Tag: Archipelago Books

Rytkheu Panel Next Week

I’ll be participating in a roundtable next week (March 22, 1:30pm EDT; 5:30pm GMT & 6:30pm CET) devoted to the work of Chukchi author Yuri Rytkheu. The virtual event, organized by the Russian and East European Institute as part of a series on indigenous and under-represented writers from Russian-speaking spaces, will be hosted by my… Continue reading Rytkheu Panel Next Week

Kin in The Harvard Review

This month was earlier slated to be when Archipelago Books released Miljenko Jergović’s Kin in my translation, but that got pushed to the middle of next month. Instead, a short piece, “In Springtime When we Air Out the Graves,” has appeared in this month’s Harvard Review (No. 57), alongside work by Rita Dove, Gregory O’Brien,… Continue reading Kin in The Harvard Review

Racing to 2019

Quite a few things have happened since I last posted, so much that I am having trouble remembering what happened when, what I wrote down and what I didn’t, where I traveled, and how many people’s names I’ve forgotten since I spoke with them. Apologies for my tardy replies and general slowness. We got a… Continue reading Racing to 2019

On Translating Word Play

I’m on my way to the AWP conference later this week and will be speaking on two panels, one on translation and word play, the other on translation and exile. Here are some thoughts about the first. Basically, it’s what I’m going to be saying in the first part of my comments. Then I’ll have… Continue reading On Translating Word Play

On Translating Miljenko Jergović

PEN gave me 500 words or so to write on this topic, which I have now written many thousands of words on in this blog, so I took a slightly different tack, beginning this way: I have been drawn since first becoming a reader to the sense of adventure that the opening pages of a… Continue reading On Translating Miljenko Jergović

Big New Book

I’ve just signed a contract to translate a 1000-page novel. It is due to the publisher in May of 2017, so I’ll be working steadily on it for the next couple of years. The publisher (the visionary Archipelago Books) asked for a sample, but I had not read the book, which came out in 2013,… Continue reading Big New Book

Prehistoric Times

Alyson Waters has a fantastic translation of Eric Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times, which was published a couple of years back by Archipelago Books. I liked it so much that I reviewed it. Here is the first paragraph: “Under the influence of having just completed this book—and let me note at the outset that the influence is… Continue reading Prehistoric Times

A book from far away

I’ve had the treat of just returning to Yuri Rytkheu’s novel A Dream in Polar Fog (trans. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse; Archipelago Books, 2005) to teach it in my class this semester. If it were just an adventure story, one would not expect the book to have been published by a press with Archipelago’s literary credentials.… Continue reading A book from far away