All things translation—April 2024 at CAT
Read about all things translation happening in and around the month of April.
Spring has sprung, and among the colors of the season are the beautiful terracotta and blue that color our office these days. The Center for the Art of Translation has new opportunities, new events, and our monthly round-up of translation news. Pictured above is the cover of our April release-—Off-White, the new novel from National Book Award finalist Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott and David McKay. Available now!
April is also National Poetry Month! In the spirit of our recent Message of Solidarity, we want to uplift Palestinian and Arabic voices and translators of Arabic this month. Our second Calico title, Home: New Arabic Poems, features poetry from across the Arabic-speaking world, including Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, and beyond. The collection evokes the sights, sounds, and tastes of contemporary life and explores the intimate world of everyday existence, its agonies and delights. Includes work by Samer Abu Hawwash (Palestine), Iman Mersal (Egypt), Ines Abassi (Tunisia), Fadhil al-Azzawi (Iraq) and others. Click the link below to peruse author bios, read an excerpt, or purchase your own copy. And you can check out poetry from Arabic and dozens of other languages featured in the Two Lines journal.
Two Lines Press is open for submissions!
Two Lines Press(opens in a new tab) is currently holding two separate calls for submissions! We are currently looking for overlooked Japanese fiction for our next Calico, and translations from African languages for full-length manuscripts. The submission requirements can be found on our website—linked below.
Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows share their year—at the Indiana Reading Conference!
After a year of research, mentorship, and projects, two of our 2022-2023 Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows, Brandon Barr and Albert Burford, talked about their yearlong Fellowship journey and the impact of the Poetry Inside Out poetry and translation curriculum on their students’ lives at the 2024 Illinois Reading Council(opens in a new tab)Conference. They were able to incorporate poems that featured themes of cultural identity into their lessons and helped students gain an authentic appreciation for each other’s experiences, knowledge, skills, and cultural and linguistic backgrounds. We wrote about their talk and student stories on the blog—read more at the link below!
Beijing Sprawl Book Club at the Mechanics’ Institute
This month, we’re partnering with The Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco to present Jeremy Tiang, half of Beijing Sprawl’s translator duo!! Jeremy will be visiting the monthly online book club at The Mechanics’ Institute, on May 1 at 12:00PM PDT. Register for this event below, or visit our events page to see what else is on the horizon at CAT.
Translation News & Updates
- The shortlist for the International Booker Prize(opens in a new tab) honors fiction in translation, in six different languages, from six different countries. CAT sends a special shout-out to the shortlisted translators: Annie McDermott, Sora Kim-Russell, Youngjae Josephine Bae, Sarah Timmer Harvey, Johnny Lorenz, Michael Hofmann, and Kira Josefsson!
- The Bait AlGhasham DarArab Translation Prize is now accepting submissions for its 2025 prize(opens in a new tab).
- The National Book Critics Circle(opens in a new tab) announced the 2023 winners of their annual awards, featuring three winners in translation!
- The finalists of this year’s Lambda Literary Awards(opens in a new tab) feature a novel in translation for the best book in Transgender Fiction.
- The Africa Institute in now accepting applications to the Global Africa Translation Fellowship(opens in a new tab) until June 1, 2024.
Recommended Reads
- On LitHub, read translator Nada Hammad’s love letter to Gaza(opens in a new tab).
- Gabino Iglesias, the new horror columnist at the New York Times(opens in a new tab), wrote on Through the Night Like a Snake .
- Layla Martinez’s Woodworm (trans. Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott) was included in Polygon’s “Must-Read Books of Spring 2024.”(opens in a new tab)
- Jeremy Klemin’s article in The Atlantic regales “The Last Frontier of Machine Translation,”(opens in a new tab) detailing the inconsistencies within artificial intelligence bots in literary translation.
Giovanna Lomanto is a poet and essayist with a tendency to play the same song on repeat until she has memorized every last note. She received her BA in English at U.C. Berkeley and finished her MFA at NYU, during which time she published two poetry collections and two mixed media chapbooks.
