Is it spring yet? It’s certainly Friday, and awards season at the very least: one of our favorite worldwide translation-friendly prizes, the International Foreign Fiction Prize, has announced its longlist, and we’re happy to see some familiar names on the list—of the fifteen nominees, a whopping five of them were translated from the German, including Asymptote friend and alum Susan Bernofsky! German poet Jan Wagner also snagged the top prize for Belletristik at the Leipziger Buchmesse this week, quite the feat in competition with the language’s admittedly high-powered prose! In an altogether more Anglophone bent, the National Book Critics Circle has announced its award-winners, and the list includes Claudia Rankine’s Citizen in the poetry category and LIla by Marilynne Robinson for fiction, and the United Kingdom’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its impressive longlist.
In optimistic translation news: it seems as if J. R. R. Tolkein’s mythic prequel masterpiece, The Hobbit, will be translated yet again—this time into Hawai’ian. In case you’re interested, here’s a handy-dandy infographic showing the world’s fifty most widely translated books (I didn’t recognize all the titles on the list, did you?). At the New York Times Book Review, Nancy Kline takes a look at four recently-published translations from the French. And if you ever read Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which jaunts through Paris, France, you can look at a photographic response to the structureless novel in New York City (phew!).
In light of their appearance at the forthcoming Frankfurt Book Fair, writers and critics from Indonesia make an appeal for a translation center to continue to promote their country’s literature. And China will send a whole set of booksellers and writers to represent the country’s literature at next year’s BookExpo America.
Though some things are brightening, others consist grimly: here’s an essay taking a hard look at academia’s willful, blissful, misguided ignorance of literature hailing from the African continent. And scholars continue to be at odds at the strange persona of Sappho—taking particular issue, and this should come as no surprise, with her sexuality. William Shakespeare’s mystery is on par with that of Sappho, but the political incorrectness of his work troubles some theatregoers and dramaturgs. How to approach a text that is brilliant, yet blatantly problematic?