Here on Earth: The Best Books in Translation

Yesterday, I had the somewhat surreal experience of being on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here on Earth with Esther Allen (brilliant translator, director of the Center for Literary Translation, and all around amazing champion of literature in translation) and host Jean Feraca while waiting to catch my flight out of O’Hare.

The show was about the Best Translated Books of the Year list, and, in my opinion, went really, really well: Esther was excellent as always, Jean had a lot of thoughtful questions and comments for us, the people who called (or Twittered) in were very interesting, and we had a chance to touch on a lot of issues from the performative aspect of translation to the great influence international literature has had on many readers to the difficulties some people have with reading books filled with “unpronounceable” character and place names.

You can listen to the entire broadcast either by clicking the “Listen” button on this page, or by clicking on this mp3 version that can be found here

Unfortunately, you can’t hear this on the recording of the broadcast, but when I first got on the air and was describing Three Percent, a woman in the gate area who was laying across a row of chairs sat up, glared at me and said “Hey, I’m trying to sleep here!”