The Game for Real New York City Book Launch
Community Bookstore | 143 Seventh Avenue | Brooklyn, NY
For our East Coast fans, we’ll be hosting a New York City book launch event at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn to celebrate the publication of his translation of The Game For Real by Czech modernist writer 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.
Ben Paloff will be joined by fellow Czech translator Alex Zucker to discuss Weiner’s “complex, mystifying fictions.”
We were very honored to be able to present translator extraordinaire Benjamin Paloff with Czech master-translator Alex Zucker at Brooklyn’s own Community Bookstore. The book they came to talk about was Two Lines Press’s The Game for Real, by Czech modernist Richard Weiner, the first time this essential author has ever appeared in English, thanks to Ben.
Below you’ll find a table of contents and full audio for the entire event. Many, many, many thanks to Hal Hlavinka of Community Bookstore for facilitating this event, recording it, and publicizing it, and thanks as well to Alex Zucker for acting as an expert in all things Czech.
AUDIO TABLE OF CONTENTS
1:35 Description of The Game for Real and Richard Weiner
7:00 reading from The Game for Real
16:10 where Weiner fits into the “fantastic four” of Czech lit
19:10 Where Weiner fit into Czech literature at the time of his writing
27:00 Weiner and Proust
28:25 The writing of Weiner’s the came out of his association with the Surrealists
31:30 The emotion of shame as it relates to The Game for Real
35:00 Czech as a young language and the impact of that on Weiner’s writing and Czech literature in general
40:10 Weiner’s relationship to Kafka, particularly The Metamorphosis
42:00 Q & A
42:30 How engaged was Weiner with sexological thought, and Weiner’s feelings about his sexuality?
45:00 Weiner’s death
46:30 Weiner’s influence in Czech literature
54:20 How will Ben research Weiner’s biography in Prague
55:40 Ben’s translations from languages other than Czech, and Ben’s beliefs about translation
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.
Alex Zucker’s translations include novels by J. R. Pick, Petra Hůlová, Jáchym Topol, Magdaléna Platzová, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. He has also translated stories, plays, young adult and children’s books, essays, subtitles, song lyrics, reportage, and poems. His translations of Petra Hůlová’s Three Plastic Rooms and Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop received Writing in Translation awards from English PEN, and he won the ALTA National Translation Award in 2010 for Petra Hůlová’s All This Belongs to Me. In addition to translating, Alex works in editing and communications. He lives in Brooklyn.