen) can attest, there is a lot of great Danish literature out there. Hopefully, Kildegaard’s excellent translations will draw English publishers’ attention to Jensen’s square stories, and perhaps other Danish works (Jensen’s and others’) as well.

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Louis Jensen, originally an architect, has been writing children’s, young adult, and adult literature since the 1980s. His books of square stories currently range from Hundrede historier (One Hundred Stories) to Hallo! flere hundrede historier (Hello! Hundreds of Stories). Lise Kildegaard, an English professor at Luther College, has translated many of Jensen's square stories and will hopefully be translating many more.

-KA

The Art of Translation panel at Emerson

The Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College invites the public to attend an event titled "The Art of Translation" on Wednesday, March 21, at 6:00 p.m., featuring David Ferry, Peter Filkins, Sheila Fisher and Michael Palma, co-hosted by Maria Koundoura and Yu-jin Chang.

This event will be held in Bright Family Screening Room at the Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street, Boston (near the Boylston stop on the Green Line, or the Downtown Crossing stop on the Orange Line).

About the speakers...

DAVID FERRY is a poet and translator. His new selected poems, On This Side of the River, will be published in autumn of 2012. His books of poems and translations include Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, and The Odes of Horace: A Translation. He is at work on a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.

PETER FILKINS is the author of four books of poems, and translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken, as well as H.G. Adler’s novels The Journey and Panorama. He is a recipient of a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, and an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications.

SHEILA FISHER is the author of Chaucer’s Poetic Alchemy: A Study of Value and Its Transformation in The Canterbury Tales, co-editor of Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, and has written essays on the Gawain-poet and gender roles in medieval romance. Her latest publication is The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation.

MICHAEL PALMA has published two poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, A Fortune in Gold and Begin in Gladness. His twelve translations of Italian poets include prize-winning volumes of Guido Gozzano and Diego Valeri with Princeton University Press.  His fully rhymed translation of Dante’s Inferno was published by Norton in 2002 and reissued as a Norton Critical Edition in 2007.

Read it in the original

No translation should ever be regarded as an adequate substitute for the original. Any literary translation is successful only if it directs attention to the original and makes access to it seem desirable. The editor still remembers a bar mitzvah present he received almost five decades ago in the city where Karl Kraus had died but a few months previously: a selection from the Hebrew poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik in German translation. let an adaptation of the final message of that book's translator conclude these remarks: "Learn German, gentle reader, and read Karl Kraus in the original!"

-- Editor Harry Zohn, in his introduction (p.27) to In These Great Times, a Karl Kraus reader published by Carcanet Press in 1984. Emphasis mine; the image above is taken from the same books.

While one is acquiring sufficient Hebrew to read Bialik and German to read Kraus in their original languages, the translated writings available in editions by Penguin and University of Chicago Press, respectively, are a good place to start for a taste. (Cross-posted from The Wonder Reflex)