Tag Archives: Interview
Bulgarian Women Who Run With the Wolves: An Interview with Nataliya Deleva and Izidora Angel
Nataliya Deleva’s Four Minutes is a profound, heart-breaking meditation on the notions of home and homelessness, with their myriad manifestations and implications in our contemporary world. An orphanage in post-communist Bulgaria provides the physical and psychological coordinates of the narrator’s existence and of the book’s loose narrative frame. Called simply and anonymously “the Home,” this […]
“Keep your day job.” Edward Lipsett reveals what it’s really like to be an independent publisher of translated literature
Edward Lipsett discusses what makes a good translation, why, as a small publisher, you should never give up the day job, and what life is like in rural Japan during a global pandemic.
Edge to Edge: Laura Marris In Conversation With John Taylor and Pierre Chappuis
By Laura Marris Some of us, if we are lucky enough, have witnessed it—the moment when a passing line of clouds tangles with the trees of a ridge, blurring the distinctions between branches and vapor, between landscape and sky. This thoughtful, sensitive volume offers the poetic equivalent of that process, a brush between two imaginative […]
Forrest Gander on editing untranslatable poet Yoshimasu Gozo
Yoshimasu Gozo is a one-of-a-kind artist. While he’s usually referred to as a poet, such a categorization almost always comes with some sort of qualification. His work is often called “unconventional” or “unorthodox.” Others stress that his poetry draws heavily from performance, music, and/or multimedia art. In a word, he writes the sort of poetry that’s […]
Michele Hutchison on Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s La Superba, expat writers and translators
Celebrated Dutch author Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s autobiographical novel La Superba, titled after the nickname for Genoa, where he has lived for the past six years, is the story of a writer named Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and the group of expats—legal and illegal—he befriends, as they try to assimilate into the labyrinthine city. I met up […]
Ann Goldstein on Ferrante Fever and what makes it into translation from the Italian
As Diana Thow and I were planning a session on Italian literature for the American Literary Translators Association conference, I happened to see translator of Elena Ferrante fame and New Yorker editor Ann Goldstein at the Turin Salone del Libro, where she was presenting a book of essays on Primo Levi and translation. [i] Goldstein, since she was […]
Passing in Translation: Jessica Powell on Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s Woman in Battle Dress
Interview by Lucina Schell, Editor Woman in Battle Dress, the last published work by renowned Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo, is just out in translation by Jessica Powell from City Lights Books. The sweeping epic imagines the remarkable life of 19th-Century historical figure Henriette Faber, who lived as a man in order to study medicine and […]
Translating Fact into Fiction: Alex Zucker on Heda Margolius Kovály’s Innocence
Interview by Stacey Knecht Stacey Knecht, a translator from the Czech and Dutch based in the Netherlands, spoke with Alex Zucker via Skype on May 22, 2015 about his latest translation, Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street by Czech author Heda Margolius Kovály, just out from Soho House Press. “Set in and around a cinema where […]
Access & Aesthetics: An Interview with Luis de Miranda, Haute Culture Books
The young and exciting Haute Culture Books has already made a name for itself with its innovative take on the participative publishing model. Governed by the philosophy “digital books should be free, physical books should be sublime,” HCB rewards its “Book Angels” with beautifully crafted art object limited editions that subsidize the wide distribution of […]
Donald Wellman on Antonio Gamoneda’s Description of the Lie
Donald Wellman joins me virtually upon the release of his latest translation of Antonio Gamoneda’s Description of the Lie for a conversation about the breakthrough poetic work in post-fascist Spain, from one of the country’s most celebrated contemporary poets. “I’ve been haunted by his voice…The power of the voice is irresistible.” “I am learning from [Gamoneda […]