Happy Friday, Asymptote! This week marked the excited announcement of the poetry judges for our very-special-favorite book award—Three Percent‘s Best Translated Book Award. In the poetry-judging lineup is the blog’s very own co-editor and GIF extraordinaire Katrine Øgaard Jensen, among many other qualified and interesting names. But Katrine’s got plenty of award-reading experience: she judged last year’s BTBA fiction prize, too. If you’re interested in BTBA-buzz (the best kind there is!), it’s worthwhile to catch up on some early, “On Location” 2016 musings, featuring French writer Anne Garréta, William Burroughs, and Czech phenom Bohumil Hrabal. READ MORE…
Posts filed under 'update'
Weekly News Roundup: 25 September 2015: Poets! Prizes! Judging! You!
This week's literary highlights from across the world.
Weekly News Roundup, 3rd April 2015: Judges Bicker, Joke’s on You!
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happiest of Fridays! Hard to believe we are already entering the fourth month of 2015. But this stretch of spring means we’re well into literary awards season, as well as awards-speculation. Close to our heart, Three Percent‘s Best Translated Book Award is just iiiiinches away from announcing the long-awaited longlist. Want some clues? Tickle your curiosity here and here. And the judges for the United States-based National Book Award have been announced. And in the Morning News’ Tournament of Books, judge Steven Merritt has ruffled feathers with disparaging reviews of Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light we Cannot See. READ MORE…
For all you graphic novel (in translation!) fans: contributing editor Adrian Nathan West translated A Human Act, about the Second Mafia War, by Manfredi Giffone, Fabrizio Longo, and Alessandro Parodi for Words Without Borders. And in Brouillon, he discusses the challenges of translating alliteration in Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny; in this case, his search through the Oxford English Dictionary leads him to “Vauntmure,” “a beautiful, obsolete word” and a type of fortification wall.
Transaction Press has just published past contributor John Taylor’s collection of essays A Little Tour through European Poetry. It follows John Taylor’s earlier volume Into the Heart of European Poetry and discusses a great number of translations, including poetry from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Lithuania, Albania, Romania, Turkey, and Portugal. It even presents an important poet born in the Chuvash Republic—not to be missed!
In November, Joshua Craze, nonfiction editor, published an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Redacted Mind, with New York’s New Museum as part of its center for translation. The center previously hosted another book project of his, How To Do Things Without Words. In his introduction to Craze’s work, Omar Berrada, co-director of Dar Al-Ma’mûn, said, “In most cases, looking for whatever text lies behind the redactions is bound to fail. Instead, Craze proposes to examine what the redaction performs. Rather than uncovering the secret beneath the mask, understanding depends on looking closely at the surface itself. It is an art of description, of listening to surfaces.”
Weekly News Roundup, 29th August 2014: Big Bucks, Howl-ing Translations
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Here are some things that might cheer you up: prizes are just the best, aren’t they? American poet (and former poet laureate) Robert Hass has snagged the 100,000-dollar Wallace Stevens Award, bucking the all-too-popular poor poet trend. And fellow Big Important Writer E. L. Doctorow wins the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. On the other side of the equator, Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta has won the country’s highest literary award.
Here are some unfortunate things. London-based superstar architect Zaha Hadid, who designed the stadium for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, sues the venerable New York Review of Books for defamation regarding the work conditions of those building the familiar-looking (hmm, feminine perhaps) stadium. Often considered India’s greatest storyteller, U. R. Ananthamurthy has passed away (let’s hope we see some more of his work in English, at least posthumously!). And nomadic Irish poet Desmond O’Grady, who you might recognize from his bit in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, has passed at age 78.
Weekly News Roundup, 22nd August 2014: PEN Awards, Don’t Kill Lawyers!
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Congratulations are in order: a virtual round of applause to the Asymptote contributors and staff lauded in the 2014 PEN Translation Fund winners: blog friend, interviewer, and invaluable assistant managing editor Eric M. B. Becker, for his translation of 2014 Neustadt winner and Mozambican author Mia Couto; and contributing editor Sayuri Okamoto for translating Japanese author Gozo Yoshimasu (“untranslatable?” ha! Just take a whiff of our January 2011 issue); former contributor Benjamin Paloff for his work with Czech writer Richard Weiner; and Philip Metres and Dmitri Psurtsev for their work with Russian writer Arseny Tarkovsky (sneak peek in our October 2012 issue). Felicitations!
Asymptote Never Sleeps: Contributor News Roundup
From films to exhibitions, here's what Asymptote contributors have been up to lately.
Coming May 7, 2014! Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa’s widely anticipated screen debut L’armée du salut (Salvation Army) has been making waves at film festivals. Watch an excerpt of the prize-winning movie here and find out more on Taïa’s official Facebook page. For French speakers: a French-language interview with Taïa. Revisit his open letter “Homosexuality Explained to My Mother,” translated into English and Chinese exclusively for Asymptote here.
Alexander Dickow brings Henri Droguet’s poetry to the United States for the first time with Clatters. Published by Rain Taxi imprint Ohm Editions, Droguet’s French text appears beside Dickow’s translation. In the translator’s afterword, Dickow opines: “Never, perhaps, has so pure a litany of despair, vanity, destruction and decay given rise to such vibrant language.” Lovely!
Moving away from the Francophone world… Boey Kim Cheng co-edited a crucial anthology of Asian Australian poetry–get up to speed with the project here. His own poem “Plumb blossom or Quong Tart” appears with voices “from Pakistan to Singapore to Thailand to Goa and beyond, telling diverse, richly textured and evolving stories.”
Forrest Gander is speaking tonight, March 26, at SOAS, University of London, about modern and contemporary Japanese poetry in translation and how it has influenced literature originally written in English. He will tackle the question so many readers have only wondered at: What gets translated and why? Join him and Asymptote contributing editor Sayuri Okamoto.
Asymptote’s 3rd Anniversary Celebrations in March and April (Plus: our New Events Page, with Multimedia!)
Check out highlights from our past celebrations in London and New York, and don't miss our upcoming events!
We’re thrilled to announce that Asymptote’s globetrotting third anniversary party, which kicked off in London and New York in January, will continue across five continents over the next month—watch our brand-new video trailer below for a taste, and don’t forget to RSVP at our Shanghai (March 29), Philadelphia (March 29), Berlin (April 3), and Sydney (April 11) Facebook Event pages, already live.
In case you can’t make it, don’t fret: we’ve launched a new Events page, where you can find photos, podcasts, videos, and dispatches of all the events we’ve ever organized, as well as an up-to-date pulse for all upcoming events!
Asymptote Never Sleeps: Editor News Roundup
The latest from Asymptote's team of international editors
Hard at work on Asymptote’s upcoming issue, our editors still have time to write, publish, translate, and organize conferences and plays. Read the thrilling and bizarre ruminations of Forrest Gump’s Slovakian evil twin, an essay on why loss in translation is inevitable and okay, and find out what to do in Seattle now that AWP has ended!
Our past contributors have been busy! Publishing new work, organizing translation contests, accepting prizes and writing poetry and articles (read it all today, right this instant!)—the only thing they haven’t done is procrastinate.
It’s time for Asymptote’s monthly community news roundup, featuring our fantastic editors’ latest accomplishments. Learn what Croatian novel to read this weekend, what to do Friday night in Philadelphia, where to catch a play set in neo-Elizabethan Appalachia, and who is Asymptote’s Guest Artist for the April issue… READ MORE…