We report on book prize-awarding every week here at the Roundup, but it isn’t often that we’re so giddy to see some nominations: our friends at Three Percent have announced the longlist for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award, awarded in categories of both fiction and poetry. We’re especially happy to see the remarkably diverse longlist include several Asymptote alums, past and present: our very own Howard Goldblatt, Asymptote contributing editor, is up for his translation of Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death (read Goldblatt’s recent essay about his relationship with author Huang Chunming here!), Mircea Cărtărescu, longlisted for Blinding (excerpted in our October 2013 issue), Arnon Grunberg for Tirza (Grunberg’s piece on J.M. Coetzee here), last year’s winner Lászlo Krasznahorkai for Seibobo Here Below (read his remarkable short prose in our July 2013 issue, translated by blog contributor Ottilie Mulzet), Javier Marías’ The Infatuations, translated by the venerable Margaret Jull Costa (interviewed here), Stig Sætterbakken’s Through the Night (don’t miss our review from our January issue), and many, many more—phew! One thing’s for sure: we don’t envy the difficult decisions those judges have got to make in the coming weeks.
Equally prestigious, and only slightly less exciting (for us, at least): the National Book Critics Circle Award winners have been announced, and the list includes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Americanah (in the ‘fiction’ category) and Franco Moretti for Distant Reading (for ‘criticism,’ natch). It’s clearly a good week for Adichie, as she’s been longlisted for the 2014 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction as well, along with nineteen other VIDA-count defying authors.
In beautiful and historic Leipzig, Germany, the Leipzig Book Fair is well underway, and the fest’s literary three nomination categories (fiction, nonfiction, and translation) have been announced. Elsewhere, in Saudi Arabia, the Riyadh International Book Fair is less welcoming, censoring the more “blasphemous” works of Pakistani writer Mahmoud Darwish. You don’t have to jet-set to participate in Twitter’s amped-up #Twitterfictionfestival: the question is, if you want to in the first place. Finally, book prizes do more than you think: the Lahore LitFest in Pakistan inspires resistance through literary dialogue.
Speaking of literary resisters: Ukraine’s best-known poet, Serhiy Zhadan, has been injured by pro-Russian activists turning on Kharkiv’s occupiers. Meanwhile, the political tension in Crimea challenges novelists writing on the otherwise little-known region. Writing through controversy is indeed challenging, especially if the controversy takes place in North Korea: Adam Johnson opines on ‘the cruelest psychological experiment ever cooked up.’ (Elsehwere in North Korea: is the country ready for a certain Danish prince?). Despite these high-profile occurrences of literary diplomacy, not all literature is necessarily political: in Japan, the literary elite appears impervious to political struggle.
In light of this week’s blog on translated children’s literature, remember that illustration is translation, too! German-language folklorist and fairy-tale writer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales are transformed in 1970s Bulgaria; Cervantes’ Don Quixote gets to try on several new looks, and two very different takes on J.R.R. Tolkein’s Middle Earth: Soviet-era illustrations, and Maurice Sendak’s imaginative take on The Hobbit.
Finally, as translators, we can relate a little too much with this unfortunate webcomic (what would blog interviewee Lucas Klein say to that?)…