Tag: literature in translation

Celebrating San Francisco Writers Workshop and Noisebridge

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Event, ReadingsLeave a comment

Many of you have heard me talking about my “Tuesday night writers group.” Back in 2006, I started sharing my fiction with some of my comparative literature grad school friends, and one of them pointed me to this public, drop-in workshop that at the time was meeting in the basement of an art gallery near Union Square in San Francisco. The first time I showed up, the moderator, Tamim Ansary called on me to read my story outloud, and as I did so, something clicked: I didn’t recognize my own voice. I’d been reading and thinking about voice in literature from a scholarly point of view, but here I was experiencing my own voice as an embodied thing. It felt stilted, unsure of itself. I could do it better, differently. I could learn. It didn’t hurt that Tamim actually liked whatever it was I read and encouraged me to come back.

This summer marks ten years since I, Judy Viertel, and Kurt Wallace took over from Tamim in moderating the San Francisco Writers Workshop, with Monya Baker joining us later. These days, the workshop is meeting at a hackerspace in the Mission, Noisebridge, and this coming Friday, June 6 at 7 pm, we’ll be gathering there to celebrate the workshop and to fundraise for our venue. Noisebridge allows us space to meet for free, while their own rent is sky high. In addition to hosting our group, Noisebridge also provides a stage for Lit Crawl and other literary gatherings throughout the year. I’ve been encouraging everyone I know to donate what they can to help support this organization that contributes to the vitality of San Francisco’s literary scene.

And please come party with us on Friday! Tamim Ansary himself will be there, presenting his new and very topical book, TRUTHER NARRATIVES. Current co-moderator Monya Baker will also read, and I’m so proud to introduce a few of our current regulars. We will have a book raffle, a storytelling game, food, and an opportunity to tour Noisebridge. I made some nifty postcards and clipboards — you will want one!

Three additional items:

* Check out this YouTube recording of a conversation about literary translation I hosted back in April for WTAW Press. Featured here are Ilze Duarte, Katherine E. Young, Jenny Bhatt, Boris Dralyuk, and Yilin Wang — translating work from Brazilian, Russian, Gujarati, and Chinese. Do email me if you read any of the books mentioned. I’m so curious to hear what makes an impression.

* My publisher, Peg Alford Pursell (whom I first met at the San Francisco Writers Workshop) asked me to judge the second annual Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize. The results are in: the winner is THIS IS ALSO LIFE by Elle Therese Napolitano. This book is an intimate portrait of two women affected by domestic violence to various degrees. Its inventive structure allows a realistic representation of the aftermath of violence and hopefully will be appreciated by other readers when the book is published by WTAW Press. Keep an eye out for it!

* Another group of the writers workshop regulars are putting together a new literary reading on Sunday June 8 at a wine bar in the Mission. Literary scene in SF is clearly *on fire*! Please welcome Public Words! I’m planning on being there. Come hang out.

With appreciation for you all,

Olga

What’s gained in translation

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn interview, TranslationLeave a comment

I really enjoyed talking to Eric Molinsky of Imaginary Worlds podcast about The Magician of Emerald City, the Soviet version of the Wizard of Oz. This podcast episode is about what’s gained in translation, and Eric found me through the essay I wrote last year for Lit Hub.

Translation so often as seen as a reductive process, a process of loss, and that’s really unfortunate. In this episode, Eric makes a good case–and the one that personally I find to have much better backing–that translation is a process of addition, that it really is a huge boon to the readers and writers out there. Please enjoy this episode and subscribe to the series. Eric does such an excellent job.

Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life, translated by Charlotte Collins

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Book review, UncategorizedLeave a comment

This novel is set in a remote Austrian mountain valley. Andreas Egger, the pr9780374289867otagonist, arrives here as a boy of four. A farmer adopts him and treats him cruelly. Egger, nevertheless, builds a life, marries, goes to war, returns, watches the world change around him as he becomes a stalwart of his valley and earns his living by leading groups of tourists through the mountains. I’m reading this novel as a meditation about stewardship of the land, an exercise of imagination about how to live lightly. It takes a certain set of experiences, good and bad luck, to get there. Here’s a sign that Egger paints to advertise his business:

IF YOU LIKE THE MOUNTAINS I’M YOUR MAN.
I (with practically a lifetime’s experiences in and of Nature) offer:
Hiking with or without baggage
Excursions (half or full day)
Climbing trips
Walks in the mountains (for senior citizens, disabled people and children)
Guided tours in all seasons (weather permitting)
Guaranteed sunrise for early birds
Guaranteed sunset (in the valley only, as too dangerous on the mountain)
No danger to life and limb!
(PRICE IS NEGOTIABLE, BUT NOT EXPENSIVE)

I’m working on a full-length review of a novel by an author from Iceland, Oddný Eir, “Land of Love and Ruins,” translated by Philip Roughton, and I find in it, what I think is a similar idea, expressed in the following terms:

It’s good to replace the idea of “love of one’s native land” with “love of one’s foster land,” to clarify your relationship to the country you tied your umbilical cord to. . . . I think that care for the foster mother is inseparable from care for all its sons and daughters, whether they’re related by blood or not. . . . perhaps we can come up with a new way to connect with nature and justice. Come up with a new collective form, a new form of shared responsibility.  . . .  I’m thinking about loyalty. Isn’t loyalty to the fosterland different than loyalty to the fatherland? I’m not thinking about loyalty for loyalty’s sake, like that claimed by sweaty, self-assertive SS hot dogs. . . . Loyalty to the fosterland can’t be separated from connections to the totality of all things.

Eir develops her thoughts on this idea of fosterland at length and through very interesting history. I find it all very appealing. Unfortunately her language, rendered by Roughton, does get a little muddled. Seethaler’s words, rendered by Charlotte Collins, read like poetry. Here it is, again, that line: “I (with practically a lifetime’s experiences in and of Nature) offer: Hiking with or without baggage.”

I want to put a smiley face at the end of that sentence.

An extended excerpt from Seethaler’s novel is available on the publisher’s website.

You can buy the book here.

Two Lines: Fall Issue

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Book review, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Two Lines Press has come out with a new anthology of world writing in translation, their Fall 2016 Issue. My favorite piece in this book is the first, “Sea Swell” by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa. This is how it opens,

I had a friend once. Indeed, at the time, I only had one friend. His name was Andrés and he lived in Paris and, much to his delight, I traveled to that city to see him. The very evening of my arrival, he introduced me to Marguerite Duras, who was a friend of his. Unfortunately, that evening, I had taken two or three amphetamines.

The voice is humorously self-depreciating, yet confident in telling an important story.  The line notes tell me that Vila-Matas specializes in “stories and novels that plays with the interrelation between fiction and reality,” so I’m reading this as roman à clef. Whether or not the author has actually ever met Marguerite Duras really doesn’t matter as much as the question whether this piece is a stand-alone story or a part of a larger narrative. The ending, though not abrupt, leaves me wanting a lot more.

An accompanying story appears on the Press’s website, “Vampire in Love.”  I haven’t yet had a chance to read it, and I’m a little put off by the title, but I hope to get to it soon.

In the printed anthology, another piece that stood out to me, is “Eni Furtado Has Never Stopped Running” by Alicia Kozameh, translated from Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger. A woman has come to the cemetery to clean her father’s remains. The narrator gives us nearly every bone of this man’s body, together with the smell and, ehrm, taste. Contemporary literature seems, at times, peaked on finding limit experiences, taboos to break, and this piece is that. I’m not sure whether I liked it because or in spite of this.