Tag: Miljenko Jergovic

Translation, Exile, and ALTA

The annual American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, the virtual portion of which is taking place this weekend, always makes me think deeply about translation. After a roundtable today organized by Diana Thow and Jamie Richards, which left me feeling stimulated but also isolated and nostalgic for the in-person ALTA conferences of the past, I… Continue reading Translation, Exile, and ALTA

People Reading Kin

I’ve been very happy to see several positive reviews of Kin in the past few days since its official release. Sarah McEachern’s piece in the LA Review of Books, “Entangled in Family: On Miljenko Jergović’s Kin and Semezdin Mehmedinović’s My Heart,” takes the title and the book’s biggest thematic thread as its main focus, with… Continue reading People Reading Kin

Kin’s Arrival, blogging, and podcasting

My copy of Kin came in the mail a few days ago, all 911 pages of it. It made the mailbox sag a bit. I didn’t have time to think much about it at the time, but since then I have scrolled back through the blog that I kept while translating the book beginning in… Continue reading Kin’s Arrival, blogging, and podcasting

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

Prelim Praise for Kin

Here, from the Calvert Journal, is one of those pre-release teasers about “books to look forward to in X year” (which, in this case is the year 2021). Matt Janney calls it, appropriately, a “time-travelling, place-hopping epic, […] at once a history of family and an ode to Yugoslavia.” This is, well, a teaser. Of… Continue reading Prelim Praise for Kin

Kakania in The Massachusetts Review

An excerpt from the fifth part of Kin is in the current (summer 2020) issue of The Massachusetts Review. Thanks to the editors, especially Corine Tachtaris and Jim Hicks, for their interest and support. It’s a strong issue with plenty of global awareness and representation, including translations by Patty Crane (Tomas Tranströmer), Peter Bush (Juan… Continue reading Kakania in The Massachusetts Review

Translating Place

My author does a lot with names. Here is an example: Like Mehmed-paše, Nemanjina Street was built in the sixteenth century. It had been a road in the neighborhood of the Hadji Balina Mosque, which the people would remember as Čekaluša. But Čekaluša did not get its name from the word čekanje, or waiting, as… Continue reading Translating Place

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

Sieges and The Unwritten

This piece by Miljenko Jergovic in my English translation was in the New York Times this weekend. I was impressed by the quality of the editing by Max Strasser. I’ve done a lot of editing, though not in a journalism vein, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. His light but confident touch was reassuring,… Continue reading Sieges and The Unwritten

Editing and Self-editing

I think about the importance of editing often as I’m working. Partly this is because I am also editing other people’s writing as I write and translate. It is easier to separate these activities when the writing is of very different kinds, but sometimes they cross paths, and then I have to be careful that… Continue reading Editing and Self-editing