Happy Friday, Asymptote! The biggest news this week is that of the official announcement of Three Percent‘s Best Translated Book Award winners, so we won’t keep you waiting: in the fiction category, Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, translated by Lisa Dillman, took home top honors (you can read a review the blog published preceding the award here—we totally called it). And in the poetry category, Rilke Shake by Brazilian author Angélica Freitas and translated by Hilary Kaplan snagged top honors. Big congratulations to the winning writers, translators, publishers, editors, and readers!
Speaking of great translations, this rune translation utterly rewrites Viking history in Sweden: a retranslation of the massive Rök runestone suggests the stone doesn’t tell the story of the country, but the story of itself. Translation is always difficult, after all: here, a writer recounts the difficulty of translating his father’s Holocaust memoir.
This week marks the inauguration of the Canadian Festival of Literary Diversity, or FOLD: the “first festival in Canada to focus on diverse literature.” And we’re one day into it already, but the City University of New York Graduate Center is hosting a two-day conference on translation and translation theory—check it out!
At LitHub, Italian-Algerian writer Amara Lakhous speaks in English, in Italian, Berber, and Arabic, and dreams of a the linguistic space bi- and trilingualism can afford him. Meanwhile, an interview with Mexican poet Valerie Mejer Caso, translated by Michele Gil-Montero and conducted by Ae Hee Lee at the Letras Latinas blog. And at the Poetry Foundation “Harriet” blog, Antena co-editor Jen Hofer talks “translation as radical transparency and excess.”
This week, Daniel Aaron, Founding Father of the academic field of American Studies, has died—at age 103, he was only about half as old as the United States themselves.