Posted on

Pierre Joris, Geoffrey Brock, and Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody in conversation, moderated by Mary Ann Caws

 

On Tuesday, December 1st at 6:00pm EST, Pierre Joris, Geoffrey Brock, and Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody joined moderator Mary Ann Caws for a conversation hosted by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery. They discussed their recent translations of Paul Celan’s Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Guiseppe Ungaretti’s Allegria, and Paul Valéry’s The Idea of Perfection, respectively.

A recording of the event is available here.

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many areas of interest in twentieth-century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets René Char and André Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Conceptually, one of her primary themes has been the relationship between image and text.

Pierre Joris has written, edited, and translated more than sixty books, including poetry, essays, and anthologies, including Fox-trails, -tails, & -trots (Poems & Proses); Paul Celan: Microliths They Are, Little Stones (Posthumous prose); Arabia (not so) Deserta and, with Adonis, Conversations in the Pyrenees. Joris is the editor and translator of Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan. In 2005 he received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his translation of Celan’s Lichtzwang/Lightduress.

Geoffrey Brock is an American poet and translator. Brock has edited three anthologies on Italian poetry and translated the work of Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco, and others. Brock’s poetry has been featured in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2007 , and his books, Weighing Light (2005) and Voices Bright Flags: Poems (2014) have received the New Criterion Poetry Prize and Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, respectively. His translations have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Florida Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stanford University.

Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody was born in Columbus, Ohio. He has translated the work of French and Belgian poets, including Benjamin Fondane, for which he was awarded the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. He is the author of two volumes of poetry in French and one in English, and has worked as a typesetter, a programmer, and a private tutor.

Posted on

Andrea Bajani on Brad Listi’s OTHERPPL

Brad Listi hosted Andrea Bajani on his podcast Otherppl! Their conversation is available now.

On the program, they discuss Bajani’s novel If You Kept a Record of Sins, recently published by Archipelago Books, in a striking translation by Elizabeth Harris. Bajani and Listi talk about Bajani’s inspirations for the novel, the writing process, and more. You can listen to the interview on Otherppl’s website, here, or on LitHub Radio, here.

Andrea Bajani (Rome, 1975) is the author of four novels and two collections of poems. His novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize. He lives in Houston and teaches at Rice University.

Otherppl is a podcast hosted by Brad Listi, author of the novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder. and founder of The Nervous Breakdown, an online culture magazine and literary community.

Posted on

Announcing the Radical Books Collective

Our friends at Decolonize That! have launched the Radical Books Collective. The initiative “responds to the need for an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading.” Archipelago’s Jill Schoolman will be serving on the board of directors.

A community of readers from around the world will discuss books that are unapologetically political and that envision transformative futures. Corporatized, profit-oriented publishing structures makes it harder to find books and writers that don’t fit the mainstream awards, praise, and review criteria. RBC will curate an alternative canon through a collective that includes publishers, bookstores, authors, booklovers and bookworms everywhere. Let’s change how books are read, circulated, reviewed and talked about.
Book clubs meet online to discuss a recently published radical book and chat with the writer.

You can find the line up of books, the schedule, and the various subscriber packages on their Eventbrite page. And you can also view their site here: http://decolonizethat.com/#section-radical.

Posted on

An Urgent Duty of Remembrance: An Interview with Scholastique Mukasonga In The White Review

In an interview with Julian Lucas for The White Review, Scholastique Mukasonga discusses – among other things – her movement from autobiography to fiction, and the historical and cultural contexts of colonialism, gender roles, and the Catholic Church in her writing about the Rwandan genocide. She also dwells on what it means to write Rwandan history in French, and the linguistic futures of emerging writers in her country. You can read the interview here, and an excerpt below:

“But I believe that I will never stop writing about Rwanda: there is so much more to write about this lost, murdered, recovering, reborn country. There are few Rwandan writers, and among them, even fewer women. I know my books are needed. It’s as though I receive orders from young Rwandans who thirst to rediscover a culture so long obscured and despised. Writing to meet their expectations has become a duty, but also a pleasure. All I have to do is dig into the trunk of my mother’s tales.”

Posted on

Daniel Handler discusses I Wish at the DC Public Library

On Tuesday, April 6th at 1:30 PM EST, Daniel Handler (best known as Lemony Snicket) will host a virtual discussion with Turning the Page DC about Elsewhere EditionsI Wish, written by Toon Tellegen and illustrated by Ingrid Godon, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. Daniel Handler will share his reflections on I Wish and on the work of Takoma Park Education Campus’s fifth graders, who created poems and drawings inspired by the story. The event is co-hosted by the DC Public Library and sponsored in part by the Dutch Culture USA Never Grow Up! Program, a part of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the United States.

The event will stream live on YouTube here.

Daniel Handler is a contemporary American novelist, best known by his pen name Lemony Snicket. He is widely known for his 13-book collection A Series of Unfortunate Events, which has also been adapted into a film and a television seriesAlongside the collection, his other major works include Adverbs, a book of short stories, and Bottle Grove, a dark comedy and the most recent of his publications. His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages.

Posted on

Scholastique Mukasonga awarded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom

Scholastique Mukasonga, author of Our Lady of the Nile, Cockroaches, The Barefoot Woman and Igifu, was awarded the prestigious Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom for 2021.

The prize, which has been awarded since 2008, was created to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). It honors individuals and associations who, in the spirit of Simone de Beauvoir, fight to defend women’s rights wherever they are comprised.

Born in Rwanda, Scholastique Mukasonga makes history as the first African woman to be honored with the human rights prize. Please join us in celebrating her incredible accomplishment.

 

Read more about her historic win here and here.

 

Posted on

Jennifer Shyue on navigating identities and mother tongues in The Common

 

Jennifer Shyue, translator of Julia Wong Kcomt’s forthcoming Bi-rey-nato, reflects on the different layers of her identity as a Taiwanese-American translator of Spanish. She writes about belonging and/or not belonging in many different cultures, about trying to explain her “hyphenation” to her mother, and about the double-edged sword that is the concept of “a mother tongue.” Read her poignant essay on The Common

 

Jennifer Shyue is a translator focusing on contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers. Her work has been supported by grants from Fulbright, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa and has appeared in 91st Meridian, The Offing, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. Her translation of Julia Wong Kcomt’s Bi-rey-nato is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse’s Señal chapbook series. She can be found on the web at shyue.co.

Posted on

Donald Nicholson-Smith reflects on translating Jean-Patrick Manchette in CrimeReads

Donald Nicholson-Smith, translator of Serge Pey‘s Treasure of the Spanish Civil War, Abdellatif Laâbi‘s In Praise of Defeat, and much more, writes about translating Jean-Patrick Manchette in CrimeReads this month. He reflects on the relationship between “genre” and “literary” fiction, the market for crime writing in translation, Manchette’s influences and legacy, and more. Read the piece here.

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. Born in Marseille to a family of relatively modest means, Manchette grew up in a southwestern suburb of Paris, where he wrote from an early age. As Nicholson-Smith writes: “Today Jean-Patrick Manchette is widely thought by the French not only to have transformed (and radicalized) the crime novel but also to have considerably blurred the dividing line between genre and properly “literary” fiction. Just recently, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of his untimely death from cancer in 1995, the publication of a sturdy volume of his correspondence has unleashed a storm of new attention to his achievement.”

Donald Nicholson-Smith was born in Manchester, England and is a longtime resident of New York City. His translations, ranging from psychoanalysis and social criticism to crime fiction, include works by Thierry Jonquet, Guy Debord, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, and J.B. Pontalis. His translation of Apollinaire’s Letters to Madeleine was shortlisted for the 2012 French-American Foundation Prize for Nonfiction and in 2014 he won the Foundation’s Fiction Prize for his translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Mad and the Bad. His translation of In Praise of Defeat by Abdellatif Laâbi was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017.

Jean-Patrick Manchette: Inside the Decades-Long Effort to Bring a Master of French Crime Fiction to American Readers

Posted on

Scholastique Mukasonga in conversation with Kaiama Glover

Scholastique Mukasonga spoke with Kaiama L. Glover about her new collection of short stories, Igifu. Glover is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies at Barnard College and Faculty Director of the Barnard Digital Humanities Center. Her teaching and research focuses on francophone Caribbean literature and postcolonialism, among other topics.

You can watch their conversation in French here.