Posts filed under 'Olga Tokarczuk'

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from the United States, Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora, and the Philippines!

This week’s roundup of literary news from around the world highlights exciting new publications and publishing trends! From a literary marriage in the United States to the return of a beloved author and history titles in the Philippines, read on to find out more!

Meghan Racklin, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the United States

Last week, at their annual awards ceremony—in person again for the first time since the onset of the pandemic—the National Book Critics Circle awarded the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize to Grey Bees by Andrew Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. The new award brings attention to books translated into English and published in the United States, where only a small number of books in translation are published each year—Publishers Weekly’s translation database lists only 419 books in translation published in the United States in 2022.

Dralyuk, the award winner, is a poet and critic as well as a translator and until recently was the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His translation was selected from a competitive group of finalists which, notably, also included the translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by Jennifer Croft—Dralyuk’s wife. Prior to the announcement of the award winner, the two gave an interview to the L.A. Times about their relationship to translation and to each other. Croft said “Once we started dating, I would find Boris on my steps, where he would tell me about what he had just translated. He gets so emotionally invested. . . . He’s so careful about every word. It was very moving and, I think, a large part of how we came together.”

READ MORE…

The Power of Bad Taste: Tokarczuk and ‘Another Person’

The world in which Polish literature giants preferred taste to glory is about to vanish.

The controversial decision to award the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Austrian writer Peter Handke sparked much criticism of the Swedish Academy’s choice. Due to the postponement of the 2018 ceremony, Handke was awarded alongside the 2018 laureate, Polish author, activist, and committed proponent of tolerance, Olga Tokarczuk. Handke’s win was widely denounced around the world, and especially in the Balkans, because of his support for Slobodan Milošević. Whilst Tokarczuk’s win was lauded, many Bosnian writers and journalists, all genocide survivors, expressed disappointment in both her acceptance of the prize in his presence and, above all, in her silence. In this essay, Bosnian writer Kenan Efendić discusses Tokarczuk’s position in this Nobel controversy and considers the writer’s role in speaking out against injustice. 

In the poem “The Power of Taste,” Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert disassembles and simplifies the intellectual ethics of serving a regime and pandering to the majority. This master of irony cut down the whole dialectics of intellectual autonomy, higher goals, comfort, and ethics—to a matter of taste.

The poem is dedicated to Izydora Dąmbska, a philosopher and professor, whose scientific and academic career would be marked and obstructed by her decision not to accept the Marxist religion and to demand the autonomy of teaching philosophy in (then) communist Poland. This happened twice: first, immediately after WWII when the country was de facto ruled by the Soviets; second, in the 1960s, when the home-brewed communist elite had already come into power. Another typical story from the totalitarian universe of the twentieth century by its form—yet a particular and unique act when measured by the courage and taste of a personal decision. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Poland, Sweden, Mexico, and Argentina!

This week our writers report on literary prizes and new releases in Poland, a collaboration between two renowned Swedish authors, the 41st International Book Fair in Mexico City, and commemorative events for María Elena Walsh in Argentina. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

It’s never too late to #bemoreOlga—to quote Helen Vassallo (translatingwomen)—and report that Olga Tokarczuk is using some of her Nobel prize money to start a foundation to support writers and translators. To acknowledge the role translators played in her worldwide success, the Polish Association of Literary Translators has pulled together some stats: as of October 2019, 193 translations had appeared of Tokarczuk’s books into thirty-seven languages, with twelve more in the pipeline, by a total of ninety translators (names all listed here).

On January 20 the weekly Polityka awarded Olga Tokarczuk the Creator of Culture prize “for books that are ahead of their time, her style and for looking into the future of literature and our entire planet.” The prize was one of Polityka’s annual arts awards, with this year’s “Passport” for literature going to Dominika Słowik for her novel Zimowla (roughly, Huddling Together) a “thriller with horror elements, set in the small village of Cukrówka, a fascinating depiction of recent history.” In her acceptance speech, Słowik cheered the fact that, for the first time, all three shortlisted authors were women. READ MORE…

The Necessity of Translating Women: Monica Manolachi Interviewing Helen Vassallo and Olga Castro

If women are left out of culture, then the very notion of culture is itself impoverished.

When participants registered for the inaugural Translating Women Conference (October 31–November 1, 2019) at the Institute for Modern Languages Research in London, UK, they probably did not yet know that October 31 would become “Brexit Day.” Fortunately, Brexit was postponed, and when some of the delegates arrived in London, they saw a sign in front of a restaurant: “The year is 2192. The British Prime Minister visits Brussels to ask for an extension on Brexit. No one remembers where this tradition came from, but it attracts many tourists every year.” Over two days, a potentially isolationist “historical day” gave way to a fruitful international dialogue focused on translation and women writers from many parts of the world, forging connections and understanding in a time of division and uncertainty.

In the following conversation, Monica Manolachi, Helen Vassallo, and Olga Castro—co-organisers of the Translating Women Conference—speak about the meaning of the hashtag #BeMoreOlga, the many conference highlights, reading books in translation, and explain why feminism and translation are connected movements that have the potential to fully open up the Anglosphere to world literature.

Monica Manolachi (MM): Helen Vassallo and Olga Castro, you co-hosted the first Translating Women Conference at London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research on October 31 and November 1, 2019. On this occasion, participants received pins with the hashtag #BeMoreOlga. What issues does this hashtag address?

Helen Vassallo (HV): This stemmed from an opinion piece I wrote after the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded the delayed 2018 prize to Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 prize to Peter Handke. Apart from the controversy in awarding the prize to Handke (a decision I found ill-judged, to say the least), I was incensed by the way in which the chair of the prize committee casually and erroneously justified the paucity of women laureates in the prize’s history by saying that “now” there are many great women writers. This only compounds the problem of women’s invisibility: suggesting that women hadn’t featured significantly because they weren’t there or weren’t “great” assumes that awards are based only on merit and not on visibility. I took issue with both the androcentric and the Eurocentric approach to choosing winners: I agree that Tokarczuk was a great choice, but the committee had previously stated that they were looking further afield than Europe, and then both prizes went to Europeans. It’s almost like saying: “well we looked, but there wasn’t anything good enough,” which is exactly what I mean about the myth of meritocracy. There wasn’t any real, demonstrable evidence that the prize committee had scrutinised its own policies, just empty rhetoric. And it was ironic that they commended Tokarczuk’s work for “crossing boundaries as a form of life”; I thought that they could take heed of that for calling into question their own criteria and approach—hence my suggestion that they “Be More Olga.” That was the specific context, but generally, “Be More Olga” stands as a call to action for all of us to be more open, to challenge borders and boundaries—whether literal or figurative—and to claim our place in a connected world. And to cap it all, Olga Tokarczuk herself was wearing one of our #BeMoreOlga badges at the Nobel Prize ceremony in December; I never dreamed that would happen! Tokarczuk’s Nobel lecture offers profound reflections on crossing borders, remaking our broken world, and challenging isolationism; it’s translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Jennifer Croft, and expresses far more articulately than I could exactly what “Be More Olga” means. READ MORE…

What We’re Reading in August

Featuring Eridanos Library favorites, tales of primeval and Mongolian displacement, and an anthology of stories about knock-offs!

József Szabó (technical manager): Of the books I’ve read during the past few months, Hans Erich Nossack’s An Offering for the Dead (trans. Neugroschel) has become a book I highly regard. It was my slow but steady mining of the out-of-print Eridanos Library series that led me to this short novel, whose not-so-familiar author stood out from the others in the set, such as: Heimito von Doderer, Michel Leiris, Piñera, Klossowski, Landolfi, Akutagawa, Savinio, Musil.

An Offering, stylistically, reads as if (Hamburger’s) Celan wrote a ~120-page surrealistic threnody in prose for European victims of a WWII bombing. READ MORE…