Holding the reader at arm’s length from the medium of its telling (the early image of the narrator attempting to read a newspaper and seeing only splotches of ink comes to mind), The Planets is therefore marked by a certain—productive—dissonance. That is, it strikes a minor note. For this reason, among others, translating the novel was not so much a matter of pulling a text or pushing a reader, but rather one of situating the work at a remove from colloquial English that was comparable to its relation to colloquial Spanish. Because from this vantage point just beyond the familiar we can observe, through the narrator’s dance with the shadow of his lost friend, the fundamental unnaturalness of the natural.

Amazon.com’s new Kindle Fire offers a disappointingly poor user experience. Using the web with the Silk browser is clunky and error-prone. Reading downloaded magazines is not much better. Still, user testing with the Fire did help us understand what the new generation of 7-inch tablets is good for: Are they more like 10-inch tablets (e.g., the iPad) or more like 3.5-inch mobile phones? To give away the conclusion, the answer is: “a bit of both.”

To get an early understanding of a 7-inch tablet’s content, services, and apps usability, we ran with the Kindle Fire.

So, rather than tell you why we chose this book for RTN, I suppose it might be more interesting to talk about why Open Letter chose to publish Chejfec, or since I don’t really remember anymore why, specifically, we signed on Chejfec (so far, we’ve signed him for three books, My Two Worlds, The Planets, and The Dark), at least say a few words about why his work appeals to me, and for that I’m going to start backwards, in an awkward place, the place where you reveal things about an author that make him sound difficult, or not salable, and then move away from that toward something slightly less awkward, to the place where potential readers might be found.

The awkward place, then: Sergio Chejfec is a writers’ writer. When I show Spanish-language writers our catalog, or talk about our new or upcoming books, they inevitably stop me at Chejfec’s name—and by they I mean a handful of writers, and by inevitably I mean each member of this handful; that is, they, inevitably; but, to be fair about my confessional fairness, this small sample is a distinguished one—and say something like, “I adore Chejfec.”

Well, what does that mean then, that people who practice at a high level have this sort admiration for one of their fellows? In this case, I think, it means that he does something with his writing that seems magical to them, magical even to people who are familiar with all the tricks and who are themselves in the process of mastering them. For example, and here I hope we’re starting to move toward the less awkward place, but slowly: My Two Worlds, Chejfec’s most recent book, the representative sample of everything he has learned to this moment in his writing life, is a one-hundred-page novel about a walk in a park.

Now, I’m a fan of the ‘walk in a park’ genre of novels (why shouldn’t the walk in the park be a genre?). My favorite is by Gabriel Josipovici, but Chejfec outdoes even Josipovici in his boldness. Rather than a series of conversations that take place over several days at the same park, as in Moo Pak, My Two Worlds is about a single walk, in a single park, on one day, and it takes place almost entirely in the head of its narrator. There are no other interlocutors, except us.

Well. I did say we’re moving slowly toward less awkward.

But what is magical about Chejfec is what he is able to do with this thinnest of threads. It’s what his narrator inhabits during this brief journey, how he imagines himself into the lives of those around him, the digressive reflections that this walk inspires in him—on writing, inheritance, travel, war, on pedal boats. It’s that he’s able to conjure a compelling narrative out of what is almost an anti-narrative—or anti-novel, as Enrique Vila-Matas calls it in his introduction. That he’s able to create this propulsive forward motion out of stasis, out of sitting on a park bench, and with such style, such beautiful style.

This near-magical ability of his is what drew us to Chejfec. And we hope you’ll go over to to get a feel for what he’s capable of doing.

Call for papers: MTM. Minor Translating Major – Major Translating Minor – Minor Translating Minor
Call Deadline: 31-May-2011

mTm Journal is a new international refereed journal with an Editorial Board comprised of leading scholars in the field of translation studies. mTm aims at starting and promoting a discussion on the particularities of translation from major into minor languages and vice versa, as well as of translation between minor languages. By the term minor language, we mean either a language of limited diffusion or one of intermediate diffusion compared to a major language or language of unlimited diffusion. By the term major language, we mean either a language of unlimited diffusion such as English, or a language that enjoys major status within a state where other, officially recognised minor languages are also spoken (e.g. Finnish as an official language in Finland compared to Swedish).

mTm is published provisionally as one volume per year. Contributions are welcome in one of the following languages: English, German, French, Spanish or Italian. All articles must be accompanied by an abstract of about 200 words in English. The third issue of the journal is scheduled to appear in November 2011. We invite contributions of approximately 6,000-7,000 words by e-mail.

Suggestions can be submitted electronically to the following addresses:

Michael.Cronin@dcu.ie
bq. parianou@dflti.ionio.gr
bq. parianou@gmail.com
bq. kelandrias@dflti.ionio.gr
bq. kelandrias@gmail.com

For more information, please contact Panayotis Kelandrias IIonian University, Corfu, Greece) at kelandrias@dflti.ionio.gr

Announcing the launch of ASYMPTOTE, a new international literary journal dedicated to the art and practice of translation. Founded out of Singapore, with editors scattered across the globe, ASYMPTOTE offers a well-calibrated window on world literature, in all its forms.

Issue Jan 2011 features original essays by Mary Gaitskill and Alain de Botton, fiction by Thomas Bernhard and Yoram Kaniuk, poetry by Aimé Césaire, Tan Chee Lay, and Ko Un, drama by Toshiki Okada, and nonfiction by Masahiko Fujiwara and Pablo Martín Ruiz. In total, ASYMPTOTE presents more than thirty-five authors via some of the finest translators working today, including Clayton Eshleman, Forrest Gander, Soren Gauger, Rika Lesser, Pierre Joris and Howard Goldblatt. Also in ASYMPTOTE’s debut issue are visual poems (one on video from Iceland), critical essays, and reviews of the latest books. All of it is available free online at our aesthetically exciting website, where we post not only the translated texts, but also, when available, the works in their original languages, audio recordings of those originals, and accompanying artwork specially curated for each issue.

Asymptote Issue One is available now, by clicking here:

The National Poetry Series is pleased to announce that Eléna Rivera has been awarded the 2010 Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Ms. Rivera’s project, The Rest of the Voyage, is a translation of the French poet Bernard Noёl, and will be published in November 2011 by Graywolf Press. Acclaimed poet and translator Susan Stewart served as judge for this year’s award, responding with this comment: “Eléna Rivera’s translation of Bernard Noёl’s Le Reste du voyage/The Rest of the Voyage is at once original and remarkably faithful… The succession of poems has a fluency that becomes as mesmerizing as any mode of transport, for Rivera is remarkably adept at varying the lines, landing with emphasis or muting the effect as she follows the speed and light of Noёl’s themes.”

Eléna Rivera is a recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation, a Fundacíon Valparaíso 2009 residency in Mojácar, Spain, and was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico. Her translation of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s Secret of Breath was published by Burning Deck Press 2009. Other translations also can be found in the Chicago Review, Tuesday: An Art Project, Circumference: Poetry in Translation, and Tarpaulin Sky. She is a poet and the author of _Mistakes, Accidents and the Want of Liberty_ (Barque Press, 2006), _Suggestions at Every Turn_ (Seeing Eye Books, 2005), and most recently Remembrance of Things Plastic (LRL e-editions, 2010). She lives in New York City.

Poet, novelist, essayist, historian and art critic Bernard Noël received the Prix National de Poésie in 1992. He was given the poet laureateship as well as the Grand Prix International Guillevic-Ville de Saint-Malo for his oeuvre in 2005. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, novels and essays, among others: Les Plumes d’Éros, Œuvres I (P.O.L., 2010—the first volume of a collected works which P.O.L. is editing and publishing), L’espace du poème, interviews with D. Sampiero  (P.O.L., 2004), Les yeux dans la couleur (P.O.L., 2004), Un trajet en hiver (POL, 2004), Romans d’un regard (P.O.L, 2003), La Peau et les Mots (P.O.L, 2002), Le roman d’Adam et Eve_  (L’Atelier des Brisants, 2001), _La Face de silence (P.O.L, 2002), Le Syndrome de Gramsci (POL, 1994), La Chute des temps (Gallimard, 1993), La rumeur de l’air (Fata Morgana, 1986). In France, his poems are accessible in three pocketbook editions: La Chute des temps and Extraits du corps from Poésie/Gallimard and Le Reste du voyage : Et Autres Poèmes from Points/poésie Seuil.

The National Poetry Series established the Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007. This award is given every other year to a translator who has shown exceptional skill in the translation of contemporary international poetry into English. Previous winners are Marilyn Hacker for King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), and Lawrence Venuti for Edward Hopper (Graywolf Press, 2009).

Before his death in 2008, Mr. Fagles told National Poetry Series Director, Daniel Halpern, “When you honor the act of translation, you stand to make the act of reading what it is:  an enterprise of interaction among different times and different regions of the world itself.”

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of poetry books annually through participating publishers. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation, Stephen Graham, Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation, Glenn & Renee Schaeffer, Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds, and, the Edward T. Cone Foundation.

Graywolf Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the creation and promotion of thoughtful and imaginative contemporary literature essential to a vital and diverse culture. For more information, please visit www.graywolfpress.org.

For more information, please contact The Coordinator, The National Poetry Series, 57 Mountain Avenue, Princeton, NJ, 08540, Phone: 609.430.0999 Fax: 609.430.9933 www.nationalpoetryseries.org

Last week I had the opportunity to travel to Helsinki, Finland at the invitation of the . FILI invited fourteen editors, from Tawain to the UK to the US, to attend a few lectures on the Finnish Publishing scene, meet with individual publishers and agents, and generally soak up the publishing atmosphere in Helsinki.

The first morning was taken up with two lectures, the first by Sakari Laiho, the director of the Finnish Book Publishers Association. The organization was founded in 1858—much of Finnish publishing seems to have gotten its start around this time—and they currently represent 103 publishers. These 103 publishers account for 80% of the commercial books printed in Finland and 90% of the revenue. Some facts and figures from his lecture:

• Books account for €300 million in sales/year
• 10% of that is domestic fiction
• 77% of Finns buy a book in a year
• 16% of Finns buy more than ten books a year
• That 16% accounts for 54% of the books sold
• Two book chains account for 80% of the market
• The average print run is around 2000 copies
• Sofi Oksanen’s sold 160,000(!) copies (There are around five million Finns.)

The most interesting tidbit from this lecture was about ‘sample stock’. In Finland, every publisher sends one copy of each book they publish to every bookstore. The bookstores agree to keep that book in their store for one or two years. If that copy is sold, they agree to order a replacement copy and so on. If it isn’t sold in that time, they return it to the publisher. This is a fantastic, if not universally exportable, idea.

The next lecture was by the director of the (the above photo is of their flagship store in Helsinki), Annamari Arrakoski-Engardt. Academic is the largest book chain in Finland; they have seven shops and account for 10% of the market (I’m not sure how these numbers square with the numbers of the last lecture). Some facts and figures from her lecture:

• Academic Bookshop sold €562 million in books in 2008
• In 2008, 13,419 books were published (I love how exact that number is)
• 10,515 were in Finnish
• 627 were in Swedish (There’s a large minority Swedish population in western Finland, around 5-6% of Finns are Finnish-Swedish)
• 2,277 were in translation (A healthy 17%)
• In 1965, there were 788 book shops
• In 1972, they abolished the fixed price law (each bookstore sells the same book at the same price)
• In 1975, there were 603 book shops
• Today there are 296
• Academic’s flagship store is 3000 square meters and houses 100,000 books
• Academic buys from 10,000 (!!!) publishers worldwide

The above photo is of the ceiling of the Academic Bookshop. It’s a beautiful space. This whole building was purpose-designed for books by the Finnish architect and designer . The shop also has a café, Café Aalto, on the second floor, where I spent hours and hours; their espresso is really good and they have these fantastic sweet croissant things that I could eat by the dozen.

After the lectures were done, each of the editors had scheduled individual meetings with all of the publishers. I ended up having ten meetings altogether, which seemed to give me a pretty good overview of everything that is going on there—well, as much as can be gleaned in three days without the ability to speak or read a single word of Finnish. But I met with the biggest publishers, like and , and newer publishers, like , and heard about the authors they’re excited about; that’s one of the really great things about working for Open Letter, by the way. We do different kinds of books here (My favorite story so far is when a publisher was going to tell us about two books: one, a more commercial author, they thought would sell 10,000 copies in the US, and the other, a more literary author, who was wonderful but who they thought would sell 1,000. Chad and I both said at the same time, “Tell us about the 1000 copy guy.”), and because we do a special kind of book, I feel like we have different kinds of meetings with publishers. There’s a common sort of lament in publishing, and I heard it in Finland too, that publishing used to be different before the money guys got involved. People are usually in publishing for the same reason—it feels like you’re a part of something a little romantic in a world without much magic left in it—but one tends to spend most of one’s time outside of that romantic space, worrying about sales, or having hour-long discussions about books written by wrestlers. We have maybe a bit more access to that romantic space than most (thank you, �����Թ�), and so in our meetings those worries tend to disappear, which, in the end, makes for a much better meeting. I get to say, “Just tell me about who you love.” And that’s a lot of fun.

Anyway, the above photo is from the ‘cash desk’ at Otava. In the old days, authors would come by Otava once a week to pick up the money from their sales. Finland’s only Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, used to come by here, until it was decided that it might be better for his wife to come instead.

On the last day of the trip, we were invited to a luncheon at the . Also at the luncheon were the nine members of a translation symposium on the work of , fourteen translators who were taking part in a beginning translation seminar, and numerous members of the Finnish publishing community, many of whom we had had the privilege to meet. The above photo is of FILI’s director, the lovely, thoughtful, intelligent, and multi-lingual (I think I heard her speak at least five different languages when I was there) Iris Schwanck, who delivered a moving lecture to cap the trip.

Thanks to Iris and everyone at FILI, and everyone in Finland who was kind enough to take the time out of their busy schedules to meet with me, for an absolute gem of a week.

Don’t forget to check out FILI’s literary journal, and, if you’re going to Frankfurt, try to catch up with Iris and the FILI team.

This year, Writers in Translation celebrates its fifth anniversary with the publication of an anthology containing extracts from the 36 books that the programme has supported since its inception. Making the World Legible contains a dazzling array of fiction, non-fiction and poetry from some of the best international writers of our time; distinct and powerful voices from every corner of the globe.

It’s available now, and, best of all, it’s free! Click it in the dreaded PDF format^TM.

Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier wrote in an essay that a Baroque style was the natural mode for Latin American fiction. He claimed that an excess of language was needed to account for an unknown reality. It was not possible to write “a ceiba”, he said, as one wrote “a pine tree”. It was necessary to describe and define the ceiba. Is it necessary to create a Latin American minimalism?

No, it isn’t. I don’t promote minimalism nor maximalism. I think people should write what they want and need to write. I think Carpentier’s observation is beautiful, but it implies a risky idea regarding audiences. Whom do we have to explain ourselves to? I believe to no one. We should not write to let the ceiba be known. We should write because of a personal need, because it’s what we do best.

Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, at the age of 87, his publisher has announced.