Melanie Mauthner, who translated Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile, was published in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s publication In Other Words.
Category: News
VIDEO: Festival Neue Literatur – Curator's Welcome
Festival Neue Literatur’s 2014 curator, Tess Lewis, presents a brief description of the upcoming festival this February 28 – March 2, 2014.
Click to watch the Curator’s Welcome.
Jonathan Lethem’s Hero: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Jonathan Lethem wrote about his admiration for Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series for The Guardian.
Read the full article here!
NPR’s Book News: "The Expedition To The Baobab Tree"
NPR mentioned Guernica’s excerpt of The Expedition to the Baobab Tree in its Book News!
For Guernica, J.M. Coetzee translates Wilma Stockenström’s story The Expedition to the Baobab Tree from Afrikaans: “A few days ago I had seen the hammerhead shark leaping in spasms there on the beach where fish-drying racks cast their grid shadows. It was trying to lift its whole body up from the sand as if wanting to swim upwards into the sky. Sometimes one eye was buried in the sand, sometimes the other; one saw doom, the other spied hope, and in uncertainty the poor thing struggled. Spasmodic jerks, fanatical till death, eyes that till death bisected the world.”
My Struggle: Book Two Among WSJ Books of the Year
Sam Sacks listed My Struggle: Book Two among the best books of 2013 in a roundup for The Wall Street Journal:
But that was only the surface—if you did a little digging, you were likely to tap into wellsprings of brilliance and vitality. No book possessed a more sublime architecture or deeper spiritual fervor than László Krasznahorkai’s “Seiobo There Below,” and the mazy, mesmerizing sentences of the Hungarian visionary spotlights the wonders that can be found in the flourishing, if resolutely unprofitable, world of books in translation. From here came the gamesome Icelandic myths in Sjón’s “The Whispering Muse” and the creepily gripping second volume of “My Struggle,” the seemingly unfiltered autobiographical novel by Swedish phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgaard.
To read the full article, click here.
Archipelago Receives NEA Art Works Grant!
Grant One of 895 NEA Art Works Grants Funded Nationwide
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Acting Chairman Joan Shigekawa announced today that Archipelago Books is one of 895 nonprofit organizations nationwide to receive an NEA Art Works grant.
This grant will allow us to continue the important work of bringing essential gems of international literature to a diverse reading public. Flourishing as an independent not-for-profit press is no small feat, and as we enter our second decade, we are grateful to organizations like NEA for supporting our efforts.
Acting Chairman Shigekawa said, “The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support these exciting and diverse arts projects that will take place throughout the United States. Whether it is through a focus on education, engagement, or innovation, these projects all contribute to vibrant communities and memorable experiences for the public to engage with the arts.”
Art Works grants support the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence: public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and enhancing the livability of communities through the arts. The NEA received 1,528 eligible Art Works applications, requesting more than $75 million in funding. Of those applications, 895 are recommended for grants for a total of $ 23.4 million.
For a complete listing of projects recommended for Art Works grant support, please visit the NEA website at arts.gov.
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Breytenbach's Farewell to Madiba
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.
Review of Even Now in AGENDA (Belgium)
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.
The Independent Reviews Blinding and Names My Struggle & Blinding Books of the Year 2013
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:
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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.
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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.
Audun Lindholm Interviews Mircea Cărtărescu for The Quarterly Conversation:
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.