Two Words: The Blog of the Center for the Art of Translation

Our First Video!!

It's a big day for the Center—our first YouTube video. This one happens to come from the event we did earlier this month with translators Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally, of Nordic crime fiction fame (Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Peter Høeg, Camilla Läckberg, Mari Jungstedt, etc., etc.) In this video, Murray and Nunnally talk about a translator's duty to the book, which Nunnally expresses quite eloquently. We're in the process of getting more videos ready, but in the meantime, you can listen to the audio of the entire event right here.

Monday Nov 28: Join Us For Peter Stamm

The perfect way to get over those turkey hangovers is to come out and join us for Switzerland's premiere novelist, Peter Stamm, with an open bar courtesy of the Swiss consulate! It's happening the Monday after Thanksgiving, on Nov 28. It's our last event of 2011, and it's free!

It all starts at 6:00 pm at Chronicle Books, 680 Second St, San Francisco (map), where Peter Stamm will be in conversation with the Center's own CJ Evans. Stamm's books will be available for sale, and he will sign books after the event.

If you're coming, let us know on Facebook and spread the word to your friends!

Praised by The New York Times as "a writer to read," Stamm has received several prestigious awards and has been translated into English by Michael Hofmann, poet and translator of Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Joseph Roth, and Nobel laureate Herta Mueller.

One more time, here are the details:

• Chronicle Books
• 680 Second Street, San Francisco, CA
• 6:00 PM
• FREE
• Reception to follow with open bar funded by Swiss Consulate of San Francisco

And here's more praise for Stamm:

"Lean as it is, his prose is wonderfully 'literary' in its fine integration of voice and story. The constant disorientation of his characters, their sense that their lives are interchangeable with any number of other lives, seem peculiarly suited to this era of globalization." — The New York Review of Books

"Stamm is a master of quietly deliberative stories." — Bookforum

TWO VOICES: Translators Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally on Stieg Larsson and Nordic Crime Fiction

On November 11, 2011, the Center for the Art of Translation's Two Voices events series hosted the pre-eminent translators of Nordic crime fiction, Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally. Since 1984 they have produced award-winning translations, including books by Henning Mankell, Peter Høeg, Camilla Läckberg, and Mari Jungstedt. Murray is best-known as the translator of the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy, and Nunnally is well-known for translating another runaway bestseller (from the Danish), Smilla's Sense of Snow. The couple were presented in conversation with Sedge Thomson, host of West Coast Live.

In this audio the duo begin by delving into the many complex issues surrounding the publication of the blockbuster Millennium Trilogy. Murray discussed the reason why he chose to take the pseudonym Reg Keeland while translating the Trilogy, which had to do with the excessive (and in his opinion, poor) intervention made by the book's editor. (He also explained the the pseudonym's surname comes from a combination of Nunnally's and Murray's hometowns, respectively Milwaukee and Oakland.) Nunnally also pointed out that taking a pseudonym was a drastic choice, as they prefer to support the work of translators by having their names prominently displayed on the books they translate. These points eventually gave way to talk about the business side of translation, where Nunnally discussed a translator's rights and why one should never sign a "work-for-hire" contract, as well as the difficulty of making a living as a translator in the United States.

Nunnally also addressed questions of re-translation in her work on Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset's landmark Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy. She explained (and used textual evidence to exemplify) why she believed the old-fashioned, stodgy tone of the previous translation was in need of rejuvenation.

The couple concluded the evening with some Q&A, which included questions about Google Translate, the differences between translating prose and poetry, their favorite translators, Nunnally's thoughts on the new translations of Dostoyevsky made by superstar translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and reasons why Nordic crime has now caught on so much in the United States.

Wave Books Publishes Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi

Noted poetry press Wave Books recently published Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi, translated by Sarah Valentine.

Some of Valentine's translations of Aygi appeared in advance of this book in 2010 in the Center's 17th volume of TWO LINES, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. In addition, translator Peter France (who also translated some of Aygi's poetry for TWO LINES) contributed a short essay on Aygi to the Center's blog.

We also hosted Wave Books editor and translator Joshua Beckman as our first Lit&Lunch event guest of our 2011-12 season, where he talked about the Micrograms of Jorge Carrera Andrade (also published by Wave Books). The full audio of Beckman's event can be listened to here.

NYC Counterfeits Release Party Tomorrow!

Tomorrow we're doing an awesome reading at one of NYC's best bookstores for the new TWO LINES, which everyone should know by now is titled Counterfeits. (Get your copy here, or Amazon it.) It's a real embarrassment of riches, with the likes of Luc Sante (pictured to the left), Albert Cossery-translator Alyson Waters, 2010 National Translation Award winner Alex Zucker, and a number more (see below for the full tally). We're also co-producing it with The Bridge, which all translation-lovers in NYC should know about.

It starts at 7:30 at McNally-Jackson, which is at 52 Prince St (map here), and there will be a wine reception afterward.

And everyone should also know that you can sample Counterfeits, plus read a bunch of stuff from Counterfeits authors and translators that's not in the book, online right now, starting from this page.

And here are the readers for tomorrow night:

Adam Giannelli is a poet, translator, and professor of English. He edited the essay collection High Lonesome: On the Poetry of Charles Wright (Oberlin, 2006). His translations of Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik's work have appeared in the magazines Field, Hanging Loose, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mantis, and elsewhere.

Patrick Phillips began translating Henrik Nordbrandt’s poems while on a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Copenhagen; in 2012, Open Letter Press will publish Cathedral: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt in his translation. His work has received both the 2001 Sjöberg Prize and the 2008 Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and has appeared in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, Agni, and New England Review. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.

Magdaléna Platzová is the author of two novels, Návrat přítelkyně (Return of a Friend) and Aaronův skok (Aaron's Leap) and two collections of short stories, Sůl, ovce a kamení (Salt, Sheep and Stones) and Recyklovaný muµ (The Recycled Man), as well as poetry, plays, and a children's book. She was previously the editor of the prestigious Czech journal Literární noviny; she now writes on culture and literature for the Prague weekly Respekt.

Luc Sante’s books include Low Life, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings. He edited and translated Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines (New York Review Books, 2007), and has published translations of shorter works by Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Desnos, Ernest Coeurderoy, and Jean-Paul Clébert. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College. He is currently translating Lower Your Hearts! by Georges Darien and My Red Notebooks by Maxime Vuillaume.

Alyson Waters has translated books by Albert Cossery, Yasmina Khadra, Louis Aragon, Vassilis Alexakis, Daniel Arasse, René Belletto, Emmanuel Bove, and Éric Chevillard, among others. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN Translation Fund, and the Centre National du Livre. She teaches literary translation at Yale University.

Alex Zucker’s translation of Jáchym Topol’s first novel, City Sister Silver (Catbird Press, 2000), was selected for the guide 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. His translation of Petra Hůlová’s first novel, All This Belongs to Me (Northwestern UP, 2009), received the 2010 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. His last book-length translation was Patrik Ouředník’s The Opportune Moment, 1855 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). He recently received an NEA fellowship to support the translation of Vladislav Vančura's classic novel Marketa Lazarova.

Rimas Uzgiris on "Tu felix, Austria" by Tomas Venclova

As part of our November 2011 TWO LINES Online offerings, we present translator Rimas Uzgiris' introduction to "Tu felix, Austria," which he translated for the November edition.

Tomas Venclova was born in Klaipeda, Lithuania, in 1937 and was educated at Vilnius University. He is a scholar, poet, and translator of literature. Because of his outspoken membership in the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, which monitored Soviet violations of human rights, Venclova was threatened with a number of sanctions, and was allowed to emigrate in 1977. Since 1980 he has been a member of the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, from which he also received a Ph.D. Collections of his poems have been published in English as Dialogue in Winter (1999), and The Junction: Selected Poems (2009). He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000 and the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz.

The poem, "Tu felix, Austria", exemplifies several themes common to Venclova's oeuvre, especially the frank engagement with death, and with the last century's history of violence and occupation, especially in Eastern Europe. Early in Venclova's career, one can find poems like "Nel Mezzo del Cammin Di Nostra Vita" (dedicated to a fellow human rights activist murdered in mysterious circumstances) in which we find a lyric self trying to survive in a environment sated with death, fear, and a state of disrepair/despair reminiscent of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The poem "In a half-mile, the highways cross, . . .", written around the time of Venclova's flight from the USSR, captures the heavy psychological burden of exile. More recently, in View from the alley (1998), "Commando" considers political violence within the larger context of the natural world. A soldier's unmarked resting site is swallowed up by nature—and by its renewing beauty.

"Tu felix, Austria" also places the individual in a wider context—this time within the recent century of political violence. The title comes from the motto of the Austro-Hungarian empire: Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube! ("Wars may be led by others—you, happy Austria, marry!"). Yet the poem immediately points to how history has undermined this prescription (usually interpreted as a reference to the success of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in using marriage to enhance its power). In the first stanza we are reminded that Austria is the birthplace of psychotherapy (which revealed the war within the family), as well as of Hitler's industrial-scale belligerence and hatred. The figure of Sisyphus, and the shift in location of contemporary violence, reveal that the horrors of the 20th century are not exceptions. Human history is grim, with little to hope for, and the psychological burden of this understanding is exacerbated by the apparent finality of death. Nevertheless, little hope is not the same as none. We may extract some meaning—or moral—from our story before we are done.

TWO LINES Online: November 2011

We've just published the November 2011 installment of TWO LINES Online. This month's offerings are "The Flies: Reply to The Dead Man" by Horacio Quiroga (praised by Guillermo Cabrera Infante as Borges' forerunner) translated from the Spanish by Kelly Washbourne; "Crocodiles Mass" by renowned poet Tomaž Šalamun, translated from the Slovenian by Tomaž Šalamun and Michael Thomas Taren; and "Tu, felix Austria" by Tomas Venclova, translated from the Lithuanian by Rimas Uzgiris.