New First Unexpected

FOR LACK OF A BETTER WORD

I review the Center for the Art of Translation's latest edition of Two Lines, "Some Kind of Beautiful Signal," for The Second Pass:

For Natasha Wimmer, the best thing a translator can do is “disappear” behind a text, a strategy that earned her a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009 for her translation of Robert Bolaño’s novel 2666. But the San Francisco-based Center for the Art of Translation is doing everything it can to put the translator front and center.

For the past 17 years, the center has published Two Lines: World Writing in Translation, one of just a handful of publications devoted exclusively to the translation of international literature into English, a sort of translators’ night out where each translator very nearly gets to step out from behind the curtain of the text. Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, this year’s edition — edited by Wimmer and acclaimed poet Jeffrey Yang — continues this worthy tradition by delivering works by poets and fiction writers working in more than a dozen languages.

 

SQUARE PEGS

My review of Squaring The Circle: Winners of the Debut Prize, a new anthology of Russian writers which highlights ten years of winners of the Russian Debut Prize for Fiction by writers under the age of twenty-five, is live at Bomb magazine's Web site.

 
Launched in 2000, the Debut Prize was established by the Pokolenie (Generation) Foundation to support and encourage Russian writers under the age of 25 to complete their first books. But while tens of thousands of manuscripts are submitted for the award each year, few make it out of Russia. Now, thanks to the Pokolenie and Moscow-based GLAS—one of the most respected English-language publishers of Russian literature—the best of this new generation of Russian authors born after the collapse of the USSR is made available to English readers in a new anthology entitled Squaring the Circle: Winners of the Debut Prize.

Squaring the Circle takes its name from the basic historical circumstances of its young authors, who live within a system of multiple uncertainties, where the problems they encounter often have no solutions. Free of old ghosts, this generation has no template for building their lives and careers—as writers or what have you. According to Olga Slavnikova, winner of the Russian Booker Prize and director of the Debut Prize, “The Debut prompts them to commit to literature their unique experience, what might be described as the shock of their first encounter with grown-up life.”