Migration, Diaspora, Contexts

The second event of a new series featuring translators who are first or second generation immigrants or who identify as part of a diaspora, this installment features: Amy Sara Carroll, one of the collaborators in the Transborder Immigrant Tool; Eiko Otake, whose work as a movement artist and translator has addressed the legacy of the atomic bomb in Japan; and Dagmawi Woubshet, who has translated (from Amharic) the letters of AIDS orphans to their deceased parents.

Thursday, May 4, 6:30PM
McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street
This event is part of the PEN World Voices Festival
More info: https://worldvoices.pen.org/session/kitchen-table-translation-migration-diaspora-contexts/

Moderator:
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu Kaza is a writer, educator, translator and artist based in New York City. Her translations from Telugu include works by contemporary feminist writers Volga and Vimala. She edited the Spring 2017 issue of Aster(ix) entitled “Kitchen Table Translation: Diaspora, Migration, Exchange.”

Panelists:
Amy Sara Carroll is the author of SECESSION (2012), FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography(2013), and REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era (forthcoming). Since 2008, she also has been a member of the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Recently, she was named a 2017-2018 Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow.

Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Otake is a New York-based movement artist, performer, and choreographer who for more than forty years worked as Eiko & Koma. Since 2014, she has directed and performed a solo project, A Body in Places, and, in collaboration with photographer-historian William Johnston, a series of exhibitions showing her dancing in ruined Fukushima, and elsewhere. She teaches an interdisciplinary course about the Atomic Bombings and Nuclear disasters at Wesleyan University and Colorado College.

Dagmawi Woubshet is an associate professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS, and co-editor of Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture, a special issue of Callaloo. His writings have appeared in publications including Transition, The Atlantic, and African Lives: An Anthology of Memoirs and Autobiographies.

Presented in grateful partnership with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Aster(ix) Journal.

Diaspora, Migration and Translation: Mona Kareem, Zohra Saed, Genya Turovskaya

The first event of a 3-part series featuring translators who are first or second generation immigrants or who identify as part of a diaspora, this installment features: Mona Kareem, who works on subalternity in the Arab feminist novel and has translated Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh and Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik (into Arabic); Kiev-born Genya Turovskaya, who has translated Russian poets Aleksandr Skidan, Elena Fanailova, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; and Zohra Saed, the co-editor of one of the first Afghan American literary anthologies and a translator of early 20th-century Turkestani poetry.

Wednesday, November 30, 7PM
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
RSVP here: http://aaww.org/curation/bridge-diaspora-migration-translation/

Moderator:
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu Kaza is a writer, educator, translator and artist based in New York City. Her translations from Telugu include works by contemporary feminist writers Volga and Vimala. She is editing the Spring 2017 issue of Aster(ix) entitled “Kitchen Table Translation: Diaspora, Migration, Exchange.”

Panelists:
Mona Kareem is a poet, translator, and journalist based in New York. She is the author of three poetry collections, some of which were translated into French, English, Spanish, Dutch, German, Farsi, Italian and Kurdish. Mona is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Literature program at Binghamton University. Her dissertation explores issues of subalternity in the Arab feminist novel. She teaches writing classes while freelancing for a number of Arabic publications.

Zohra Saed is a co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press). Her essays on the Central Asian diaspora and their food history have appeared in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (NYU Press), and in The Asian American Literary Review. Mispelled Cities/Falsch geschriebene Stadte: Sahar Muradi and Zohra Saed, a bilingual English/German chapbook, was published for documenta13. She is the co-founder and editor of Brooklyn Upset Press. As part of her work on Central Asian literatures, she is translating Turkestani poems from early 20th century.

Genya Turovskaya is a poet, translator, and psychotherapist. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City. She is the author of the chapbooks Calendar (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Tides (Octopus Books), New Year’s Day (Octopus Books), and Dear Jenny (Supermachine). Her original poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, Octopus, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Asymptote, PEN Poetry, Fence, and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling Presse. She is the co-translator (with Stephanie Sandler) of Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse) which won the University of Rochester’s Three Percent 2010 award for Best Translated Book of Poetry. She is also a co-translator of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan). She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Gregory Rabassa (1922-2016)

A Celebration

The Bridge is proud to co-present a Reading & Conversation honoring the great Gregory Rabassa

Friday, October 21, 6PM
Rooms 9204-9206
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
Free/Reception to follow
More info available here

Few figures have marked the English-language literature of our time as deeply as did Gregory Rabassa. Translator of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1966), Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark (1967), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral (1974), Luis Rafael Sánchez’s Macho Camacho’s Beat (1980), Luisa Valenzuela’s The Lizard’s Tail (1983), José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (2005), and more than fifty other works from Spanish and Portuguese—and himself the author of a number of books, including his prize-winning memoir If This Be Treason (2005)— Rabassa was a beloved professor and colleague at City University of New York, where he taught at the Graduate Center and Queens College for more than forty years.

Among the numerous honors Rabassa received were the National Book Award in Translation (1967), the Gregory Kolovakos Award for career achievement from PEN American Center (2001), the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts (2006), and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir (2006). “We Spanish-language writers, especially of my generation, owe him enormous gratitude for the way he helped us plant roots in the English-speaking world,” wrote Mario Vargas Llosa earlier this year.

Speakers include Edith Grossman, Peter Constantine, Earl Fitz, Ezra Fitz, Esther Allen, Ilan Stavans, Mauricio Font, Elizabeth Lowe, Harry Morales, Daniel Shapiro, Nora Glickman, Declan Spring, Ammiel Alcalay, Stanley Barkan, Catarina Cordeiro, David Draper Clark, and Rabassa’s daughters Clara Rabassa and Kate Rabassa Wallen.

In addition, the 14 recipients of the 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants, who carry forward the tradition Rabassa did so much to consolidate, will be announced and honored.

This event is presented as part of Translation, an interdisciplinary research group that investigates how translation might be understood as a process of transformation that deepens engagement with places, people, cultures, and languages. The group is supported by the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.

Co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, the Translation Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, CUNY Grad Center; the MFA in Creative Writing and Translation, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Queens College, CUNY; PEN America; Words Without Borders; Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (published by Routledge in association with The City College of New York, CUNY); the Instituto Cervantes of New York; and Julianne and Earl E. Fitz.

the fourth event in the spring 2016 series
co-presented by the PEN America Translation Committee

How do you publicize and sell a book in translation? What role do booksellers and independent bookstores play? Is it true readers are wary about picking up foreign writers, or is this just a myth? Does an “it book”, like those by Ferrante or Knausgaard, actually sell well? A panel of expert booksellers and publicists–Miriam Bridenne (Albertine), Kate Garber (192 Books), Hal Hlavinka (Community Bookstore), and Becky Kraemer (Cursive Comms)–discuss these and other questions in the fourth and final event of the Business of Literary Translation series.

Tuesday, May 17, 7PM
The Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street, between 5th and Madison Aves
http://centerforfiction.org
The event is free but please RSVP here.

Moderator:
Hal Hlavinka is the event coordinator at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, where he’s hosted authors and translators like Álvaro Enrigue, Natasha Wimmer, Orhan Pamuk, and Luc Sante. His work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Music & Literature, The Quarterly Conversation, and Golden Handcuffs Review.

Panelists:
After almost two decades in publishing, including working as a publicist for foreign fiction at Actes Sud and a few round trips between Paris and New York, Miriam Bridenne decided to settle down at Albertine Books — a reading room and a bookstore dedicated to books in French and translated from the French — to do what she enjoys most: recommending books she loves. Somehow this also includes taking bizarre pictures for Albertine’s social media outlets.

Kate Garber has worked in a variety of bookstore positions for nearly a decade, and is currently the book buyer at 192 Books in Chelsea (Manhattan). She is also a judge for this year’s Best Translated Book Award in fiction.

Becky Kraemer founded Cursive Communications & Marketing after more than ten years working in trade publishing in positions at Simon & Schuster, Hyperion, and Melville House. Her clients have included British publisher Oneworld Publications and Bloomberg Businessweek. Follow Becky on Twitter at @beckykraemer and online at www.cursivecomms.com.

This is a co-presentation by the Bridge and the PEN America Translation Committee. 

the third event in the spring 2016 series
co-presented by the PEN America Translation Committee

Copyright, royalties, fees, recognition, editorial control: Are literary translators getting better contracts than they used to? What are the “best practices”? What influence do authors’ agents have on translators’ contracts? How can translators get help negotiating a contract? Translator Shelley Frisch, publisher Juliet Grames (Soho Press), and agent Jacqueline Ko (The Wylie Agency) join translator Alex Zucker for a discussion of literary translation contracts.

Tuesday, April 19, 7PM
The Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street, between 5th and Madison Aves
http://centerforfiction.org
The event is free but please RSVP here.

Moderator:
Alex Zucker, cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee, has three translations of Czech authors out in 2016: Tomáš Zmeškal’s Love Letter in Cuneiform (Margellos World Republic of Letters), Josef Jedlička’s Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life (Karolinum Press), and Magdaléna Platzová’s The Attempt (Bellevue Literary Press).

Panelists:
Shelley Frisch’s translations from the German include biographies of Nietzsche, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Kafka, for which she was awarded a Modern Language Association Translation Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. Her latest, a dual biography of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, was named a finalist for the NBCC Awards.

Juliet Grames is Associate Publisher at Soho Press, where she also acquires and edits literary fiction and the Soho Crime international crime fiction imprint.

Jacqueline Ko is an agent at the Wylie Agency, representing literary fiction and nonfiction, including work in translation. The Wylie Agency has offices in New York and London, and represents more than 900 clients internationally.

Come back to the Center for Fiction every third Tuesday of the month for the rest of the spring 2016 series. The last event in the series is on bookselling (May 17), and will feature a lively and candid discussion with booksellers, publicists, events organizers, and, as always, translators.

This is a co-presentation by the Bridge and the PEN America Translation Committee. 

the second event in the spring 2016 series
co-presented by the PEN America Translation Committee

How do you edit a translation? What do you need to know, or not know? How do you deal sensitively and appropriately with a text written in another language, and the writer, translator, foreign editor, and other parties who might have had a hand in creating it? Four experienced editors—Lexy Bloom, Jeremy Davies, Sal Robinson, and Declan Spring—discuss the pleasures and puzzles of working on translations, from dealing with cultural differences to handling “translationese.”

Tuesday, March 15, 7PM
The Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street, between 5th and Madison Aves
http://centerforfiction.org
The event is free but please RSVP here.

Moderator:
Sal Robinson has been an editor for international literature at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Melville House. With Bill Martin and Monika Zaleska, she runs the Bridge.

Panelists:
Lexy Bloom is Senior Editor at Vintage and Anchor Books and Senior Culinary Editor at Alfred A. Knopf, imprints of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Penguin Random House, Inc. She edits both fiction and nonfiction, focusing on works in translation and voices from around the world; as well as food writing and cookbooks. She has edited the work of award-winning and bestselling authors such as Haruki Murakami, Deb Perelman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Madhur Jaffrey, Mia Alvar, Alex Prud’homme, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and many others for Knopf, Pantheon and Vintage/Anchor. She has overseen the publications of the works of Irène Némirovsky, author of Suite Française, as well as the paperback editions of writers such as Claire Messud, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan, Hanya Yanagihara, and Abraham Verghese.

Jeremy M. Davies was for some years Senior Editor at Dalkey Archive Press. He is the author of two novels, Rose Alley (2009) and Fancy (2015), as well as The Knack of Doing, a collection of short fiction just out this month from David R. Godine.

Declan Spring is Vice President and Senior Editor at New Directions, where he has been working since 1991. He has edited books by Jorge Luis Borges, Horacio Castellanos-Moya, Inger Christensen, H.D., Thalia Field, Forrest Gander, Gustaw Herling, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Paul West.

Come back to the Center for Fiction every third Tuesday of the month for the rest of the spring 2016 series. Events to follow will be dedicated to contracts (April 19) and bookselling (May 17), and will feature lively and candid discussions with translators, editors, publishers, and booksellers.

This is a co-presentation by the Bridge and the PEN America Translation Committee.

Breaking In

the first event in the spring 2016 series
“The Business of Literary Translation”
co-presented by the PEN America Translation Committee

The front door or the back window? 5 emerging and seasoned translators talk about how they got into the “house” of literary translation. 

Does the existence of MFA programs make it easier than it used to be? How important is it to have mentors? And is it possible to make a living as a literary translator? Allison Markin Powell, Allison M. Charette, Heather Cleary, Katrine Øgaard Jensen, and Mary Ann Newman will discuss these and other subjects.

Tuesday, February 16, 7PM
The Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street, between 5th and Madison Aves
http://centerforfiction.org
The event is free but please RSVP here.

Moderator:
Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant in New York City. She has worked in the editorial departments of American and Japanese book and magazine publishing, and has translated works by Osamu Dazai, Hiromi Kawakami, and Fuminori Nakamura, among others. Her translation of Kawakami’s The Briefcase was nominated for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize, and the UK edition (Strange Weather in Tokyo) was nominated for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Powell currently serves as co-chair of PEN America’s Translation Committee, and she maintains the database http://www.japaneseliteratureinenglish.com.

Panelists:
Allison M. Charette translates literature from French into English. She received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Naivo’s Beyond the Rice Fields, the first novel to be translated from Madagascar, forthcoming from Restless Books in 2017. She founded the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network in America (ELTNA.org), a networking and support group for early-career translators. Allison has published two book-length translations, in addition to short translated fiction that has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Other Stories, InTranslation, the SAND Journal, and others. Find her online at charettetranslations.com.

Heather Cleary’s translations and literary criticism have appeared in Two Lines, A Public Space, The Quarterly Conversation and Words Without Borders, among other publications. Her book-length translations include Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (finalist, Best Translated Book Award 2013) and The Dark (nominee, ALTA’s National Translation Award 2014) and Poems to Read on a Streetcar, a selection of Girondo’s poetry published by New Directions (recipient, PEN and Programa SUR translation grants). She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from NYU and a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University. She was a judge of the 2015 PEN Translation Prize, and is currently on the jury of the 2016 BTBA. In 2012 she co-founded the Buenos Aires Review—a digital, bilingual magazine of literature and culture.

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a journalist, writer, and translator from the Danish.  She previously served as editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and as blog editor at Asymptote.  A two-time Thanks To Scandinavia scholar, she now edits the Words without Borders blog while serving as poetry judge for the Best Translated Book Award. Her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s poetry collection Third-Millennium Heart is forthcoming from Broken Dimanche Press in 2016. Katrine teaches fiction in Columbia University’s undergraduate creative writing program.

Mary Ann Newman is the Director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan culture in the U.S. She is a translator, editor, and occasional writer on Catalan culture. She has translated a novel and a short story collection by Quim Monzó, essays by Xavier Rubert de Ventós, and a collection of poems by Josep Carner. Her latest translation is Private Life, a Catalan classic by Josep Maria de Sagarra, published by Archipelago Books.

Come back to the Center for Fiction every third Tuesday of the month, February through May, for the rest of the series. Events to follow will be dedicated to editing (March 15), contracts (April 19), and bookselling (May 17), and will feature lively and candid discussions with translators, editors, publishers, and booksellers.

This is a co-presentation by the Bridge and the PEN America Translation Committee.

Lisa Hayden and Eugene Vodolazkin

discussing the translation of

the story of a healer and holy fool, and his travels in medieval Europe

Tuesday, December 8, 7PM
BookCourt, http://bookcourt.com
163 Court Street

What people are saying:

“In Laurus, Vodolazkin aims directly at the heart of the Russian religious experience and perhaps even at that maddeningly elusive concept that is cherished to the point of cliché: the Russian soul.”  –Ken Kalfus, The New Yorker

“Kaleidoscopic in his language and reach, Vodolazkin takes us on a journey of discovery and absolution, threaded together through the various, often mystical lives of Arseny as a healer, husband, holy fool, pilgrim and hermit… The pages, dotted with names of anachronistic herbs and forgotten family lineages – not to mention Vodolazkin’s complex interplay between modern and medieval Russian – do not make for a simple or smooth translation. Lisa Hayden should be commended for her effort, for she achieves just that. Subtly, she blends the familiar and unfamiliar, trusting the organic process through which the book unfolds and allowing the language to speak for itself…” –Beau Lowenstern, Asymptote 

Participants:

Eugene Vodolazkin was born in Kiev and has worked in the department of Old Russian Literature at Pushkin House since 1990. He is an expert in medieval history and folklore and has numerous academic books and articles to his name. Laurus won both the National Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Book Award on its original publication in 2012. His debut novel, Solovyov and Larionov, is forthcoming from Oneworld in 2016. He lives with his family in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Lisa Hayden is a literary translator who lives in Scarborough, Maine. Her other translations from the Russian include Vladislav Otroshenko’s Addendum to a Photo Album and Marina Stepnova’s The Women of Lazarus. Her website, Lizok’s Bookshelf, focuses on contemporary Russian fiction. She received her MA in Russian literature at the University of Pennsylvania and lived in Moscow during 1992-1998.

This is a co-presentation by the Bridge and the PEN Translation Committee, PEN American Center. With special thanks to Becky Kraemer of Cursive Communications & Marketing.

Aaron Lacayo: On Translating Gordon Matta-Clark’s Art Cards

Wednesday, November 4th, 7PM

part of McNally Jackson Live, with Heidi Julavits, Sadie Stein, Alice Gregory, Caleb Crain, Hermione Hoby, Ariel Schrag, Anna Clyne, and Sarah Thomas

McNally Jackson Books, http://www.mcnallyjackson.com
52 Prince Street (btwn Lafayette and Mulberry)

Over the course of the 1970s, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark composed short, enigmatic, and wordplay-full notes on over a hundred index cards. As part of an evening dedicated to “private writing,” Aarón Lacayo will discuss how he translated the cards into Spanish for the first collection of them ever to appear in print.

Aarón Lacayo is a writer, translator and a PhD candidate in the Spanish & Portuguese Department at Rutgers University. His Spanish translation of Gordon Matta-Clark’s conceptual poetry, (Art Cards / Fichas de Arte), was published by Sangría (Santiago de Chile, 2013). He has written about translation, poetry and cinema in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Carte Italiane and La Fusta. His literary interests include contemporary U.S., Latin American, and Italian literature. His English translation of Claudia Hernández’s novella, La han despedido de nuevo (They have fired her again), will come out later this year.

With thanks to Sangría Editora: http://www.sangriaeditora.com/
This is a co-presentation by the Bridge and the PEN Translation Committee, PEN American Center.

On Translating Nonfiction:
Shelley Frisch & Catherine Porter

Thursday, October 29, 6:30PM

McNally Jackson Books, http://www.mcnallyjackson.com
52 Prince Street (btwn Lafayette and Mulberry)

Shelley Frisch taught at Columbia University while serving as Executive Editor of The Germanic Review, then chaired the Haverford/Bryn Mawr Bi-College German Department before turning to translation full-time in the 1990s. She has published widely on German literature, film, cabaret, and the political and linguistic dimensions of exile, as well as on translation; her book on the origin of language theories, The Lure of the Linguistic, was published in 2004. Her many translations from the German include biographies of Nietzsche, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Kafka, for which she was awarded a Modern Language Association Translation Prize and Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.  Her translation of Karin Wieland’s Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives will be published by Liveright/Norton this fall, and she is completing her translation of the final volume of Reiner Stach’s Kafka biography trilogy, Kafka: The Early Years, to be published by Princeton University Press. The previous volumes, Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight, have garnered numerous awards, and were chosen by the TLS and The Guardian as a Best Book of the Year; The Years of Insight was also longlisted for the 2014 PEN Translation Award. Shelley Frisch co-directs international translation workshops in Switzerland, Germany, and Ireland with Karen Noelle, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Catherine Porter received her doctorate in French literature from Yale University in 1972. She is a Visiting Professor at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and Professor of French Emerita at the State University of New York College at Cortland, where she taught French at all levels and chaired the Department of International Communications and Culture for a total of ten years. She served as president of the Modern Language Association in 2009, introducing translation as the theme of the annual convention that year. She has authored a number of essays on foreign language pedagogy as well as on translation, and she served as co-editor, with Sandra Bermann, of Wiley-Blackwell‘s Companion to Translation Studies, published in 2014. A freelance translator in the humanities and the social sciences since the mid-1970s, Porter has published numerous essays and more than three dozen books in translation from the French, from Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language (Johns Hopkins, 1979) to Antoinette Fouque’s There Are 2 Sexes (Columbia, 2015). She is currently working, with Cornell colleague Susan Tarrow, on a collection of essays by the late French Hellenist Jean Bollack, The Art of Reading, from Homer to Paul Celan, for the Center for Hellenic Studies, and on Élisabeth Roudinesco’s acclaimed new biography, Freud in His Time and Ours, for Harvard University Press.

This is a co-presentation by the Bridge and the PEN Translation Committee, PEN American Center.