Are you stuck for a way to celebrate international translation day on 30 September? Why not submit an entry to Translation Idol? Because that's the deadline.
Germany has kindly awarded us a public holiday to celebrate. We'll be at the Alte Kantine Wedding on Thursday, 3 October, 8 p.m. It costs €5 on the door or €3 for poor people, but obviously if you send us a translation you're automatically on the guest list. If you can't come you can still send a translation, because we'll have someone read it on your behalf. And if you don't send a translation you should still come, because we'll be proclaiming the republic of no man's land, where everyone gets a vote on the best translation and where we realistically demand the impossible: translation.
So join me and Germany's next top author Deniz Utlu for fun, frolics and fabulous prizes. There is also a bar.
Friday, 27 September 2013
Thursday, 26 September 2013
...And the Shortlist Sample Translations!
But the VERY VERY EXCITING thing is that English sample translations of all six German Book Prize contenders are now online at New Books in German. Please take the rest of the day off work and read them all. They are by Martin Chalmers, Iain Galbraith, me, Zaia Alexander, Kári Driscoll and Alexandra Roesch. So obviously you should start with the Clemens Meyer one.
And seeing as you happen to be a publishing type with a large budget at your disposal, you could also enquire about buying translation rights, now that you too have fallen for Im Stein.
And seeing as you happen to be a publishing type with a large budget at your disposal, you could also enquire about buying translation rights, now that you too have fallen for Im Stein.
Talks on Work
Two lots of talks: one in London organised by the Translators Association and featuring my pal Jamie Lee Searle and me talking to translators about how to get the kind of work you want to get and not the kind you don't want. That's on 18 November but you can book now.
And before that a whole day's worth in Berlin, called Paths to Publishing and featuring all kinds of other more publishing-y people talking about publishing issues. All on 6 October.
And before that a whole day's worth in Berlin, called Paths to Publishing and featuring all kinds of other more publishing-y people talking about publishing issues. All on 6 October.
Wednesday, 25 September 2013
Meyer and Me
Why yes, I did go out drinking with Clemens Meyer. He plays the trumpet and likes Benedict Cumberbatch and James Joyce and single malt whisky from Islay. He is also an outstanding writer.
Tuesday, 24 September 2013
Several Things in One Go
A quick round-up of all sorts of things:
The Prize of the SWR Bestenliste - an annual riff on the monthly SWR Bestenliste, a list of top recent fiction compiled by critics - has gone to Ulrike Edschmid for her work in general and the novel Das Verschwinden des Philip S. in particular. I must admit the book had slipped under my radar. It's about a couple in 1960s West Berlin, and what happens when the man becomes a left-wing terrorist. In July it also won the Grimmelshausen Prize, bagging Edschmid €10,000 for a narrative work that deals with contemporary history.
This coming weekend, the Goethe Institut New York is holding a series of talks, I think, about Berlin and New York and translation and literature and the all-round wonderfulness that is the Literary Colloquium Berlin. It's called Shining Island and you should go, if at all possible, because it features some fantastic people.
The new issue of New Books in German is out, all purple and regally full of recommended books. Very soon, they'll also have English sample translations from all six novels shortlisted for the German Book Prize. What they already have is a sweet little feature by Romy Fursland, I believe, about new publisher (and friends of mine) Readux Books. Where you can now place advance orders, by the way, and probably ought to.
Translators Canan Marasligil and Nicki Harman are revving up for their London discussion on International Translation Day by stating their positions on whether or not translators should write forewords and footnotes, on the Free Word Centre website.
The Prize of the SWR Bestenliste - an annual riff on the monthly SWR Bestenliste, a list of top recent fiction compiled by critics - has gone to Ulrike Edschmid for her work in general and the novel Das Verschwinden des Philip S. in particular. I must admit the book had slipped under my radar. It's about a couple in 1960s West Berlin, and what happens when the man becomes a left-wing terrorist. In July it also won the Grimmelshausen Prize, bagging Edschmid €10,000 for a narrative work that deals with contemporary history.
This coming weekend, the Goethe Institut New York is holding a series of talks, I think, about Berlin and New York and translation and literature and the all-round wonderfulness that is the Literary Colloquium Berlin. It's called Shining Island and you should go, if at all possible, because it features some fantastic people.
The new issue of New Books in German is out, all purple and regally full of recommended books. Very soon, they'll also have English sample translations from all six novels shortlisted for the German Book Prize. What they already have is a sweet little feature by Romy Fursland, I believe, about new publisher (and friends of mine) Readux Books. Where you can now place advance orders, by the way, and probably ought to.
Translators Canan Marasligil and Nicki Harman are revving up for their London discussion on International Translation Day by stating their positions on whether or not translators should write forewords and footnotes, on the Free Word Centre website.
Friday, 20 September 2013
Two More Shortlists: Swiss Books and Debut Novels
I'm still confused about this Swiss book prize business. There still seems to be one Swiss Book Prize run by the Swiss booksellers for which only German-language books are eligible, and one Swiss Literature Prize run by the government, for which books in the other Swiss languages can be nominated as well.
Anyway, here are the nominations for the Swiss Book Prize:
Ralph Dutli: Soutines letzte Fahrt
Roman Graf: Niedergang
Jonas Lüscher: Frühling der Barbaren
Jens Steiner: Carambole
Henriette Vásárhelyi: immeer
The winner is announced on 27 October.
Then there's the "aspekte"-Literaturpreis, which goes to a debut novel written in German, regardless of provenance. Here's their shortlist:
Roman Ehrlich: Das kalte Jahr
Jonas Lüscher: Frühling der Barbaren
Eberhard Rathgeb: Kein Paar wie wir
Hannes Stein: Der Komet
Stefanie de Velasco: Tigermilch
Monika Zeiner: Die Ordnung der Sterne über Como
The winner is announced on the TV show that runs the award on 4 October.
My favourites are Lüscher and de Velasco, just so you know.
Anyway, here are the nominations for the Swiss Book Prize:
Ralph Dutli: Soutines letzte Fahrt
Roman Graf: Niedergang
Jonas Lüscher: Frühling der Barbaren
Jens Steiner: Carambole
Henriette Vásárhelyi: immeer
The winner is announced on 27 October.
Then there's the "aspekte"-Literaturpreis, which goes to a debut novel written in German, regardless of provenance. Here's their shortlist:
Roman Ehrlich: Das kalte Jahr
Jonas Lüscher: Frühling der Barbaren
Eberhard Rathgeb: Kein Paar wie wir
Hannes Stein: Der Komet
Stefanie de Velasco: Tigermilch
Monika Zeiner: Die Ordnung der Sterne über Como
The winner is announced on the TV show that runs the award on 4 October.
My favourites are Lüscher and de Velasco, just so you know.
Thursday, 19 September 2013
Germany's Literary Pope Remembered
Marcel Reich-Ranicki died yesterday at the age of 93. He was a very unusual character, a literary critic revered by (almost) the entire nation. He was born in Poland in 1920 but spent his youth in Germany, developing a passion for Thomas Mann and Goethe before being deported to Warsaw in 1938; he survived the Nazis in the ghetto but his parents and brother were murdered in concentration camps. He returned to the country in 1958 after a stint as a Polish diplomat in London. In West Germany, he joined the Gruppe 47 but apparently felt like an outsider. He became a very successful newspaper critic, heading the literary section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for fifteen years and writing a column for the newspaper's Sunday edition until May of this year.
What made him a household name, however, was television. He was the main talking head on an extraordinary show, das literarische Quartett, from 1988 to 2001. Seventy-five minutes of literary critics arguing on sofas, over seventy-seven episodes. Imagine. He had already been on the jury for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize from its initiation in 1977. The competition has been broadcast live since 1989, showing sweating writers and ruthless critics over three days. Imagine.
Reich-Ranicki was known for making literary criticism accessible and entertaining; readable reactions to literature that were allowed to play for laughs, including by ripping writers' work to verbal shreds, in print and in person. That made him popular and unpopular; the political and artistic feud that developed between him and the writer Martin Walser came to a head in the 2002 roman à clef Death of Critic. It was Walser who compared powerful critics to popes, I believe, years before his controversial novel. What bothered me personally, and perhaps this fits with that comparison, was MRR's apparent insistence that his own taste was definitive; tantamount to a literary canon. In fact he went as far as to issue his very own canon, aimed at "the reader". It was first announced in der Spiegel in 2001 with the now rather jaded headline "Was man lesen muss" - the equivalent to those "50 books everyone needs to read" lists, only in a lot more detail.
But readers loved him, making his autobiography a million-seller. His column often consisted of questions sent in by devoted fans, asking his opinion on particular writers. The phrasing of many of these questions suggests that people simply wanted someone to tell them, definitively, whether a writer is good or bad. And if MRR said so, it must be true. The obituaries are calling his death the end of an era, and that may well be the case. He was one of the people we have to thank for making German literary criticism fun to read. Yet it feels like no coincidence that the speech opening this year's Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, held by Michael Köhlmeier, began with a reminder of how cruel Reich-Ranicki and critics in general could and can be, when he (and they) trashed the writer Jörg Fauser thirty years previously. This year's judges, the critics in their summer suits, took the hint and held back. I think it's not only Köhlmeier; there's also a more widespread feeling that there's no need to be cruel to write good criticism. Perhaps because it's so easy now for anyone to sling mud publicly. That's something I try to bear in mind for my amateur criticism here - I want to write entertainingly but not at anyone else's expense.
My two favourite obituaries are a loving one in the FAZ by Frank Schirrmacher and a respectful but critical one in the taz by Ina Hartwig. Read both.
What made him a household name, however, was television. He was the main talking head on an extraordinary show, das literarische Quartett, from 1988 to 2001. Seventy-five minutes of literary critics arguing on sofas, over seventy-seven episodes. Imagine. He had already been on the jury for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize from its initiation in 1977. The competition has been broadcast live since 1989, showing sweating writers and ruthless critics over three days. Imagine.
Reich-Ranicki was known for making literary criticism accessible and entertaining; readable reactions to literature that were allowed to play for laughs, including by ripping writers' work to verbal shreds, in print and in person. That made him popular and unpopular; the political and artistic feud that developed between him and the writer Martin Walser came to a head in the 2002 roman à clef Death of Critic. It was Walser who compared powerful critics to popes, I believe, years before his controversial novel. What bothered me personally, and perhaps this fits with that comparison, was MRR's apparent insistence that his own taste was definitive; tantamount to a literary canon. In fact he went as far as to issue his very own canon, aimed at "the reader". It was first announced in der Spiegel in 2001 with the now rather jaded headline "Was man lesen muss" - the equivalent to those "50 books everyone needs to read" lists, only in a lot more detail.
But readers loved him, making his autobiography a million-seller. His column often consisted of questions sent in by devoted fans, asking his opinion on particular writers. The phrasing of many of these questions suggests that people simply wanted someone to tell them, definitively, whether a writer is good or bad. And if MRR said so, it must be true. The obituaries are calling his death the end of an era, and that may well be the case. He was one of the people we have to thank for making German literary criticism fun to read. Yet it feels like no coincidence that the speech opening this year's Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, held by Michael Köhlmeier, began with a reminder of how cruel Reich-Ranicki and critics in general could and can be, when he (and they) trashed the writer Jörg Fauser thirty years previously. This year's judges, the critics in their summer suits, took the hint and held back. I think it's not only Köhlmeier; there's also a more widespread feeling that there's no need to be cruel to write good criticism. Perhaps because it's so easy now for anyone to sling mud publicly. That's something I try to bear in mind for my amateur criticism here - I want to write entertainingly but not at anyone else's expense.
My two favourite obituaries are a loving one in the FAZ by Frank Schirrmacher and a respectful but critical one in the taz by Ina Hartwig. Read both.
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