The trial over the fate of the Kafka manuscripts left in Max Brod’s possession, that he bequeathed to his secretary Esther Hoffe, has finally reached a settlement. The judge ruled that the manuscripts should go to Israel’s National Library, though of course Hoffe’s surviving daughter will appeal until the end of her own life, after […]
The release of the recommendations of the EU’s European Platform for Literary Translation (PETRA) took place during a Frankfurt Book Fair panel on translation on Friday, Oct. 12. “In most countries, literary translators are in need and have trouble earning a living,” the report states (this incidentally is also true of literary critics, bloggers and […]
As the ALTA conference goes into day two the European Society of Authors have issued an invitation to build a “literary and intellectual community committed to translation, transmission and mediation of literature in the different languages of the European continent.” Coincidence? Actually, presenting the whole issue as a European vs. American high-stakes competition might be […]
When the first Annual Conference of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) took place 35 years ago I didn’t really mind that I couldn’t go. I was nine, and barely read English-language writers, even those who filled speech bubbles in comic books. I was interested in other things. Times have changed. Today I would give […]
I wrote a brief tribute to translator Michael Henry Heim on Asymptote Journal as I was preparing an interview with him when I learned of his death on September 29. Reading about his singular career and reading so many of the amazing books he translated was and will continue to be a truly inspiring experience. […]
“Jasieński clearly believed that new convictions required a new formal approach, and as such he reinvents his language every fifty pages or so, and entirely rethinks how a metaphor might be used … it once seemed logical that a political revolution needed a corresponding revolution in the arts. Now the politics struggle to change while […]
The European Commission has come out with its list of translation grant recipients, otherwise known as “Strand 1.2.2 : Support for Literary Translations: selection results.” You can go to the official website and click on the link to a bunch of PDF charts and graphs that are about as unliterary as you can get, or […]
The 2012 PEN Translation Fund Grants have been announced, with the work of two Central European writers among the final 12. A Hóhér Háza (The Hangman’s House) by Andrea Tompa, translated by Bernard Adams tells the story of a Hungarian-Romanian family living through the final two decades of Ceauşescu’s Romania. Tompa is president of the […]
Writing in the Malay Insider, Erna Mahyuni compares government interference in Russia and Malaysia through the prism of her favorite author Mikhail Bulgakov. Where Putin’s Russia has a new anti-protest law, Malaysia has a peaceful assembly law. And where writers in Stalin’s Soviet Union were pushed towards acceptable themes and subjects to write about, the […]
Unless a writer is translated into one of the big languages – English, French, German, Spanish – then it becomes very hard to get translated into the smaller languages. Three EU Literary Prize winners - the Czech Republic’s Tomáš Zmeškal, Bulgaria’s Kalin Terziiski and Romania’s Răzvan Rădulescu, talk about the challenges facing writers from smaller languages […]
