Happy Friday, Asymptote! For those of us interested in translation—and the funds to pay for it—the day the PEN/Heim Translation Fund awards/fellowships are announced is always good. Special congrats to Dong Li, Asymptote blog friend—but he’s by no means the only familiar name on the list. Big congrats to all the winners, and the blog wishes you luck on all your projects!
And. Continuing the theme of huge news (for translators, writers, and readers at least—and aren’t we all?), Three Percent has announced the winners for the Best Translated Book Awards! In the fiction category, top honors go to Chinese author Can Xue (who we interviewed in the journal over a year ago) for her novel The Last Lover translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, and Rocío Cerón’s Diorama, which was translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong. Pride note: new blog co-editor, Katrine Jensen, was a member of the judging panel—so you can trust these picks!
Keeping along with the Prize talk! The United Kingdom‘s take on the fiction BTBA has announced its winner: German Jenny Erpenbeck for The End of Days, translated by none other than blog and journal-friend (and all-around translation celeb) Susan Bernofsky. Can Xue had a great week this week, as she was one of nine nominees for the Neustadt Prize in Literature (considered by many to be the “American Nobel”). Asymptote has published a great deal of the 2016 finalists, and even the American nominee, Carolyn Forché, has translation chops of her own—give the list a look-see.
We’re familiar with a lot of Canadian authors writing in English, but French-language talent occupies a different—perhaps precarious—space of its own. How do we think about French-CanLit, both “too different and too familiar?” Coupled that reading with an interview with Japanese-language writer Minae Mizumura, author of The Fall of Language in the Age of English. We reviewed the book on the blog in March, but Full-Stop has got an excellent review up, too.