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Featured Audio and Articles
June 12: A Night of Fairy TalesScott Esposito, May 14, 2012 11:57:00 AM
To close out the 2011-12 Two Voices season, join us for a special evening on translating fairy tales!
Kate Bernheimer, Ilya Kaminsky, and Maria Tartar take you deep into the dark woods with readings from classic and contemporary fairytales. And these aren't the fairytales you grew up with—they're the darkest, scariest tales you've ever heard! A reception with cash bar will follow the event.
If you can make it, definitely plan to drop by. This event is super affordable, and promises to be a memorable experience!
TWO VOICES: Novelist Sergio ChejfecScott Esposito, May 10, 2012 12:54:00 PM
In his Two Voices presentation on May 8, lauded Argentine author Sergio Chejfec started by explaining the biographical roots of his strange, compelling novel The Planets. The book is about an Argentine who goes missing during the military dictatorship of 1976-82, and Chejfec began by explaining that the plot of the book actually has to do with a friend of his who did disappear during the military dictatorship for the 1970s. He was one of an estimated 30,000 Argentines to disappear during that span.
THAT OTHER WORD: Episode 1 | March 2012 | Lorin SteinMadeleine LaRue, March 20, 2012 03:11:00 AM
In this first episode, Scott Esposito interviews Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review and former senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They discuss editing the English version of Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03 (translated by Mitzi Angel), procuring the rights to Roberto Bolaño’s works and editing Natasha Wimmer’s translations, and Stein's translation of Edouard Levé's book Autoportrait. Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito also chat about César Aira’s Varamo, László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, and Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories.
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
Translation After the Fall of the Iron Curtain
Posted on March 16, 2010 by
So once the USSR was no more, some Russian publishers thought they could make a killing by translating into Russian all the books that had been suppressed during communism. Publishing Perspectives relates the interesting story of how that went:
Funded by a grant from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ad Marginem's first book ? an anthology of philosophical and psychoanalytic texts on Sado-masochism ? sold 100,000 copies in 12 months, although hyperinflation devoured a significant chunk of the profits. Encouraged, Ivanov and his colleagues soon issued texts by thinkers ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes.
Ad Marginem Press LogoSince then the Russian reading public's interest has shifted elsewhere, and in the last decade it is not Ad Marginem's philosophy list that has brought the publisher its greatest successes and controversies but rather its fiction. Both the self-proclaimed literary monster Vladimir Sorokin and the radical author-politician Edward Limonov have published important books with Ad Marginem. Operating from a basement apartment south of the Kremlin, the publisher is both literally and figuratively underground. . . .
Despite Ad Marginem's ups and downs, it looks like the Western philosophical books it's brought into Russian have fueled some interesting experiments. Have a look at the article for a list of some very interesting Russian titles, including a few I wouldn't mind seeing translated into English.