The absolute happiest news of the week? Asymptote’s April issue is out, and it sure is star-studded: our most recent issue features the likes of Nobel laureate Herta Müller; writer, editor, and translator David Bellos; Spanish-language sensation Antonio Ungar, Prix-Goncourt prize carrier Jonathan Littell; up-and-coming Amanda Lee Koe (highlighted in our special Diaspora English-language fiction feature!); Robert Walser Prizewinner Marianne Fritz; and past Asymptote favorite Jonas Hassen Khemiri… among so, so many others—it’s a spectacular issue from top to bottom (we promise we aren’t biased!) and absolutely worth checking out. Blog co-editor extraordinaire Eva Richter tackled some of her personal favorites earlier this week: dive into the issue and discover your own!
Amid this translation-related glee, a serious shock of sad news: Colombian legend and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez has passed away this week. We owe Márquez quite a bit: his writing proved to the masses that translated literature should be required reading (not that we ever needed reminding, but still). Take look at his 198 Nobel lecture, “The Solitude of Latin America,” here.
So let’s hear it for championing translations! Swedish writer, translator, and Nobel judge Gören Malmqvist is a vocal proponent of Chinese literature; Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic, My Struggle, translator Don Bartlett on translating “Norway’s love of literature”; here’s how Czech novelist Milan Kundera has left quite an impact on three writers in and around Central Europe, while over at NPR, Italian writer Francesca Marciano opines on the mind-expanding benefits trying on another language for size and writing bilingually. If you’re ever short on time, grab one of these fifty best books clocking in at fewer than 200 pages—Flavorwire’s list includes quite a few translated gems and Asymptote favorites. Franz Kafka may be translated the world around, but please, don’t even begin to use the word “Kafkaesque” in English—ever. And with such a wealth of writing at our fingertips, what does it even mean to be “against” world literature?
You might read in translation, but you write where you are. Norway might be the best place to be a writer, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t literary corruption in high places. Irish writer Colm Toibin has been named Chairman of the PEN World Voices festival this week, and voiced out against stereotyping his literary countrymen: don’t call him a storyteller.
It’s been another big week for prizes: the American Pulitzer Prize announced its winners this week, including bestseller Donna Tartt for fiction and Vijay Seshadari for poetry. Three Percent has narrowed down its Best Translated Book Award finalists: here are the fiction and poetry nominees. If choosing just one winner from a list of ten looks daunting, try 124: that’s the tall list of nominations for the Nigeria Prize for Literature.
THAT’S ALL FOLKS :-( :-( :-) (on yelling in all caps and the [surprisingly long] evolution of the emoticon).