reading the world podcast – Three Percent

Reading the World Podcast #9: Martha Collins

E.J. Van Lanen — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 15:28:30 +0000

Erica Mena and special co-host Mike Schorsch talk with translator and poet Martha Collins about translation as political action, and translation of Vietnamese poetry.

Click here for all the past podcasts (which include conversations with Suzanne Jill Levine, Bill Johnston, Esther Allen, Lawrence Venuti, and Susan Harris), and you can also .

Reading the World Podcast #8: Mark Schafer

E.J. Van Lanen — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:46:59 +0000

In this Reading the World podcast, Erica Mena talks to translator Mark Schafer about his two latest translations, Before Saying Any of the Great Words by David Huerta (Copper Canyon, 2009) and The Scale of Maps by Bélen Gopegui (City Lights, 2011).

Click here for all the past podcasts (which include conversations with Suzanne Jill Levine, Bill Johnston, Esther Allen, Lawrence Venuti, and Susan Harris), and you can also .

Reading the World Podcast #7: Fady Joudah

E.J. Van Lanen — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 19:54:30 +0000

This episode of the Reading the World Podcast features a conversation with Fady Joudah, Palestinian-American poet, physician, and translator. He won the Yale Younger Poets Competition in 2007 for his collection The Earth in the Attic (Yale) and was just awarded the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation for his rendition of Mahmoud Darwish’s If I Were Another (FSG).

Click here for all the past podcasts (which include conversations with Suzanne Jill Levine, Bill Johnston, Esther Allen, Lawrence Venuti, and Susan Harris), and you can also .

Reading the World #6: Forrest Gander

E.J. Van Lanen — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:08:20 +0000

Here’s the new episode of the Reading the World Podcast. This one is hosted by Erica Mena (poet, translator, regular RTW podcast host) and Annie Janusch (translator, University of Iowa translation student) and features conversation with Forrest Gander about approaches to translating poetry and his forthcoming translation “Watchword” by Pura López Colomé.

Click here for all the past podcasts (which include conversations with Suzanne Jill Levine, Bill Johnston, Esther Allen, Lawrence Venuti, and Susan Harris), and you can also subscribe through iTunes.

Amazon.com Continues to Give Extremely Helpful Grants to Extremely Good Presses

Chad Post — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:52:22 +0000

Over the past few years, Amazon.com has been awarding grants to including a lot of ones related to literature in translation. Their list of grantees includes Open Letter (for ), PEN America (for the Translation Fund), Words Without Borders, Copper Canyon, Milkweed, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Poets & Writers, Small Press Distribution, etc., etc.

The latest addition to the list is the extremely worthy Archipelago Books:

Archipelago Books is delighted to announce today that it is among a diverse group of nonprofit organizations to receive a $25,000 grant from Amazon.com. Archipelago Books is a Brooklyn, NY-based not-for-profit press dedicated to publishing world literature in translation. The generous grant from Amazon.com will be used to support the forthcoming publication of the novel Stone Upon Stone, written by Nike Prize-winning author Wiesaw Myliwski and translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston. The novel will be released in December of 2010.

Myliwski’s novels and plays, among them Widnokrag [Horizon] (1996) and Traktat o uskaniu fasoli [A Treatise on Shelling Beans] (2006) focus on life in the Polish countryside. Although he has twice received the Nike Award (the Polish equivalent of the Booker Prize), Stone Upon Stone will be Myliwski’s first work published in English translation. Stone Upon Stone has already received much praise in the Polish press. Anna Tatarkiewicz called the novel “the first masterpiece in Slavic literature, perhaps even in European literature, in which the fate of the peasant attains the standing of human fate in all its tragic vastness.” Meanwhile, Krystyna Dabrowska hailed the novel as “A hymn in praise of life. . . . A paean to speech and the art of storytelling.”

So great to see Amazon.com continue this program and their support of very interesting projects and presses.

And since everything’s connected, here’s a link to the most recent episode of the Reading the World podcast which features Bill Johnston talking about the process of translating Stone Upon Stone.

Reading the World Podcast #5: Bill Johnston

E.J. Van Lanen — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:00:00 +0000

This month we talk with translator Bill Johnston about Polish translations, dialects, and his forthcoming translation “Stone upon Stone” by Wieslaw Mysliwski.

Reading the World Podcast #4: Esther Allen

E.J. Van Lanen — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:31:35 +0000

And here’s the new episode of the (iTunes link, or click here to read our posts about the previous episodes).

This month features a discussion among Esther Allen, Erica Mena, and Chad Post on all sorts of translation things, mainly related to Esther’s translation of Jose Manuel Prieto’s Rex. (Which Chad reviewed a while back, and which was a finalist for the 2010 Best Translated Book Award.)

You can find out more about Esther Allen at

Enjoy! And next month we have Polish translator Bill Johnston . . .

Reading the World Podcast #3: Suzanne Jill Levine

E.J. Van Lanen — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:00:00 +0000

A new month and a new Reading the World Podcast, this time with Suzanne Jill Levine, famed translator (of Three Trapped Tigers, of Heartbreak Tango, of dozens of other wonderful books) and author of the very influential The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.

We recorded this back at MLA in December (in a bitterly cold Philadelphia—which seems WEIRD given the fact that it’s frickin’ 70+ degrees in CNY right now), where the focus was translation and Jill talked a lot about the then forthcoming Borges series that she had edited for Penguin Classics. (With the help of the very cool John Siciliano.)

Anyway, the first two volumes of the Borges series are now available: and And galleys for the last three books—On Mysticism, On Writing, and On Argentina—recently arrived in the mail. I’m planning on reviewing these three, starting with “Mysticism,” which has been on my mind a lot of late. (Aided by my recent PKD bender. And obsession with Lost)

We talk a bit about this special Borges series during the podcast, but for more info, check my post from this past December.

Double admission: I rarely, if ever, listen to anything I’m involved in, or read anything written about me. But I just listened to this, and holy shit, it’s even more incredible than I imagined possible. (And I don’t sound like a complete ass! Sweet!)

So, please, please listen, let me know what you think, and if you can, subscribe on iTunes and give us a review. (This goes directly to the iTunes RTW Podcast page.) And pass this along to any and everyone you know. We really want to spread the word about these before starting the second (and third) rounds of taping . . .

Reading the World Podcast #2: Susan Harris

Chad Post — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:40:10 +0000

Well, it’s the beginning of the month and time for another Reading the World Podcast. Erica Mena and I co-host this monthly podcast, which features interviews with authors, translators, scholars, publishers, and other international literature enthusiasts. All of the episodes we’ve taped are pretty awesome—a lot of fun, and very thoughtful and interesting as well. You can listen to the first episode here, although I recommend and giving us a 5-star rating. (Along with my aforementioned dream of seeing someone reading and Open Letter book on the subway, my other goal in life is for this podcast to be more popular than one of the dozens of Twilight and Harry Potter podcasts available on iTunes. Just one. But we can’t do this without your support . . . )

Anyway, this month’s episode features Susan Harris of who came on to talk about WWB’s educational programs and the that she edited along with Ilya Kaminsky. If you know Susan, than you know that this is a pretty funny and exciting conversation . . . and one that needed a bit of editing. Uh, yeah.

RTW Podcast on iTunes

Chad Post — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:15:00 +0000

When we were launching the Reading the World podcast the other day, iTunes was all jacked and couldn’t accept our feed, etc., etc. (It just works! Sometimes. I suspect Apple IT employees were too busy watching TV on their souped-up iPads to bother with something so low-tech like iTunes.) Anyway, it’s up there now, so you can

There’s a logo and everything!