The Game for Real Book Launch
Diesel, A Bookstore | 5433 College Avenue | Oakland, CA
We welcome author and translator Benjamin Paloff to Diesel Bookstore in Oakland, California to celebrate the publication of his translation of The Game for Real by Richard Weiner.
The Game for Real is the first of Weiner’s books ever translated into English. Called “The Man of Pain” by the sci-fi author Karel Čapek (who popularized the word robot), Richard Weiner is one of European literature’s best-kept secrets. Often compared to both Robert Walser and Kafka, Weiner was a modernist who wrote with the Surrealists between World War I and II. Ignored during the communist era, Weiner’s work was rediscovered and has attracted new fans since 1989.
Audio Table of Contents
0:00 Introductions
2:18 CJ Evans on Two Lines Press and The Game for Real by Richard Weiner
7:16 Intro to Benjamin Paloff
10:18 Benjamin Paloff reading The Game for Real
21:10 The roots of Ben’s interest in Richard Weiner
26:44 Weiner’s experiences during World War I and the literature that came of it
30:55 Weiner’s feelings on Proust, his long essay on Proust, and similarities between Weiner’s and Proust’s writing
38:00 Ben’s challenges translating Weiner, and how he handled “Weinerisms”
42:14 Weinerisms that have made it into Czech, and the trajectory of Weiner’s literature after World War II
49:50 How the two halves of The Game for Real entwine
53:45 Ben’s thoughts on translating humor
59:45 The pleasures of translating Weiner
1:05:14 Lexical oddities in Weiner’s prose
1:06:55 “Losing himself” in the act of translation
1:13:30 Origins of the name “Giggles” in translation of The Game for Real and Weiner’s relationship to the Surrealists
Benjamin Paloff is the author of The Politics, a collection of poems; his next, And His Orchestra, will be released by Carnegie Mellon University Press in early 2015. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Stanford Humanities Center, he has translated several books from Polish, most recently Marek Bieńczyk’s Transparency and Andrzej Sosnowski’s Lodgings: Selected Poems. He teaches at the University of Michigan.
Richard Weiner (1884–1937) is widely considered to be one of the most important Czech writers of the twentieth century. The author of several works of poetry and prose, his writing was suppressed during the Communist period and only became recognized for its importance after 1989.