Author Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and translator Alison Entrekin, collaborators on Three Stories of Forgetting, interviewed each other about writing, working on multiple projects at the same time, and how “translation is writing in a straitjacket.”    Alison Entrekin interviews Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida Alison Entrekin:...

It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is...

Hideo Yokoyama's detective novel <a href="Six Four, about a cold case and the conflicts within a police department, was first released in Japan to wide acclaim. Yokoyama's carefully plotted, high-tension novel seemed perfect for U.K. and U.S. readers that had been devouring books...

The circumstances of my own life have fueled my attraction to Leonardo Padura’s last two novels and led to my translation of them. When I first read The Man Who Loved Dogs—his sprawling novel about Trotsky’s years in exile, and the Soviet plot to...

It’s Emmanuel Carrère who stopped me from writing this article. Right at the moment when I’d planned to knuckle down and sort through the disparate ideas that had occurred to me during the four years I’d spent translating his works, Farrar, Straus and Giroux—which...

Susan Brind Morrow is the author of a new book, The Dawning Moon of the Mind, in which she details her revolutionary translation of the Pyramid Texts—a series of carvings found in a semi-collapsed pyramid in Egypt, and the basis for a...

Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the significance of the poem to his writing, noting that...

I say this with love in my heart: New York City is a woman who doesn't give a fuck about you. It's not personal; she doesn't give a fuck about anyone. Or, to be fair: she's the type who cares deeply, fiercely, but only after she's known someone a good long time, and usually after that someone has proven capable of both suffering and thriving without her help. New York City doesn't like needy people, and in 2003, when I first moved from Tel Aviv to Manhattan, I was very needy.

One of the great pleasures of seeing The Southern Reach Trilogy in print has been the ingenuity and sophistication of the foreign language editions. Among the absolute best of the many versions are Destino’s covers for the Spanish editions. Destino commissioned artist and designer Pablo Delcán to create these covers, which capture the surreal vibe of the novels as well as the theme of transformation running through the narrative. I caught up with Delcán via email to ask him about how he created these striking images, and to share with readers some early versions. You can experience more of his amazing work at his website. Spanish readers can also check out the Destino Southern Reach webpage.

On Leave by Daniel Anselme was first published in Paris—as La Permission—in the spring of 1957. It had few readers and only a handful of reviews. It was never reprinted. In America, you can’t find it in the Library of Congress or any major university collection. Save for an Italian translation, On Leave almost disappeared. Yet it was an important book, and has become more precious with the passing of time. It tells in simple terms of the damage wrought by an unpopular and unwanted war on young men who are obliged to fight it. In 1957, as France’s engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, On Leave told French readers things they did not want to hear: the silence surrounding its publication speaks loudly of its power to disturb. This short novel was all the more unsettling because it is neither a testimony nor a polemic. In fact, it hardly mentions military action at all.

Authors in Conversation A heartfelt introduction by Björk is a hard act to follow. But when Sjón and Hari Kunzru took the stage at Scandinavia House, The Nordic Center in America, they pulled out all the stops: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, and the relationship between punk rock and surrealism; the moment the great god Pan stepped into our world at the beginning of the 21st century (not to mention Poseidon); the enviable lives of the "hidden people" of Iceland, who look just like us except they only have one nostril; the joy of the trickster; the value in translation; and, most pressingly, the danger of the furry trout ("The furry trout looks exactly like a normal trout, but it’s got fur.") Which is a long way of saying, read on, we dare you. Hari: Sjón is a pen name. I read in various places that it means vision or sight. Is that a family name? Sjón: Sjón is the name that I took when I was fifteen. I published my first book the summer I turned sixteen. I had discovered Icelandic modernist poetry the winter before. Even though I had seen Modernist surrealist poetry in translation before, it was when I saw it written in Icelandic and written by Icelanders that I realized that you were actually allowed to do those amazing things with words, in Icelandic.

Scandinavia House, The Nordic Center in America, 2013 Dear friends, I’d like to introduce a dear friend of mine, Sjón. I met him first when I was sixteen. With others he had started the first and only surrealist movement in Iceland, a group of six or so members called Medúsa. I was in a punk band at the time. Medúsa wrote poetry, did scandalous food performances around the city, ran a gallery (which was actually kind of a shed), had exhibitions of paintings, drawings, and sculpture, and played music. They were all around twenty years old, which, at that age, was a lot older than me. I guess I became sort of the only female unofficial member.

Prologue to Woes of the True Policeman by Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas Translated by Natasha Wimmer Woes of the True Policeman is a project that was begun at the end of the 1980s and continued until the writer’s death. What the reader has in his hands is the faithful and definitive version, collated from typescripts and computer documents, and bearing evidence of Roberto Bolaño’s clear intention to include the novel in a body of work in a perpetual state of gestation. There are also a number of epistolary references to the project. In a 1995 letter, Bolaño writes: “Novel: for years I’ve been working on one that’s titled Woes of the True Policeman and which is MY NOVEL. The protagonist is a widower, 50, a university professor, 17-year-old daughter, who goes to live in Santa Teresa, a city near the U.S. border. Eight hundred thousand pages, a crazy tangle beyond anyone’s comprehension.” The unusual thing about this novel, written over the course of fifteen years, is that it incorporates material from other works by the author, from Llamadas telefónicas (Phone Calls) to The Savage Detectives and 2666, with the peculiarity that even though we meet some familiar characters—particularly Amalfitano, Amalfitano’s daughter, Rosa, and Arcimboldi—the differences are notable. These characters belong to Bolaño’s larger fictional world, and at the same time they are the exclusive property of this novel.

by Iza Wojciechowska and Rosalind Harvey “Some people say I’m precocious,” begins Juan Pablo Villalobos’ super-slim, super-fast first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole. What follows is a beautiful, heart-breaking story told from the perspective of Tochtli, a precocious kid whose dad is a major Mexican drug lord. Tochtli has seen people murdered and has found his father’s gun room, but those things aren’t as important to him as collecting hats and acquiring a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. Slowly, though, he begins to reconcile the world he understands with the world as it really is. Written in Spanish and translated by Rosalind Harvey, the book is an incredible debut—and a wonderful work of translation. This is Rosalind’s first solo translation, having previously worked with Anne McLean to co-translate Oblivion by Hector Abad (FSG, 2012) and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions, 2012). I talked with Rosalind about Tochtli’s advanced vocabulary, her advice for young translators, and about the potential for more mainstream Estonian chick lit, Indonesian thrillers, and Bolivian erotica. Down the Rabbit Hole is the first book you have translated solo. How was it different than working with a co-translator? Do you have a preference for translating alone or with a partner? The main difference is the sense of responsibility—working with another translator, especially one of Anne [McLean]’s stature, you always feel a little more relaxed as you know someone else’s eyes will be checking over your work (as well as the editor’s, of course). And the books I did with Anne were by authors who had either specifically requested her or that she had ‘discovered,’ so while I loved working on them I knew I never fully owned them, so to speak. So the fact that I read Juan Pablo’s book shortly after it came out in Spanish, then took it to And Other Stories to persuade them of its worth, then translated it all working quite closely with Juan Pablo, meant I felt a huge responsibility to get it right and to do his work justice in English. Which is scary, but the flipside of that is that you get to enjoy the end result even more than with a co-translation! I enjoy both ways of working though, and am currently doing another co-translation with Frank Wynne, and further down the line I would love to give a leg up to a less experienced translator by co-translating with them, as that’s what helped to get me where I am today.

By Andrés Neuman Translated from the Spanish by Richard Gwyn This story first appeared in The Coffin Factory, issue 3 I entered the hospital dying of hatred and wanting to give thanks. How fragile is rage. We might shout, hit, spit at a stranger. The same person to whom – depending on their verdict, depending on whether they tell us what we are anxious to hear – we might suddenly express our admiration, or hug, or swear an oath of loyalty. And it would be genuine, that love. I entered without thinking anything, thinking about not thinking. I knew that my mother’s present, my future, depended on the toss of a coin. And that that coin was not in my hands and maybe not in the hands of anyone else either, not even those of the doctor. I have always thought that the absence of god liberated us from an unbearable weight. But more than once, I have missed the idea of divine mercy when entering or leaving a hospital. Filled with seats, corridors, hierarchies and ceremonies of hope, silent on their upper floors, hospitals are the closest thing to a cathedral in which we unbelievers may tread. I entered trying to avoid this kind of reasoning, because I was afraid that I would end up praying like a cynic. I lent an arm to my mother, who so many times had given me hers when the world was enormous and my legs very short. Is it possible to shrink overnight? Can someone’s body turn into a sponge that has soaked up so many fears that it gains in density, while losing volume? My mother seemed shorter, thinner, but nevertheless more laden down than before, as if earthbound. Her porous hand closed over mine. I imagined a child in a bathtub, naked, expectant, squeezing a sponge. And I wanted to say something to my mother, and I didn’t know how to speak.

This fall FSG will publish Parallel Stories by acclaimed Hungarian author Péter Nádas. Editor Elisabeth Sifton writes, "After his last novel, A Book of Memories, appeared in English in 1997, many critics and readers agreed with Susan Sontag's assessment that it was the greatest novel written in postwar Europe. But Nádas was already moving past that signal achievement. And now we can see how Parallel Stories—which took eighteen years to write, Nádas has said, and appeared in Budapest in 2005—extends and deepens the scope of his fiction, both in historical terms and in the most intimate, hidden terms of body and soul. The multilevel narrative reaches back to the 1930s, thickens in the crisis seasons of 1944–45, 1956, and 1961, and thrusts forward to 1989; and at every point we experience the intense and daring ways that the men and women he so memorably creates live through or transcend, create or deny the brutalities of their strife-torn times. This is a great novel about the twentieth century and, with its dazzling formal innovations and daring candor, a postmodern novel for the twenty-first."

This newly translated piece by Jorge Luis Borges appears in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry. Ilan Stavans, the book's editor and the translator of "Borges and I," stopped by the FSG offices to record the piece in Spanish and English for us: [audio:https://fsgworkinprog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/borges-y-yo.mp3] The other one, Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires, stop, maybe a bit mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance way and a grillwork door; I have news from Borges by mail or when I see his name in a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose; the other shares those preferences but with a vanity that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to affirm that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can plot his literature and that literature justifies me. It doesn’t cost me anything to confess he has achieved a few valid pages, but those pages can’t save me, perhaps because what’s good no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and traditions.

Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux published in March, takes place in 2028, but it’s deeply indebted to—indeed, deeply enmeshed in—the past. Sorokin, whose knowledge of Russian literature and history is encyclopedic (without any of the stuffiness that such a word might suggest), has written a book haunted by the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Yet Oprichnik (a term for Ivan the Terrible’s most feared courtiers) also suggests that the violence, cruelty, and human degradation that characterized that regime have recurred throughout the country’s dark history. And very little has changed. In a glowing review of the book in The New York Times Book Review, Stephen Kotkin wrote: So it is in Putin’s Russia, where a gang of police officials, the siloviki, lord over not just the richest private citizens but also other parts of the state. Sorokin’s imaginative diagnosis of Putinism further grasps that the officials’ looting is driven not by profiteering alone, but by their conviction that they are defending Russian interests. Everything Sorokin’s oprichniks do is a transaction, but their love of country runs deep. They may give in to temptation and tune in to foreign radio (“enemy voices”), but these moments of weakness vitiate neither their pride in their work nor their code of honor. They have ideals. Day of the Oprichnik is a satire and a polemic and a picaresque and a tragedy, but it’s also, as Kotkin notes, a brilliant analysis of a society in crisis—perhaps perpetually in crisis. Below, in an exclusive essay, Sorokin explores the roots of his remarkable diagnosis. -Mark Krotov, Assistant Editor Ideally, prose isn’t written—it simply happens. Luckily, that’s exactly what occurred in the case of Day of the Oprichnik. The desire to find the literary equivalent of a chemical formula—one that would explain the servants of Russia’s authoritative absolutism—had been brewing for a long time, but any subject is connected, somehow or other, with style and with tone, which plays an important part in this formula. Write Lolita in the language of Goncharov or Faulkner, and it’ll be a rather predictable book. Each regime has its own style. Each hangman has his own unique humor, with which he justifies his actions and cheers himself up. It’s well-known that Ivan the Terrible often laughed hysterically as he gazed upon the suffering of the boyars he was torturing. It’s not hard to guess that out of respect for the tsar, the entourage present at the executions also roared with laughter. And so the people gathered on the square laughed, too. In the history of our country, where the government’s violence against individuality has always carried an inevitable character, laughter has concealed and hidden much. But laughter has also saved many. I wanted to tell the story of a monstrous government’s servant in the language of the laughing marketplace.

In 1949 Theodor Adorno famously said that “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How, Adorno seemed to be asking, could existing forms of artistic representation be expected to convey something so aberrant, so distant from normal human behavior? Adorno’s comment thus represents a challenge to artists who seek to present the horror of the Holocaust in general and of Auschwitz in particular: to do so, they must move beyond traditional modes of representation and create new structures and forms.

As this glimpse at the proofs of my versions of Leopardi’s Canti suggests, a translation, like an original poem, is never finished, only abandoned. And that remains true even after the book is published—I’ve already started collected "improvements" for a future printing. There’s usually a way to say what needs to be said more concisely, more pithily, more beautifully. That’s why I’ve found translation over the years to have been an incredible education in writing.