Audio
Featured Audio
April 17, 2012
In this episode, Scott Esposito eagerly anticipates the Dirty War in Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets, and Daniel Medin shares a delightful description of a freeloader from Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories. They discuss Daniel Sada’s Almost Never and the general robustness of contemporary Mexican fiction, attempt to explain why reading Can Xue’s Vertical Motion is like running downhill in the dark, then hesitate over whether to call Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels a memoir or a work of criticism, but agree that it is about Oulipo and very candid. Daniel Medin then speaks to Petra Hardt, head of the rights department at Suhrkamp Verlag and author of Rights: Buying. Protecting. Selling. Suhrkamp is one of the most prestigious presses in Germany and in Europe, and since its founding in 1950 has published not only many of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century — among them Paul Celan, Theodor W. Adorno, and Thomas Bernhard — but foreign authors as well, including Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Julio Cortázar.
THAT OTHER WORD: Episode 3 | May 2012 | Benjamin Moser
May 15, 2012
In this rather German conversation, Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito discuss the melancholy and pleasure in the most recent collection of W.G. Sebald’s poetry to appear in English, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001. History is a found object in Sebald, and also in December, a wintry advent calendar of thirty-nine short stories by Alexander Kluge and thirty-nine photographs by Gerhard Richter. Robert Walser’s The Walk may induce laughing out loud at the wilderness, and the thirtieth anniversary of Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute should inspire some very leisurely drives from Paris to Marseilles. In the second half of the episode, Scott Esposito interviews Benjamin Moser, author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Moser has recently re-translated Lispector’s last novel, The Hour of the Star, and is currently editing a series of four of her earlier works for New Directions (Near to the Wild Heart, A Breath of Life, Agua Viva, and The Passion According to G.H.).
TWO VOICES: Novelist Sergio Chejfec
May 10, 2012
In his Two Voices presentation on May 8, lauded Argentine author Sergio Chejfec started by explaining the biographical roots of his strange, compelling novel The Planets. The book is about an Argentine who goes missing during the military dictatorship of 1976-82, and Chejfec began by explaining that the plot of the book actually has to do with a friend of his who did disappear during the military dictatorship for the 1970s. He was one of an estimated 30,000 Argentines to disappear during that span.
TWO VOICES: Pulitzer-Winning Poet and Translator Richard Howard on Out in the Bay
May 3, 2012
In this audio, Pulitzer-winner poet and legendary translator Richard Howard discusses his career and reads his work. He talks about works he's written in the voice of famous individuals, such as Isadora Duncan—and about how this writing relates to his work with translation. Howard touches on his famous translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, particularly how he chose to deal with Baudelaire's challenging rhyme scheme. (He chose, controversially, to abandon the terminal rhymes.) Howard explain show he translated the poems so as to evoke the feeling of rhymes without actually making the lines rhyme as did Baudelaire. He also reads from his translation of Stéphane Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun."
TWO VOICES: Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel on Translating Murakami
April 5, 2012
On April 3, 2012, translators Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel—best-known as the main English translators of Haruki Murakmai's novels and short stories—discussed their work with the Japanese master of the surreal's latest book, 1Q84. The event got off to a proper start with a discussion of one of the primary questions surrounding 1Q84: how do you pronounce its title? Jay Rubin canvassed the audience for answers, which ranged from "nineteen-eighty-four" to "eye-que-eight-four" (which Rubin ruled out, since the first character is a number one). He then went on to a discussion of the role that the title plays in the novel . . .
THAT OTHER WORD: Episode 1 | March 2012 | Lorin Stein
March 20, 2012
In this first episode, Scott Esposito interviews Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review and former senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They discuss editing the English version of Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03 (translated by Mitzi Angel), procuring the rights to Roberto Bolaño’s works and editing Natasha Wimmer’s translations, and Stein's translation of Edouard Levé's book Autoportrait. Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito also chat about César Aira’s Varamo, László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, and Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories.
TWO VOICES: Peter Constantine on 3,000 Years of Greek Poetry
March 15, 2012
In this audio, translator Peter Constantine argues passionately against the notion that there is a past to Greek poetry and a present, but no middle. Here, Constantine offers ample evidence of all the great Greek poetry written between the ancient and modern eras.
TWO VOICES: Richard Howard on French Literature and Stéphane Mallarmé
February 23, 2012
The Center was joined by legendary translator Richard Howard on February 16, 2012 to discuss his work with some of the greatest French writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this audio event he focuses on Stéphane Mallarmé's most famous—and likely most challenging—poem, "Afternoon of a Faun," which encompasses seven pages and includes several challenges of syntax, typography, and form. He characterizes the work as "for the spoken word only," and it can be heard as Howard intends in the audio in his dramatic reading.
TWO VOICES: Perry Link, China Specialist and Translator of Nobel Winner Liu Xiaobo
February 6, 2012
On January 26, translator and China scholar Perry Link joined the Center, the Asia Society, and the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco for a discussion on imprisoned Chinese activist and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Liu Xiaobo’s No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of his political essays and poetry. In his role as translator, editor, and scholar, Link reviewed the process of publishing the collection, Liu’s literary background and career as writer and activist, and both the personal and political influences of his development into one of China’s most notorious and celebrated “dissidents.”
TWO VOICES: Counterfeits Release Reading, with Luc Sante, Patrick Philips, Alyson Waters, Adam Giannelli, Alex Zucker, and Magdaléna Platzová
January 5, 2012
On November 9, the Center for the Art of Translation celebrated the release of Counterfeits, its 18th annual anthology of world literature, with a star-studded event in New York City. You can listen to the audio from that event right here.
TWO VOICES: Robert Hass, Greg Delanty, and Michael Matto Discuss Anglo-Saxon Poetry
December 15, 2011
This event brought together editors, poets, and translators Robert Hass, Greg Delanty, and Michael Matto to talk about some of the great richness of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Delanty and Matto are coeditors of The Word Exchange, which features over 70 contemporary poets (Hass included among them) translating a wealth of Anglo-Saxon verse into modern English. In this audio you can hear Hass, Delanty, and Matto read in both English and Anglo-Saxon while discussing these poems.
TWO VOICES: Translator Natasha Wimmer in Conversation with Daniel Alarcón
December 6, 2011
In this audio, celebrated author and Guggenheim fellow Daniel Alarcón talks with Natasha Wimmer about her translators of Bolaño's masterworks, The Savage Detectives and 2666. The audio was originally recorded on October 7, 2009. They start the conversation by discussing why Wimmer got into translation to begin with. As she notes, translation is often seen as the closest form of reading . . .
TWO VOICES: Translators Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally on Stieg Larsson and Nordic Crime Fiction
November 21, 2011
On November 11, 2011, the Center for the Art of Translation's Two Voices events series hosted the pre-eminent translators of Nordic crime fiction, Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally. Since 1984 they have produced award-winning translations, including books by Henning Mankell, Peter Høeg, Camilla Läckberg, and Mari Jungstedt. Murray is best-known as the translator of the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy, and Nunnally is well-known for translating another runaway bestseller (from the Danish), Smilla's Sense of Snow. The couple were presented in conversation with Sedge Thomson, host of West Coast Live.
TWO VOICES: Carmen Boullosa and Pura Lopez Colome
October 17, 2011
Mexico is traditionally thought of as a country in love with machismo, and that fact can be seen in the Mexican writers who succeed in English—among them Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, and Octavio Paz. Yet there are many women in Mexico writing landmark literature, and this audio presents two of them. As part of the annual Litquake literature festival in San Francisco, the Center for the Art of Translation partnered with the Mexican Consulate to present two of Mexico's most vital female writers: Carmen Boullosa and Pura López Colomé.
TWO VOICES: Joshua Beckman Presents Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade
October 13, 2011
"The purpose of this book is to send readers off to new places--new places of the mind." So began Joshua Beckman's Two voices presentation of Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade, described, in part, as the Japanese concept of haiku translated into the Latin America of the 20th century.
TWO VOICES: Michael Henry Heim and the Three Eras of Modern Translation
September 15, 2011
Translator of Thomas Mann, Milan Kundera, Hugo Claus, and many more, Michael Henry Heim joined the Center for the Art of Translation in its new offices in downtown San Francisco. Heim has worked with translation since the 1960s, and his presentation focused on how he has seen the translator slowly been brought brought out from "under the carpet" since then. Throughout, Heim came across as a passionate advocate of translation, one who has had the pleasure of seeing it emerge more and more, to the point that now, in Heim's opinion, it has developed serious momentum and has a bright future.
TWO VOICES: Poet and Translator Fanny Howe on A Wall of Two
June 16, 2011
"My work on a translation for seven years has been part of a long fixation, which I hope to put to rest here." This was the bold statement with which Fanny Howe began her Two Voices presentation on the book of Holocaust poetry, A Wall of Two.
TWO VOICES: Stephen Snyder on Yoko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami, and the Business of International Literature
May 12, 2011
Early in this Two Voices event, translator Stephen Snyder made a bold pronouncement: Haruki Murakami would win a Nobel prize, and 1Q84, his blockbuster novel that many are comparing to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, would be the book to do it. Snyder wasn't wholly going out on a limb. As he told the audience, he correctly predicted Kenzaburo Oe's Nobel prize in 1994. But more to the point of his presentation, Snyder has seen the intricacies of the publishing industry close up, and he has a strong sense of how tastes are made with regard to inernational authors.
TWO VOICES: An Evening with Lydia Davis
April 25, 2011
We're proud to present audio of renowned author, translator, and MacArthur "Genuis" Lydia Davis, who discussed her acclaimed new translation of Madame Bovary last week as part of the Center's Two Voices events series in San Francisco.
Whereas so many writers seem to fall neatly into categories, Davis's career has more often than not defied categorization . . .
The Center Presents Cyrus Cassells on Out in the Bay
April 19, 2011
In conjuction with his appearance in San Francisco for the Center's Two Voices literary events series, Cyrus Cassells also appeared on the public radio show Out in the Bay to discuss translation, Catalan poet Francesc Parcerisas, and why San Francisco is his favorite U.S. city (plus, which city is is favorite international one).
TWO VOICES: Author Yiyun Li on Legendary Chinese Author Shen Congwen
April 14, 2011
"I'm going to tell you a lot of love stories today," Yiyun Li said to begin her Two Voices event on the masterful Chinese writer Shen Congwen. Although little-known in the U.S., Congwen has been a hugely influential author on Li--as she declared during the event, Congwen's letters were one of the three books she brought with her when she emigrated from China to the United States in 1996.
TWO VOICES: Poet and Translator Cyrus Cassells on Catalan Poet Francesc Parcerisas
March 24, 2011
Pulitzer-nominated poet Cyrus Cassells and Franscec Parcerisas first struck up a friendship in 1983, when the former was in Barcelona exploring the charming city that has been home to so many artists and writers. Twenty years later the two men met again in Barcelona, and it was then that Cassells made the snap decision to become Parcerisas’ English-language voice. As Cassells tells it, it was a moment of great serendipity and much drama: "In his living room he recited, movingly, in Catalan, the poem "Objects,' which prompted an almost lightning-quick decision on my part to become his translator."
Cassells read a number of Parcerisas' poems to a rapt Two Voices audience, switching with ease from English to Catalan and back.
TWO VOICES: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal Launch Party Audio
December 7, 2010
On November 17 we celebrated the launch of the new book in our TWO LINES series, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. Here you can hear the audio from the readings portion of that event, where translators Kurt Beals, Katherine Silver, Rick London, and Joel Streicker reading poetry and prose from Anja Utler, Martin Adan, and Samanta Schweblin, all included in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal.
TWO VOICES: Stephen Kessler on Luis Cernuda
November 11, 2010
In this audio, award-winning translator Stephen Kessler discusses his work with Cernuda's amazing late poetry. Cut off from his readership and his colleagues, Cernuda continued to write, but he was unaware of his growing renown in his native land. Then, at almost 50 years of age, Cernuda moved to Mexico, where he began to write the poetry that appears in Kessler's translation, Desolation of the Chimera. Though Cernuda was lured to Mexico by both the promise of a familiar lifestyle and the love of a young man, the poems in Desolation are, per Kessler, the work of a man writing "as if for himself alone."
TWO VOICES: Carolina de Robertis on Bonsai
October 6, 2010
In this podcast from the Center for the Art of Translation, award-winning author and translator Carolina de Robertis discusses her translation of the Chilean novel Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra.
TWO VOICES: Daniel Kehlmann on Fame
September 28, 2010
In this podcast from the Center for the Art of Translation, bestselling German author Daniel Kehlmann reads from and talks about his new "novel in stories," Fame.
TWO VOICES: Bernardo Atxaga, Leading Basque Novelist
June 8, 2010
As London's newspaper The Guardian once wrote, Bernardo Atxaga is not just a Basque novelist but the Basque novelist: a writer charged, whether he likes it or not, with exporting a threatened culture around the world. If Basque culture is threatened, its literature is perhaps most imperiled of all: Atxaga himself claims that just one hundred books have been written in the Basque language Euskara in the past 400 years.
TWO VOICES: Marlon Hom on Angel Island Detention Poems and Chinatown Songs
May 18, 2010
Over the course of 30 years--from 1910 to 1940--the Angel Island Immigration Station processed over 200,000 immigrants, most of them Chinese. Confined to a small cell and awaiting their fate, Chinese immigrants found various ways to assuage their anxiety: one of them was poetry, which they carved into the station's wooden walls. Here Marlon Hom discusses these poems, as well as their impact on the Chinese-American community, China, and the literature written in the years and decades afterward.
TWO VOICES: Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld on Dahlia Ravikovitch
April 13, 2010
Dahlia Ravikovitch was more than Israel's leading female poet: she was also an outspoken activist who challenged Israel to forge its identity and once aided Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish when he was under house arrest. Hear acclaimed translators Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld talk about this enigmatic figure, the challenges posed by the Hebrew language, and when happens when two people work on the same book.
TWO VOICE: Peter Bush on La Celestina
April 6, 2010
What came before Don Quixote? Give yourself five points if you said La Celestina. A Spanish Romeo and Juliet, Celestina was published in 1499 and became Spain's first-ever bestseller, paving the way for everything from Don Quixote to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and beyond. Grab a glass of wine and hear Peter Bush read from his acclaimed new translation and talk about why this book is a cornerstone of Spanish literature.
TWO VOICES: Alison Anderson on JMG Le Clezio
March 11, 2010
Literary translation is often a job with little renown and few financial rewards, but translator Alison Anderson managed to strike it big twice in 2008: the French author JMG Le Clezio, whose novels Anderson has translated, received the Nobel Prize for literature, and Muriel Barbery's novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog became a national bestseller. Here Anderson talks about the pleasures and the pains of becoming a hot commodity and the books behind these literary celebrities.
TWO VOICES: Susan Bernofsky on Robert Walser
February 9, 2010
In 1993 when Susan Bernofsky published her first book-length translation of Robert Walser, the author was little-known in English and virtually unread in the United States. By 2009, when Bernofsky’s translation of The Tanners signified that all of Walser’s novels were available in English for the first time, the release of that book was greeted with praise from publications as diverse as BookForum, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times. The rise of Walser in translation over the past two decades has been nothing short of stunning, and it is thanks in no small part to a group of fine translators, of whom Bernofsky has played a leading roll.
TWO VOICES: Breon Mitchell on The Tin Drum
November 10, 2009
Why retranslate a classic author? And if you're going to do it, how do you do it right? Breon Mitchell talks about his translation of Günter Grass's masterpiece, The Tin Drum.
TWO VOICES: Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolano
October 10, 2009
Hear Natasha Wimmer, translator of the blockbuster novels The Savage Detectives and 2666, discuss Roberto Bolano and his two major novels. She also reads her translation-in-progress of Bolano's unpublished essay collection Entre parentesis (Between Parentheses) and discusses Bolano's unpublished manuscripts.
Lit&Lunch with Karen Emmerich on Greek Literature
May 5, 2009
Hear Karen Emmerich discuss and read from her translations of four major Greek writers—Amanda Michalopoulou, Eleni Vakalo, Ersi Sotiropoulos, and Miltos Sachtouris—as part of the Center for the Art of Translation's Lit&Lunch series.
Two Voices with Fady Joudah on Mahmoud Darwish
March 10, 2009
In this Two Voices event recording, hear acclaimed poet and translator Fady Joudah read from The Butterfly’s Burden, his award-winning translation of three books from this major Arabic poet, as well as several poems of his own. Among Darwish’s works, Joudah reads “I Have the Wisdom of One Condemned to Death” and “Who Am I Without Exile,” and he offers important context for these works by reading his own poetry. In between readings he discusses the status of Arabic poetry in English translation, building a case that there has to be a “particular pile of dead Arabs” for Arab writers to gain notice.
Lit&Lunch With Novelist Yoko Tawada
February 10, 2009
Hear Yoko Tawada speak about The Naked Eye, translation, writing in multiple languages, and living in new cultures as part of the Center for the Art of Translation's Lit&Lunch series.
Two Voices with Translator Katherine Silver on Horacio Castellanos Moya
October 7, 2008
Compared to Roberto Bolaño and the great Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, Horacio Castellanos Moya has attracted a devoted following in English with his first translated novel, Senselessness, about an embattled, displaced journalist charged with editing a 1,100-page report on the military’s massacre of Guatemala’s indigenous people. In this Two Voices event audio, hear translator Katherine Silver explain how this testimony, recounted in the broken Spanish of the Cakchiquel people, “infects” the narrators own colonial Spanish. She further explains how both languages proceed to subversively “infect” her own English translation
Lit&Lunch with Edith Grossman on Nobel Prize Winner Mario Vargas Llosa and Others
March 11, 2008
We were pleased to welcome the acclaimed translator of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Edith Grossman, to the Center for the Art of Translation’s Lit&Lunch series. In this podcast of the event she, named by Harold Bloom the Glenn Gould of translation, discusses both the art and the business of translation, and reads from her translations of authors Mario Vargas Llosa and Antonio Muñoz Molina.
TWO VOICES: Translator Damion Searls in Conversation with Scott Esposito on Norwegian Author Jon Fosse
