Posts filed under 'current events'

What’s New in Translation? March 2017

Our team reviews some of the newest translations published in English this month

heretics

Heretics by Leonardo Padura, tr. by Anna Kushner, FSG

Review: Layla Benitez-James, Podcast Editor

Leonardo Padura’s novel, Heretics, has finally made its way to North American shores and English speakers everywhere thanks to translator Anna Kushner’s work for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Originally published by Tusquets Editores of Spain as Herejes in 2013, Heretics is a startlingly, and in many ways disturbingly, relevant work for 2017—as rising levels of xenophobia and nationalism are straining already tense relationships across many borders and affecting refugees throughout Europe and North America. Padura’s novel opens in the Havana of 1939 with the rejection of the St. Louis, a German transatlantic liner sailing from Hamburg whose 937 almost entirely Jewish passengers were fleeing the Third Reich. Their tragic return to Europe—a effective death sentence—is watched by Daniel Kaminsky, the first character introduced and the namesake of the first of the novel’s four sections. Daniel has high hopes in his nine-year-old heart that his parents and sister aboard the ship will make it to land.

At 525 pages, Padura has ample space to leap through an ever thickening plot as his characters become more and more entangled in a seemingly unlikely series of events. Yet the read is a quick one, driven forward by drastic jumps between Havana and Amsterdam and a narrative structure which throws the reader several curveballs in the pages where a more traditional detective story might feel the need for resolution. It’s especially relentless in its final two dozen pages. This book, addicting in and of itself, will also compel readers to dive into the real history of the events on which it centers; they are oftentimes much stranger than any fiction could hope to be, even though Padura tells us right before we embark that “history, reality, and novels run on different engines.” However, to describe the work as a historic thriller, or even to focus on the mystery of a stolen Rembrandt that is woven throughout the larger plot, only hits at one level of Padura’s game. He lets us fall through history almost effortlessly, revealing the inevitable repetition of human cruelty from biblical times through the 17th century, the 20th and up through our own muddy 21st. He neither sugar coats nor exploits these horrors, to his credit.

While the novel takes one of Padura’s recurring characters, Mario Conde, as its hero, a reader uninitiated into this Cubano’s world will have no trouble becoming quickly acquainted. His prose style is elliptical; events and ideas are repeated by different characters as if Padura holds each piece of plot up to the light like a precious stone, turning it this way and that to appreciate its different angles and facets. Though Salinger undoubtedly receives the most attention, influences from Chandler, Hemmingway, Murakami, Kundera, and the occasional phrases from Voltaire’s Candide, which perhaps even inspired the name of Conde’s most pious friend, Candito, also find their place. Readers will note quite a bit of Nietzsche, too, as our hero is forced to try and make sense of the emo subculture springing up on the Island, not to mention a healthy dose of Blade Runner and Nirvana references to even things out.

Perhaps one of the most delightful plays between reality and fiction is the one Padura plays with the genre itself.  Despite some dark passages, the work is deeply humorous and self-reflective, especially in the periodic wish of our narrator to compose his own hard-boiled thriller as he continually feels trapped in one himself. No stranger to taking on huge historical figures (from Adiós Hemmingway to The Man Who Loved Dogs, which stars Leon Trotsky), Padura’s Rembrant is compelling and once again does that work of blurring fact and fiction that inspires a desire for the work to have come wholly from the real world.

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Diversifying Translation

"But since any piece of literature could fit under its umbrella, 'World Literature' is not so much a genre as perspective."

In 1827, the seminal German humanist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—noting that literature was being shared across national borders of Europe and beyond—wrote the now-famous line: “the era of World Literature is at hand, everyone must do what they can to hasten its approach.”

We consider this quote the start of a global literary consciousness that shifted the conception of literature from a reflection of national character to a global phenomenon reflecting the (purportedly universal) human spirit. READ MORE…

Dispatch: International Translation Day 2014

Our criticism editor goes to UK’s annual celebration of translation

International Translation Day is the UK’s annual event for its translation community. Now in its fifth year, it is an opportunity for translators, writers, publishers, students, booksellers, librarians, and critics to gather and debate significant issues, developments in the industry, to network, learn, and exchange ideas. This year it was held in the conference centre at the British Library in London—quite the upgrade from Farringdon’s Free Word Centre—meaning more guests can benefit from the seminars on offer.

The day kicked off with a panel discussion on continuing professional development, chaired by the nervily impatient Jo Glanville, Director of English PEN. On the panel were non-fiction translator Michael Cunningham, who specialises in translating social policy documents; Lucille Desblache, Director of the Centre for Research in Translation and Transcultural Studies at the University of Roehampton; and Daniel Hahn, tireless champion of all things translation-related, newly elected chair of the Society of Authors, and recent translator of Paulo Scott’s wonderful novel Nowhere People (of note: Hahn somehow found the patience to greet a growing queue of acquaintances and admirers after the panel discussion, before dashing off to catch a flight to Dublin).  READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: Bloomsbury Publishing

"I don't publish literature from other languages as a translation. I publish it as literature."

Founded in 1986, Bloomsbury Publishing is an independent publishing house dedicated to promoting quality literature. During the editor’s week of the Buenos Aires Book Fair I met with Bill Swainson, Senior Commissioning Editor of the Adult Editorial Division at Bloomsbury Publishing in London. 

Bloomsbury logo

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