Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! Can you believe we’ve already sprung forward (in the United States, at least)? This means we’re already a quarter-way through the year. Luckily, time flies slowly when digging through the archives: on finding German writer Arthuer Koester’s Darkness at Noon—a masterpiece known to the world only through translation—in its original, maybe. And speaking of the archive: with only black-and-white photos, what color were Franz Kafka’s eyes? This—and 99 other “finds”—in Reiner Stauch’s fascinating curation of Kafkanalia.
Speaking of daylight savings, we sure saved daylight—and lost sleep—on UNESCO’s World Poetry Day this past March 21. Here’s everything you needed to know so you can plan in advance next time.
This week in prizes: Tram 83, by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated by Roland Glasser, and published by our friends at Deep Vellum Books, won the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature in addition to being longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize—phew. In fact, the whole International Booker longlist is worth checking out: lots of favorites speckle the list, like Italian ano-menon Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein!), Yan Lianke, Marie NDiaye, and many others (all translated, of course). And this year’s Whiting Award winners have been announced, for emerging English-language writers.
The Struggle continues: Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book Five is in review, and the book bears witness to the “spectacle of solitude.” And if you’re into big literary spinoffs, remember that Ferrante’s children’s book is a thing that exists in the world. But here’s the thing you ought to read: the Irish novel that was so good, people were afraid to translate it. Seriously.