RTWCS: Helen Anderson and Konstantin Gurevich on Ilf & Petrov's "The Golden Calf"
Last Monday we kicked off the spring season of the Reading the World Conversation Series with an event featuring the husband and wife translating team of Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson. They talked with Open Letter editor E.J. Van Lanen about the process of translating Ilf & Petrov’s The Golden Calf, which ...
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"Giving the Fig"
I’m no marketing guru, but there is one rule of advertising that I think everyone should follow: if you dominate a market, never draw attention to your (smaller) competition. This is why Apple attacks Microsoft so directly in ads—for better or worse, Microsoft has a market share the size of a Chicagoan’s ...
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The Golden Calf: An Interview with the Translators
Over at the consistently interesting Lizok’s Bookshelf, Lisa Hayden Espenschade has an interview with Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson, the co-translators of Ilf & Petrov’s The Golden Calf: In your translators’ note, you write, “we approached the novel as a work of literature first and foremost, ...
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Filling in Gaps in The Golden Calf
Early this month, Open Letter released its new translation of The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov, a satiric Russian writing duo from the 1930s who are most well known for this novel and its predecessor, The Twelve Chairs , which was made into a Mel Brooks movie. Both of these books are insanely funny, although to be honest, ...
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Retranslated Classics
Sticking with PW for another post, Lynn Andriani has a great piece about three “iconic 20th-century novels being released in new translations” this fall: Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle (translated by Harry T. Willetts, and which restores nine chapters missing from the “lightened version” ...
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The Fall/Winter Open Letter Catalog
I’ll highlight all of the books in here one by one over the next week, but for anyone who can’t wait, you’ll find descriptions, author and translator info, and most importantly, samples from each of the books in the pdf version of the catalog. Obviously biased, but this is a great list, with Jakov ...
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