NY Times on "Woman from Shanghai"
Earlier in the month we posted a piece by Chinese translator—and amazingly nice guy—Wen Huang about Xianhui Yang’s collection of “stories” Woman from Shanghai. And no, those aren’t unnecessary quotes—these pieces are based on real-life events, with added fictional/literary aspects in ...
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Observer, Paper-over-Board, and Oprah
OK, I threw my little fit about this on Facebook, and now that that’s out of my system, I can take a more tempered, critical look at Leon Neyfakh’s article in today’s New York Observer about books without dust jackets. (It’s new! It’s hip! It’s trendy!) September will see the ...
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"Migration" by Mathias Énard
Last week we posted about a new story of Mathias Énard’s that appeared in Le Monde. Énard, as you may already know, is the author of Zone, a critically acclaimed, award-winning 517-page one-sentence novel that we’ll be bringing out next year. Well, in the meantime, superstar translator—and recent NEA ...
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NEA Translation Fellowships (Follow-Up)
I know E.J. posted about this last week, but I wanted to give my own personal shout-out to a few of the recipients of this year’s NEA Translation Fellowships. Complete descriptions of all sixteen funded projects can be found here, but in addition to the projects E.J. mentioned—Charlotte Mandell’s ...
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Yoko Tawada on Ideograms and Dostoevsky
For all its noise, Facebook can still be a great way of keeping up with what your friends are working on. For instance, over the weekend, Susan Bernofsky posted about a Yoko Tawada she recently translated for the “Japan Focus” issue of the“Asian-Pacific Journal.”:http://japanfocus.org/ The article ...
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Bragi Olafsson in the L.A. Times
While I was gone last week, Michael Shaub blogged about Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets for Jacket Copy: With its 99.9% literacy rate (seriously), and a roster of great authors (Halldór Laxness, HallgrÃmur Helgason) that belies the fact that it has a smaller population than Bakersfield, the nation of Iceland could ...
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NEA grants and Open Letter
The National Endowment for the Arts just announced its 2010 winners of the Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects. And there’s a few Open Letter connections this year. First, Charlotte Mandell won a grant to translate Mathias Enard’s Zone (“The narrative unfolds during a train journey from Milan ...
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