David Bellos

translator of

Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1987)
& The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department
to Submit a Request for a Raise (2011);
and Ismail Kadare’s The File on H (1996) & The Siege (2008)

will present & discuss his new book

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
Translation and the Meaning of Everything
(Faber & Faber 2011)

Thursday, October 15th, 2011, 7:00 PM

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street
 (between Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012
(212-274-1160)

“Forget the fish—it’s David Bellos you want in your ear when the talk is about translation. Bellos dispels many of the gloomy truisms of the trade and reminds us what an infinitely flexible instrument the English language (or any language) is. Sparkling, independent-minded analysis of everything from Nabokov’s insecurities to Google Translate’s felicities fuels a tender—even romantic—account of our relationship with words.” —Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and 2666

 “In the guise of a book about translation this is a richly original cultural history . . . A book for anyone interested in words, language and cultural anthropology. Mr Bellos’s fascination with his subject is itself endlessly fascinating.” —The Economist

Funny and surprising on every page, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means—whether we wish to understand Astérix cartoons or a foreign head of state. Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron’s Avatar. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across human experience to describe why translation sits deep within us all, and why we need it in so many situations, from the spread of religion to our appreciation of literature; indeed, Bellos claims that all writers are by definition translators. Written with joie de vivre, reveling both in misunderstanding and communication, littered with wonderful asides, it promises any reader new eyes through which to understand the world.

Publisher’s page: http://us.macmillan.com/isthatafishinyourear/DavidBellos

Watch the video

Salon‘s Thomas Rogers talks with David Bellos about Is That a Fish In Your Ear? and translation.

David Bellos is the director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, where he is also a professor of French and comparative literature. He has won many awards for his translations of Georges Perec, Ismail Kadare, and others, including the Man Booker International Translator’s Award. He also received the Prix Goncourt for George Perec: A Life in Words.

The Bridge 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. For more information on the series and our upcoming events, please visit our website, http://thebridgeseries.org, or our Facebook page, and receive regular updates by emailing “subscribe” to: thebridgeseries@gmail.com.

Margaret Carson, Sergio Chejfec & E.J. Van Lanen

read & discuss the translation, editing & writing of
My Two Worlds (Open Letter Books)

Thursday, September 15th, 2011, 7:00 PM

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street
(between Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012
(212-274-1160)

Margaret Carson translates contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama from Latin America. Recent translations include Virgilio Piñera’s “Electra Garrigó” and Griselda Gambaro’s “The Camp,” published in Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (2008) and Mercedes Roffé’s The Radiance of Things. She teaches in the Modern Language Department at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Sergio Chejfec, originally from Argentina, has published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays, among them Lenta biografía (1990), El aire (1992), El llamado de la especie (1997), Cinco (1998), Los Planetas (1999), Boca de lobo (2000), Los incompletos (2004), El punto vacilante (2005) Baroni- Un viaje, (2007) and Mis dos mundos (2008). His books have been translated into French, German, and Portuguese; My Two
Worlds is his first novel to be translated into English. Among many grants and prizes, he has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2007 and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000. Chejfec lived in Caracas, Venezuela between 1990 and 2005, where he was editor of Nueva Sociedad, a journal of social sciences, politics, and culture. He currently resides in New York and teaches in the Creative Writing in Spanish Program at NYU.

E.J. Van Lanen is the senior editor at Open Letter Books, Rochester, NY,  a press dedicated to publishing innovative works of fiction from around the world.

The Bridge is the first independent reading and discussion series in New York City devotedto literary translation. In association with McNally Jackson Books, one of the city’s premier independent booksellers, and other engaged cultural institutions, the series 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 translation-related issues. For regular updates, please email “subscribe” to thebridgeseries@gmail.com, or join our Facebook page.

translators from the Italian

Michael Moore & Patrick Barron

read from their work

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011, 7:00 PM

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street
(between Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012
(212-274-1160)

+ The New York City Launch
of Chicago Review‘s
“New Italian Writing” issue (56:1)

co-sponsored with McNally Jackson & Chicago Review

The Bridge is the first independent reading and discussion series in New York City devoted to literary translation. In association with McNally Jackson Books, one of the city’s premier independent booksellers, and other engaged cultural institutions, the series 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 translation-related issues. For regular updates, please email “subscribe” to thebridgeseries@gmail.com, or join our Facebook page.

Michael Moore is the Chair of the PEN Translation Fund and an interpreter/translator for the Italian Mission to the United Nations. His translations include, most recently, Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi, The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca, and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. He is currently working on a new translation of the 19th-century Italian classic, The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni.

Patrick Barron grew up in the Pacific Northwest, lived in Northern Ireland and Italy for a number of years, and now is based in Boston, where he teaches at the University of Massachusetts. He has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy in Rome, the Fulbright Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His books include The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (Chicago, 2007) and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology (Italica, 2003). His work has appeared in Chicago Review‘s new Italian writing issue (translations of Biagio Cepollaro and Lorenzo Durante) as well as in publications such as Two Lines, Poetry East, Forum Italicum, and Paideuma.

Edmund Keeley & Karen Emmerich

read and discuss their translations of
postwar Greek poetry
Elytis, Gatsos, Ritsos, Sachtouris, Vakalo et al.

Thursday, April 14, 2011, 7 PM

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street
(between Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012
(212-274-1160)

Edmund Keeley was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1928 and spent his childhood in Canada, Greece, and Washington, DC, before earning his B.A. from Princeton University in 1948 and a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from Oxford University in 1952. He has translated many of the major Greek poets of the twentieth century, including C.P. Cavafy (Collected Poems, translated with Philip Sherrard and George Savidis, 1975), Angelos Sikelianos (Selected Poems, translated with Philip Sherrard, 1979), Odysseus Elytis (Selected Poems, 1981), Yannis Ritsos (Exile and Return: Selected Poems 1967-74, 1985), and George Seferis (Collected Poems, 1995) as well as working on key anthologies of Greek poetry such as Six Poets of Modern Greece (translated with Philip Sherrard, 1961), The Dark Crystal: An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry (translated with Philip Sherrard, 1981), A Century of Greek Poetry 1900-2000 (with Peter Bien, Peter Constantine, and Karen van Dyck, 2004), and The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (co-editor with Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, and Karen van Dyck, 2009). He is the author of seven novels, among them The Libation (1958), The Imposter (1970), and School for Pagan Lovers (1993). He has also written at length on Greece, Greek writers, and translation in books like Cavafy’s Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress (1976), Ritsos in Parentheses (1979), On Translation: Reflections and Conversations (1998), Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey, 1937-47 (1999), and Borderlines: A Memoir (2005). He taught English, Creative Writing, and Hellenic Studies at Princeton for forty years and retired as Straut Professor of English Emeritus. He is a past Director of the PEN American Center. His awards include the Rome Prize for fiction and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Landon Prize for Translation, the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, and the Criticos Prize for non-fiction.

Karen Emmerich is a translator of modern Greek poetry and prose. Her recent translations include The Sleepwalker and Rien ne va plus by Margarita Karapanou (Clockroot, 2010 and 2009), Landscape with Dog and Other Stories by Ersi Sotiropoulos (Clockroot, 2009), and I’d Like by Amanda Michalopoulou (Dalkey Archive, 2008). Her translation of Poems 1945-1971 by Miltos Sachtouris (Archipelago, 2006) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award. Emmerich has received translation grants and awards from the NEA, PEN, and the Modern Greek Studies Association. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University.

The Bridge is the first independent reading and discussion series in New York City devoted to literary translation. In association with McNally Jackson Books, one of the city’s premier independent booksellers, and other engaged cultural institutions, the series 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 translation-related issues. For regular updates, please email “subscribe” to thebridgeseries@gmail.com, or join our Facebook page.

Christopher Middleton & Susan Bernofsky

renowned translators of Swiss author Robert Walser
read & discuss their work

moderated by
Edwin Frank
Editor, NYRB Classics

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011, 1:00 PM

The Swiss Institute
495 Broadway, 3rd Floor
SoHo, New York City
(212-925-2035)

Lunch-time comestibles will be available for purchase.

Organized by The Bridge Series and the Swiss Institute in cooperation with Poets House and McNally Jackson Books.

Of the Mortal Fire: Christopher Middleton with John Yau, Poets House April 7, 7 PM

Introductory translation workshop with Susan Bernofsky,
McNally Jackson, April 26, 7 PM
Advanced registration required.

Christopher Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926, served in the Royal Air Force during World War II and after, studied at Merton College, Oxford — where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on Hermann Hesse — and taught at the University of Zurich and then at Kings College, London, in the 1950s and early 1960s. His first published translation, Robert Walser’s The Walk and Other Stories, appeared in 1957 — less than a year after Walser’s death — and was instrumental in launching Walser’s posthumous reception both in German and in English. While in London, Middleton, as he recounts, “helped to make the new German writing of the Fifties and Sixties accessible to British and American readers. I wrote reviews, gave radio talks”; and together with Michael Hamburger he edited the landmark anthology Modern German Poetry 1910–1960 (1962). During the same time, Middleton’s career as a poet was developing; and his first two books, Torse 3 (1963) and Nonsequences (1965), were published while he still lived in England. In 1966, Middleton moved to the United States, to teach at the University of Texas, and has continued living in Austin since his retirement in 1998. In addition to over two dozen books of his poetry, short prose, and critical writings, Middleton’s published work includes anthologized translations by Gottfried Benn, Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht, Günter Grass, and the following translated books: Georg Trakl, Selected Poems (1967); Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten (1969, reprint NYRB Classics); Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1970); Friedrich Hölderlin and Eduard Mörike, Selected Poems (1972); Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial (1974); Robert Walser, Selected Stories (1983, reprint NYRB Classics); Goethe, Selected Poems (1983); several books by Gert Hofmann; Andalusian Poems, with Leticia Garza-Falcón (1993); Robert Walser, Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912–1932 (2005); and Jean Follain, 130 Poems (2010). Christopher Middleton’s participation is made possible by Poets House, where he will read his poetry and talk with John Yau on April 7, 2011, 7:00 PM.

Susan Bernofsky published her first book translation, Robert Walser’s Masquerade and Other Stories, in 1990. Since then, she has translated five more books by Walser — The Robber (2000), The Assistant (2008), The Tanners (2009), Microscripts (2010), and Berlin Stories (forthcoming 2011, NYRB Classics) — as well as Jenny Erpenbeck’s The Old Child and Other Stories (2005), The Book of Words (2007), and Visitation (2010); Yoko Tawada, Where Europe Begins (2002); Ludwig Harig, The Trip to Bordeaux (2003); Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (2006); Uljana Wolf, False Friends (forthcoming,, Ugly Duckling Presse); and Swiss author Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider (forthcoming, NYRB Classics). Bernofsky wrote her doctoral dissertation on Friedrich Schleichermacher’s theory of translation and early 19th-century translation practice, and is the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe (2005). She is the recipient of the Looren Translation Prize (2009), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2008), a Lannan Foundation Residency Award (2007), two National Endwoment for the Arts Translator’s Fellowships (2008; 1991), and the Kurt and Helen Wolff Translation Prize (2006), among other awards. She has taught translation and German literature at Princeton University, Bard College, and Sarah Lawrence College, as well as workshops and master classes on translation in the creative writing programs of Columbia University and Queens College. She is Chair of the PEN Translation Committee and author of the literary translation blog Translationista.

Susan Bernofsky will be offering a one-session introductory workshop on literary translation for beginners at McNally Jackson on April 26.  For details, click here.  Advance registration required.

Spanish-language translators

Edith Grossman & Steve Dolph

will read from their work

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011, 7:00 PM

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince Street
(between Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012
(212-274-1160)

Edith Grossman is a translator, critic, and teacher of literature in Spanish. She was born in Philadelphia, attended the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Berkeley, completed a PhD at New York University, and has been the recipient of awards and honors including Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Queen Sofía Translation Prize, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Grossman has brought over into English poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by major Latin American writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, and Mayra Montero. Peninsular works that she has translated include Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, novels by Julián Ríos, Carmen Laforet, and Antonio Muñoz Molina, and poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her recent translation of the Soledades, by Luis de Góngora, will be published by Penguin Classics in July, 2011. She lives in Manhattan and has two sons, both of whom are musicians.

Steve Dolph is the founding editor of Calque, a journal of literature in translation. His translation of Juan José Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington was recently published by Open Letter Books. Two more translations of Saer novels, Scars and La Grande, are forthcoming from Open Letter. He lives in Philadelphia.

The Bridge 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 the art and practice of translation. For regular information on our upcoming events, please visit our Facebook page and join our mailing list by emailing “subscribe” to: thebridgeseries@gmail.com.