Two Voices: Events from the Center for the Art of Translation

In his Two Voices presentation on May 8, lauded Argentine author Sergio Chejfec started by explaining the biographical roots of his strange, compelling novel The Planets. The book is about an Argentine who goes missing during the military dictatorship of 1976-82, and Chejfec began by explaining that the plot of the book actually has to do with a friend of his who did disappear during the military dictatorship for the 1970s. He was one of an estimated 30,000 Argentines to disappear during that span.

In this audio, Pulitzer-winner poet and legendary translator Richard Howard discusses his career and reads his work. He talks about works he's written in the voice of famous individuals, such as Isadora Duncan - ;and about how this writing relates to his work with translation. Howard touches on his famous translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, particularly how he chose to deal with Baudelaire's challenging rhyme scheme. (He chose, controversially, to abandon the terminal rhymes.) Howard explain show he translated the poems so as to evoke the feeling of rhymes without actually making the lines rhyme as did Baudelaire. He also reads from his translation of Stéphane Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun."

In this episode, Scott Esposito eagerly anticipates the Dirty War in Sergio Chejfec and rsquo;s The Planets, and Daniel Medin shares a delightful description of a freeloader from Nescio and rsquo;s Amsterdam Stories. They discuss Daniel Sada and rsquo;s Almost Never and the general robustness of contemporary Mexican fiction, attempt to explain why reading Can Xue and rsquo;s Vertical Motion is like running downhill in the dark, then hesitate over whether to call Daniel Levin Becker and rsquo;s Many Subtle Channels a memoir or a work of criticism, but agree that it is about Oulipo and very candid. Daniel Medin then speaks to Petra Hardt, head of the rights department at Suhrkamp Verlag and author of Rights: Buying. Protecting. Selling. Suhrkamp is one of the most prestigious presses in Germany and in Europe, and since its founding in 1950 has published not only many of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century - ; among them Paul Celan, Theodor W. Adorno, and Thomas Bernhard - ; but foreign authors as well, including Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Julio Cortázar.

On April 3, 2012, translators Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel - ;best-known as the main English translators of Haruki Murakmai's novels and short stories - ;discussed their work with the Japanese master of the surreal's latest book, 1Q84. The event got off to a proper start with a discussion of one of the primary questions surrounding 1Q84: how do you pronounce its title? Jay Rubin canvassed the audience for answers, which ranged from "nineteen-eighty-four" to "eye-que-eight-four" (which Rubin ruled out, since the first character is a number one). He then went on to a discussion of the role that the title plays in the novel . . .

In this first episode, Scott Esposito interviews Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review and former senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They discuss editing the English version of Jean-Christophe Valtat and rsquo;s 03 (translated by Mitzi Angel), procuring the rights to Roberto Bolaño and rsquo;s works and editing Natasha Wimmer and rsquo;s translations, and Stein's translation of Edouard Levé's book Autoportrait. Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito also chat about César Aira and rsquo;s Varamo, László Krasznahorkai and rsquo;s Satantango, and Robert Walser and rsquo;s Berlin Stories.

In this audio, translator Peter Constantine argues passionately against the notion that there is a past to Greek poetry and a present, but no middle. Here, Constantine offers ample evidence of all the great Greek poetry written between the ancient and modern eras.

The Center was joined by legendary translator Richard Howard on February 16, 2012 to discuss his work with some of the greatest French writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this audio event he focuses on Stéphane Mallarmé's most famous - ;and likely most challenging - ;poem, "Afternoon of a Faun," which encompasses seven pages and includes several challenges of syntax, typography, and form. He characterizes the work as "for the spoken word only," and it can be heard as Howard intends in the audio in his dramatic reading.

On January 26, translator and China scholar Perry Link joined the Center, the Asia Society, and the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco for a discussion on imprisoned Chinese activist and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Liu Xiaobo and rsquo;s No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of his political essays and poetry. In his role as translator, editor, and scholar, Link reviewed the process of publishing the collection, Liu and rsquo;s literary background and career as writer and activist, and both the personal and political influences of his development into one of China and rsquo;s most notorious and celebrated and ldquo;dissidents. and rdquo;

On November 9, the Center for the Art of Translation celebrated the release of Counterfeits, its 18th annual anthology of world literature, with a star-studded event in New York City. You can listen to the audio from that event right here.

This event brought together editors, poets, and translators Robert Hass, Greg Delanty, and Michael Matto to talk about some of the great richness of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Delanty and Matto are coeditors of The Word Exchange, which features over 70 contemporary poets (Hass included among them) translating a wealth of Anglo-Saxon verse into modern English. In this audio you can hear Hass, Delanty, and Matto read in both English and Anglo-Saxon while discussing these poems.

In this audio, celebrated author and Guggenheim fellow Daniel Alarcón talks with Natasha Wimmer about her translators of Bolaño's masterworks, The Savage Detectives and 2666. The audio was originally recorded on October 7, 2009. They start the conversation by discussing why Wimmer got into translation to begin with. As she notes, translation is often seen as the closest form of reading . . .

On November 11, 2011, the Center for the Art of Translation's Two Voices events series hosted the pre-eminent translators of Nordic crime fiction, Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally. Since 1984 they have produced award-winning translations, including books by Henning Mankell, Peter Høeg, Camilla Läckberg, and Mari Jungstedt. Murray is best-known as the translator of the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy, and Nunnally is well-known for translating another runaway bestseller (from the Danish), Smilla's Sense of Snow. The couple were presented in conversation with Sedge Thomson, host of West Coast Live.

Mexico is traditionally thought of as a country in love with machismo, and that fact can be seen in the Mexican writers who succeed in English - ;among them Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, and Octavio Paz. Yet there are many women in Mexico writing landmark literature, and this audio presents two of them. As part of the annual Litquake literature festival in San Francisco, the Center for the Art of Translation partnered with the Mexican Consulate to present two of Mexico's most vital female writers: Carmen Boullosa and Pura López Colomé.

"The purpose of this book is to send readers off to new places--new places of the mind." So began Joshua Beckman's Two voices presentation of Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade, described, in part, as the Japanese concept of haiku translated into the Latin America of the 20th century.

Translator of Thomas Mann, Milan Kundera, Hugo Claus, and many more, Michael Henry Heim joined the Center for the Art of Translation in its new offices in downtown San Francisco. Heim has worked with translation since the 1960s, and his presentation focused on how he has seen the translator slowly been brought brought out from "under the carpet" since then. Throughout, Heim came across as a passionate advocate of translation, one who has had the pleasure of seeing it emerge more and more, to the point that now, in Heim's opinion, it has developed serious momentum and has a bright future.