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We spoke with Czech author Petra Hůlová about her novel Three Plastic Rooms (trans. Alex Zucker, Jantar Publishing, 2017), which received a PEN Translates award from English PEN and was selected as one of World Literature Today’s notable translations of 2017. Her second book to be published in English translation, Three Plastic Rooms is narrated by a prostitute in Prague who ponders sexuality, aging, and the nature of materialism. Petra Hůlová will...

In memory of Mireille Knoll   I’ve always envisioned literary translation as a form of creation—a creation by a third party who takes the baton passed by the author to move the text somewhere new, permitting it to unfold in the space of a new language. This creation draws upon the experience of the author and demands a certain self-distancing. A retreat. A sort of humility. It’s not the task of the translator to infiltrate the already-written text. The...

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities   Can you describe the mood of Paris as you feel/see it? Of all the cities in the world, Paris is probably one of the rare ones where reality is constantly rubbing shoulders with fantasy. Whether you live there or not, whether you’ve been there once or...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Biblioasis | Transparent City by Ondjaki, translated from the Portuguese by Stephen Henighan | Fiction | 324 pages | ISBN 978-1771961431 | US$15.95 What the publisher says: “In a crumbling apartment block in Luanda, Angola, impoverished families hoard memories to survive a corrupt regime. Odonato—nostalgic for the...

The fourteenth annual PEN World Voices Festival kicks off on Monday in New York City. From April 16–22, more than 165 writers from around the world will participate in conversations, readings, translation slams, and performances on this year’s theme: Resist and Reimagine. We’re looking forward to hosting an event to mark the publication of our April issue of Argentine literature. Join us on Wednesday, April 18 at 7pm at Book Culture (LIC location) for...

In this new bimonthly series, “Best of the B-Sides,” critic and bookseller Lori Feathers recommends a new work in translation along with a number of backlist (“B-Side”) titles that you might have missed. The books selected might explore a similar theme, or include various titles from an author’s body of work. With this series we hope to draw readers to timeless works in translation. In her first installment, Lori  looks at five books that take on...

The winner of the inaugural EBRD Literature Prize will be announced on Tuesday, April 10 in London. Launched by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in partnership with the British Council and the London Book Fair, the prize aims to promote literature from emerging economies where the bank invests—from Morocco to Mongolia, from Estonia to Egypt—to champion the variety of arts and history in those countries, as well as to celebrate the art of...

Denise Muir attended the 2018 Bologna Children’s Book Fair, which took place March 26–29 in Bologna, Italy. The Bologna Children’s Book Fair is about more than just books. Of course, there’s the selling, signing, promoting, and pitching, and the book-related wheeling and dealing, but a mere translator doesn’t always have access to the business side of the fair. As a result, though, this means one is free to wander the stands and dip in and out of...

Masatsugu Ono’s Lion Cross Point, translated by Angus Turvill, is forthcoming from Two Lines Press. The novel follows ten-year-old Takeru, who arrives at his family’s home village amid a scorching summer, carrying memories of unspeakable acts against his mother and brother. Takeru befriends Mitsuko, his new caretaker, and Saki, his spunky neighbor, and he begins to see a strange figure called Bunji, who has the same name as a delicate young boy who mysteriously vanished long...

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities   Can you describe the mood of Galway as you feel/see it? Galway has a fair share of homelessness, crime, poverty, and suicide. But this unique Irish city blows away all other cities and towns in Ireland with its upbeat, high-energy positive buzz that attracts...

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We spoke with some of the extraordinary publishers who make these books possible about their experience working in this vital field.    Elsewhere Editions “We are interested in books that ask questions rather than provide answers.” —Jill Schoolman and Kendall Storey, publishers of Elsewhere...

Cuban writer José Lezama Lima once remarked that he began to grow old the day his mother died. A similar sentiment haunts the pages of Tomb Song, the novel by Mexican writer Julián Herbert, which is both a visceral lament about his mother’s death from leukemia and a scathing portrayal of the author’s home country. Born in Acapulco in 1971, Herbert was already known in Mexico for his poetry, his essays, and a well-received collection of short stories. Tomb Song,...

This story by Estonian writer Maimu Berg tracks a mercurial Stalin and his cowed entourage on a spontaneous trip to Tallinn.   After the film ended and the lights came on, J. V. Stalin gradually turned his face toward his companions, narrowed his eyes, and made a vague expression, so that one couldn’t understand what mood he was in. The comrades tried in every way to hide their boredom, tedium and simply their sleepiness—it was way past midnight, how far past they...

you're right I’m greedy everything’s got to be mine— truth and pain and all the coconut yogurts I hold onto everything with a hundred claws as if I’d lived in the Soviet era too you’ve no idea what it means to stand in a sausage line!  a bread line! a milk line! an egg line! though standing in a sausage line was probably just like it is today still women’s work mostly because only women  have criticized me for my lack of experience standing...

In these two stories by Estonian author Urmas Vadi, Roman declares war on Putin and Gérard Depardieu, and Margo receives a peculiar order from the king of Ground Beef Land.   Boycott Roman wanted, unconditionally, to be present during the delivery; he wanted to deliver the child himself so no stranger’s hands would come between him and the baby. There had already been too many other people ahead of him in life, preventing him from reaching something of importance. Now,...

Humans are, in essence, not much more than highly developed mammals. We are scientifically classifiable by Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature, just like the pine tree and the bark beetle. Human intelligence has led our species to marvelous zeniths of technology and an ability to survive in the most punishing habitats imaginable. Yet, just as crucial as respiration and physical endurance are the tasks of reproduction and cooperation. Humans are a social species, but the question of...

He lives in several worlds simultaneously. —Juan José Saer, La Grande   In the opening pages of La Grande, the final, unfinished novel by Juan José Saer, the writer from Santa Fe who lived most of his life—and died—in Paris, Willi Gutiérrez has returned to Argentina after thirty years abroad. His return is shrouded in mystery, and the observation above is both a reference to Gutiérrez’s past—which, rumor has it, constituted a...

In this homage to Juan José Saer, Sergio Chejfec sends a novelist, an essayist, and a theologian on a pilgrimage to the great writer’s final resting place in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery.   Three Argentineans are in Paris one Sunday in spring. They walk through its empty streets as if they had nothing else to do that morning. They think of their families, of the people they’ve momentarily left behind, and of their imminent return to routine: each...

In this 2014 essay, Marcelo Cohen reflects back on decades as a translator in Spain and the complex relationship between translation, exile, and identity.   This text takes as its starting point another that I wrote once for a talk on exile and Argentine literature. But don’t think I’m simply trying to make things easier on myself. Remembering Joyce’s famous motto, “silence, exile, and cunning,” I briefly considered as a title for this chronicle: "On the...

In this essay, literary and cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo takes on the longstanding myth that Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America.   Among the many commonplaces about Buenos Aires, I’ll mention but two. The first panders to the Argentinean ego and is especially inaccurate: Buenos Aires resembles Paris. The second was a criticism that could be heard for decades from the mouths of these same Argentineans who would drive themselves into a frenzy imagining themselves heirs of...

A retiree from one of Argentina’s state-owned companies finds his garden engulfed by the sea one day in this story from recently rediscovered mid-century writer Sara Gallardo​. Once upon a time there was a pensioner with a garden in Lanús. He had been head of personnel at a state-owned company. His garden was the admiration and envy of all Lanús. That’s a zone that, as everyone knows, lacks water two days out of three. The neighborhood writes notes of...

In this excerpt from her first-ever book-length translation into English, Borges contemporary Norah Lange seeks to cast a light onto the enigma of her three mysterious neighbors’ identities.    Despite their excuses, I tried many times to convince them of how easy and convenient it would be for them to communicate, and even call for help, if they had a telephone. “The afternoon I saw you at the post office, it was reassuring to know I could call home and ask someone...

Lena hears the slap against Zig Zag’s haunch, he’s leaving! She grabs her daughters, one under each arm, runs out the back door, tosses the two little spitfires into the hammock strung up under the neighbor’s shed, and shouts, Dona Mercês, I’m desperate, watch them please, give them water if they cry, she doesn’t wait for a response, she bolts down the alleys of the favela, barefoot and disheveled, just in time to see the cart turning the corner onto the...

Ulf Stark and Linda Bondestam’s sweetly eccentric picture book My Little Small opens itself to many layered interpretations. On the surface, it’s a story of finding a small friend to care for. Dig a little deeper and Stark’s philosophical ruminations come through.   “In a mountain, deep in a cave In the dark, there lives a Creature. The sun hurts her eyes and her skin, too.” Like her mountain cave, the Creature is “gray, gray, gray.”...

Edited and Translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Jacqueline Cornetta, Alison Macomber, and Alexander Soria The following is excerpted from Querido Pablito / Julissimo Querido: Selected Correspondence, 1950–1971, a selection of letters exchanged between Paul Blackburn and Julio Cortázar, recently published by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Blackburn and Cortázar’s letters move fluidly between English and Spanish, and the editors...