For all you graphic novel (in translation!) fans: contributing editor Adrian Nathan West translated A Human Act, about the Second Mafia War, by Manfredi Giffone, Fabrizio Longo, and Alessandro Parodi for Words Without Borders. And in Brouillon, he discusses the challenges of translating alliteration in Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny; in this case, his search through the Oxford English Dictionary leads him to “Vauntmure,” “a beautiful, obsolete word” and a type of fortification wall.
Transaction Press has just published past contributor John Taylor’s collection of essays A Little Tour through European Poetry. It follows John Taylor’s earlier volume Into the Heart of European Poetry and discusses a great number of translations, including poetry from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Lithuania, Albania, Romania, Turkey, and Portugal. It even presents an important poet born in the Chuvash Republic—not to be missed!
In November, Joshua Craze, nonfiction editor, published an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Redacted Mind, with New York’s New Museum as part of its center for translation. The center previously hosted another book project of his, How To Do Things Without Words. In his introduction to Craze’s work, Omar Berrada, co-director of Dar Al-Ma’mûn, said, “In most cases, looking for whatever text lies behind the redactions is bound to fail. Instead, Craze proposes to examine what the redaction performs. Rather than uncovering the secret beneath the mask, understanding depends on looking closely at the surface itself. It is an art of description, of listening to surfaces.”
Parthian Press, an independent publisher in Wales, released its first translation from the Slovak. The House of the Deaf Man, a whopping 629-page family saga by Peter Krištúfek, was translated by Julia Sherwood, Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia, jointly with her husband Peter Sherwood. Sherwood also recently edited a feature on “Contemporary Women’s Writing in Slovakia” for Words Without Borders, and contributed a translation of “Sea Anemone” by Uršuľa Kovalyk, a feminist writer and poet whose work is characterized by surreal imagery and explicit celebration of female sexuality.
MARGENTO, Romania editor-at-large, saw his work featured in the annual Canadian publication Experiment-O, a top innovative literature and arts venue. He presents Verse-trans-verse, “a species of verse generated in a language by means of translation into another (or other) language(s).” He writes of his work, “Each sequence includes (one of/a link to) the original(s), translation into Romanian, and then translation (back) into English.”
Guest Artist for Asymptote’s July issue Robert Zhao Renhui was awarded the President’s Design Award, Singapore, for Design of the Year. He won this prestigious award for “A Guide to the Flaura and Fauna of the World,” a successful collaboration between photographer Renhui and graphic designer Hanson Ho. The design “appropriates diagrammatic charts, computer programming language and old software interfaces, and juxtaposes these with Robert’s images to suggest the human race’s use of technology and data analyses to control nature.”