Happy Friday, Asymptote readers! If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, you might be itching for warmer climes—though budgetary constraints mean that armchair travel‘s your only option. Take to this list of the Guardian‘s best-of world literature if you’d like handheld globetrotting.
We frequently report on literary awards here at the roundup—in fact, it seems like every week there’s a new accolade—but rarely do these awards go to books published over a year before. Not so for scholarly translations: an 80-year-old work of journalism and ethnography by Russian writer Vladimir Gilyarovsky, Moscow and the Muscovites, has snagged the 2015 AATSEEL Award for Best Scholarly Translation into English (the translator is Brendan Kiernan). Congratulations!
In the tumult of translation: the New York Review of Books examines three new translations of Italian legend Primo Levi, available for the first time in English. And there’s even more about what Levi—a Holocaust survivor and chemist—can tell us about today. Katrina Dodson, translator of Brazilian writer-of-the-moment Clarice Lispector, is interviewed about the joys and sorrows of translation at the Stranger (for our blog interview, click here). And to Burmese readers, translating “tales of woe” means writers can share stories of strength and suffering with more and more readers.
And speaking of twilight writers: the Guardian opines on what makes memoirs written by dying authors so incredibly readable—and unimpeachable. And Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace remains perennially beloved or unread. Why is that? Other writers are oppressed by political precarity: translator-poets Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte read in solidarity with the Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh. And in happier news, Iranian poets under persecution Fateme Ekhtesari and Mehdi Moosavi have managed to escape Iran.
In case you were wondering (perhaps while reading Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, which take place in “dialect” and Italian? …or is that just me), here’s the difference between language and dialect—in plain English.