Image taken from EMP
We asked the members of our community what translated works they’d be reading in the summer. Here is what they shared!
You can send us the title, author’s name, and translator’s name of what you are reading these days via Twitter too! Remember to mention us (@uw_translation) and use the hashtag #uwtranslatorsread.
Michael Biggins Slavic Languages and Literatures
My summer reading list of books in translation starts with three titles that will be featured at the July 26, August 30 and September 27 meetings, respectively, of Readings from the Heart of Europe, a UW- and Seattle community-based book discussion group, open to all, that explores great books from the many, mostly post-colonial and post-communist literatures of East Central and Southeastern Europe. I’m a member and one of a team of four organizers of the group. We’re particularly excited that at each of these summer 2020 meetings we’ll be joined by the translator of that month’s book in focus, as follows…
For our July 26 meeting we’ll be reading best-selling Croatian author Dubravka Ugrešić’s highly acclaimed novel Fox, and joined by translator Ellen Elias-Bursać (Open Press Books, 2018).
On August 30 we’ll be discussing Romanian author Mircea Cărtarescu’s novel Blinding, Book One, and joined by the book’s translator Sean Cotter (Archipelago Books, 2013).
Then on September 27 we’ll explore Book Two of Slovenian author Lojze Kovačič’s wartime trilogy Newcomers, translated by yours truly (Archipelago Books, 2020).
Our book club welcomes new members and even one-time participants, so I encourage everyone to follow our group on Facebook and join us for any or all of these book discussions, as the spirit moves you – not to mention our other fall 2020 and subsequent meetings in 2021.
Other books in English translation that our group has recently discussed have included 2018 Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times (from Polish), 2019 Austrian Nobel Prize Winner Peter Handke’s A Sorrow beyond Dreams (from German), 2009 Nobelist Herta Müller’s (Romania/Germany) The Land of Green Plums, a novel by Romanian author Max Blecher and, most recently, on June 28, Bulgarian prose writer Georgi Gospodinov’s Physics of Sorrow, for which the author’s American translator Angela Rodel was able to join us from Bulgaria as our featured discussant. We would be honored to welcome our UW Translation Hub colleagues and friends at any of these upcoming events over the summer. You can register for them from our Facebook page to receive a link that will connect you to each meeting on Zoom.
Aria Fani Near Eastern Languages and Civilization
The Story of Layla and Majnun
Leyli o majnun (Persian), Nezami Ganjavi, 12th century ADc.
Trans. Dr. R. Gelpked. London: Bruno Cassirer, 1966e.
This is the most successful love story that has emerged from West, Central and South Asia. It has been composed, rewritten, and circulated in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hindi and so many other languages. I am rereading it to prepare for a fall course titled “Radical Routes of Love: Reading Leyla and Majnun in Five Iterations.” This story is a great entry point to dispel our current anxiety about imitation and obsession with tracing and examining influence.
Jesús Hidalgo Spanish and Portuguese
La montaña mágica
Der Zauberberg. Thomas Mann, 1924.
Trans. Isabel García Adánez, Debolsillo, 2020.
My wife has read many canonical texts by Latin America authors. So, in order to reciprocate her interest in the literary texts written in my own language, we have agreed to read at least one canonical novel in her mother tongue (German) every year. In 2019, we managed to read Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and this summer we chose Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
It’s been years since I wanted to read Mann’s 1,000-page piece (the first time that I heard about it was back when I was an undergrad, as it inspires a character in a short story by one of my favorite Peruvian authors) and it just seems to be the right time to meet Hans Castorp, Settembrini, and Clawdia Chauchat.
Emily Thompson Samuel & Althea Stroum Center for Jewish Studies
La aventura de Miguel Littín clandestino en Chile, Gabriel García Márquez, 1986
Trans. Asa Zatz (2010), New York Review of Books
Gabriel García Márquez’s journalism is a hidden treasure of Latin American literature. The style is more testimonial than reportage, with stories that are full of unverifiable facts. I haven’t stopped thinking about Relato de un náufrago (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor) since I read it for a class with Edgar O’Hara in 2013. That testimony is another case in which the government tells a different story than the person at the center of the narrative. García Márquez has a history of revealing, through testimonial journalism, the things that governments fight to hide. In light of that, and in light of America’s current citizen/government tensions, I look forward to reading Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín. The translator is Asa Zatz. His New York Review of Books bio page reveals that Asa has translated around 100 books, and this is the first of his work I will read. Clandestine in Chile is the story, as related to García Márquez, of the filmmaker Miguel Littín’s undercover return to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, the mother country from which he has been exiled. The Chilean government seized and burned almost 15,000 copies of the book. As a librarian, book bannings and burnings fascinate me. As a translator, I’m curious to find out how many footnotes it takes to explain the political minutiae of a Latin American dictatorship to U.S. readers. Maybe we’re prone to understand it without extensive notes, these days.
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