Breyten Breytenbach wrote a moving piece on the passing of Nelson Mandela for Harper’s, “The Leaving of Madiba“:
Madiba is leaving us. As he enters the timelessness of exile, he leaves behind him a country that he had helped forge. But the country had deserted him a long time ago.
Read the full article here.
Belgian critic Michael Bellon reviewed Hugo Claus’s Even Now, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, for AGENDA:
Colmer always opts to render the vitality and the natural power of the language rather than slavishly copying the rhymes, alliterations, and meanings. In the epilogue, Claus’s Dutch colleague and friend Cees Nooteboom asks to be haunted by him once in a while, as he is by this collection.
The full review can be found here.
Boyd Tonkin reviewed Mircea Cărtărescu‘s Blinding, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter, for The Independent:
Stitched into the multi-stranded fabric of Blinding is a tender, mesmerically precise account of a humble Bucharest upbringing and its formative effects: “The me of today englobes the me of yesterday.” Prolonged illness and its solitude led little Mircea to dive within his broiling imagination for sustenance. Blinding captures these hospital episodes with devastating force. Meanwhile, the careers of relatives expose the morbid paranoia of the regime.
Above all, Blinding insists that memory can make a world. “The past is everything, the future nothing.” From that past – which stretches back to encompass all of human history – Cărtărescu has fashioned a novel of visionary intensity. Bring on the next instalment – soon.
Read the whole article here.
Boyd Tonkin of The Independent included two Archipelago titles on his list of Books of the Year 2013: Fiction in translation:
How should authors transform autobiography into self-standing fiction? For Karl Ove Knausgaard, with A Man in Love (translated by Don Bartlett; Vintage, £8.99), this second volume in the Norwegian writer’s acclaimed My Struggle series mines the everyday material of young fatherhood. Yet he converts it into a stunningly eloquent set of reflections on masculinity, domesticity and the artist’s itch to escape.
Mircea Cartarescu from Romania has been pursuing his own extraordinary suite of “auto-fictions.” Blinding, the first to appear in English (trans. Sean Cotter; Archipelago, £15.99), asks much from readers as it shifts between tender family history, Ceaușescu-era satire and visionary fantasies that recalls William S Burroughs. Stay with him: epiphanies and beauties abound in this deliriously ambitious work.
See the whole list here.
Enlightening interview with Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding (trans. by Sean Cotter), by Audun Lindholm in The Quarterly Conversation:
To the contrary, I would say that I have not actually exploredBucharest during the past fifteen years; I have invented the city. The Bucharest of Blinding is a complete construct. As the title of the essay implies, it is “My Bucharest.” Today, it is not a particularly good place to live, a crowded metropolis with three million people, too many cars, and heavy pollution—not least of all noise pollution. It has become a symbol of ruthless capitalism, a place where industrial magnates and oil tycoons arrogantly outbid each other in defiance of the rest of the population. It is also a dangerous city to live in.
The Bucharest I write about is quite different. It is the Bucharest of my childhood and youth. Objectively speaking, the city was far more beautiful then, but for me it was something more, a miracle, a marvel to the young child wherever he looked. The child is a bricoleur, one who assembles his world using whatever he can get his hands on. So you see, I have a complicated love/hate relationship with Bucharest: When I started writing Blinding, love was the driving force. In recent years I have begun to dislike the city more and more. Today, Bucharest is a construction site for ruins.
Archipelago translator Stacey Knecht has published an insightful piece on her connection with Hrabal and his work on the blog Slavische Studies:
Admittedly, I first began to study Czech because I wanted to read Hrabal’s work in the original. The English translations I’d read seemed to tug in all the wrong places. Something was being glossed over, fleshed out, overcompensated for. Somewhere beneath all that was the voice and pulse of the author, I could feel it, but without knowing the original I couldn’t say what it was.
Read the whole post here.
David Colmer translates Dutch literature in a wide range of genres including literary fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and poetry. He is a four-time winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize, and received the prestigious 2013 Vondel Translation Prize, the 2009 Biennial NSW Premier and the PEN Translation Prize. His translation of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (Archipelago) was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and he received–along with Gerbrand Bakker–the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Bakker’s novel The Detour. 
Jan Decleir is a prolific Belgian film and stage actor born in Niel, Antwerp. He has started in Academy Award winning movies as Karakter and Antonia. For his role in The Barons, he received the Margritte Award for Best Supporting Actor.Check out this video of a dance collaboration with Archipelago translator Amaia Gabantxo (Plants Don’t Drink Coffee). Here’s a description from the Vimeo site:
“Palo a Palo” is a collaboration between Amaia Gabantxo and Andrea Peterson. It combines words and movement, song and dance inspired in Butoh and Flamenco. Narrating stories from the Spanish Civil War and the two performers’ families’ experience of it, it’s an ongoing project that waves together a series of palos (flamenco beats) and vignettes that together form a full-length show. The different palos represent the wide array of human emotion and expression: from loneliness to despair to joy, each emotion has its own rhythm in flamenco. In “Palo a Palo”, this flamenco concept is taken as far as possible, in this instance aided by the medium of Butoh. At first, the two performers interact through seemingly disjointed performances of spoken poetry and Butoh inspired dance. Shifts occur through a recorded soundscape that, coupled with rhythmic clapping (palmas), resolve into a union of flamenco song and dance. Like a moebius strip, butoh and flamenco, word and song, reflect on and inspire each other, neither of the two aiming to be front nor reverse, but both, either, none.
Palo A Palo from Luz Canons on Vimeo.
Directed and Shot by Luz Canons
Amaia Gabantxo is a writer and literary translator, a flamenco singer and university professor of Basque language and literature. Following the dictate of a pilgrim soul, she has lived many lives in many countries, always singing her way through them.
Andrea Peterson has been performing in the U.S. and overseas for the last 7 years. She has been training with the Chicago Butoh community and under the guidance of artistic director Wendy Clinard of Clinard Dance Theatre in Pilsen
for the last 3 years.
Carla Baricz has written a fantastic review of Mircea Cărtărescu‘s BLINDING for Words Without Borders:
Sean Cotter has done a masterful, inspired job with the translation. The meditative, Baroque rhythms of Cărtărescu’s Romanian flow into graceful, vigorous English thanks to Cotter…nothing seems gratuitous: language itself, in its long lists and flights of fancy, proves Cărtărescu’s ultimate point about birth. Every human life is a Gospel, every birth an Annunciation…
Read the full review here.
GUEST POST: In honor of German author Georg Büchner’s 200th birthday, Lenz translator Richard Sieburth celebrates this historic day:
Oct. 17 is the bicentenary of Georg Büchner‘s birth–a date he shares with his distant American doppelgänger, Nathaniel West.
According to Paul Celan (in The Meridian, his 1960 acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Prize), dates matter.
In the edition of Büchner’s Lenz that Celan had on hand (as emended by an early twentieth-century editor), the first sentence read: “The 20th of January, Lenz walked through the mountains.” Associating this date with January 20, 1942, the day on which the implementation of the Final Solution was discussed at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, Celan comments (in Pierre Joris’s translation):
Perhaps one can say that each poem has its “20th of January” inscribed within it? Perhaps what’s new in the poems written today is exactly this: theirs is the clearest attempt to remain mindful of such dates? But don’t we all write ourselves from such dates? And toward what dates do we write ourselves?
Here are the opening lines of Lenz (which I based on the most recent German edition, which drops the spurious “January,” lacking in Büchner’s original manuscript version):
The 20th, Lenz walked through the mountains. Snow on the peaks and upper slopes, gray rock down into the valleys, swatches of green, boulders, and firs. It was sopping cold, the water trickled down the rocks and leapt across the path. The fir boughs sagged in the damp air. Gray clouds drifted across the sky, but everything so stifling, and then the fog floated up and crept heavy and damp through the bushes, so sluggish, so clumsy. He walked onward, caring little one way or another, to him the path mattered not, now up, now down. He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head.
Of this last sentence Celan observes: “He who walks on his head . . . has the sky beneath himself as an abyss.” In a 1925 essay on Büchner, German critic Arnold Zweig had already claimed: “this sentence marks the beginning of modern European prose.” For Deleuze and Guattari, the “promenade schizophrénique”of this first paragraph of Lenz in turn enacts a kind of rhizomic “thrust” or “traversal” with which we are, to this day, still catching up.
Dates still matter: On Oct 17, 1961, over 200 pro-FLN Algerian sympathizers were killed by French police thugs (on the orders of ex-collabo Maurice Papon) in the so-called Paris Massacre. Georg Büchner, author of an incendiary 1834 pamphlet encouraging the peasants of Hessia to rise up in armed revolt against their feudal overlords, would have appreciated this date.
In honor of Georg Büchner’s 200th birthday, we’re offering Lenz for only $10.00 on our website from now until October 17th only! Just type the Coupon Code 200lenz at checkout.
Richard Sieburth is the translator of LENZ, as well as The Salt Smugglers, Emblems of Desire, and Stroke by Stroke, among others. His English edition of the Nerval’s Selected Writings won the 2000 PEN/ Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His recent translation of Maurice Sceve’s Délie was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.
Bogdan Suceavă just wrote a beautiful review of Mircea Cărtărescu‘s Blinding, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter, for the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Reading Cotter’s Blinding feels like reading a work originally conceived in English. Many passages of the book are written like a poem, with meter and rhythm, and Cotter matches the quality the Romanian original has….The atmospheric tone and poetic cadence are like rays of light and shadow captured on a photographic plate.
Read the full review here.
