February 2020 translation news roundup
2020 is off to a busy start, and we sneaked in a few updates from January that you may have missed.
Prizes
The 2020 Man Booker International Prize(opens in a new tab) longlist was announced at the end of February. This year’s list includes works translated from 8 languages, including Norwegian, Farsi, Afrikaans, Japanese, and more.
And we can’t forget the PEN Translation Prize finalists(opens in a new tab) announced in January. The list includes our very own Aaron Robertson, nominated for his translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon!
News
Madeleine Schwartz writes in praise of French novelist Marie NDiaye(opens in a new tab) in The New York Review of Books: “Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement.”
Two Lines Press published our second book from Korean author Kim Sagwa, and already b, Book, and Me has shown up on “Best Of” lists in Glamour(opens in a new tab), Translated Lit(opens in a new tab), Poets & Writers(opens in a new tab), and more.
Author Dorothy Tse and translator Natascha Bruce hosted a reading and conversation(opens in a new tab) about That We May Live, the first in our new Calico book series and featuring speculative Chinese fiction, at the Leeds Lit Fest in the UK.
Parasite’s Oscar win revives the dubbing v. subtitling debate(opens in a new tab).
Reading List
The Los Angeles Review of Books(opens in a new tab) considered They Will Drown in their Mothers’ Tears alongside two other books of Nordic speculative fiction: “these novels grapple with trauma through highly experimental prose that elucidates the mind-bending experience the authors are living.”
Does poetry matter? L.A.’s former Poet Laureate explains why it’s life changing(opens in a new tab).
Why read translations? The head of the Goethe Institut South Asia opened the Jaipur Festival with a speech about why there is no borderless literature and why that is not bad at all(opens in a new tab).
A fascinating “family tree” diagram traces the origins of the 100 most-spoken languages in the world(opens in a new tab).
