Both Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, and The Child Poet by Homero Aridjis and translated from the Spanish by Chloe Aridjis, have been named to a Best of 2016 list by The Irish Times.

Literary correspondent Eileen Battersby writes about Cockroaches that it’s “[b]eautifully written in graceful, lilting prose” but is also “harrowing reading, made all the more shocking by the way life later went on, as if the genocide had never happened. Mukasonga’s life remains dominated by her ghosts.”

Of The Child Poet, she writes that it is a “[g]lorious memoir explaining how a childhood accident created a major Mexican writer.”

 

You can read the rest of the list here.

Translator Donald Nicholson-Smith, who just translated In Praise of Defeat by Abdellatif Laâbi from the French, recently gave a presentation on Laâbi and his work in San Francisco and was in conversation with Scott Esposito of Two Lines Press.

Listen to the entire audio here.

Three of our titles have been longlisted for the 2017 PEN Translation Award for two different categories.  Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap and translated from the German by Tess Lewis is longlisted for the PEN Translation Award for a book length work of translated prose.  Absolute Solitude by Dulce María Loynaz and translated from the Spanish by James O’Connor, as well as In Praise of Defeat by Abdellatif Laâbi and translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith, are both nominated for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

You can take a look at the full list here.

Chloe Garcia Roberts, the translator of our forthcoming Feather, a children’s book by Cao Wenxuan, interviews Chloe Aridjis, the translator of The Child Poet by Homero Aridjis for the column, The Critical Flame Conversations.  

 

“I sometimes wonder how different the result would have been had I finished the translation when I first started it in 1993, rather than over twenty years later, once I’d written two novels of my own. I tried to remain as unintrusive as possible and not succumb to certain writerly instincts that have inevitably developed since then. Spanish is the language of my own childhood and especially adolescence; English is more associated with my adult life (my studies were in the US and UK, I live in England, write in English), so there was a kind of translation taking place at other levels too, and I had to reach into my own past and reinhabit a world that existed purely in Spanish—and of course the vanished world of my father’s childhood, since Mexican villages have undergone all sorts of transformations too. Donkeys have been replaced by cars, every home has a television, every family has someone who’s gone off to seek fortune in Mexico City or the US.”

 

You can read the full interview here.

 

Homero Aridjis, poet, environmentalist, and author of The Child Poet, has penned a letter to Donald Trump on behalf of Mexico, discussing the great unease with which Mexico views the future given Trump’s penchant for racist and xenophobic rhetoric throughout his presidential campaign. Aridjis calls on Trump to work towards the success of both nations, citing our shared history and the interweaving of our cultures. Aridjis also urges Trump to reconsider his position on the myriad of environmental issues which affect us all, regardless of nation.

You can read the entire article on the Huffington Post website here.

Scholastique Mukasonga, author of the award-winning Our Lady of the Nile and the freshly released memoir Cockroaches, joined Laurent Dubois, Maboula Soumahoro, Darryl Pinckney, and Chris Jackson for a panel discussion titled “Europe and America in the Black Literary Imagination” as part of the Festival Albertine 2016 this past weekend.

If you missed the event, or would just like to watch it again, Festival Albertine has made a livestream video recording of the event, which you can watch here.