In the newly published issue of The Quarterly Conversation there is an exchange between two translators of the Austrian writer Josef Winkler, Bernard Banoun and Adrian West, who translate him into French and English respectively. Between Banoun’s account of visiting Winkler’s hometown with him (“…imagine visiting Illiers-Combray with Proust or Yoknapatawpha with Faulkner” he writes.) […]
The shortlist for the Rossica Translation Prize 2014 has been announced for the best translation from Russian and it’s a pitched battle between five books. Interestingly, only one of the books’ authors is still alive, as one was quite famously killed in a duel (and that in 1837, so he wouldn’t be showing up at […]
Two novelists, among many others – not to mention a host of non-novelists – have thrown in their two cents on the situation in Ukraine from two very different points of view. Natalka Sniadanko is a Ukrainian writer and translator (of Kafka, Czesław Miłosz, Olga Tokarczuk and Zbigniew Herbert among others). Writing in the New […]
A Russian military invasion has been at the top of the headlines, and with the publication of the opening chapter of Zakhar Prilepin’s novel Sankya in B O D Y last weekend, it’s timely to point to an excellent article by Phoebe Taplin in Russia Beyond The Headlines (RBTH) on the long Russian literary tradition […]
“Sasha noticed some busses bearing the coat of arms with a fanged beast. The curtains in the bus windows trembled. People were sitting in those busses, waiting for an opportunity to step out, to run out, clutching rubber mallets in tough fists, looking angrily for somebody to hit, and to hit them with flourish, to […]
The Missing Slate has published an excerpt from the fantastic novel Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book by Slovak writer Daniela Kapitáňová and translated by Julia Sherwood. The book was published in the UK by Garnett Press in 2011 but has yet to find a US publisher. First published in Slovakia in 2000 to great success the […]
At World Literature Today translator and publisher Ross Ufberg talks about translating Vladimir Lorchenkov’s The Good Life Elsewhere, translation in general and the newly established New Vessel Press. The interview is full of interesting and fairly optimistic takes on publishing literature in translation: “… I have read lots of Russian novels in my life and […]
“Zsolt Láng experienced a strong allergic reaction to 100% of contemporary Hungarian authors. When any of the papers asked him to write on such and such, he would invariably turn the request down. Last time, however, he agreed to review the latest book of Zsolt Láng, for reasons only known to himself.” From “Cat’s Caramel” […]
There is a some environmental and personal catastrophe in Kazakhstan and a story in interwar Central Europe ending in a journey to the concentration camps. Then a very different journey from Moldova pointing towards the promised land of Italy, some Ottoman intrigue and conversations with Orhan Pamuk, and three works by Chekhov. […]
Serbian writer Jelena Lengold, author of the short story collection Fairground Magician, is appearing at Europe House in London on Friday, February 21 for an evening of conversation. The collection was published by Istros Books in 2013 in a translation by Celia Hawkesworth, after having won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011. Read […]
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