Translators from the Turkish
Erdağ Göknar and Aron Aji

read from their work and discuss Turkish literature in translation

Thursday, May 2, 7 PM

free and open to the public

McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street
(between Lafayette and Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012

This event is co-sponsored with McNally Jackson Books and City Lights Publishers and is a Recommended Event of the 2013 PEN World Voices Festival.

Aron Aji is the translator of three books by Bilge Karasu: Death in Troy (City Lights 2002), The Garden of Departed Cats (New Directions 2004), for which he received the National Translation Award in 2004; and A Long Day’s Evening (City Lights 2012), which was supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship. He is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, and a Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.

Erdağ Göknar is the translator of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (Knopf 2001) for which he received the Dublin IMPAC Award together with Pamuk; Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (Harcourt 2002); and A.H. Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace (Archipelago 2011), which was supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship. He is an Assistant Professor of Turkish at Duke University and the author of the newly published Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge 2013). 

Translators from Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian

Ellen Elias-Bursać, Nataša Milas & Jennifer Zoble

reading their work

Thursday, April 18, 7PM

McNally Jackson Books/52 Prince Street, NY NY

Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating novels and non-fiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers for over twenty years, including writing by David Albahari, Daša Drndić, Antun Šoljan, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Karim Zaimović. Her translations of the work of David Albahari have been honored with ALTA’s National Translation Award for Götz and Meyer in 2006 and the AATSEEL Award for Words Are Something Else in 1998. She has also recently received an NEA translation grant and a Banff International Literary Centre fellowship.

She lived in Zagreb from 1974 until 1990, and has a Ph.D. in Translation Studies/Philology at Zagreb University. She has been a professor at Harvard and Tufts, teaching languages, history, and translation practice and theory. She also spent six years at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague as a translator/reviser in the English Translation Unit of the Conference and Language Services Section. She is the co-author of an award-winning textbook for the study of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian with Ronelle Alexander, and she is currently working on a book project about translation and interpreting at the Tribunal.

Nataša Milas is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is a scholar of Russian and Balkan literature and film, translator of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian literature, and an editor. Her translation of Muharem Bazdulj’s novel Transit, Comet, Eclipse is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Nataša is currently guest editing a special Bosnian issue of the journal Absinthe: New European Writing, forthcoming in the Fall 2013. She also served as one of the co-editors for Bosnian Issue of Kino Kultura (August 2012). Nataša’s most recent writing has appeared in In Contrast: Croatian Film Today, Kino Kultura, and Slavic and East European Journal.

Jennifer H. Zoble is a founding co-editor of InTranslation, a project of The Brooklyn Rail, and she recently joined the Liberal Studies faculty of NYU. She earned MFAs in literary translation and nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and a master’s in teaching from the New School. Her translations from Cipele za dodjelu Oskara (in English translation: Shoes for Oscar Night), a collection of short stories by Bosnian author Melina Kamerić, have appeared or are forthcoming in Anomalous, Ozone Park, Washington Square, and The Iowa Review.

The Bridge, Wave Books, and Poets House present

Graham Foust & Samuel Frederick

on their joint translation of the poetry of Ernst Meister

Tuesday, March 19, 7PM

@ Poets House, Kray Hall

10 River Terrace/http://www.poetshouse.org/

$10 general admission, $7 for student & seniors, free for Poets House members

Graham Foust is the author of five books of poems, including Necessary Stranger (a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in 2007) and To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (forthcoming from Flood Editions in 2013).  His poems, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The Nation, Conjunctions, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Boston Review, American Letters and Commentary, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Verse, and Fence.  A graduate of Beloit College, George Mason University, and the Poetics Program at the University of Buffalo, he works at the University of Denver.

Samuel Frederick is an assistant professor of German at Penn State. He is the author of one book, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern University Press), and the co-editor of A Companion to Robert Walser, currently in preparation. With Graham Foust he has translated three volumes of Ernst Meister’s verse, the first of which, In Time’s Rift, was published by Wave Books in 2012, and the second of which will be published by Wave Books next year.

Ernst Meister (1911-1979) was born in Hagen, Germany, and studied first theology, then literature, art history, and philosophy at verious German universities. After the publication of his first book in 1932, Meister wrote “for the drawer” while the National Socialists were in power, and it was not until the 1950s that he began publishing again. During the prolific last third of his life, he produced more than sixteen volumes of verse as well as numerous other literary and visual works. Often compared to Paul Celan because of the brevity and difficulty of his poems, Meister tends toward a more abstract existentialism that renders his work both intensely emotional and inimitably strange. Having written outside the dominant literary circles of his time, he remains relatively unknown, though he was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize, having been informed of the honor just days before his death.

For more information about In Time’s Rift or Wave Books, please go to: http://www.wavepoetry.com/

Translators from Japanese

Stephen Snyder & Allison Markin Powell

Reading their translations of the work of Yoko Ogawa, Hiromi Kawakami, and more

Thursday, February 21, 7PM

McNally Jackson Books/ 52 Prince Street, NY NY

Stephen Snyder is Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. His most recent translation is Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (Picador, January 2013). He has translated works by Ogawa, Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Kunio Tsuji’s Azuchi Okanki (The Signore) won the 1990 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission translation prize. His translation of Natsuo Kirino’s Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004. His translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011. He is the author of Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafu and co-editor of Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, and he is currently working on a study of publishing practices in Japan and the United States and their effects on the globalization of Japanese literature.

Johnny Lorenz
Idra Novey

together with New Directions publisher

Barbara Epler

 read & discuss their translations of Brazilian author

Clarice Lispector

Wednesday, 23 January, 2013 7:00 PM
The Center for Fiction
17 E. 47th Street New York, NY 10017
(btw Grand Central & Lexington/53rd)

Please RSVP
212-755-6710 or
events@centerforfiction.org

In 2012, New Directions published five books by the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. One of the most exciting literary publishing events of the year, the project includes four books edited by Benjamin Moser, author of the recent Lispector biography Why This World: Near to the Wild Heart (translated by Alison Entrekin); A Breath of Life (translated for the first time by Johnny Lorenz); Agua Viva (translated by Stephan Tobler); and The Passion According to G.H. (translated by Idra Novey). These were preceded by a new translation by Moser of Lispector’s Hour of the Star. The Bridge Series is excited to present two of the project’s New York-based translators, Johnny Lorenz and Idra Novey, who will read from their work and discuss the project together with New Directions publisher Barbara Epler.

Johnny Lorenz received his doctorate in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is an associate professor at Montclair State. He has published poetry in Rattapallax, Massachusetts Review and Luso-American Literature, and scholarly articles in Interventions, Brasil/Brazil and Luso-Brazilian Review. Recipient of a 2003 Fulbright Scholarship to translate Brazilian poetry, he has published translations in Metamorphoses, Washington Square, Bomb, and Granta’s The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists. His translation of Clarice Lispector’s novel A Breath of Life was published in 2012 by New Directions.

Idra Novey is the author of Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, and The Next Country. Her poetry has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, in Poetry Magazine, Slate, and elsewhere.  Her most recent translation is Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. She currently teaches at NYU and in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Barbara Epler grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and joined New Directions as an editorial assistant after graduating from college in 1984. She became Editor in Chief in 1995 and in 2008 she was named Publisher and in 2011 the President.

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) was a Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was an infant when her family fled for Rio de Janeiro. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel Near to the Wild Heart and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. She completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.

The Bridge Series is the first independent reading and discussion series in New York City devoted to literary translation. It aims to promote public awareness about the art of translation by serving as a regular venue for readings, by both well-established and emerging translators and authors, and discussions on a range of issues related to this important literary art and practice. To receive regular updates, email “subscribe” to: thebridgeseries@gmail.com.

The Center for Fiction, founded in 1820 as the Mercantile Library, is the only organization in the United States devoted solely to the vital art of fiction. The mission of The Center for Fiction is to encourage people to read and value fiction and to support and celebrate its creation and enjoyment. With all our resources, including our exceptional book collection, our beautiful reading room, our expanding website, and our ever-growing array of creative programs, we seek to serve the reading public, to build a larger audience for fiction, and to create a place where readers and writers can share their passion for literature. For more information and for a schedule of events, visit http://www.centerforfiction.org.

Translators from Spanish

Suzanne Jill Levine & Stephen Kessler

On Borges, translation as subversion, and outsider writers of all stripes

Monday, November 26, 7pm

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street (between Lafayette & Mulberry)

New York, NY  10012

Suzanne Jill Levine has received many honors for her translations of Latin American literature, most recently the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation, for The Lizard’s Tale, by José Donoso. She has long been the translator for the work of Manuel Puig and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and she was the general editor for the Penguin Classics Borges series, including the volumes Poems of the Night, The Sonnets, On Writing, On Argentina, and On Mysticism. She’s also the author of a biography of Puig, Manuel Puig and The Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions, a book on translating Latin American fiction, The Subversive Scribe, and a new chapbook, Reckoning. She is the founding editor of Translation Studies Journal at UCSB. More information can be found at her website: http://www.complit.ucsb.edu/projects/translationstudies/Jills_Site/Welcome.html

Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator, and editor. His version of Desolation of the Chimera by Luis Cernuda was selected by Edith Grossman for the 2010 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets. His other recent books include The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters (essays), The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (as editor and principal translator), The Mental Traveler (novel), and Burning Daylight (poems). He is also the editor of the quarterly literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review. His translation of Poems of Consummation by 1977 Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre will be published in early 2013 by Black Widow Press. More about Stephen Kessler is available on his website, www.stephenkessler.com.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

The NYC launch of the new issue of Two Lines

Passageways

with readings by

Erica Mena

Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren

Naja Marie Aidt

Wednesday, October 24, 7PM

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street (between Lafayette & Mulberry)

New York, NY  10012

wine & cheese to follow

Erica Mena is a poet, translator, and letterpress printer. Her work has appeared in Vanitas, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Words Without Borders, Two Lines, and Asymptote, among others. She is the founding editor of Anomalous Press, and poetry reviews editor for The Quarterly Conversation. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and is an MFA candidate in poetry at Brown University. For “Passageways,” she has translated, from Spanish, two poems by Puerto Rican poet Rafael Acevedo.

Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren is a writer, translator, and visual artist, and the blog editor for Words without Borders. Her translations from Brazilian Portuguese have appeared in Guernica, Two Lines, and Asymptote. She holds a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Michigan and is currently working towards her MFA degree in poetry and literary translation at Columbia University. “Passageways” features her translations of three poems by Brazilian poet Flávio de Araújo.

Naja Marie Aidt is the author of ten books of poetry and three collections of short stories, including the acclaimed Baboon. She’s received the Nordic Council Literature Prize, among other honors. In the United States, her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, Best European Fiction 2010, Copenhagen Noir, Zen Monster, Ecotone, and International Poetry. She is represented in “Passageways” by a short story, “Blackcurrant,” translated from Danish by Denise Newman.

About “Passageways”

“Passageways” is the nineteenth volume of Two Lines, an anthology put out yearly by the Center for the Art of Translation. Edited by award-winning translator Daniel Hahn and lauded poet Camille Dungy, it offers new, never-before-in-English writing from a dozen languages and more than 15 countries, and features international powerhouses—Quim Monzo, Fanny Rubio, Yves Bonnefoy, and Naja Marie Aidt—alongside work from emerging talents. Translators with work in the volume include Forrest Gander, Lydia Davis, Peter Bush, Julia Sherwood, Alexis Levitin, Alison Entrekin, Stefan Tobler, Margaret Jull Costa, and Brenda Hillman, among many others.

“Passageways” is capped off by the latest, freshest new fiction and poetry from that literary giant known as Brazil. Handpicked by the leading Portuguese translators, this parade of all-stars reveals the breathtaking writing coming out of one of South America’s most dynamic scenes.

For more information about the issue, go to www.catranslation.org. Copies are available for sale on the Center’s website and also through the University of Washington Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at independent bookstores nationwide.