The first will take place in the Humanities Center at Rush Rhees Library on the Ģ����ý’s campus from 12:30-2pm. Perfect for any students, faculty, etc., who are on campus and want a little lunchtime brain stimulation!

The second will take place at (Village Gate, 302 N. Goodman) from 6-7:30pm. A very bookish bar and restaurant, Nox is one of our favorite places to host events. Great space, great staff, great food, and great cocktails.

In terms of the events themselves, at both, Bae will be read a bit from all four of her translated books and will answer a series of questions about her craft and influences. I’ve already scripted the questions, so I can say with certainty that she’ll talk a bit about how she got her start—and the Korean literary scene in general—the impact of German literature (she’s translated Kafka, Sebald, Erpenbeck, and others into Korean) on her style and literary approach, the way she creates a landscape of consciousness in her books, and much more.

One of South Korea’s most highly acclaimed writers, Bae Suah is the author of five novels and more than ten short story collections, and has received both the Hanguk Ilbo and Tongseo literary prizes. Nowhere to Be Found, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. Translations of her works have been widely praised for their beauty and precision, with Sophie Hughes summing it up wonderfully for Music & Literature:

The experience of reading the prize-winning Korean-born writer Bae Suah is simultaneously uncanny, estranting, and spellbinding, an effect that becomes perceptible the more you read . . . Bae Suah offers the chance to unknow—to see the every-day afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know—which is no small offering.

So, if you’re in Rochester, you should definitely come out to one or both of these, and even if you’re not here, you should check out one of her books. Here’s the full info on the three that are already available:

(Translated by Deborah Smith)

The meeting between a group of emigrants and a mysterious, wandering actress in an empty train station sets the stage for Bae Suah’s fragmentary yet lyrical meditation on language, travel, and memory. As the actress recounts the fascinating story of her stateless existence, an unreliable narrator and the interruptions of her audience challenge traditional notions of storytelling and identity.

(Translated by Deborah Smith)

Near the beginning of A Greater Music, the narrator, a young Korean writer, falls into an icy river in the Berlin suburbs, where she’s been house-sitting for her on-off boyfriend Joachim. This sets into motion a series of memories that move between the hazily defined present and the period three years ago when she first lived in Berlin. Throughout, the narrator’s relationship with Joachim, a rough-and-ready metalworker, is contrasted with her friendship with M, an ultra-refined music-loving German teacher who was once her lover.

(Translated by Sora Kim-Russell)

A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction. She can’t quite understand what motivates others to take life seriously enough to focus on anything—for her existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeting concepts. From losing her virginity to mindless jobs and a splintered, unsupportive family, the lessons learned have less to do with the reality we all share and more to do with the truth of the imagination, which is where the narrator focuses to discover herself.

In honor of the three editors of this volume—Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, and Russell Scott Valentino—are coming to town to talk about Heim and his lasting influence on a variety of aspects of the field of literary translation.

Esther, Sean, and Russell (all of whom are greatly respected for their own personal translations) did an amazing job putting this book together, creating a volume that’s both a homage to one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century and a book that adds a lot to translation studies. The essays in this book—from a variety of contributors, including Dubrakva Ugresic, Celia Hawkesworth, Rosanna Warren, Maureen Freely, Alex Zucker, Breon Mitchell, and more—are by turns engaging, heartbreaking, brilliant, and intellectually stimulating.

I’ll be moderating this panel, and there will be a reception to follow.

So, if you’re in the area,

RTWCS: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation
Thursday, April 2nd at 5:00pm
Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library (755 Library Road at the U of R)

Hope to see you there!

A Conversation with Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

Tuesday, September 24th, 6:00pm
Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library

Publishers Weekly had this to say about Where Tigers Are at Home, the Winner of the prestigious Prix Médicis: “Blas de Roblès simultaneously channels Umberto Eco, Indiana Jones, and Jorge Amado . . . what begins as a faux metabiography turns to picaresque adventure with erotic escapades, scams, and unexpected changes of fortune.”

Come here Open Letter Books director Chad W. Post talk with Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès about his novel, about Athanasius Kircher—the bizarre, almost always wrong 17th century philosopher at the center of the book—and about Blas de Roblès’s time teaching French literature and philosophy in Brazil, China, Italy, and Taiwan.

*

A Conversation with Simon Fruelund

Tuesday, October 1st, 6:00pm
Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library

Simon Fruelund, the former editor at Gyldendal, Denmark’s largest publishing house, has burst onto the international literary scene with the publication of two books in English translations this year—_Milk and Other Stories_ and Civil Twilight—both of which have received great critical praise. As Alan Cheuse of NPR stated, “Fruelund is a master of the short form, importing some designs from our own Raymond Carver, applying them to the interstices of the European everyday, and making them his own. The title story is a masterpiece in miniature.”

His translator, K.E. Semmel, recipient of a Danish Arts Council grant and inveterate St. Louis Cardinals fan, will discuss Fruelund’s work with him, touching on issues of translation and trends in Nordic literature as a whole.

Hopefully we’ll be able to do something with them in the spring. In the meantime, stay dry, everyone!

As one of—if not the—only residencies in the U.S. dedicated to international writing and literature, the Ledig House brings dozens of fantastic writers and translators to Omi, NY every year. It’s a gorgeous space, serving an excellent mission, and I’m really thankful that D.W. Gibson helps arrange this event every year so that we can help bring some extra attention to a few of the writers staying there.

Bios for the four authors involved in this year’s event can be found below, but just so I don’t bury the lede, here’s all the details about the event itself:

RTWCS: Ledig House Event
Tuesday, October 30th
6:00pm
Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library
Ģ����ý

OK, and here are this year’s participants, each of whom will read a short bit of their work and then answer a few questions:

Saskya Jain
(India/Germany, Fiction/Translation)

Saskya was raised in New Delhi by a German mother and Indian father. Educated at Berlin’s Free University and Columbia University, she holds an MFA in Fiction from Boston University, where she was the recipient of the Florence Engel Randall Award for Fiction and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship for travel to Iran. Her writing has appeared in Literary Imagination, Hyphen Magazine and The Baffler. Saskya is currently at work on her first novel.

F.G. (Francisco) Haghenbeck
(Mexico, Fiction)

Francisco was born in Mexico City and has worked as an architect, museum designer, freelance editor, and TV producer. He currently works full time writing novels and editing historical and comic books. Two of his books are available in English: Bitter Drink (AmazonCrossing) and _The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo (Atria). He loves eating his wife’s gourmet food, drinking cocktails, reading the noir novels of Raymond Chandler and, watching cartoons with his daughter, Arantza.

Andrés Felipe Solano
(Colombia, Fiction)

Andrés has published the novel Sálvame, Joe Louis, and has worked as features editor for SoHo Magazine. In 2007, he lived in Medellin, Colombia, where he rented a room in a notoriously violent neighborhood and worked in a factory for six months. Based on this experience, he wrote Seis meses con el salario mínimo, finalist for the prize awarded by the FNPI, chaired by Gabriel García Márquez. In 2010 Granta included him in their list of The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. He is working on his second novel, The Cuervo Brothers.

Amanda Curtin
(Australia, Fiction)

Amanda’s first novel, The Sinkings, was published by UWA Publishing in 2008, followed by a short fiction collection, Inherited, in 2011. She has been awarded residencies at the Tasmanian Writers Centre (Australia), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland) and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland). Amanda is an Adjunct Lecturer at Edith Cowan University in Perth. At Writers Omi, she will be working on a novella project.

And for all you Facebook users, you can find this event where you can invite all your friends, etc.

Hope to see you there on Tuesday!

Next Tuesday, April 10th, fiction panelists Jeff Waxman will be here in Rochester for a special Reading the World Conversation Series event, during which he’ll reveal the BTBA finalists in poetry and fiction.

Before he unveils the shortlists (which will also be posted here as soon as he reads them off), we’ll talk about the evolution of the award, the role of the BTBA in general book culture landscape, how the panel came to make its decisions, and so on. Seeing that Jeff works at the University of Chicago Press and 57th St. Books, he has a unique perspective on literary awards and promoting international literature.

Following our talk and the unveiling of the finalists, we’ll read a few pages from a few of my favorite titles on the list. (We don’t have enough time to read from all of them—anyone want to camp out in the Welles-Brown room?—but we want to at least highlight a few of the books in a special way.)

(NOTE: Cover images on this were chosen randomly by Nate for design purposes only. Read nothing into this. And having the list in front of me, I can only reiterate—read nothing into this poster.)

Also, this means that over the three weeks building up to the celebration of the two winners—which will take place on Friday, May 4th at 6pm at during the PEN World Voices Festival—we will be highlighting all of the poetry finalists and running short excerpts from the ten fiction finalists. Which means you have almost one more month of BTBA stuff to look forward to . . .

The results were pretty entertaining, in part because Ben (who is also a contributing editor to Harper’s and on the board of the National Book Critics Circle) is so damn entertaining, and in part because Lispector is one of the most interesting literary figures of this past century.

Sergio’s came out last summer to a good deal of critical acclaim. And Margaret’s translation was hailed by Publishers Weekly as “magnificent” and “should be treated as a significant event.”

For fans of Chejfec, we’re bringing out his next book, The Planets, this June . . . You can preorder by or you could simply and get this, and more . . . (End promotional plug.)

Our second (and final!) Reading the World Conversation Series event of the fall is happening in just a few days. As always, it’s taking place in Rochester, NY. So, if you’re in the area, you’d better check it out—lest all your friends go without you and bond intimately over the great time they all had (true story).

Here are the rousing details:

Reading the World Conversation Series:
Sergio Chejfec & Margaret B. Carson

DECEMBER 1, 2011
Thursday, 6:00 p.m
Plutzik Library in Rare Books & Special Collections
Rush Rhees Library, Ģ����ý
(Free and open to the public.)

Sergio Chejfec is the author of a dozen books, three of which are coming out from Open Letter Books: My Two Worlds (available now), The Planets (2012), and The Dark (2013). Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas singled out My Two Worlds as one of the “best books of the year.” The English edition has been universally praised, with Publishers Weekly saying Margaret B. Carson’s “magnificent translation” should be “treated as a significant event.”

My Two Worlds is a novel about an author walking through a city in the South of Brazil. As he wanders, this unnamed narrator thinks about his walk, about his new book (which isn’t getting very good reviews), and about his life (his birthday is a few days away).

Chejfec and Carson will discuss this novel, literature, and the process of translation.

(Sponsored by The Dept. of Rare Books, Special Collections & Preservation)

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(This event is presented by Open Letter and Ģ����ý Arts & Sciences. It is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.)