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Czech fiction in translation

June 8, 2017, 9:51 am
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       The Prague Daily Monitor reports State to sponsor foreign publishers to translate Czech writers, as the government has apparently decided to be more generous, covering up to 70 per cent of translation costs (previously: 25 per cent) and with publishers now:
newly able to ask for money for the layout and printing of a book, the costs associated with copyright fees and promotion
       (The official Culture Ministry documentation can presumably be found here.)
       On the one hand -- yay ! great ! On the other -- it just shows how dependent US/UK publishers remain on being subsidized. Essentially, except in the rarest cases, they need to be paid to publish something. No wonder translation-into-English is dominated by European languages (that can cough up the most cash). A sad state of affairs.
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Women's Prize for Fiction

June 8, 2017, 9:51 am
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       They've announced the winner of the prize-that-was-once-called-the-Orange-Prize-but-I-can't-be-bothered-to-remember-this-week's-sponsor (give me a break: next week, or soon thereafter, there's going to be ... yet another 'new sponsorship model'), and it's The Power, by Naomi Alderman.
       This does not appear to have been released in the US yet; one hopes this prize-win changes that; meanwhile, get your copy at Amazon.co.uk.
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Griffin Poetry Prizes

June 9, 2017, 10:09 am
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       The Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the major international poetry awards, with two categories -- international and Canadian -- and yesterday they announced this year's winners.
       Falling Awake, by Alice Oswald, won the international category; see, for example, the W.W.Norton publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
       Injun, by Jordan Abel, won the Canadian category; see the Talonbooks publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
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French-American Foundation Translation Prizes

June 9, 2017, 10:09 am
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       They awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prizes -- for the 30th time ! -- at a nice ceremony at the Century Association yesterday, with keynote remarks from last year's 'Translator Laureate', Lydia Davis.
       (Information about the winners wasn't up at the official site yet, last I checked, but see all the finalists.)

       The fiction prize went to Sam Taylor's translation of Maylis de Kerangal's The Heart (not to be confused with the UK/Canadian translation of the same book by Jessica Moore, published as Mend the Living ...).

       The non-fiction prize was split between two books:
        - Charlotte Mandell and Lauren Elkin's translation of Claude Arnaud's Jean Cocteau: A Life; see the Yale University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
        - Jane Marie Todd's translation of Olivier Wieviorka's The French Resistance; see the Harvard University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
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Andrey Kurkov Q & A

June 9, 2017, 10:09 am
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More One Hundred Years of Solitude celebration

June 10, 2017, 10:27 am
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       As I recently noted, it's the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk), and there's been quite a bit of coverage.
       In addition to the interesting piece by Alvaro Santana-Acuña in The Atlantic I previously pointed you to, How One Hundred Years of Solitude Became a Classic, see now also:
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Princess of Asturias Award for Literature

June 10, 2017, 10:27 am
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       They've announced this year's winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, and it is Adam Zagajewski, whose Slight Exaggeration just came out in English; he'll get to pick up the prize with the other laureates "in the second fortnight of October".
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The Great Passage review

June 11, 2017, 10:43 am
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       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Miura Shion's The Great Passage.

       This just came out from AmazonCrossing -- and the 125 reviews on Amazon suggest it's attracting some attention (though apparently not from reviewers elsewhere ...).
       The translation is by Juliet Winters Carpenter -- whose translation of Mizumura Minae's Inheritance from Mother also just came out (that from Other Press; it's reviewed in today's The New York Times Book Review).
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Sofia Translation Forum

June 11, 2017, 10:43 am
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In Praise of Litigation review

June 12, 2017, 11:03 am
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       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Alexandra Lahav's book In Praise of Litigation, recently out from Oxford University Press.
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Czech literature in translation

June 12, 2017, 11:03 am
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       At Radio Praha David Vaughan speaks with the Readers International-publisher, in Dorothy Connell and the Challenges of Bringing Czech Writing to the English-speaking World.
       Among their publications which they discuss is Michal Viewegh's Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia; -- and for: "probably the most popular Czech writer of the last quarter of the century", it's sad how little of his work has been translated into English (Bliss Was it in Bohemia is a recent exception).
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Michel Houellebecq Q & A

June 13, 2017, 11:22 am
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       At Garage Christian Lorentzen offers Nobody Will Make Us Do Yoga: A Conversation with Michel Houellebecq, as the Submission (etc.)-author's art show recently opened in New York and he's been doing and getting lots of press.
       It's kind of an odd interview, but among the interesting answers is Houellebecq's explanation why he moved back to France, after living in Ireland for eleven years: "To speak French."
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PEN Translates honorees

June 13, 2017, 11:22 am
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       They've announced the winners of the 2017 English PEN Translates 'awards' -- which aren't really prizes, but rather: "made to publishers to cover the English language translation costs" -- though the projects are selected on the basis of: "outstanding literary quality, strength and innovation of the publishing project, and contribution to literary diversity in the UK".
       Some familiar big-name authors (well, relatively speaking, as far as literature in translation goes) in the mix, including César Aira, Javier Cercas, and Jenny Erpenbeck, and some big-name translators, too, but at least there's quite an effort to go beyond the usual, and so we find a translation from Somali (see the Bloodaxe publicity page) -- not fiction, alas -- as well as from the Belarusian, the Прэмію Гедройца-shortlisted A large Czeslaw Milosz with a dash of Elvis Presley (maybe not the final title in English ... ?), forthcoming from Scotland Street Press, among other promising-sounding titles..
       I look forward to seing some of these (though, since this is a UK-based effort, probably not many of these, except the bigger names ...).
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Salki review

June 14, 2017, 11:44 am
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       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Wojciech Nowicki's Salki, just out in English from Open Letter.
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Peace Prize of the German Book Trade

June 14, 2017, 11:44 am
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       They've announced that Margaret Atwood to Receive the 2017 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, as she will pick up the prestigious €25,000 prize on 15 October, at the conclusion of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
       As I mentioned two weeks ago, she's also been named the winner of this year's Franz Kafka Prize -- and the prize-ceremony for that is usually around that time of the year too, so that will be convenient for her, she can just hang around Central Europe for a while.
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Seoul International Book Fair

June 15, 2017, 12:06 pm
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       The Seoul International Book Fair runs through Sunday.
       They have both a 'Guest of Honor' (Turkey) and a 'Spotlight Country' (Canada). There are also some Special Exhibitions & Events, including on 'The Era of Bookstores' (apparently small independents are making a comeback in South Korea too) and the promising-sounding 'Reading Clinic' ("It is a one-on-one reading clinic with pre-registered readers and experts of writing, science and genre literature").
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Man Booker International Prize

June 15, 2017, 12:06 pm
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       The Man Booker International Prize has been awarded, in this incarnation -- a mash-up of what used to be the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (whose format -- book prize for a work of translated fiction published in the UK -- it took over) and the old-style Man Booker International Prize (which used to be an author-career prize, with them only retaining the name and the big bucks) --, for the second time, and they've announced that A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman Wins The Man Booker International Prize 2017, with translator Jessica Cohen getting half the prize pay-out.
       A Horse Walks Into a Bar isn't (yet) under review at the complete review -- I might get to it, though I haven't seen a copy yet --; meanwhile, see for example the Alfred A. Knopf publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
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Suite for Barbara Loden review

June 16, 2017, 12:09 pm
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       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Nathalie Léger's Suite for Barbara Loden, out in nice editions from Les Fugitives (in the UK) and Dorothy (in the US), in a prize-winning (Scott Moncrieff !) translation.
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Bookselling in ... Thailand

June 16, 2017, 12:09 pm
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       In the Bangkok Post Nanat Suchiva reports that: 'Thailand's independent bookstores have shown a remarkable resilience in the face of the rising popularity of digital media', in In the good books.
       Apparently, the independents -- about fifty of them in the entire cuntry -- are having more success in adapting to changed circumstances than the big chains .....
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Even creative writing isn't safe from AI (?)

June 16, 2017, 12:09 pm
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       A paper recently put up at arXiv.org considers When Will AI Exceed Human Performance ? Evidence from AI Experts (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) -- though they undermine themselves from the get-go by claiming 'evidence' in the title: what they did was ask around, i.e. get opinions -- which doesn't really qualify as any sort of 'evidence' in my book .....
       Still: "352 researchers responded to our survey invitation (21% of the 1634 authors we contacted)", and their opinions as to when machines -- powered by artificial intelligence (AI) -- will perform at the same (or higher) levels than humans is disturbing enough.
       Among the very depressing results: there are experts who think it won't be much more than a decade before AI can: "Write New York Times Bestseller" (defined as being able to: "Write a novel or short story good enough to make it to the New York Times best-seller list"), with the median response a still-depressing 33 years.
       (Perhaps even more depressing: some experts think "Write High School Essay" (defined as: "Write an essay for a high-school history class that would receive high grades and pass plagiarism detectors") is pretty much around the corner -- and the median (!) guess is 9.6 years -- ahead of "Generate Top 40 Pop Song" (11.4 years), which I suspect says more about the standard that the experts thinks American high school learning is at than anything else .....)
       So, you creative types, you can hang on a bit longer -- the outlook is rosier than for retail salespeople (median expectation until AI takes your job: ca. 15 years) -- but apparently there's no long term future in writing The New York Times (or presumably any other kind of) bestsellers ..... (And I suspect if they had asked the experts, the median expectation for literary-artsy novels would have been even lower .....)
       I imagine James Patterson is already looking into collaborating with computers -- his 'books' surely lend themselves to automated writing -- and once he figures it out he'll probably dominate the bestseller lists even more than he already does (the brand-name being the only thing humans will have left going for themselves).
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