Posts featuring Amalia Andrade

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 2, 2024 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Carol Khoury, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, and Miranda Mazariegos

Literary news from Palestine, Egypt, and Latin America!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us news of a “literary cartography” of Palestine, the most recent literary fairs and festivals in Egypt, and censorship of Latin American authors in Florida. Read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Despite the burgeoning array of literary endeavors in support of Gaza, this dispatch aims to shed light on a profoundly comprehensive initiative. Back in July 2023, when we unveiled our coverage of the podcast entitled “Country of Words,” conceived and orchestrated by Refqa Abu-Remaileh, little did we fathom the vastness of Refqa’s overarching vision under the same title.

“Country or Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature” was inaugurated by Stanford University in the last weeks of 2023. Rooted in the constellation paradigm within literature, this digital-born project aspires to retrace and remap the global narrative of Palestinian literature throughout the twentieth century, traversing the Arab world, Europe, North America, and Latin America. Nestled at the confluence of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, “Country of Words” establishes a networked locus for the data and narrative fragments of a literature in constant motion, harmonizing porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into a resilient, open-ended literary chronicle.

Internal and External Dialogues: PEN Grantee Isabella Corletto on Being Multilingual and Coming to Translation Through Publishing

June 14, 2023 | in Interviews | by Isabella Corletto and José García Escobar

Constantly switching back and forth or speaking in Spanglish, gave me a lot of flexibility with the way I use language and approach the world.

Earlier this year, PEN America awarded the 2023 PEN Grant for The English Translation of Italian Literature to Isabella Corletto, a young Guatemalan translator based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The grant awards $5,000 to an individual working on translating an Italian literary fiction or nonfiction text into English, and with it, Isabella will complete the translation of Giorgia Tribuiani’s Padri (Fazi Editore), a novel whose prose, according to her, “blurs the lines between narration, internal dialogue, and external dialogue”, built around “the tension between the mundane and the extraordinary”.

As a translator working with multiple source languages, Isabella also translated from Spanish into English Amalia Andrade’s Things You Think About When You Bite Your Nails (Cosas que piensas cuando te muerdes las uñas) in 2020, and currently works at Indent Literary Agency (home of authors like Leila Guerriero, Dolores Reyes, Oscar Martínez, and Guadalupe Nettel) and Words Without Borders as their 2022-2023 editorial fellow.

A talented polyglot born in Guatemala City but with access to an international education, she has been formed by a myriad of languages: Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese. In her work, she sees no borders between them. “The more language and literature classes I took, the more interested I became in reading exophonic and multilingual writers, many of whom I realize now are also translators,” she said.

Recently I had a chance to talk to her about her craft and being multilingual. We discussed growing up bilingual, working in publishing, the authors that shaped her as a person and reader, and the need and importance of translating more Guatemalan and Central American authors into English.

José García Escobar (JGE): I feel like we can ask translators the following question a limited number of times before it gets redundant. So, I’d like to take advantage of the moment. What drew you to translation?

Isabella Corletto (IC): I’ve always loved reading and writing, and I grew up bilingual—yet I never really thought much about translation growing up. While I always knew it was a useful skill and was grateful for it, I think I took speaking both fluently for granted, to a certain extent. Probably because most people around me growing up also spoke both languages. I always knew I wanted to write and work with books, but I never considered literary translation as a possible career path.

Learning Italian made me realize how much I love learning and working with multiple languages. For the first time, I had to think about all of the grammatical and idiomatic particularities of a language I was learning, but also of the two I grew up with.