Here are some things that might cheer you up: prizes are just the best, aren’t they? American poet (and former poet laureate) Robert Hass has snagged the 100,000-dollar Wallace Stevens Award, bucking the all-too-popular poor poet trend. And fellow Big Important Writer E. L. Doctorow wins the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. On the other side of the equator, Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta has won the country’s highest literary award.
Here are some unfortunate things. London-based superstar architect Zaha Hadid, who designed the stadium for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, sues the venerable New York Review of Books for defamation regarding the work conditions of those building the familiar-looking (hmm, feminine perhaps) stadium. Often considered India’s greatest storyteller, U. R. Ananthamurthy has passed away (let’s hope we see some more of his work in English, at least posthumously!). And nomadic Irish poet Desmond O’Grady, who you might recognize from his bit in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, has passed at age 78.
At blog friend M. Lynx Qualey’s ArabLit blog, Arabic translator Max Schmookler opines on a touchy subject for translators: how can you separate the good from the bad—or even worse—the mediocre? How does a story become “great” on its own terms, even in translation? Certainly a worthwhile read for all of us translators and translation-readers. And if one translation is good enough—why translate more? On translating and reading Russian behemoth Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
In a similar vein of #translationreads, here’s a piece on Electric Literature about translating Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in Italian—and then back again. Again, thanks to the ever-reputable Paris Review, Egypt takes a decidedly noir turn—thanks to illicit translation. In the United Kingdom, the demand for translations is on the up-and-up, for the first time in what seems like forever—thank the Scandinavians for unsettling the perception of translation as stodgy and highbrow. And Italian writer (and BTBA nominee) Elena Ferrante keeps getting more and more buzz. Despite her (?) anonymous and secretive literary presence, we just can’t help but ask ourselves: who is Ferrante?
The New York Times’ “Bookends” column persists, despite the hate, this time asking: does where you live affect how (and what) you write? (Answer: duh. Armchair travel happens through translation). Where you are might affect the way you read, in any case: Amazon proposes to test its delivery-by-drone method in India first. Still, language is a major player—especially if you’re the only one in the world who can speak it. At the New York Times, who speaks Wukchumni: on translating and preserving a language and a heritage. Apparently, translation persists even when terms are deemed “untranslatable.”
And finally: we haven’t made the switch yet, but if we make the blog all-Comic Sans, Jessamyn West will be behind us, all the way.