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

"My work on a translation for seven years has been part of a long fixation, which I hope to put to rest here." This was the bold statement with which Fanny Howe began her Two Voices presentation on the book of Holocaust poetry, A Wall of Two.

Early in this Two Voices event, translator Stephen Snyder made a bold pronouncement: Haruki Murakami would win a Nobel prize, and 1Q84, his blockbuster novel that many are comparing to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, would be the book to do it. Snyder wasn't wholly going out on a limb. As he told the audience, he correctly predicted Kenzaburo Oe's Nobel prize in 1994. But more to the point of his presentation, Snyder has seen the intricacies of the publishing industry close up, and he has a strong sense of how tastes are made with regard to inernational authors.

We're proud to present audio of renowned author, translator, and MacArthur "Genuis" Lydia Davis, who discussed her acclaimed new translation of Madame Bovary last week as part of the Center's Two Voices events series in San Francisco. Whereas so many writers seem to fall neatly into categories, Davis's career has more often than not defied categorization . . .

In conjuction with his appearance in San Francisco for the Center's Two Voices literary events series, Cyrus Cassells also appeared on the public radio show Out in the Bay to discuss translation, Catalan poet Francesc Parcerisas, and why San Francisco is his favorite U.S. city (plus, which city is is favorite international one).

"I'm going to tell you a lot of love stories today," Yiyun Li said to begin her Two Voices event on the masterful Chinese writer Shen Congwen. Although little-known in the U.S., Congwen has been a hugely influential author on Li--as she declared during the event, Congwen's letters were one of the three books she brought with her when she emigrated from China to the United States in 1996.

Pulitzer-nominated poet Cyrus Cassells and Franscec Parcerisas first struck up a friendship in 1983, when the former was in Barcelona exploring the charming city that has been home to so many artists and writers. Twenty years later the two men met again in Barcelona, and it was then that Cassells made the snap decision to become Parcerisas and rsquo; English-language voice. As Cassells tells it, it was a moment of great serendipity and much drama: "In his living room he recited, movingly, in Catalan, the poem "Objects,' which prompted an almost lightning-quick decision on my part to become his translator." Cassells read a number of Parcerisas' poems to a rapt Two Voices audience, switching with ease from English to Catalan and back.

Compared to Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, Jon Fosse is one of Europe's most important writers living writers. Here, the translator of two of his novels, Damion Searls, talks with the Center's Scott Esposito about this intriguing writer.

On November 17 we celebrated the launch of the new book in our TWO LINES series, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. Here you can hear the audio from the readings portion of that event, where translators Kurt Beals, Katherine Silver, Rick London, and Joel Streicker reading poetry and prose from Anja Utler, Martin Adan, and Samanta Schweblin, all included in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal.

In this audio, award-winning translator Stephen Kessler discusses his work with Cernuda's amazing late poetry. Cut off from his readership and his colleagues, Cernuda continued to write, but he was unaware of his growing renown in his native land. Then, at almost 50 years of age, Cernuda moved to Mexico, where he began to write the poetry that appears in Kessler's translation, Desolation of the Chimera. Though Cernuda was lured to Mexico by both the promise of a familiar lifestyle and the love of a young man, the poems in Desolation are, per Kessler, the work of a man writing "as if for himself alone."