(Re)discovering familiar authors. Those familiar with Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (that is to say: everybody) might be happy to discover that more than twenty previously unknown poems have been uncovered and are slated for publication later this year in Latin America (no word on translations quite yet).
Big, big news in letters across the globe (especially for us Asymptote-fans): the shortlists for the PEN Literary Awards have been announced, and the translation categories are peppered with our very own past contributors. In the prose category, Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook sports a nomination. You can read an excerpt from the novel, translated by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler, in our January 2013 issue! And Asymptote alum and professor Michael Hoffman is up in the same category for his translation of The Emperor’s Tomb by Joseph Roth (read his essay on Wolfgang Koeppen in our January 2014 issue here). We like to see our past contributors doing big things: Reif Larsen, frequent contributor and goofy Asymptote friend, writes in The Guardian on the trials of seeing his first novel receive the Hollywood treatment.
Speaking of prizes: Ugandan author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has won the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for “Let’s Tell the Story Properly.” And the Italian Premio Gregor von Rezzori goes to Naissance d’un pont by Maylis de Kerangal.
French philosopher, translator, and theorist Barbara Cassin’s 2004 book, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (in English: Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon), has, against all odds, been translated into English this year. Here’s an interview with the Public Review. Some books get translated over and over again: Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu certainly comes to mind, and at the Boston Review, a fantastic history of the tome in English translation (here, by the way, is the very first “Proust Questionnaire”).
In football/soccer news, here’s England‘s crushing loss to Uruguay (in the form of an epic poem). Even if you aren’t catching the football/soccer games, the Three Percent World Cup of Literature is already underway (be sure to check out our editor-at-large Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s coverage of the spar between Mexico and Croatia!).