Big, big news in translation-land this week: the 2014 winners of Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award were announced! Asymptote-rs abound: the winner in the fiction category is Seiobo There Below, written by Hungarian author, Asymptote alum, and last year’s winner László Krasznahorkai, translated by Asymptote’s very own (past blog contributor!) Ottilie Mulzet. In the poetry category, Italian poet Elisa Biagini snagged top honors for A Guest in the Wood, team-translated by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky: check out Asymptote’s feature here!
We’ve been saying it all along, but it’s good to see mainstream attention for writing in across the gutter: at the New York Times, novelists write in translation and discover other worlds tucked away from their mother languages. Read an interview with the incomparable Lydia Davis, writer of the most brilliant short fiction and translator of French and Dutch (check out her Asymptote contribution!): “there’s no question that having translated all these years makes me all the more conscious of what English does.” Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti might disagree with those wishy-washy terms: here’s an interview on his quantitative literary criticism.
At the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wonders what makes the French Little Prince so universally adored. Stick to the book version of Gabriel Garcia Màrquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude: the late Colombian author on why his most famous epic could never be given the Hollywood treatment.
Lit-believers for social justice. At Vanity Fair, Salman Rushdie’s close friends, family, and advocates reflect on the 25th anniversary of the fatwa called for Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses. Meanwhile, Nigerian-American author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie celebrates and supports Kenya’s most prominent openly gay author, Binyavanga Wainaina, on TIME’s 100 Most Influential list. And the PEN American Center joins forces to collectively demand China’s immediate release of Uighur writer Ilham Tohti.
Fests and awards! We’re jealous of everybody attending the PEN World Voices Festival, happening until May 4. Check out the events: lots of translation-rich stuff to dig in to. Author Ahmed Saadawi has snagged the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, guaranteeing an English-language translation of his novel, Frankenstein in Baghad. Congrats!