Adam Thirlwell's Tribute to Barbara Wright
This past weekend, Adam Thirlwell (author of the novel Politics and The Delighted States, which is all about translation) wrote a really nice tribute in The Guardian to late translator Barbara Wright (who would’ve loved to have received a fan letter from Adam—and most likely would’ve sent him a cool ...
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Zgaiba by Stelian Tanase [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
The latest entry in The Guardian‘s series of short stories about the transformations of Eastern Europe post-1989 is Stelian Tanase’s Zgaiba, translated from the Romanian by Jean Harris. (Who runs the Observer Translation Project, which is the best source online for information about Romanian literature.) So ...
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Crap
The National Endowment for the Arts just announced some of the highlights from its 2008 “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts,” and the results, well, aren’t very encouraging. Here are just some of the gloomy findings: There are persistent patterns of decline in participation for most art forms. ...
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Something Is Burning Outside by Laszlo Krasznahorkai [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
Today’s installment in The Guardian‘s series of short stories from Eastern Europe is ‘Something Is Burning Outside’ by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Krasznahorkai, whose Melancholy of Resistance and War & War are both amazing and both in print from New Directions (with Satan Tango forthcoming . . . ...
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Good News for Detroit Arts and for Cultural Orgs in General
Not sure when the last time the words “good news” and “Detroit” were used in the same sentence, but according to the Detroit Free Press, the Erb Family Foundation of Birmingham has recently announced $1.6 million in grants to 35 local arts organizations, “ranging from $100,000 to the Detroit ...
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The German Donald Duck, or, The Power of a Translator
This is a couple weeks old now, but star translator Susan Bernofsky wrote an excellent article for the Wall Street Journal about the immense popularity of the German version of the Donald Duck comic book: Comics featuring Donald are available at most German newsstands and the national weekly “Micky Maus”—which ...
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Chocolate by Michal Olszewski [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
The second installment in The Guardian‘s series of short stories from Eastern Europe is ‘Chocolate’ by Michal Olszewski. Olszewski is a young (b. 1977) Polish writer who works in Krakow for the daily paper, Gazeta Wyborcza. The story—which is wonderfully translated by recent “Found in ...
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