We’re very proud to announce the Web Exclusive supplement to our latest anthology, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.

The site features 12 writers in translation, ranging from classic authors like Rainer Maria Rilke to up-and-comers like Mahmoud Darwish’s literary descendant, Ghassan Zaqtan. The Web Exclusive is a great opportunity for us, since we had so much great material this year that there wasn’t a way to get it all into print.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be shining a spotlight on the translators on Two Words, so that they can explain in their own words why they’ve championed the work that appears in the Web Exclusive edition of Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. For now, enjoy.

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s angry dissection of the so-called Bolano myth has been published in English by Guernica magazine. In part, Moya says:

I don’t know if it’s my bad luck or if it happens to my colleagues as well, but every time that I’ve found myself on American soil—at the airport bar, at a social gathering, wherever—and I’ve made the mistake of admitting to a citizen of that country that I’m a fiction writer who comes from Latin America, that person will immediately pull out García Márquez, and will do it, what’s more, with a self-satisfied smile, as if he were saying to me, “I know you, I know where you come from.” (Of course, I’ve found myself with wilder ones who boast about Isabel Allende or Paolo Coelho, which, ultimately, makes no difference at all, since Allende and Coelho are little more than the light and self-help versions of García Márquez.) As time goes by, however, those same North Americans, at those same bars and social gatherings, have begun to pull out Bolano.

For more on Moya, you can listen to audio from our event with his translator, Katherine Silver. And for more on Bolano, check out our audio from the Natasha Wimmer event we did in October.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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 She also reads her translation-in-progress of Bolano’s unpublished essay collection Entre parentesis (”Between Parentheses”) and discusses Bolano’s unpublished manuscripts.

Remember Bay Area residents: this week is your chance to see Roberto Bolano’s translator, Natasha Wimmer, at two events courtesy of the Center.

On Tuesday (tomorrow!) we’ll be hosting Wimmer at Lit&Lunch, 12:30 @ 111 Minna in downtown SF. If you’ll be coming, let us know by RSVPing on our Facebook page.

And then on Wednesday, Wimmer will be in conversation with local literary celeb Daniel Alarcon at Lone Palm bar in the Mission (22nd & Guerrero). Doors open at 6:00. If you’re coming, RSVP here.

If you can’t make these, don’t fret. We’ll be doing two events in November with Breon Mitchell, whose re-translation of The Tin Drum will be hitting store shelves any day now.

The easiest way to stay on top of all our events is to sign up for our Facebook page. There you’ll find regular updates from the Center, the translators we work with, and more.

We’ll be doing two events with Natasha Wimmer on October 6 and 7. (Wimmer will also be editing an anthology of translated literature for the Center, due out next year.)

In addition to reading from and discussing 2666, at these events Wimmer will be talking about some new Bolaño projects she currently has ongoing. To give readers an idea of what to expect, I chatted briefly with Wimmer about these books.

Scott Esposito: First I wanted to ask you about these new Bolaño texts they’re digging up, particularly El Tercer Reich (”The Third Reich”) and the supposed sixth book of 2666.

Natasha Wimmer: I’ve read “The Third Reich” (and in fact, it looks like I’ll be translating it, though I have yet to sign on the dotted line). It’s about an elaborate board game called “The Third Reich” (Bolaño was a great fan of war games), it takes place on the Costa Brava, and it pits a German tourist against an enigmatic South American who rents paddle boats on the beach. I loved it.

I haven’t read the purported sixth section of 2666, or even really heard much about it. Maybe it will remain forever ghostly—the spectral answer to all our 2666 questions.

SE: That seems preferable to its publication, in my opinion. You’re currently translating Antwerp and Entre parentesis (”Between Parentheses”) for New Directions, due out in 2010 and 2011, respectively. First I wanted to ask you about Antwerp, which is a novel but actually predates Bolaño’s “first” novel (The Skating Rink, just published in English translation) by a good 13 years.

NW: Antwerp is Bolaño intensified and condensed—the Big Bang, as Bolaño’s friend and literary executor Ignacio Echevarria referred to it. It was written in 1980, which makes it his first novel, though it wasn’t published until 2002. It’s a very short book, with short chapters, each of them like a prose poem, but there is a semblance of a crime plot, and the action (such as it is) takes place on the Costa Brava.

SE: And then Entre parentesis is Bolaño’s nonfiction?

NW: Entre parentesis (translation of the title still to be decided) is a collection of nonfiction, almost all of it written during the last five years of Bolaño’s life. In effect, it’s a kind of literary autobiography—intense, funny, scathing, moving. Bolaño isn’t bound by many conventions in writing about himself or about other writers, and he’s in full oblique-lyrical sail in lots of these pieces. It’s the kind of book that actually makes you gasp in places—at Bolaño’s daring, at his honesty, and at his skill.

SE: And lastly, I wanted you to weigh in on talk of Bolaño being the next great thing in Latin American letters, in the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

NW: It’s hard for me to be objective on the subject—I’m too close to the books to get the proper perspective on them. And it’s probably too early for anyone else to judge definitively, either. All I can say is that Bolaño’s voice echoes in a very persuasive way.

Those who have been holding out for a 1-volume, paperback edition of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 can now purchase just that from Picador. The book has just been released, totaling 912 pages and costing $18.00.

Bay Area residents who have waited till now to give Bolaño’s enormous opus a shot will have an added incentive to dive in, as the Center will be hosting two events with the book’s translator, Natasha Wimmer, in October. On Tuesday, October 6, we’ll have her for the inaugural event of our 2009-10 Lit&Lunch season, where she’ll be reading from her translation, discussing the challenge of undertaking such a work, and talking about why Bolaño has become such a phenomenon.

On October 7 we’ll be doing an evening event in which Wimmer will be in conversation with a local literary luminary. More info on that event to come.