Weekly News Roundup, 10th January 2014: Looking ahead, Literary algorithms, Standard English’s imminent death

A look at some of the most important literary news of the past week

Hindsight is 20/20. Only one-and-a-half weeks into the new year, here at Asymptote we’re still mulling on what the past year means for the one to come. 2014 promises to be a good year for new translations, highlighted in part by the English PEN center’s most-anticipated in 2014 compilation, or Publishers Weekly’s take on graphic novels in translation.

Looking ahead, but stuck on the classics? Homer’s Iliad, the Greek classic to rule them all, is being translated into Kurdish, and translation has commenced on a Tibetan version of the China Encyclopedia. Translation and conquest have a complicated history: the first Tamil-language Bible, published in 1714, ultimately backfired on its colonializing aims—and here’s why. Keep an eye out for Asymptote contributor and Translationista Susan Bernofsky’s razor-sharp rethinking of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, profiled here in Slate Magazine. Meanwhile, writers who admired Spanish surrealist Federico Garcia Lorca—including the likes of Langston Hughes, W.S. Merwin, Stephen Spender, and Ben Belitt—take a stab at translating the revolutionary poet in a new collection of his poems. How do translators translate? When Nelson Lopez took on Tales of Clay by Salvadorian poet Salarrue, he took cues from the likes of Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Coen brothers. Sadly, in Turkey, unhappy nouvelles in censorship: a high court has suspended translator İsmail Yerguz due to supposed obscenity in Yerguz’s Turkish-language rendition of French writer Apollinaire’s Les exploits d’un jeune Don Juan.

The phrase “library reform” is sure to trigger terror in the hearts of any book-loving purist. Fair warning: this week is downright scary. In Tripoli, Lebanon, the Al Sa’eh Library was victim of arson tragically scorching over 50,000 books from its historic catalog. For better or for worse, this sort of literary bonfire is impossible at Bibliotech in San Antonio, Texas: it’s the world’s first paper-book-free, all-digital library. Amidst all this digitalization, who is today’s librarian, and what does s/he do? Say goodbye to Dewey Decimal!

The times are really a-changin’ in the lit world. An update for literary luddites: if you’d like to write a bestseller, there’s now an algorithm for that (hot tip: cool it on the verbs and clichés). Scientists quantified books once more by examining the economic link between sad and happy books, and it turns out there’s a hard-numbers reason Steinbeck didn’t write Grapes of Glee instead. Amazon is the undisputed king in online bookselling, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few competitors nibbling at its gargantuan heels. Zola Books, an online book-finding portal, has acquired Bookish, thereby taking a piece out of Amazon’s book-discovery pie. And if you’re interested in real-life, human translation (as we at Asymptote obviously are), there’s (quite literally) an app for that: One-Hour Translation connects busy business people with live translators, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

If French thinker Simone de Beauvoir lived today, she’s be a startling 106 years old, which wouldn’t have pleased her one bit. Mulling over 2013’s literary losses: over at The Millions, ten literary obituaries from 2013 sure to tug at your heartstrings (including odes to Irish poet Seamus Heaney and Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe). C. T. Hsia, the literary scholar largely noted as the first to introduce the Chinese literary tradition to English speakers, also passed this week at age 92. This week also mourns the loss of revolutionary Black Arts poet Amir Baraka, who died yesterday at age 79.

Latest in literary lauding: the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, one of the leading efforts in putting Arabic literature on the translation map, has announced all sixteen novels of its 2014 longlist. Ridiculously popular American romance author Danielle Steel has won the French Legion of Honor (Steel has sold over 600 million books worldwide—think she has access to any algorithms?). Finally, if you’re interested in dubious art criticism, catch deceased North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il’s take on opera and cinema.

For those of us translating into English: is there a “standard English” any more? (The answer is, and always has been, NO).