Happy Friday, Asymptote friends!
Big congratulations to the new poet laureate of the United States, Juan Felipe Herrera! Herrera attended the University of Iowa and his current gig is a direct update from his last one (he spent the past two years as poet laureate of the state of California, where he’s from).
Meanwhile, recommended reading abounds. The Millions reviews French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, big winner of the Prix Goncourt and only recently appearing in John Cullen’s English translation (would have been nice to know this from the review—but, alas). In the Paris Review Daily, former blog contributor and all-around translator/thinker/writer extraordinaire Damion Searls argues for a lesser-known (stateside, at least) Norwegian writer: Jon Fosse. According to Searls: in the Beatles band of Norwegian lit, Fosse is George, “the quiet one, mystical.” Hmm. If Fosse is a pure/prose/poet, it’s important to remember the dutiful audacity of prose-at-large: how should we remember what and how prose writing accomplishes what it does? (I’d like to wager that translation plays a vital role in revealing the mechanics of language. But that’s just me).
Did you go to Book Expo America? It’s an EVEN bigger deal than AWP, and this year highlighted Chinese literature—if grimly. The event’s emphasis on Chinese-language literature only seemed to emphasize this country’s literary inability to attract crowds—often in the form of overt anti-Chinese protest, rallying against governmental over-oversight. Ugh. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other literary regions that—on the whole—go overlooked: in Canada, French-language Québecois poetry is perennially under-the-radar.
Part of those protests were affiliated with PEN, by the way, an organization that coincidentally announced the remainder of its 2015 PEN Literary Award winners this week (including Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Sherri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial). Meanwhile, other awards: the French-American Foundation has announced its translation prizes (including a lifetime achievement award and both fiction and non-fiction categories). And take a look at Other People’s Countries, the Welsh Book of the Year.
Finally, you’ve probably read it already, but here’s this news cycle’s latest hand-wringing essay about digitized translation. Let’s be clear, though: translation is an art (Susan Bernofsky would agree).