The German Donald Duck, or, The Power of a Translator
This is a couple weeks old now, but star translator Susan Bernofsky wrote an excellent article for the Wall Street Journal about the immense popularity of the German version of the Donald Duck comic book: Comics featuring Donald are available at most German newsstands and the national weekly “Micky Maus”—which ...
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Chocolate by Michal Olszewski [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
The second installment in The Guardian‘s series of short stories from Eastern Europe is ‘Chocolate’ by Michal Olszewski. Olszewski is a young (b. 1977) Polish writer who works in Krakow for the daily paper, Gazeta Wyborcza. The story—which is wonderfully translated by recent “Found in ...
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A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing
The recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has a really interesting piece by Peter J. Dougherty—director of Princeton University Press—on the future of academic publishing. Rather than lament the slow, never-ending death of print, he takes a different approach: And while university presses grapple ...
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Best Harper's Ever & A Giveaway
Well, at least in relation to Open Letter books . . . The new issue of Harper’s has two pieces on Open Letter titles: a long review by Robert Boyers of Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck and a shorter review of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Rupert in Benjamin Moser’s New Books column. (Both pieces ...
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Guardian's Short Story Project
To mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, all this week The Guardian will be running original short stories from a host of Eastern European writers. Up first is East German writer Clemens Meyer with Of Dogs and Horses, a short story from Die Nacht, Die Lichter (published by S. Fisher in German, but is ...
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Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania
Of the three authors featured in the prose poem collection Memory Glyphs, beautifully translated from the Romanian by Adam Sorkin with Mircea Ivanescu, Bogdan Stefanescu and one of the poets (Radu Andriescu), only the latter is still alive. From the translator’s preface we find out that Cristian Popescu died when he was not ...
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Dream of Reason by Rosa Chacel
Going through all my BEA catalogs, Rosa Chacel’s Dream of Reason (University of Nebraska Press, translated from the Spanish by Carol Maier) was one of the books that really caught my eye. And not just because it’s long (like 776-pages long), or because the author is compared to Joyce, Proust, and Woolf ...
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