Happy Friday, Asymptote! Biggest big deal this week: our new issue, which features so. many. literary standouts and standouts-to-come—an interview with Junot Díaz, an essay by Ingo Schulze, writing from Sibylle Lacan, and on, and on. As per tradition, we’ll be sharing our bloggy favorites here on Monday, but you could click blindfolded and come across a gem. Happy reading!
If you’re a translator in 2016 (!), you’re sure to have a fraught relationship with Google Translate. On one hand, the mystic algorithmic Googlic properties of the service provide for an interesting alternative to the usual bilingual dictionaries we translating folk tend to turn to, but on the other hand, Google’s app supposedly threatens to bully us into irrelevance. And that’s why this glitch—in which Google Translate translated every instance of “Russia” into “Mordor,” as in The Lord of the Rings, is especially hilarious.
Do you have any readerly resolutions for 2016? Perhaps reading more translated titles should be one. You might take a look at this list of contemporary Romanian writers available in English translation (one of whom has appeared in the hallowed digital archives of Asymptote: Mircea Cărtărescu!). Here’s a helpful overview of the French-language translations made available in English last year. And the January issue of the White Review, a favorite translation-specific digi-publication, is online—take a gander. And if all of this sounds like a little much, simply implement these tips on how to read faster in practice and it’ll seem a whole lot less insurmountable.
My mother alwasy told me: if you’re a lifer, go for the doctorate. And the very first PhD in Translation Studies has been awarded in Malta. Speaking of groundbreakers, four plays by American playwright David Mamet into Persian for the very first time—whoopee! Speaking of translators, it isn’t easy when your author’s alive—but are millenium-old poets more difficult to render?
In Sweden, every 16-year-old girl will receive a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists (we should all be so lucky)! The longlist for the biggest Arabic fiction prize has been announced: the International Prize for Arabic fiction’s comes from 159 entrants, which have been narrowed down to 16 long-listed contenders (are any available in English yet? Asking for a friend).