Two Voices at Litquake: What Should I Read in Translation?
Variety Preview Room | 582 Market Street | San Francisco, CA
More and more readers are interested in exploring other cultures through literature in translation, but the range of choices can be daunting. To help separate your Murakami from your Ravikovitch, we offer three expert translators recommending books you can read right now in translation. From new works from the Middle East to hot hits from Japan, this event promises a lively–and informative–discussion.
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an Egyptian-American translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world who translates from Arabic, French, and German. He has received the Sarah Maguire Prize, PEN Center USA’s translation prize, Poetry Magazine’s translation prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and an NEA translation grant, among other honors, and has twice been a finalist for the PEN America Translation Prize (once in poetry and once in prose). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice. He lives in the countryside just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Chana Kronfeld teaches Hebrew, Yiddish, and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her co-translation of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open won the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marie Syrkin Awards.
Eric Selland is the author of The Condition of Music (Sink Press), Arc TangentandBeethoven’s Dream (both on Isobar Press, Tokyo). His translation of The Guest Cat, a novel by Takashi Hiraide, was on the New York Times Bestseller list in February of 2014. Eric currently lives in Tokyo where he works as a translator of economic reports.
Alissa Valles is the author of the poetry collections Orphan Fire (2008) and Deluxe Noiseless (forthcoming), and is the editor and co-translator of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems: 1956–1998 (2007) and The Collected Prose: 1948–1998 (2010). She has also translated poetry and prose by Aleksander Wat, Miron Białoszewski, among others. She is currently on the editorial board of the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics and previously served as an editor for Words Without Borders. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.