Early in this Two Voices event, translator Stephen Snyder made a bold pronouncement: Haruki Murakami would win a Nobel prize, and 1Q84, his blockbuster novel that many are comparing to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, would be the book to do it. Snyder wasn't wholly going out on a limb. As he told the audience, he correctly predicted Kenzaburo Oe's Nobel prize in 1994. But more to the point of his presentation, Snyder has seen the intricacies of the publishing industry close up, and he has a strong sense of how tastes are made with regard to inernational authors.

In this audio, lauded translator Bill Johnston talks about his translation of Stone Upon Stone by Wieslaw Mysliwski, which received both the 2012 PEN Translation Award and the 2012 Best Translated Book Award. As Johnston mentions in the question-and-answer session at the end of this audio recording, it was a dream project for him, a book he had long wanted to translate and finally got the opportunity to do, once he found a publisher "crazy enough" to take a risk on it.For his own part, Johnston called it one of the greatest novels to come out of Europe in the past century.

On April 3, 2012, translators Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel—best-known as the main English translators of Haruki Murakmai's novels and short stories—discussed their work with the Japanese master of the surreal's latest book, 1Q84. The event got off to a proper start with a discussion of one of the primary questions surrounding 1Q84: how do you pronounce its title? Jay Rubin canvassed the audience for answers, which ranged from "nineteen-eighty-four" to "eye-que-eight-four" (which Rubin ruled out, since the first character is a number one). He then went on to a discussion of the role that the title plays in the novel . . .