Two Words: The Blog of the Center for the Art of Translation


THAT OTHER WORD: Episode 3 | May 2012 | Benjamin Moser

Posted on May 15, 2012, 03:51:00 AM by Madeleine LaRue

“That Other Word,” a collaborative podcast between the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris and the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, offers discussions on classic and contemporary literature in translation, along with engaging interviews with writers, translators, and publishers.

A copy of this podcast can be downloaded here. You can also subscribe to all of the Center's audio on iTunes, or in RSS.

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.). He talks about falling in love with Lispector, his missionary urge to promote her work, The Hour of the Star’s stylistic strangeness and surprising pathos, and why online grammar forums make the work of translation less lonely.

Table of Contents

INTRO: Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito

1:50 W.G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001

3:44 Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter’s December, including a reading from “6 December 1989”

9:54 Robert Walser’s The Walk

13:03 Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, plus Cortázar’s From the Observatory

17:22 Daniel Medin introduces Benjamin Moser

FEATURE: Scott Esposito interviews Benjamin Moser

19:30 How the new translations of Clarice Lispector came to be

25:39 Writing Why This World and generating interest in Lispector’s work

30:52 Translating The Hour of the Star, Lispector’s unusual style, and working with four different translators to create one author’s voice

40:12 The origins and afterlife of The Hour of the Star

48:00 The tools of translation; discovering new authors


June 12: A Night of Fairy Tales

Posted on May 14, 2012, 11:57:00 AM by Scott Esposito

To close out the 2011-12 Two Voices season, join us for a special evening on translating fairy tales!

Kate Bernheimer, Ilya Kaminsky, and Maria Tatar take you deep into the dark woods with readings from classic and contemporary fairytales. And these aren't the fairytales you grew up with—they're the darkest, scariest tales you've ever heard! A reception with cash bar will follow the event.

If you can make it, definitely plan to drop by. This event is super affordable, and promises to be a memorable experience!

June 12
8:30 pm
Viracocha
998 Valencia Street, in the Mission
$5 — order tickets at Brown Paper Tickets

And here are our awesome guests:

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages & Literatures and Folklore & Mythology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in the fields of German Studies, Children’s Literature, and Folklore. She is the author of Classic Fairy Tales, Annotated Peter Pan, Enchanted Hunters, and other volumes.

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. His anthology of 20th century poetry in translation, Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, was published by Harper Collins in March, 2010.

Kate Bernheimer is the author of a trilogy of fairy-tale novels and the story collection Horse, Flower, Bird (Coffee House Press 2010) and edited My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin 2010), a World Fantasy Award nominee and Shirley Jackson Awards finalist. She also has edited two essay collections about fairy tales and writes children's books. She founded and edits the literary journal Fairy Tale Review and is Associate Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.


TWO VOICES: Novelist Sergio Chejfec

Posted on May 10, 2012, 12:54:00 PM by Scott Esposito

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.

From here, Chejfec moved on to broader questions of biography in literature: he declared his dislike for confessional literature, saying that when he writes about himself, he writes as though he is another person. Calling literature a space between determination and indetermination, Chejfec explained his preference for the latter because he likes to vacillate and avoid certainties in his books.

Chejfec put his books into context, arguing that The Planets fits into a tradition of discussing the Argentine dictatorship from oblique angles. He also discussed The Planets in relationship to the work of the great Argentine novelist Juan Jose Saer, whom Chejfec called perhaps the greatest novelist Argentina produced int he 20th century. Chejfec discussed in particular Saer's Nadie nada nunca (Nobody Nothing Never). That book is about the disappearance of a couple during the dictatorship, and, while the book clearly has a political angle, Chejfec also argued for a more metaphysical interpretation.

Chejfec's work was read in both English and Spanish, followed by a few questions and answers. Here, Chejfec spoke about the particularly Jewish angle to the political repression in Argentina, mentioning that a disproportionate number of individuals disappeared by the dictatorship were Jewish. He also talked about whether he considered himself a Jewish author or an Argentine author and the difference between truth and meaning in his books.


TWO LINES Online Author Wins Best Translated Book Award

Posted on May 7, 2012, 12:47:00 PM by Scott Esposito

On Friday, Open Letter Press announced its winners for the Best Translated Book Awards for 2011. The poetry winner was Kiwao Nomura’s Spectacle & Pigsty, published by Omnidawn and translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander. We excerpted this book back in July 2011 at TWO LINES Online. The part we excerpted is very striking, just on a visual level, and it's no surprise that this book went on to take the award:

crawl
crawltwist
crawltwistcross
crawltwisterectcrossinterlace
crawltwisterectdeviatecrossinterlacewear

Also, big congratulations to Omnidawn, a fine, local press, as well as to Yoshida and Gander for measuring up to what was clearly a very difficult translation challenge. Yoshida is new to us (although she's definitely on our radads now); and, of course, Forrest Gander is very well known to the Center, having translated many fine poems for past volumes of TWO LINES and TWO LINES Online.


TWO VOICES: Pulitzer-Winning Poet and Translator Richard Howard on Out in the Bay

Posted on May 3, 2012, 02:31:00 PM by Scott Esposito

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." Lastly, Center literary programs manager CJ Evans reminisces about being Howard's student. This conversation originally appeared on Out in the Bay, KALW, 91.7 FM, in conjunction with Howard's appearance for the Center's Two Voices series of literary events.


TWO LINES Online: May 2012

Posted on May 3, 2012, 09:57:00 AM by Scott Esposito

We've just published the May installement of TWO LINES Online. In it we offer two excerpts from the Italian novel Exhausted Space written by Tommaso Pincio, aka the Italian Thomas Pynchon. No joke: here's translator Acacia O'Connor's bio note for Pincio:

Tommaso Pincio is the nome d’arte of Italian author Marco Colapietro. While the pseudonym is clearly an Italianization of Thomas Pynchon, Pincio claims he took it because it is also one of the Seven Hills of Rome, his birthplace. Pincio is the author of five novels, one of which, Love-Shaped Story has been translated into English. Lo Spazio Sfinito, Pincio’s second novel, was published in 2000 by Fanucci and re-issued by minimumfax in Rome in November 2010.

He's also an artist. To the left you see his portrayal of David Foster Wallace. Here are the excerpts: 1, 2.

In poetry we have a translation from the great Anna Rosen Guercio. This is a very fun, well-translated poem: I've got gold fever 120 degrees by José Eugenio Sánchez.


Center People in the News

Posted on May 1, 2012, 10:10:00 AM by Scott Esposito

This week brings some nice news for friends of the Center. First off, we see Katherine Silver (listen to her Lit&Lunch appearance here, or read her in TWO LINES) getting a great New York Times review for her translation of Mexican author Daniel Sada's Almost Never. In said review, we see something that "almost never" happens occur: authentic praise for a translator in a book review:

What is so daring here? It’s not Sada’s depiction of the Madonna-whore complex, nor his take on the delusions of a Mexican macho — although both make for delicious burlesque. What’s new is the voice, and Sada’s glorious style. Katherine Silver pulls off the near-­impossible feat of translating the cacophony of thoughts, interjections and slang rattling around Demetrio’s fevered brain, not to mention the continual asides of an arch narrator. Here is Demetrio attempting to write his first letter to Renata . . .

We couldn't agree more. And the book was even selected as one of the NYT's Editors' Choices. Big congrats to Katie!

In other news, TWO LINES alumus Kurt Beals sees his translation of Anja Utler's engulf — enkindle selected as a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. (We originally published poems from this book in TWO LINES.) You can read about why this is such a great book at Three Percent, where Erica Mena makes the case for this book being the eventual winner of the award:

engulf — enkindle is a stunning book of poetry. It literally stunned me into absolute submission; it is the book of poetry I’d been wanting to read for years. It’s a small volume, and I read it in one sitting, faster than I normally read poetry, because I couldn’t slow down. The language sunk its hooks into me and pulled me through the book, like rafting down rapids. If some of this sounds violent, that’s no mistake – the book is full of sensual violence, done to the body of language and the body in the poem.


Putting More of the Arts into Education

Posted on April 30, 2012, 02:42:00 PM by Erin Branagan

We at the Center are fervent supporters of arts in the schools—that's one of the reasons why we've expanded our Poetry Inside Out program to over 40 classes in the past year. We’re excited to see the high profile that arts education has been commanding recently and wanted to share a few recent developments with you.

Last week, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announced a new Turnaround Arts initiative to bring arts education to eight low-performing schools around the country to increase student engagement and learning. Artists like Sarah Jessica Parker, Kerry Washington, and Forest Whitaker will each sponsor a school. This is the first federal initiative to consider the role of arts in school reform—and we hope not the last.

California has also just launched Create CA, a statewide initiative to bring art back to our schools. It's the latest effort to get more arts education in public school since Proposition 13 severely reduced funding for arts more than thirty years ago. Create CA will bring together the many groups—artists, educators, business executives and state officials—working to expand access to arts education in order to influence legislation, increase funding, and raise awareness.

And lastly, in March the NEA came out with a report showing academic achievement gains for at-risk students participating in “arts-rich” school environments. The report analyzed results from four earlier studies and found that students in schools with arts opportunities were more engaged and academically successful than their counterparts at schools without the arts. This is hardly surprising to us after all the improvement we've seen with our Poetry Inside Out students, but it's still good to see our anecdotal data backed up by empirical results.

We hope that these efforts will begin to change attitudes about the value of arts education—we'll keep you updated about their progress.


From Exhausted Space: Chapters 14 and 15

Posted on April 26, 2012, 03:24:00 PM by Tommaso Pincio

Women are prone to disappearance. Everyone takes note of this age-old truth sooner or later in life, but the issue isn’t that women disappear nor why they disappear. The question is: where do they go? What becomes of them? What became of Marilyn Monroe? It’s a question without an answer and, considering how much time has passed, it will stay that way for years to come. After being fired, every trace of Marilyn Monroe was lost. Her fate remains a mystery to this day. No one knows where she went, if she left the country or changed her identity, if she’s still alive. All we know about her are the things that didn’t happen. Death didn’t happen, at least not officially because nowhere is she registered as deceased. She didn’t find another job, not a legal job, at least, because she was never officially hired by another company. She was never married, not that this means anything much—by the end of the 50s the institution of marriage was showing its first signs of collapse. She didn’t travel, in the sense that she didn’t buy any tickets that might require the registration of personal details.

Obviously, all these things that officially didn’t happen don’t rule out any hypotheses. She could be long dead--perhaps her body is still being saved in the refrigerator of some morgue waiting to be identified. She might have worked for people where the less they knew about her, the better it would be. She might have been desperately in need of money and was contacted by one of those secret companies that recruit people to experiment with new pills going on the spatial pharmaceutical market.

It appears as though she was very beautiful and might have therefore tried her hand at a career as a cat-walker. Historians have determined that for every girl who succeeded, there are tens if not hundreds whose brains were addled by Gravital, a chemical supplement they say is relatively harmless and was extremely popular at the time. Aspiring cat-walkers took it in huge quantities, however, enabling them to walk in the Void of Space as gracefully as they would in the presence of gravity. She could therefore have been reduced to walking in one of those institutions for spacial adjustment dysfunction, along with the many other now-nameless girls completely incapable of controlling their bodily functions, unable to understand why they had been so reduced or to remember how beautiful they once were; passing hours in front of a mirror pretending to walk in Space, trying to imagine the Void around them, the Void and weightlessness. Or Marilyn Monroe might be one of those lifeless bodies that drift off at the mercy of silent galactic currents, one of the many female bodies orbital controllers sometimes spy from a distance. They stare at them as if they were ghosts but don’t signal their presence to their base because cat-walker bodies don’t get in the way of orbital spaces, they don’t disturb frequencies and they aren’t detected by the ship’s instruments. Technically speaking, a dead body in Space doesn’t exist, it doesn’t alter the Void and it doesn’t add to it, they disappear the moment they become part of it. The harmony of nothing. Morally speaking, on the other hand, it was better that cat-walker corpses floating in space didn’t exist. They represented the dirty soul of the new Space Frontier. Often those bodies, motionless against a background of imposing blackness, had pasts one would rather not know about. Those girls died in Space because they didn’t know enough to recognize the bittersweet taste of rotten oxygen candies. Unsuspecting, they put the cubes of oxygenated gum in their mouths, they sucked on them, sure of themselves and of their beauty. Without sensing anything out of the ordinary, they would leave the company’s ship and start modelling in Space. The ship moved away almost immediately so as not to ruin the astral shot: a girl walking suspended in space and, all around her, the Void. This was the aesthetic demand that condemned them. By the time they realized they were running out of air, by the time they realized that the candy was rotten, it was too late. By that point they’d be flailing in panic, trying to get the attention of the spaceship that had brought them there, but the ship had by then become a white dot, hardly distinguishable from the stars around it. They’d make despairing movements with their arms, issuing soundless screams, using up what little bit of air remained in their throats. Face trembling, eyes wide, mouth agape, then silence. They died knowing just how extreme the absence of sound can be. By the time the ship returned there was nothing to be done. The girls’ bodies weren’t loaded on board, they were abandoned in Space.

Abandoning a body in Space wasn’t a crime. The cat-walker phenomenon, on the other hand, wasn’t entirely legal and so in order to avoid pointless problems, they preferred not to bring the dead girls back to Earth. A cat-walker contract contained a release similar to that which orbital controllers were obligated to sign, but honestly almost all space travel in the 50s, whether legal or illegal, required a release. In other words, leaving for Space was a little like disappearing, a person’s name was suspended in the record books, officially it didn’t even show that the person had left—it was as if they were still on Earth. On Earth but untraceable. It was the odd and primitive way in which they compensated for the legislative gap in the matter of Space: whosoever embarked did so at their own danger and risk, no law of any state protected them. It was the price to pay for the last frontier and the reason why many, for the most part women, never returned. By law these people never went into Space, they never lifted a foot from the Earth—they were untraceable people but people that could still be found on our planet and if anything awful had happened to them it had at any rate happened on Earth. Legally speaking, there was no place safer than Space. Legally speaking, no one had yet died in Space.

No one can say if Marilyn Monroe also became part of this vanished class. But since historians began to occupy themselves with this issue, the question they have attempted to answer has been: Would things have gone differently if Neal Cassady, returning to Quantum that day at the beginning of summer, had found the orientress with her reflective mouth properly in her place, or if he had in any case succeeded in tracking her down? Mind you, it’s not so much the “ifs” of what might have happened that disturbs historians, but rather if effectively something different had happened. Marilyn’s disappearance is a black hole. It’s a fact that threatens history around her, a real and true sword of Damocles that might fall at any moment, upending years of scrupulous manipulation of the facts.

Not long ago historians tracked down the man who was personnel manager for Quantum at the time Marilyn was fired. It was highly unlikely that he be able to tell them anything useful after so much time had passed, but they got in touch with him anyway to ask if the name Marilyn Monroe meant anything to him.

They were psychologically prepared to hear “no.” “It certainly does. That’s the girl we fired for her reflective mouth. A nice-looking broad,” he replied without seeming to think much about it, as if it was the most natural thing to remember. And as if forty years hadn’t passed.

The connection must be bad, the historians thought, recovering from their shock by telling him that his words had gotten lost halfway, at some point along the mysterious planetary routes designed by telephone companies.

“Miss Monroe worked at Quantum when I was personnel manager.” Historians liked hearing things they already knew repeated, it cast a light on the dark side of the whole affair. It calmed them.

“I remember her perfectly. I was the one who signed her dismissal letter.”

“Why did you let her go?”

“For her reflective mouth. It was 1956, there were some things you still couldn’t do. Like that, like it’s nothing.”

“But Modernella Jane also did her mouth up that way, reflective.”

“Not also, only. Modernella Jane was the only one who did her mouth up all reflective. Some years later it became a more or less accepted fashion, but in ’56 it meant being inappropriately provocative.”

“A provocateur who made her way onto TV, though.”

“Friends, you all belong to a new generation. If a television personality did something, it didn’t by any means mean that you could do it.” The historians wanted to tell him that essentially things hadn’t much changed, that in many ways it had even gotten worse. They would have had to explain to him why, however, and they weren’t quite sure of how to do that.

“And then when it came down to it Quantum was a bookstore. There was a style to respect, a grammar.”

“Tell us more about the reflective mouth. What about it was so inappropriate?”

“In the 50s, the symbolic value of things was fundamental. People all dressed the same way and demanded that everything have a meaning. Everything had to correspond to something. Acts that didn’t have a clear meaning were improper.”

“But what meaning could there be behind the way you do your make-up? Make-up is make-up.”

“That’s what you say. When they shot Modernella Jane’s face, little by little the camera zoomed in on her reflective lips and as it did you could clearly make out the reflection of the guests in her studio. Then the lips began to open slightly, you glimpsed her reflective teeth, her mouth continued to open and you discovered that the tongue was reflective too. The television screen was overpowered by this reflective mouth, while the show’s guests and its studio technicians were all reflected and distorted around the oral cavity of that woman. It was a disturbing image.”

“Back then”

“Back then, yes. Who’d say otherwise? Anyway, it was completely out of the question for an orientress to show up at her place of work made-up like that.”

“What happened exactly?”

“Ms. Monroe was a headstrong girl. She tended to, how can I say this, to defy people. She provoked them, basically. She did the same thing with us. When we requested that she avoid inappropriate makeup she didn’t say a thing. Usually the girls would at least reply to our criticism, they’d apologize, offer assurances about their future conduct or otherwise they’d ask for an explanation, which was a way of opposing us. With her, nothing—she kept her mouth shut. This was pretty indicative.”

“Indicative of what, if you’ll excuse us?”

“Of what was going on in her head, seems obvious to me.”

“Certainly. And afterwards?”

“After what?”

“After you fired her.”

“The following day she came into work just like always. There was nothing else to be done, if I hadn’t thrown her out they would have thrown me out. It was her or me. Besides, she didn’t seem too worried about losing her job, she gave off the impression that her reflective mouth came before anything else. Some sort of ideal.”

“Her mouth?”

“Yes, her mouth. I already told you, in those years we lived on symbolic gestures.”

“Do you know what became of her? Did you ever see her again?”

“No, but I still have a photo of her. The one she sent along with her application. I liked holding onto the photos of the girls who applied to be orientresses. I have over thirty and it’s a very revealing sample, a real piece of history.”

“We don’t doubt it. Was her mouth reflective in that photo?”

“Definitely not. We would never have hired her.”

The conversation pretty much ended there. The man hadn’t said very much and the historians were satisfied. They wondered if the problems caused by Marilyn Monroe could be traced back to the purchase of the stellar atlas and came to the conclusion that it was a likely hypothesis. Neal Cassady could have very well been one of the customers who were disturbed and provoked by the reflective-mouthed orientress. As for what Neal did to track Monroe down, everything could remain as it was before. The black hole of the orientress with the reflective mouth remained intact.

Afterwards, the historians wrote a letter to the old man who had been Quantum personnel manager as a young man. They attempted to explain what it was they were doing, despite the fact he had never asked. They thanked him for what he had told them. In their hearts they thanked him more for what he hadn’t told them, but they didn’t write that because they doubted he’d understand.

Some months later the man responded. He wrote that it had been a pleasure talking to someone from the old days, he wished the historians good luck with their work, even if he wasn’t sure he quite understood what that information was good for and whether what the historians were doing really constituted as “work”. He also wrote that they seemed “a little nutty” but that ultimately he couldn’t say because certain things he just didn’t chew on. He wrote just that. There was also a P.S. The man enclosed the photo of Marilyn Monroe, saying he was sure it would be to their liking. “I’m old and I don’t want it winding up in the trash when I die. That’s what’ll become of all my photos because my daughter despises my collection. What can you do, she thinks I’m an old pervert. You keep it.”

1956

For the first time the existence of an eighth musical note is theorized. The fad of keeping bowls of goldfish glued to the windshields of automobiles breaks out. Prayer in schools is declared unconstitutional while, still on the matter of constitutional rights, the death penalty is reinstated. For no apparent reason the sale of lawnmowers suddenly skyrockets. The first “luminous saucer-like object” is spotted. Number-less watches appear for the first time. Casual encounters start to catch on. The Eiffel Tour is disassembled and transferred to Montana for two weeks. The Frisbee is marketed. People try to be happier. The first memory bubble is isolated in the laboratories of the Walt Disney Institute. The consumption of margarine exceeds that of butter. The hypothesis that mouth-to-mouth breathing is carcinogenic is advanced. The introduction of the three-point shot in basketball is proposed. It is demonstrated that the viruses that attack information systems are biologically innocuous to man. A photograph from a man’s deathbed declares that the image he took of the Loch Ness monster twenty-two years prior was a fake. A Supreme Court decision denies the existence of virtual reality. The Equal Opportunities Commission establishes that the concept of sexual molestation between opposite-sex individuals is a contradiction in terms. Playboy publishes some nude photos of Modernella Jane. Production begins of chewing air, which in few years time will replace the use of the less-safe oxygen candies. A federal law prohibits the sale of Gravital without a regular space boarding pass. The institution, by promotional means, of the first personalized news bulletin. A survey reveals that thirty-seven percent of men believe the Barbie doll to be the ideal partner.

Tommaso Pincio is the nome d’arte of Italian author Marco Colapietro. While the pseudonym is clearly an Italianization of Thomas Pynchon, Pincio claims he took it because it is also one of the Seven Hills of Rome, his birthplace. Pincio is the author of five novels, one of which, Love-Shaped Story has been translated into English. Lo Spazio Sfinito, Pincio’s second novel, was published in 2000 by Fanucci and re-issued by minimumfax in Rome in November 2010.

Acacia O'Connor lives in New York City where she manages the Kids Right to Read Project for the National Coalition Against Censorship and American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. She obtained her M.A. in literary translation studies from the University of Rochester in 2011 and her B.A. in English and Italian from Vassar College. At Vassar, O'Connor was editor of The Miscellany News, and her writings have since appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer and online at Open Letter's translation blog, Three Percent. In 2009 she received a Fulbright fellowship to teach English in southern Italy. This is her first published translation.

Original text: Pincio, Tommaso. Lo Spazio Sfinito. minimum fax: Rome, 2010.

Read more world literature at TWO LINES Online.


Sergio Chejfec Called "Exciting New Argentine Novelist"

Posted on April 24, 2012, 11:52:00 AM by Scott Esposito

On May 8 we'll be hosting Sergio Chejfec in person for an event at 111 Minna. Over at The Argentina Independent, Joey Rubin has named him as one of 5 Argentine authors that you need to check out. I couldn't agree more:

These five aren’t just the most interesting novels by Argentine writers being published in the US and UK this year, they’re the most interesting novels being published in the US and UK, period. And they are all by Argentine authors that we’d feel remiss if you didn’t know about. So take out your pen and jot these names down, or load them onto your “To-Read” App, or scan them with your Google Glasses, whatever your style may be.

And here's the praise for Chejfec's book The Planets, which he'll be discussing at the event.

The Planets by Sergio Chejfec
When Open Letter Books (US) published Sergio Chejfec’s novel ‘My Two Worlds’ in English last year, the English-reading public was introduced, for the first time, to a unique writer: hyper-perceptive, unafraid of interiority, sworn to the incremental drama of hermeneutics. The novel was well received — one critic called the book a “vast and complicated work of literature;” meaningful praise for a novel only 102 pages long. So this summer, be alert for literary excitement when Open Letter releases the second volume of Chejfec in English: ‘The Planets’. First published in Spanish in 1999, ‘The Planets’ was written during the fifteen-year period when Chejfec lived in Venezuela, a temporal and cultural dislocation important to the text. As ‘My Two Worlds’ used ambulatory reflection, ‘The Planets’ uses the act of remembering to elevate a simple story into an elegant register. It’s a mode of literature difficult to master, but worthy of celebration when done right. Head over to the Open Letter website to begin the celebration.