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Featured Audio and Articles
TWO VOICES: Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel on Translating MurakamiScott Esposito, April 5, 2012 12:41:00 PM
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 . . .
Two Voices with Translator Katherine Silver on Horacio Castellanos MoyaTwo Voices audio, October 7, 2008
Compared to Roberto Bolaño and the great Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, Horacio Castellanos Moya has attracted a devoted following in English with his first translated novel, Senselessness, about an embattled, displaced journalist charged with editing a 1,100-page report on the military’s massacre of Guatemala’s indigenous people. In this Two Voices event audio, hear translator Katherine Silver explain how this testimony, recounted in the broken Spanish of the Cakchiquel people, “infects” the narrators own colonial Spanish. She further explains how both languages proceed to subversively “infect” her own English translation
TWO VOICES: Stephen Snyder on Yoko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami, and the Business of International LiteratureScott Esposito, May 12, 2011 11:39:00 AM
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.
Upcoming Events
Lit&Lunch: How to Translate Fairy Tales, with Kate Bernheimer, Ilya Kaminsky, and Maria Tatar
June 12, 2012
Contributors and the editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, an anthology of fairy tales, discuss the unique craft of translating myth and the history of fairy tales.
A Night of Fairy Tales
June 12, 2012
To close out the 2011-12 Two Voices season, join the staff and friends of the Center for the Art of Translation for a special evening on translating fairy tales!
Audio Entries
See Us At AWP!
Posted on January 31, 2011 by Scott EspositoIf you'll be at the the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs this week, join the Center for some panels that we'll be featured on.
Also feel free to drop by our table anytime at booth D21.
On Friday, I'll be in a panel on the various ways in which translated literature can function as experimental literature in the U.S. Here's the description:
Friday: 10:30 a.m.-11:45 a.m.
Nathan Hale Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level F127.The Experimental and the International. (Hilary Plum, Karen Emmerich, Scott Esposito, Steve Dolph, Anna Moschovakis, Jill Schoolman) This panel considers why literature in translation is often described as experimental: What issues arise as foreign literary traditions enter the U.S. milieu? How does the phenomenon of literature in translation shed light on American conceptions of experimental vs. mainstream? What can happen when highly language-focused (thus experimental?) work moves between languages? A discussion among translators, writers, and book & magazine editors and publishers in the field of international literature.
And then on Saturday, the Center will be sponsoring a panel on the poet as translator, to be moderated by our founder, Olivia Sears:
Saturday: 9:00 a.m.-10:15 p.m.Thurgood Marshall North Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level S110.
In the Interest of Language: The Poet as Translator. (Olivia Sears, Wayne Miller, Valzhyna Mort, Idra Novey, Sidney Wade) To translate, one must engage with the original language, but also fully inhabit and interpret the mood, culture, and the voice of the writer. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that translation is the closest of close readings, and that such attention to the nuances of each word gives a poet new insight into the intricacies of language. The Center for the Art of Translation invites four premier poet/translators to explore how translation has informed their relationship with their own words.