On Sunday, February 27, at 11 AM EST, Trafika Europe Radio Season Five is launching with an exceptional literary line-up, featuring conversations with Ilija Trojanow, Ana Blandiana, Viorica Patea, Fiona Sampson, Franca Mancinelli, and Bill Johnston, translator of many Archipelago titles!

Johnston will discuss his translation of Jean Giono’s Ennemonde, published by Archipelago last fall, with host Clayton McKee.. He will talk about his translation process, the nuances of translating Polish and French, and how he became such a fan of Giono’s work. For more information, please visit Trafika Europe Radio’s Facebook page, here, or their website, here.

Ennemonde Girard: Obese. Toothless. Brilliant. Loving mother and murderous wife: a character like none other in literature. In telling us Ennemonde’s astounding story of undetected crimes, Jean Giono immerses us in the perverse and often lurid lifeways of the people of the High Country, where vengeance is an art form, hearts are superfluous, and only boldness and cunning such as Ennemonde’s can win the day. Ennemonde is a gleeful, sardonic grin of a novel.

Jean Giono was born in Manosque in 1895 and spent most of his life in that part of Provence, which is also the setting for his immense body of work, over fifty novels, as well as poems, essays and plays. During World War II, he turned to political writing and was jailed for pacifist activities. He is best known in North America for his autobiographical Blue Boy, The Horseman on the Roof, and The Man Who Planted Trees.

Bill Johnston is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His translations include Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay; Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, Flaw, and In Red; Jerzy Pilch’s His Current Woman and The Mighty Angel; Stefan Żeromski’s The Faithful River; and Fado and Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk. In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award for Tadeusz Rozewicz’s new poems, and in 2012 he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize and Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone.