Those of you who have been reading my newsletter for a while know that October is Litquake season in San Francisco — Litquake being our annual festival that celebrates writing and literature. Events are happening all across town this week and the next, culminating with a literary pub crawl through the Mission neighborhood on October 24th: Lit Crawl. Please check out the full schedule online, and join me in attending two events with which I’m entangled in various capacities.
First, on October 24, at 5 pm, I will be at the Red Poppy Art House, to listen to the stories from TEA (Transeurasian) Writers Collective. Emceed by the writer comedian in our midst, Yuliya Patsay, the writers will read excerpts from their published and new work, and muse on the ideas of Untranslatable and Unsayable. How do cultural taboos and superstitions contribute to opacity in translation and muddle understanding between cultures? Read our full event description on Lit Crawl’s website, and come hang out and listen to these stories — and as always, let me know if you’re interested in participating in this group.
Then, at 6:30 pm, move with me from tea to beer at The Sycamore, for Chopped Liver: Stories from Secular Jewish Life. This event is extra special to me because my dad will be reading from his book Kогда рок был зелёным. He wrote the book in Russian, and I translated the excerpt he’ll be reading at this event. It’s set in 1968 and tells the story of a Soviet student rock band formed around a summer construction brigade. So, the students are building a cow shed by day and play The Beatles and The Animals songs by night. Speaking of the untranslatable. But fun!
In other news this month, my review of Ingeborg Bachmann’s The Collected Prose, translated by Tess Lewis and Philip Boehm, was published in On the Seawall. Bachmann is a post WWII Austrian writer, a poet and a radio personality, who achieved great fame in the German speaking world for calling out lingering Nazi practices in the culture and for connecting Nazism to men’s behavior toward women. She has long been celebrated in the feminist movement, and it’s very rewarding to see this translation bringing her work to wider English-speaking audiences.
Bachmann’s prose, especially in the early period, tends to the philosophical, and among other things, she does an incredible job of portraying the effects of mental illness on her characters’ lives. I would not recommend reading this book from the beginning — in my review I suggest a particular reading order. Please read the review, buy the book, and enjoy. For me, this has been a very rewarding reading project.
