and the fabulous Three Percent and Open Letter

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/

Chad Post in another incarnation

Brooklyn Rail gets in the picture

An amazing sample translation resource from the Rail:

http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/index.html

Norwegian Literature resource

http://www.norla.no/

This has got it all-- translation subsidies, some info on contemporary Norwegian writers, prize news, etc.

In their own words:

What does NORLA do?
NORLA facilitates contact between Norwegian authors and publishers and foreign publishers, translators, universities and others interested in Norwegian literature abroad
NORLA provides translation subsidies to publishers of Norwegian literature abroad, both fiction and non-fiction
NORLA offers travel grants for Norwegian authors and their translators
NORLA arranges seminars in Norway and abroad for translators and publishers
NORLA provides promotional subsidies for sample translations and presentations of authors
NORLA participates in international book fairs
NORLA offers professional advice and guidance

Reading the World 2007: E-Panel of Literary Translators

E-panel of translators:

Howard Curtis
Katherine Silver
Paul Olchvary
Richard Jeffrey Newman

fairly interesting about fluency/ process/ etc. (and a shout out for Two Lines!)

Graduate Translation Conference next year

This is following up on the one started at UCLA and continued at Iowa by Becka.

CALL FOR LITERARY TRANSLATORS
The Politics and Practice of Translation:
2008 Graduate Student Translation Conference, Columbia University
March 29–March 31, 2008 Keynote Speaker: Charles Simic

The newly formed Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University is seeking graduate student translators from all over the country to participate in the third biannual Graduate Student Translation Conference in New York City, March 29-31, 2008. The Center hopes to gather a varied group of emerging and established translators for a weekend of workshops and round tables on the current politics and practice of literary translation in the United States.

The weekend will consist of Workshops, Round Tables, and a Saturday dinner at which Charles Simic will give the keynote speech. We encourage graduate students to apply for a place in one of the literary translation Workshops and/or to be one of the Round Table participants. Application details are below.

Application materials must be received by September 31, 2007.

1. Literary Translation Workshops:

If you are a graduate student working on literary translations (from any language) and would like to be considered for a Workshop, please send an email to info@centerforliterarytranslation.org with Conference Workshop Application as the subject line. Please attach a sample of your work (5-10 pages of poetry or prose), the original text, and a brief (up to 1 page) statement on your motivations for translating this particular work and the challenges you encountered in effectively rendering it into English. Please also include a CV.

Each Workshop will have roughly nine translators; each person will have one submission workshopped and will be expected to provide comments on the submissions of other participants.

2. Round Tables

The Center also seeks applications from graduate students interested in participating in one or more of the following Round Tables:
1. Translation and Theory
2. Translation and Canon Formation
3. Multilingualism and Translation
4. Translation: Ethics, Censorship, Speaking Out
Each Round Table will have 3-4 participants; each person will give 5-7 minutes of opening remarks leading into a discussion involving the audience and the participants.
Interested graduate student participants should send an e-mail, with the Round Table title as the subject line, to info@centerforliterarytranslation.org. Include in the e-mail a brief (up to 1 page) explanation of why you want to be on the panel and what angle you plan to take on the issue. Please also attach a CV.
For more information on the conference or the center, please visit http://www.centerforliterarytranslation.org. Please direct questions to info@centerforliterarytranslation.org.

Please note: a limited amount of financial assistance for travel may be available in certain circumstances; contact the organizers if you would not be able to attend without some support. Every effort will be made to provide accommodations for successful applicants from outside the New York area; however, we can’t guarantee accommodation.

New translation series @ Yale University Press

"Yale University Press has a new endowed series of foreign literature in translation, called the Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters, which will focus on "works of cultural and artistic significance previously overlooked by translators and publishers." They have signed five titles so far, with publication beginning in 2008, including contemporary Chinese novelist Can Xue's FIVE FLAVOR GROVE, a new translation of selected poems by Italian poet Umberto Saba, a poetry collection from Syrian-born poet and essayist Adonis, and another collection of poems by Greek writer Kiki Dimoula. "Press director John Donatich and editorial director Jonathan Brent will serve as general editors, and consulting editors include Umberto Eco, Orhan Pamuk, Charles Simic, and Elie Wiesel." -- ALTAlk

click here: WWB anthology

looks great! I love all these snazzy translated book websites.

"Tragic but Sexy": selling Bolaño

A Writer Crosses Over
Roberto Bolaño's Latest: Translated From the Spanish -- and the Dead

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007; D01




So here's what you're up against if you're an American publishing
house like Farrar, Straus and Giroux trying to persuade readers to
shell out $27 for the first English translation of Roberto Bolaño's
nearly 600-page novel, "The Savage Detectives," just out this week.

You've got to introduce them to an author of indeterminate nationality
of whom, it is safe to say, 99 percent of Americans have never heard.
The Chilean-born Bolaño spent most of his adult life in Mexico and
Spain; he liked to call the Spanish language his homeland.

You've got to sell the book in a crowded market notoriously resistant
to literature in translation. You've got to sell it without benefit of
author interviews in newspapers or blogs, on television or NPR,
because your author isn't around to do them: Bolaño died of liver
disease, at 50, in 2003.

Most important, you've got to explain why the heck readers should want
to spend large chunks of their scarce leisure time in the company of
Bolaño's scruffy, combative protagonists: two obscure poets who, in
the novel's key plot juncture, leave Mexico City for the Sonoran
Desert -- pursued, as it happens, by an enraged pimp -- on a quest to
track down an even more obscure poet from a previous generation.
Bolaño never portrays the marginal lives and literary passions of the
pair directly. They are glimpsed, instead, through the retrospective
testimony of more than 50 narrators who have, however briefly,
encountered them.

Fifty narrators! "The Savage Detectives" is simply lousy with poets
and would-be poets. They drink too much, sleep with each other and
feud over poetic principles never fully defined. What unites them is
the conviction that literature, taken seriously, can function as a
belief system, a religion, a way to confront the glorious, doomed
insanity of human existence.

This is the key to Bolaño's appeal, says Farrar, Straus and Giroux
president and publisher Jonathan Galassi.

Sure, he concedes, a novel peopled with penniless foreign poets might
seem off-putting. But "it's a metaphor, you know, it's not literally a
novel about poets. It's about poetic temperament in the world. It's
romantic. It's about young idealists coming up against corruption and
tragedy."

There's no doubt in his mind.

"It's a perfect book for us to publish," Galassi says.

I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted,
of course. . . . I'm not really sure what visceral realism is.

-- Opening lines from

"The Savage Detectives"

The tale of how "The Savage Detectives" came to be published in the
United States is a story about the difficulties inherent in literary
migration between cultures. It is about the commercial food chain in
which small publishers' successful initiatives get followed up by
larger houses. It is about how Latin American writing has evolved
beyond the boom sparked by Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years
of Solitude" four decades ago.

But most of all, it is the story of an extraordinary writing life.
Bolaño, whose work has been widely celebrated abroad since "Los
Detectives Salvajes" was published in Spain in 1998, remains so
obscure here that Farrar, Straus felt the need to commission the
book's translator, Natasha Wimmer, to research and write a lengthy
biographical essay to introduce him.

Wimmer herself had never heard of the author before Farrar, Straus
asked her to look at the book. "I was completely blown away by it,"
she says. "I thought it was the best thing I had read in any language
in years."

Bolaño, she learned, was born in Santiago in 1953, the son of a
truck-driving, amateur-boxing father and a mother who taught math and
statistics in the smaller Chilean towns where they mostly lived. When
he was 15, he moved with his family to Mexico City, where he soon, as
Wimmer sums it up, "dropped out of school to devote himself to reading
and writing and adolescent rebellion."

She begins her essay with a scene in which "a 23-year-old with wild
hair and aviator glasses" reads a manifesto in a bookstore called
Librería Gandhi that "urged his fellow poets to give up everything for
literature, to follow the example of Rimbaud and hit the road." This
was Bolaño in 1976, helping launch a movement known as "infrarealism,"
whose adherents -- in Wimmer's words -- were supposed to "abandon the
coffeehouse and take the part of . . . the lonely, the unnoticed and
despised."

In "The Savage Detectives," which is heavily autobiographical,
infrarealism becomes "visceral realism" and Roberto Bolaño becomes
"Arturo Belano." In real life, as Wimmer notes, the writer lived by
his principles for many years, "drifting from one menial day job to
another and writing by night."

Much of this drifting took place in Europe, for which Bolaño left
Mexico in 1977. Returning to Chile was not an option. He'd gone home
four years earlier, arriving a few months before Gen. Augusto Pinochet
launched his 1973 coup against socialist President Salvador Allende.
Bolaño had thrown in his lot with pro-Allende forces -- though his
contributions were modest, to put it mildly. He was arrested and
briefly imprisoned, escaping only through the fortuitous intervention
of a couple of former schoolmates turned prison guards.

Eventually settling in Barcelona, he worked as, among other things, a
longshoreman, a dishwasher, a garbageman and (his favorite job) a
night watchman for a campground near the city. Poor, sick and at one
time addicted to heroin, he continued to write poetry and scorn the
literary establishment. Finally, marriage and the birth of a son (in
1990; a daughter followed) persuaded him to start writing prose
fiction -- a form he had always considered inferior, but one that
might actually produce income.

It did.

By the early 1990s he was supporting his family by writing stories and
novellas. By the end of the decade, "The Savage Detectives" had won
the Rómulo Gallegos prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most
significant literary award.

But there was more driving Bolaño than money. "In 1992," Wimmer
writes, "he had been diagnosed with a fatal liver disease, which meant
that nearly all his fiction was written under the threat of death."

Despite his growing reputation in continental Europe and Latin
America, the English-speaking world was slow to take notice.

The Brits got there first. In 2003, Harvill Press published a
translation of Bolaño's novella "By Night in Chile," which takes the
form of a deathbed confession by a priest and literary critic involved
with the Pinochet regime. Meanwhile, in New York, Barbara Epler --
editor in chief of New Directions, a widely respected small press with
a long history of publishing literature in translation -- had been
lobbied by Bolaño admirers such as Guatemalan American novelist
Francisco Goldman.

"You've got to look at Bolaño!" Epler remembers Goldman urging. When
Epler heard the Harvill translation was in the works, she called and
asked to see the galleys.

"I had never read a book like 'By Night in Chile,' " Epler says. "I
was beside myself."

New Directions published the book in December 2003. It sold a modest
6,000 copies or so -- "that's good for us," Epler says -- and she
followed up with two more Bolaño novellas ("Distant Star" and
"Amulet") and a story collection ("Last Evenings on Earth"). She
figured New Directions would do his longer fiction as well.

No such luck.

Bolaño's estate decided it wanted a bigger publisher for "The Savage
Detectives" and the even more massive novel, "2666," that Bolaño
completed shortly before his death. Enter Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
which bought world English rights to both books (for a sum most likely
in the very low six figures) then spun off United Kingdom rights to
Picador. Farrar, Straus will publish "2666" next year.

Epler was disappointed but not bitter.

"What can we say? It's like -- rats!" she says. But Farrar, Straus "is
a good publisher" whose size and corporate ownership give it "more
muscle and marketing power." Besides, any marketing muscle applied to
"The Savage Detectives" will surely boost interest in Bolaño's other
work.

New Directions has half a dozen more short Bolaño works coming, Epler
says, "and I think we'll eventually do the poetry."

"[T]he only protagonist of Bolaño's work -- the authentic heroine of
his books -- is literature itself. Literature as Golden Fleece or Holy
Grail or Rosebud-branded sled pursued to the bitter end by men and
women who believe solely in it."

-- Novelist Rodrigo Fresán, in the Believer

Farrar, Straus editor Lorin Stein has his own story of discovering
Roberto Bolaño's work.

Stein -- an intense, slightly built man of 33 who grew up in
Washington -- is precisely the kind of literary obsessive most likely
to be drawn to a writer like Bolaño. In high school, at Sidwell
Friends, he gravitated immediately to the literary magazine. One
summer, he and some friends pooled their money and hired a favorite
Sidwell teacher to conduct a special poetry class.

Scuffling around after college, Stein got a part-time job at
Publisher's Weekly while trying to find work with a book publisher. He
didn't know one from the other when he started, but he learned.

One day a PW colleague pulled a book off a shelf and offered it to him
to take home and review over the weekend. Farrar, Straus is publishing
it, she told him, "so it probably won't be a waste of your time."

"I've told my boss this so many times," Stein says, laughing, "when
there was a book I didn't think we should publish."

He landed his first Farrar, Straus position in 1998 -- he started as
Galassi's assistant -- and worked his way into an editing job. He also
made a Spanish friend who'd known and loved Bolaño, and in 2004, the
year after Bolaño's death, Stein went to Barcelona to visit her.

"We were in a bookstore," he recalls, "and she said, 'Look, here's an
English translation of 'By Night in Chile,' you have to read this.' "

He took her advice, inhaling the book on the first leg of his flight
home, and found himself thinking: "If this exists and I didn't know
about it, then we should be doing a lot more foreign fiction."

Galassi, meanwhile, first heard about Bolaño from the late Susan
Sontag, who served as a kind of early warning system for superior
literature from overseas. He read "The Savage Detectives" in an
Italian translation and immediately wanted to publish it.

Who did he see as its audience? The same people who read Faulkner, he
says, or García Márquez -- though Bolaño represents something quite
different from the great Colombian magical realist.

"This is what's going on in Latin American literature in the post-boom
years," Galassi says. "This is a whole new kind of thing. It's
influenced by surrealism, but it's not inhumane. It's very accessible,
but it's not quite realistic. It's tragic, but it's sexy. It's
panoramic."

It's also replete with slang from, at minimum, five countries --
Mexico, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Spain -- which made it no joke to
translate. Wimmer says it took her close to a year.

"The obvious challenge is that there are so many voices," she says.
She'd plug idiomatic phrases she didn't know into the Internet ("it's
really good for finding how words are used in context"). She also
wrestled with the rhythm of Bolaño's sentences. Should she break them
up, because run-on sentences are far more common in Spanish than
English, or should she declare them a stylistic choice not to be
messed with? (Short answer: some of each.)

Wimmer and Stein had their share of fights, Stein says, as translators
and editors will. But these were outweighed by their shared passion
for the book.

What exactly makes him love it, Stein is asked?

He has some trouble answering, but he works at it.

For one thing, Bolaño's portrait of poetry-obsessed Mexican youth
"made me nostalgic," he says, "because that's the way we were -- I
mean, that's the way any artsy kid is." He shares with Bolaño's
characters what he calls "a basic fruitful misunderstanding," which is
"that poetry and books matter." Bolaño treats literature as if it's "a
church that no one quite believes in anymore -- but that no one can
live without."

But there's more.

Bolaño's novel follows its two main characters into a future where
every poetic principle they cared about is lost or forgotten -- but it
doesn't have to be about poetry. "Everything disappears," Stein says,
"and your own youth disappears, and these guys -- they never get it
back. You know? You watch them just trail off into the distance."

It sounds desperately bleak. But somehow, "The Savage Detectives"
makes it exhilarating.

"I told Natasha afterwards that I felt more alive reading it than I
felt when I went out and lived my life," Stein says. "And she said,
'I'm so glad to hear you say that. I felt the same way.' "

I think there's too much poetry, and poetry doesn't sell.

-- From "The Savage Detectives"

So how do you sell someone as strange, original and indisputably
non-American as Roberto Bolaño in a U.S. market surrounded, as Sontag
once wrote, by a "wall of indifference to foreign literature" -- a
market in which, as Epler calculated a few years back, less than .5
percent of the books published are fiction in translation?

That's what Farrar, Straus publicity and marketing chief Jeff Seroy is
paid to think about. But Seroy laughs at the notion that he can wave a
magical marketing wand and send "The Savage Detectives" flying off
bookstore shelves.

"I mean, we're not pulling rabbits out of hats," he says.

Members of the Farrar, Straus team have tried to highlight the book's
significance in various small ways. There was the two-page spread in
the catalogue, for example, and the roughly 3,000 advance reader's
copies sent to reviewers and booksellers. "That's not typical for us
to do with books in translation," Seroy says, "so that sent a signal."

They worked hard on the type-driven cover, with its ragged, graphic
title and jumble of excited quotes on the back. And they took an
unusual approach to the front flap copy.

"Ordinarily one goes into a lengthy description of the book," Seroy
says, but in this case, he and Stein decided less would be more. "We
really just needed to say: This is a dazzling work which established
the international reputation of an important world writer. The plot
summary is half a sentence."

There was Wimmer's essay, sent to selected reviewers and journalists
and posted on a Web site built for "The Savage Detectives." And there
was the fact that the Web site refers readers to the New Directions
Bolaños -- an unusual cross-pollination that says: The writer is
what's important here.

But in the end, Seroy says, their strategy was simple: They needed to
convey "the right kind of excitement to the right people." By this he
means letting those in "the literary establishment and the review
establishment" know that he, Galassi and Stein truly believed,
institutionally and personally, that they were dealing with a great
and important book.

Will it work?

Maybe.

There's already been considerable pre-publication press, both in
smaller literary publications and in mainstream magazines such as
Harper's and the New Yorker, where Daniel Zalewski wrote that the
original publication of "The Savage Detectives" in 1998 "aroused the
same level of excitement in Latin America that 'One Hundred Years of
Solitude' had, three decades earlier."

Bolaño's trajectory could mirror that of W.G. Sebald, whose first
books, written in German and unknown here, were also published by New
Directions -- to wide praise -- beginning in 1998. Sebald then jumped
to Random House, which made a modest splash with his novel
"Austerlitz" -- taking great care, as Epler notes, not to highlight
the fact that it was a translation.

Yet even the most ecstatic press doesn't necessarily sell books. No
one at Farrar, Straus is ready to make profit projections on "The
Savage Detectives."

"I'm not looking at a P&L at this point," Seroy says. But even if the
book ends up losing money, "it won't put us out of business."

Then he sums up the publishing philosophy, not universally shared,
that made his colleagues go after Roberto Bolaño in the first place:

"We'll still always be happy that we published the book. And what more
could you ask?"