“…and he coughs decorously and goes off decorously to his study. Where he decorously. Straightens. Some papers. Slowly. Carefully. Tap-ping them. To cut off the edges. It’s very important now. To the millimeter exactly. At the edge of the table. And we’re each of us alone again… Ah, yes: childhood! Land of terror…” From Alexandra […]
On Sept 29 there will be a book launch for The Absolute Gravedigger by Vítězslav Nezval, translated into English by Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novická and published by Twisted Spoon Press. The great Czech poet published the book in 1937 and is considered one of the masterpieces of interwar surrealism. Novická and Delbos received a […]
English PEN is running a competition for the best book its supported through its Writers in Translation programme. Among these is Witold Szabłowski’s The Assassin from Apricot City translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The book about Turkey, migrants, people smuggling and much more was excerpted in B O D Y when it was […]
PEN America has announced the recipients of this year’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants and there’s some great writing from Central and Eastern Europe in the works as well as from the rest of the world. First of all, B O D Y’s own Stephan Delbos along with Tereza Novická won for their translation of The […]
The PEN World Voices Festival kicks off in New York City today and though it’s already gotten quite a lot of unintentional publicity due to the protest against awarding Charlie Hebdo the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Free Expression Courage Award there is a lot else of interest going on, with Africa being the main […]
The Paris Review has an article on great Polish science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem’s view of the future (and, of course, present) of humanity entitled “The Future According to Stanisław Lem”. The occasion is the screen adaptation of Lem’s 1971 novella The Futurological Congress, translated into English by Michael Kandel, into a film called The Congress […]
PEN has announced its 2014 Translation Fund Winners and there are some cool and unusual writers that will be coming into English from this part of the world, and by this part of the world I mean in this case from a few blocks away from where I’m sitting writing this. One of the grants […]
PEN America have announced the winners of most, though not all, of this year’s lucrative and sought after literary awards. Of Literalab interest is, above all, the PEN Translation Prize, which goes to Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov for their translation of Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, which was on the Best Translated […]
The PEN World Voices festival is underway in New York, running from April 29 to May 5. There are a lot of great events, including Mikhail Shishkin speaking on a panel about book reviewers, a conversation with Polish author of Russians in Warsaw Agata Tuszyńska, a Literary Safari including Hungarian Noémi Szécsi and Czech Michal […]
Translator Alex Zucker was in Prague to speak about his translation of Jáchym Topol’s novel The Devil’s Workshop (Chladnou Zemí), which will be published in June 2013 as well as his previous Topol translation City Sister Silver. To give an idea of the difficulties presented in translating Vladislav Vančura’s 1931 modernist masterpiece Markéta Lazarová, which […]
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