Anyway, MLA was a pretty interesting experience. This was the first time Open Letter has displayed at MLA (or any conference for that matter), and the one thing I noticed was that women tended to avoid our booth like the plague. We shared the booth with (awesome), and it must’ve been our discussions about football (Seattle?), or something. Regardless, it was an interesting show, and hopefully we’ll be back next year with a larger reception and even more books. (FYI: Next year’s MLA Presidential Theme is “Language, Literature, Learning.” Which seems, at first glance, to a quasi-outsider, to be, well, obvious, but there you are.)

In addition to all the presentations, panels, cocktail receptions, and job interviews, the MLA also includes a number of book awards, including the which is awarded each even-numbered year. (I know, but it’s for the works from 2010, and since the MLA used to take place between Christmas and New Year’s Day, this made a bit more sense.)

This year’s award went to Breon Mitchell for his retranslation of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Here’s what the selection committee had to say:

On virtually every page of Breon Mitchell’s new translation of The Tin Drum, the reader finds brilliant solutions to vexing problems. This meticulous work, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of Günter Grass’s classic novel, accomplishes precisely what one hopes for in a retranslation: it brings us closer to both source and target languages. Mitchell makes us aware that even good work, such as Ralph Manheim’s respected earlier translation, bears improvement, as great consistency, coherence, and tempo are achieved throughout the entire volume in rendering its obsessive drumming theme. The translator’s afterword, where Mitchell explains carefully and concisely all the “tools of the trade” available to twenty-first-century translators, performs an enormous contribution to the field by lifting the curtain on the translator’s craft and making clear to readers the huge challenges at hand.

Congrats, Breon! I’ve heard him speak about this translation a couple of time (most recently at the Wolff Symposium, which include this about his career in translation and work on The Tin Drum.)

It’s also worth nothing that honorable mention went to Lawrence Venuti for his translation of Edward Hopper by Ernest Farrés. Again, the committee:

Lawrence Venuti, one of our foremost translation theorists, has applied his principles of pragmatic and ethical translation to the contemporary Catalan poetry of Edward Hopper with superb results. Venuti’s translation of Ernest Farrés’s volume, written in a source language whose literature is little known in the English-speaking world, constitutes a beautiful triangulation of cultures and media. We read with fascination as the North American translator captures the Catalan poet’s meditations on the works of an iconic, popular North American painter. Venuti has not only accurately followed Farrés’s shifting styles through the progression of poems but also sought out some of Hopper’s own idiosyncratic vocabulary through excavation of the painter’s correspondence and diaries. This brilliant choice on Venuti’s part, explained in the volume’s introduction and demonstrated in the endnotes, results in an original translation strategy that redefines traditional fidelity to the source text.

Congrats, Larry! Ironically, at the last MLA, Erica Mena and I interviewed Venuti about his translation of Edward Hopper for what became the very first Reading the World Podcast. Venuti is always interesting, and he’s totally on in this podcast—definitely worth listening to.

Well, at long last, we’re ready to release the first episode, featuring Lawrence Venuti, translator, theorist, and scholar. He talked with us about Edward Hopper, a collection of poems by Catalan author Ernest Farres that Venuti translated and that was published by Graywolf earlier this year.

In contrast to some of the upcoming podcasts—which include conversations with Susan Harris, Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Bill Johnston—this one’s a bit on the long side, but well worth it. Venuti is fascinating to listen to, and the way he breaks down his translation—and Farres’s project as a whole—is spectacular.

Anyway, you can listen to the podcast via this post, or by downloading it through iTunes (assuming that iTunes will start working again—it was having “technical difficulties” yesterday). And stay tuned—we’ll release episode #2 at the beginning of March . . .

The prize—which was awarded for the first time last year—is given each year to a translation who has “shown exceptional skill in translating a book of contemporary poetry into English.”

Venuti is an incredible force in the world of translation and translation studies. He translated from Italian, French, and Catalan and is also the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. He’s been awarded a number of grants and fellowships, including ones from the NEA, NEH, and PEN, and in 2007 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently teaches at Temple University.

I’ve read some of the poems from Edward Hopper in Two Lines, Calque, and and it promises to be an interesting collection. (It’s coming out next year from Graywolf Press.) Basically, each poem is named after and based on an Edward Hopper painting. Based on that, it’s sort of surprising that Edward Hopper has been “adapted to the stage in both Catalan and Spanish.” In addition to writing poetry, Farres is also an editor for the cultural supplement of La Vanguardia.