It’s funny how each of my BookExpo America trips has its own
feel: this year’s BEA left me with the sense of a stronger-than-ever community of
translators and publishers of translations. This wasn’t because China was the market
focus country this year and had a ginormous
amount of space on the exhibition floor but because of conversations with
translators and publishers in and around BEA. As usual, BEA hosted a series of market
focus panel discussions about the business of translation, but this year also included
announcements of the winners of the Best Translated Book Award as well as a
succession of panels organized by the
PEN American Center Translation Committee. I came away from all that convinced
that recent start-up publishers—Two Lines Press, New Vessel Press, and DeepVellum Press among them—as well as lots of more established small-to-medium
publishers—such as Europa Editions, Soho Press, Other Press, and Open LetterBooks—are winning lots of awards, getting reviewed, and (the big thing!)
publishing books that they can sell because they know who their readers are. I
could double the publisher list without even having to consult Google or my BEA
lists but will just add that there’s also a bunch of several London-based publishers of
varying sizes and ages—And Other Stories, Pushkin Press, and OneworldPublications, for example—that make me think this isn’t just a U.S.-based
phenomenon. On to events and books!
Of course it’s ancient history now, but just for the record
and just in case you missed it, the 2015
Best Translated Book Award winners are, for prose, Can Xue’s The Last Lover, translated from
the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen and published by Yale University Press,
and, for poetry, Rocío
Cerón’s Diorama, translated from
the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong and published by Phoneme Media. Phoneme, by the
way, is another pretty new press, and Diorama
is their first book of poetry. For
more on BTBA 2015.
I loved the PEN Translation Committee’s
panels because they were brief and packed with information and tips. “Reaching the Reader: Publicizing
International Literature,” with Juliet Grames, associate publisher at Soho
Press, and Allison Markin Powell, a translator from the Japanese, looked at
issues like the role of the translator, social media versus bookstores (summary:
bookstores have it all over Twitter,
thinks Grames) (okay, the italics are mine!), online reviewers with good credibility (I noted The CompleteReview, Words Without Borders, and Three Percent), and Google authenticity. Meaning:
the panelists looked at online and offline aspects of publicity. “Baiting the Hook: How to Catch an Editor’s
Interest” was just as good: among other things, translator Ezra Fitz
reminded us that it’s okay to spoil plots when sending book synopses to an
editor (why do I always forget this?!) and Corinna Barsan, an editor at Grove
Atlantic, said bigger is better when it comes to sample translations, synopses,
and, generally, the informational package you send to publishers. Nothing in
either panel was a surprise but all the presenters touched on subjects we (or
at least I) often need reminders about. I was rather late to Retranslating the Great Works of
Literature: How and Why? so didn’t hear all that Robert Weil of Liveright
& Co. and translators Tess Lewis and Burton Pike had to say.
Publishers offered picks at two translation “buzz” panels, too: Coach House served
up Louis Carmain’s Guano, translated by Rhonda Mullins;
Gray Wolf Press listed A Woman Loved, by Andreï Makine and
translated by Geoffrey Strachan (this book involves a filmmaker obsessed with
Catherine the Great); and Coffee House Press offered The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria
Luiselli and translated by Christina MacSweeney. A special thriller and crime
buzz panel dished up Soho Press’s recommendation of Fuminori Nakamura’s The
Gun, translated by Allison Markin Powell, and Heda Margolius Kovály’s Innocence, translated by Alex Zucker; plus Europa Editions’ Gang of Lovers, written by Massimo Carlotto and translated by
Antony Shugaar, and I Will Have Vengeance, written by
Maurizio de Giovanni and translated by Anne Milano Appel.
What else? It was great to see translator and writer friend Aviya
Kushner, whose The
Grammar of God will be out this fall. After working with and quoting
from various English and Russian translations of the Bible for my translation
of Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus, I’m
especially looking forward to Aviya’s book because it’s about the Bible,
translation, and belief. For now, I always love recommending Aviya’s essay, “Kafka and the
Habits of Highly Effective People,” a truly wonderful piece of writing… There
aren’t a lot of Russian-English translations to add to the 2015 translation list, though I had
no idea (or simply forgot?) the Theatre
Communications Group publishes translations: Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard will be out this year
in a translation by Robert Nelson, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky;
that same trio translated Nikolai Gogol’s The
Inspector, released last year. As for books I picked up… I already read and
enjoyed The
Man Who Spoke Snakish, a novel by Andrus Kivirähk and translated
from the Estonian by Christopher Moseley (Grove Atlantic), which features a
stylized version of medieval Estonia, a contemporary-sounding first-person
narrator from the forest, cultural clashes between meat-eating forest-dwellers
and bread-eating villagers, interspecies marriage, and a charming but vicious
adder named Ints. (Truth be told, I especially loved the adders in this book.) I
just started Heda Margolius Kovály’s Innocence, in Alex
Zucker’s translation (Soho Press), which combines Kovály’s love of American
noir (she was a translator, too) with Czech realities. The very first books I
picked up at BEA this time around were Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend,
translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions), and Kamel Daoud’s The
Meursault Investigation, translated by John Cullen (Other Press). Maybe
Camus will come off the shelf for a reread, too.
One other note: next year’s BEA will be in Chicago and the
market focus will be Poland. Hmm. I’ve never been to a BEA outside New York but
Poland, hmm.
And one truly final note. I didn’t go to many events that
were part of the BEA market focus program but a Chinese and American poetry
reading at the Bowery Poetry Club—beautifully moderated
by translator Eleanor Goodman and with readings from Lan Lan, Zhao Lihong,
Edwin Frank, Canaan Morse, and Peter Gizzi—was a perfect way to have no regrets
whatsoever about spending a couple hours in a dark room on a beautiful sunny
Saturday afternoon. Bonus since I’m so clueless about translations from
languages other than Russian: learning about Paper
Republic, a fantastic site about Chinese literature in translation.
Disclaimers: A
million for all the books—thank you to the publishers!—and contacts, plus the usual.
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