It’s that time of year again. If you’ve got a pulse and an Internet connection, chances are you’ve caught sight of the New York Times’ 100 notable books of 2013 list (or its more selective 10 best books of 2013 list). If you’re sick of a format that’s become journalistic junk food, you might have tested NPR’s addicting 2013 Book Concierge app instead. And if you’re craving a more global bent, The Independent rallies the best-translated fiction of 2013. These roundups are nice, but Scott Esposito’s survey of contenders for the 2013 Best Translated Book Awards over at Three Percent is more our style, featuring work by Asymptote contributors Mircea Cartarescu and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
Speaking of awards… Be sure to cast your vote in the shortlist of Typographical Era’s newly inaugurated 2013 Typographical Translation Awards (Asymptote’s own managing editor Megan McDowell is nominated for her translation of Under This Terrible Sun by Carlos Busqued!). From the award-receiving perspective, some new winners this week: Russia’s 2013 “Russian Booker” (Русский Букер) has been awarded to Andrei Volos for the yet-unavailable-in-English Возвращение в Панджруд. In Austria, Florjan Lipuš joins the likes of Christa Wolf and Josef Winkler and wins the Franz-Nabl Preis of Graz for his body of work (although you can find Lipuš’ The Errors of Young Tjaz in English here). Meanwhile, French and German translator Pierre Joris has snagged the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for his translation of Paul Celan’s critical work The Meridian, while the Lois Roth Award for Literary translation goes to Australia’s Royall Tyler for The Tale of the Heike. More awards in translation: Alice Oswald has won the Popescu Prize (awarded to European poetry translated into English) for Memorial, a re-thinking of Homer’s Iliad. Felicitations to all!
Apparitions of multiculturalism this week: In Paris, the notorious musical of English linguistic pomp, My Fair Lady, is a hit with Parisian audiences, despite being performed in English (the 85 percent of non-Anglophone theatergoers are apparently content with stage subtitles). Not understanding the local lingo doesn’t seem to be a problem either for American singer Jennifer Grout, finalist on the television show Arabs Got Talent in Morocco, trying her hand at traditional Arabic music. And in China, performances of the ubiquitous college-campus play The Vagina Monologues reflect a feminism growing slowly, but surely, in a country still marked by widespread conservatism.
New in digital publishing this week: the folks at Triple Canopy have launched a new digital publishing platform. In Norway, the National Library has decided to digitize all books—yes, that’s right, all books—by 2020. Looks like the entirety of Norwegian literature might soon be as easily accessible as a Buzzfeed listicle (or, alternately: Asymptote!). The BBC wonders if e-books’ availability and accessibility might encourage Africa’s book culture. In Cambodia, Hal Sothik champions a new book culture in a country long fueled by an oral tradition. And in Viet Nam, writers and critics bemoan the literary “slump” the country has faced for the past 15 years (despite the fact that activists like Dr. Doan Cam Thi promote contemporary Vietnamese literature in French markets). Finally, an interview with prolific Tamil-to-English translator Lakshimi Holmström on translating and writing today.
Some real-life literary enigmas, solved: in Lithuania, previously-unknown translations of Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s work have resurfaced, and the work appears to be the earliest Baltic translation of any Indian work—ever. While some books appear, others go missing: in Italy, the massive theft of rare books from the Girolamini Library in Naples might be the biggest literary scandal in 200 years. Interestingly, the supposed thief and forger Marino Massimo De Caro cites Borges in his defense: “Borges, in Ficciones, wrote that when a book is false, it is equal to, if not better than, the original.” (Nice try.) One last linguistic puzzle you should weigh in on: could your native language unwittingly impact your financial destiny?
In new releases: the 34th issue of The Quarterly Conversation is fresh off the (virtual) press, featuring a special look at the Dalkey Archive Press’ efforts at translating Korean literature to boot. Meanwhile, be sure to click over to Words Without Borders’ December Issue—it’s Oulipo-themed, and all those constraints add up to a lot of fun.
We finish this post in remembrance of the letter “E.” You’ll be missed.