He stepped into the bushes to fool around a little. “What can I say about Grigory,” he thought later, “when I don’t even know whether I exist?” From The Sublimes by Yuri Mamleyev, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. This highly influential cult classic from 1968 has never before been translated into English and […]
I have been expressing my admiration for Central European crime writing since I was practically a baby, but being a baby no one understood what I was saying, so it took until I started Literalab and began writing about it that my admiration took on intelligible form. Since then I have surveyed regional crime fiction […]
Today’s Authors & Translators featured translator is the celebrated Marian Schwartz (and her authors – we shouldn’t forget the authors, after all) with a fascinating interview. Among other things, she discusses her soon to be published version of Anna Karenina (August 2014) and the intimacy of being able to work personally with an author, something […]
“I’m making notes from Lacan, I turn the page in my notebook and come upon the sprawled foetus of a poem…” The beginning of the first of two poems by Tadeusz Dąbrowski translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in B O D Y. And that, after some Polish fiction by Agnieszka Taborska in last […]
Agnieszka Taborska’s novel Niedokończone życie Phoebe Hicks (The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks) was published in Poland in 2013. Selected excerpts of the completed translation by Ursula Phillips were published in Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y. In extracts from Polish reviews of the novel translated by Julia Sherwood you can read about […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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