The Good Books

Selections from PEN America 14: The Good Books are now online! Here are a few of things you can check out over at PEN.org:

Forum: The Good Books
Welcome to the World's Greatest Book Swap: writers sharing books that they love--what could be better? We were blown away by the thoughtful responses we received, and by how many! Over fifty writers participated in our virtual swap. We've posted a few, with more to come. For now, have a look at Maurice Berger on Roland Barthes's Mythologies and Barack Obama; Srikanth Reddy on Chinese Tales and translating a translated translation; Rabih Alameddine on The Book of Disquiet and the many heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.

The 1986 PEN Congress, 25 years later
We culled through almost 3,000 pages of previously unpublished transcripts to bring you highlights from a literary event spearheaded by Norman Mailer and featuring Arthur Miller, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, Czeslaw Milosz, and many more. (Check out Rhoda Koenig's long write-up of the event in New York Magazine for some of the glamor and gossip surrounding the '86 Congress.)

Among the pieces we included is one we call "From Voice to Voice," in which remarks by Saul Bellow touch off responses from Allen Ginsberg, Nadine Gordimer, Susan Sontag--but enough with my name-dropping, go have a look yourself. And make sure to read "From the Floor," too, in which Grace Paley and Margaret Atwood protest the under-representation of women writers at the Congress (and Norman Mailer offers his perhaps inflammatory rebuttal).

World Voices
The issue also features fiction, poetry, and essays by some of the participants in this year's PEN World Voices Festival, including Marcelo Figueras, Asaf Schurr, Najat El Hachmi. And there are three essays from Finding the Words, an anthology compiled by our sister chapter PEN Canada: Pasha Malla & Moez Surani assemble an "Ethical Code for Writers," Alain de Botton revisits places of unexpected inspiration in "On Writing," and Madeleine Thien ghost-hunts through Cambodia and Vietnam in "Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh."

Artwork
What's the sound of a sword cutting into a book? A book being sliced? Paper falling? ZAK, SHAKA, BARA BARA. Check out Book, a great comic by Yuichi Yokoyama with awesome onomatopoeic translations by Taro Nettleton. There's more book slicing and dicing to be seen in the sculptures of Brian Dettmer (our wonderful cover artist), and some quotation re-appropriation by Jenny Holzer.

As usual, you can find all of this and more if you subscribe to PEN America or purchase a copy of the journal.

Praise for Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

In The New York Times Book Review this past Sunday there's a great piece by August Kleinzahler, "Rebirth of a Poet," which praises Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation of Songs of Kabir. More so than his predecessors, Mehrotra manages to "[capture] the ferocity and improvisational energy of Kabir's poetry."

Kleinzahler includes quotations from the poems "Friend" and "It's a Mess," both of which were included in PEN America 11: Make Believe, and read by Paul Auster during the issue's launch party.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was a recipient of a PEN Translation Fund Grant in 2009, the same year that he was nominated for the chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, alongside Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott. (Here's a Times article about the unusually controversial race.)

The PEN Translation Fund provides grants to support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, drama, and poetry that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in egregiously flawed translation. Read more about PEN's Translation Committee here.

If you haven't already, check out the online feature for PEN America 11: Make Believe. You can purchase the issue and any of our other issues, or become a subscriber, by clicking here.

(Photograph of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra courtesy of The Telegraph.)

Friday event for PEN America 14: The Good Books

As I mentioned last week, the first copies of PEN America 14: The Good Books arrived in New York today. We'll have excerpts to read online after the festival is over, but if you're in New York, you'll find copies at select World Voices events -- including "The Great Global Book Swap," a reading and conversation we're holding on Friday in connection with the new issue.

For the Friday event, Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, Mario Bellatín, and Rahul Bhattacharya have chosen books they read in translation that meant a great deal to them as readers and writers. They will read short excerpts from their selections and discuss why they chose the books they did -- and we'll also discuss the larger subject of literature in translation around the world. Collectively, our Friday panelists have lived in France, India, Mexico, Mauritius, Qatar, Scotland, Sudan, and at least one or two other places as well.

This is a live version of our new issue's forum, in which over 50 writers (among them: Madison Smartt Bell, Amitava Kumar, Yiyun Li, Karen Russell, Lynne Tillman, and many more) imagine they've been invited to a great global book swap, and must bring one book in translation. There are many wonderful choices beautifully explained, and we'll be sharing a number of those pieces here and at PEN.org in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, I hope you can join us on Friday. Here are the full details:

When: Friday, April 29
Where: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave., New York City
What time: 2–3:30 p.m.

With Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, Mario Bellatín, and Rahul Bhattacharya
Free and open to the public. No reservations required.

Co-sponsored by Scandinavia House and PEN America

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Imagine you are invited to a great global book swap and have to bring just one beloved book originally written in a foreign tongue: what would it be? Join five eminent writers who have trotted the globe and lived everywhere from Mexico to Mauritius, India to Sudan, for a reading and a talk about the works of translation that enriched and changed their lives.

The underappreciated Sergei Dovlatov

Like PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar, I knew nothing of Sergei Dovlatov (pictured right, with one-time Vice President of PEN Kurt Vonnegut, who has the lighter of the two mustaches) before I heard this New Yorker fiction podcast with David Bezmozgis (who has a novel excerpt in The New Yorker this week; he’s on their “20 under 40” list). I loved Bezmozgis’s story “Natasha,” published a few years ago in Harper’s, and so was particularly curious to hear what past New Yorker contributor he would choose to read and discuss with Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor.

He did not disappoint. Dovlatov’s “The Colonel Says I Love You” is witty and wise; it demonstrates what Joseph Brodsky once said about Dovlatov (as I would later learn, thanks to Amitava): “The decisive thing is his tone, which every member of a democratic society can recognize: the individual who won’t let himself be cast in the role of a victim, who is not obsessed with what makes him different.” Dovlatov writes direct but surprising stories that draw heavily from his life; Bezmozgis aptly compares him to David Sedaris, though Dovlatov’s humor is less broad, and his circumstances—living and writing in communist Russia—give his stories a kind of moral weight, even if he handles it lightly.

So why isn’t he read more in the United States? Soon after the podcast, Sonya Chung pointed out on The Millions how hard it has become to get copies of his books in English, though they were all translated and published once upon a time (he died in 1990). “Why is Dovlatov so little known or read in the West today?" she asked, repeating a question Triesman had asked Bezmozgis. His answer: “I have no idea. It’s hard to understand these things.” As Chung notes, “Dovlatov couldn’t have said it better himself.” (Responding to Chung’s piece, the blogger languagehat, who reads Russian, said: “Dovlatov is one of the funniest and most likable writers I know, and I’m sure Americans would love him if he were properly introduced.”)

So when we were putting together PEN America 12, we decided we would re-publish one of Dovlatov’s stories. Happily, one of his translators, Antonina W. Bouis, is a generous member of PEN; I still have her copy of The Suitcase (though I’ll be returning it soon, promise!), from which we selected “A Poplin Shirt.”

When I was a child, my nanny, Luiza Genrikhovna, did everything distractedly. Once she dressed me in shorts and shoved both legs into one opening. I walked around like that all day. I was four. I knew that I had been dressed wrong, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to change. I still don’t.

So the narrator tells us near the beginning of the story; he goes on to recount his first outing with his future wife (she speaks first in this bit):

“You can be trusted. I understood that immediately, as soon as I saw Solzhenitsyn’s portrait.”

“That’s Dostoyevsky. But I respect Solzhenitsyn, too.” We had a modest breakfast. Mother gave us a piece of halvah after all.

Then we went outside. The houses were decorated with bunting. Candy wrappers lay in the snow. Our janitor, Grisha, was showing off his ratiné coat.

....We went to the movies to see Ivan’s Childhood. The film was good enough for me to patronize. In that period I liked only detective movies, because they let me relax. But Tarkovsky’s movies I praised, patronizingly—and with a hint that Tarkovsky had been waiting for almost six years for a screenplay from me.

Near the end, the narrator reflects on the life he and his wife have lived:

Are we alike, then? I at least have a stimulus, a goal, an illusion, a hope. What does she have? Only our daughter, and indifference. We have twenty-five years of marriage behind us—twenty-five years of mutual isolation and indifference to real life. In those twenty-five years, our friends fell in love, married, and divorced. They wrote poems and novels about it all. They moved from one republic to another; they changed jobs, convictions, habits, became dissidents and alcoholics, tried to kill others or themselves. Marvelous, mysterious worlds arose and collapsed with a roar all around us. Like taut strings, human relations snapped. Our friends were reborn and died in the search for happiness.

And we? We faced all the temptations and horrors of life with our only gift—indifference. What is more solid than a castle built on sand? What is more durable and dependable in family life than mutual lack of character? What could be stabler than two hostile states each incapable of defending itself?

To read the rest, pick up PEN America 12: Correspondences, or try to find a copy of The Suitcase at your local used bookstore. And then maybe blog about it. Eventually someone will get the point and start publishing Dovlatov’s books in the U.S. again.

Cuban journalist freed, Burmese poet speaks, Colombian journalist excluded

Journalist Normando Hernández González (pictured right) was freed from prison in Cuba Saturday morning. He was arrested in 2003—one of 75 writers and activists jailed in a major crackdown on dissent—and sentenced to 25 years in prison for criticizing the government’s management of tourism, agriculture, fishing, and cultural affairs. His prison conditions were reportedly deplorable and he was hospitalized repeatedly over the past seven years.

As his health declined, PEN mounted an increasingly urgent campaign on his behalf, awarding him the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award in 2007 and pressing the Cuban government to provide adequate medical care and grant him a humanitarian release. He was finally released as part of an agreement between Cuban authorities and the Catholic Church to free 52 political prisoners, all jailed since the March 2003 crackdown. He will reportedly fly to Spain with his wife and daughter today.

Meanwhile, Saw Wei, whose subversively acrostic poem “February the Fourteenth” we published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, has given an interview to the The Irrawaddy, a magazine that covers Burma and other parts of southeast Asia (it's named for a river in Burma; credit to The Literary Saloon for spotting the interview). As previously noted, Saw Wei was jailed for disturbing public tranquility with a poem; happily, he did more writing while in prison:

I wrote some poems and essays while I was in prison. I have to make some final revisions to an essay called “Modern Art and Modern Images.” Before I was put in jail, I had already written about 50 short stories and planned to publish the stories in one go. But I couldn’t finish that, because I was imprisoned.

For the community work, we have a group called “White Rainbow.” We need more members. I want to go everywhere to help our people. If there are no restrictions, I will continue this work.

Meanwhile, a Colombian journalist, Hollman Morris, who was recently selected to participate in the Nieman fellowship program at Harvard, has been denied a visa by the United States. “We were very surprised. This has never happened before,” the Nieman curator, Bob Giles, is quoted as saying in an AP story about the case. PEN, the ACLU, and the American Association of University Professors have sent a letter to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton protesting Morris’s exclusion.

On a lighter note, if you’re having a hard time letting go of the World Cup, here’s a possible antidote: 32 books to add to your reading list, one from each finalist nation—courtesy of Anderson Tepper. For Brazil, he selects Clarice Lispector, and suggests you join in the discussion of her final work, The Hour of the Star (New Directions), at PEN.org/penreads. That discussion has been quite interesting so far; “Clarice is not mysterious or (worse) obscure,” writes one participant in the conversation, who seems familiar with her work in Portguese, “she is intense.”

Update: The AP has the first photographs (taken by Arturo Rodriguez) of Hernández landing in Madrid.

PEN Reads starts today + other links

PEN Reads has begun with this short essay by Colm Tóibín. Check it out and weigh in with your own thoughts. And if you haven’t already, get a copy of The Hour of the Star and stay tuned to PEN.org/PENReads for more in the weeks ahead. (It’s a short book so you needn’t worry too much about falling behind—or resort to watching the movie... though apparently it’s pretty good?)

The Rumpus also has a book club and until Friday they’re giving away free books.

Also via The Rumpus: Etgar Keret (beloved contributor to PEN America) describes for the online magazine Tablet his practice of writing fake dedications. When “a total stranger” asks you to sign a book, he says, what can you write that doesn't sound smarmy or false? Which leads him to this conclusion: “If the books themselves are pure fiction, why should the dedications be true?” One book he inscribes: “To Avram. I don’t care what the lab tests show. For me, you’ll always be my dad.” And in another, which someone has asked him to sign for his girlfriend, Keret writes: “Bosmat, though you’re with another guy now, we both know you’ll come back to me in the end.”

Keret’s countryman and fellow short-short story writer Alex Epstein has just published in the United States a collection of his really wonderful stories (translated by Becka Mara McKay)—ten of which were featured in PEN America 12: Correspondences. Words Without Borders has both a review of the book and a video interview with Epstein. He participated in the PEN World Voices Festival this year, so you can also watch him converse with Norman Rush, Claire Messud, et al; listen to him discuss the short story with Aleksandar Hemon, Yiyun Li, and others; and hear him participate in the PEN Translation Slam.

And you can read the stories we published in PEN America 12: Correspondences. Here’s the shortest one:

THE MELANCHOLY OF ANTIQUE TELEPHONES

In ’83, the horoscopes are never wrong. After ten years, she moves the rotary telephone from the living room into the bedroom. Every morning, upon waking, she lifts the receiver and listens to whispering and rustling and rattling, as at a window. Maybe this is time, suddenly returning. Maybe this is rain. Maybe this is already her mother tongue.

Read the others here.

New online reading group: PEN Reads

This week PEN American Center announced the creation of PEN Reads, an online reading group that will focus on books connected in some way with PEN’s mission—to protect free expression and promote international literary fellowship. The discussion will be built around short essays by writers, translators, scholars, and others, and participation will be open to anyone.

The short essays will be posted at www.PEN.org/PENReads, and readers will be able to comment on each post, participating in a conversation with the discussion’s contributors and with each other.

The first book chosen for PEN Reads is The Hour of the Star, a short, classic novel by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, who lived from 1920 to 1977 (that’s her above, in Paris in 1947; photograph by Bluma Wainer). The book was translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. Here, in English, is how it begins:

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

You can read more here. And you can read an excerpt from Benjamin Moser’s biography of Spector (the NBCC Award-nominated Why This World) here.

Moser will be participating in the online discussion, which will be kicked off Tuesday, July 6 at noon with a contribution from the great Irish novelist Colm Tóibín.

Weekend reading, pre-festival edition

PEN.org and Words Without Borders have made several works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by World Voices authors available online. So start reading now; then, next week, you can introduce yourself to the authors whose work you especially loved.

Read fiction and essays by Sofi Oksanen, Atiq Rahimi, Andrzej Stasiuk, and Miguel Syjuco before going to “Readings from around the Globe” (Wednesday, 8 pm, 92nd Street Y) which also features Mohsin Hamid, Yiyun Li, Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith, and others.

Before Thursday’s conversation about Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Elizabeth Hardwick (“New York Stories,” 7 pm, Morgan Library), you’ll want to read an excerpt from Quim Monzó’s book, Gasoline, which is set in New York; Monzo is participating in the conversation along with Darryl Pinckney, Roxana Robinson, Colm Tóibín, and Edwin Frank. (You might also check out Robinson’s short story “The Trade” in PEN America 11: Make Believe.)

If you choose instead to attend Eshkol Nevo’s conversation with Michael Orthofer (also Thursday at 7 pm, Center for Jewish History) read an excerpt from Nevo’s Homesick. Or, if you’re headed to “Weather Report,” Thursday’s conversation about global warming (8 pm at the Metropolitan Museum), you can read pieces on the subject by participants James Hansen and Bill McKibben.

Finally, before you go to Saturday’s conversation about war, read Deborah Amos on “The Eclipse of the Sunnis.”

Literary magazines here and abroad, now and in the future...

In the latest “little review”—“a weekly look at the world of little magazines”—Christopher Glazek mentions the “Magazines of the Americas” project recently launched by n + 1. Beginning with the new issue, n + 1 hopes to include in each issue a translated work from another magazine published in the Americas; upcoming issues will feature work from writers in Peru and Columbia. You can learn more about the project here.

Meanwhile, the editors of The Massachusetts Review have declared their intentions to begin the magazine’s “second half century by dramatically increasing the amount we publish in translation,” as noted by Scott Esposito over at Two Words. (They’ve even hired a translation editor.) “Our government has been broadcasting The Voice of America for well over fifty years,” Jim Hicks writes (PDF), “it’s high time that the country opened its ears as well as its mouth.”

That’s exactly the spirit behind “Literary Magazines: Here and Abroad, Now and in the Future,” an event PEN America is sponsoring along with Galapagos Art Space (where the event will be held), during the upcoming World Voices Festival. M Mark, the editor of PEN America, will be joined by the editors of Granta and Tin House—John Freeman and Rob Spillman, respectively—as well as by Peter Stamm, a Swiss writer and an editor of the literary quarterly Entwürfe für Literatur, and Rodrigo Fresán, the Argentinian writer who lives in Spain and has contributed to Granta, PEN America, and other “little magazines.”

We’ll talk about how the role of the literary magazine is changing in the internet age, how it varies across continents, and more. We’ll also launch issue #12 of PEN America (about which more soon), and celebrate the new issues of Granta (devoted to sex) and Tin House (focused on games). Both those magazines, of course, have long championed writing from all over the world, and I’ve already trumpeted recent recognition for PEN America’s “international coverage.”

Galapagos Art Space is a great venue with a good bar, and the event is free. Hope to see you there.

When: Thursday, April 29
Where: Galapagos Art Space, DUMBO, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn
What time: 7–8:30 p.m.

Free and open to the public. No reservations.

Festival highlights: New European Fiction & War

This year, there will be two World Voices events at Le Poisson Rouge, where PEN America had its own launch party back in October. It’s a fun space, right in the middle of Greenwich Village, and both these events look terrific.

The first—which will take place at noon on Saturday, May 1—is centered on Best European Fiction, an anthology published by Dalkey Archive that got a lot of attention earlier in the year. The event also reunites Aleksandar Hemon (who edited the anthology) and Colum McCann (who will write the preface to next year’s Best European Fiction), two PEN America favorites whose conversation in The Believer I highlighted a few weeks back.

As I understand it, the event will start with a conversation between Colum and Sasha about the state of fiction in Europe. Then three contributors to the anthology (Naja Marie Aidt, valter hugo mãe, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint) will read from their work before talking with Hemon about fiction in their respective countries (those would be Denmark, Portugal, and Belgium).

“War” will bring together Deborah Amos, Philip Gourevitch, Arnon Grunberg, Sebastian Junger, and Daniele Mastrogiacomo. Amos covers Iraq for NPR; Gourevitch has written about war in Rwanda, Iraq, and elsewhere; Grunberg is a novelist who has visited Iraq several times in the last few years; Junger’s war reporting has been collected in a new book simply titled War, which will be published in May; and Mastrogiacomo is an Italian journalist who, in 2007, was kidnapped along with the journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi and a driver, Sayed Agha, while covering the war in Afghanistan.

These five writers will discuss the difficulties and the responsibilities entailed in reporting on wars around the world.

Utne Independent Press Award nomination (and the “Top Quark”)

Two pieces of happy news to share. First, PEN America has received its first Utne Independent Press Award nomination, in the category of international coverage. We face stiff competition from last year’s winner The New Statesman, plus The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Middle East Report, NACLA Report on the Americas, The New Internationalist, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, and The Walrus. It’s great to be in their company.

Second, Tomasz Rozycki’s guest post about “Scorched Maps,” a poem of his published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, was selected by Robert Pinsky for the “Top Quark,” celebrating the year's best blog writing in arts & literature. Here’s what Pinsky said about Rozycki’s piece:

Tomasz Rozycki’s poem “Scorched Maps”—translated by Mira Rosenthal into real lines of poetry in English: I will remember this poem about memory and Rozycki's commentary (same translator) on it. The image of the past and its losses as “subterranean” is familiar. Re-imagined in “Scorched Maps,” the image regains its emotional force: the seeker face-down and speaking to the earth, and the earth along with the lives it contains responding, “vast and wild around my head.”

PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar received second prize for his short-short story “Postmortem,” which, Pinsky said, “has also entered my imagination in a way I will not forget. ” And Lydia Kiesling received third prize for her review of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, a review published by The Millions. Congratulations to Lydia, Amitava, Mira, and Tomasz.

Festival highlight: Opening Night

Most World Voices events are free, but a few do cost money and require tickets—which often sell out.

Among these is the opening night reading, which this year features a particularly eclectic group of readers, from Salman Rushdie to Patti Smith—plus Mohsin Hamid, László Krasznahorkai, Andrea Levy, Yiyun Li, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, Sofi Oksanen, Atiq Rahimi, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Andrzej Stasiuk, and Miguel Syjuco.

In keeping with the last couple of World Voices Festivals, each of these readers will read in his or her own language, with the English text of the reading scrolling on a giant screen behind them. You can hear the poetry of the original—and still know what the readers are talking about (and appreciate the work of their translators, too).

This year, the “Opening Night Extravaganza” will be held in the beautiful reading space at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center.

Readings from Around the Globe: Opening Night Extravaganza

When: Wednesday, April 28 Where: 92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York City What time: 8–9:30 p.m. Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members and Poetry Center subscribers; www.smarttix.com or (212) 868-4444. For Member discount code, please contact Lara Tobin at lara@pen.org or (212) 334-1660 ext. 126. Co-sponsored by 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center

Liao Yiwu detained in China

As has been reported in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, and elsewhere, the writer Liao Yiwu was detained at an airport in Sichuan Province on his way to Germany to attend lit.Cologne, one of the largest literary festivals in Europe.

Liao Yiwu is a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) and the author of the internationally acclaimed book The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, which was inspired by the oral histories of Studs Terkel. The English translation by Wen Huang was partly funded by a grant from the PEN Translation Fund, and chapters of the book were published in The Paris Review. You can listen to Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch read from the book here, and you can listen to Katie Fishman reading an essay by Yiwu, “My Enemies, My Teachers,” here. (Update: Gourevitch writes about Liao’s detention for the “News Desk” blog at The New Yorker.)

According to the Times, Liao “had been warned in recent days not to attend the Festival, but insisted on exercising his right to travel freely. He was held at a detention center and questioned by police for three hours before he was permitted to go home. He is now under house arrest.”

After the Tiananmen Square protests, Liao wrote an epic poem, “Massacre,” and recorded himself reading it. The poem got him four years in prison. This is the thirteenth time he’s been detained by the Chinese goverment.

In an email to PEN American Center, Liao said: “Words alone cannot express my outrage. I’m a writer and never considered myself a political dissident. But Liu Xiaobo was right when he said, ‘To gain and preserve your freedom and dignity, there is no other way except to fight.’”

(The drawing of Liao Yiwu above, done over a newspaper article about his writing, is by Larry Roibal; click to enlarge.)

Translate these books

The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation includes a wonderful feature called “Translate This Book!” The editors talked to “some of the top translators into English working today,” to “publishers big and small,” to “agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors,” and then compiled their thoughts on “the best books that still aren’t in English.” It's a great list, with illuminating commentary from those surveyed. Here’s Enrique Vila-Matas on a book by Rodrigo Fresán (whose very funny conversation with Jonathan Lethem ran in PEN America 8: Making Histories, along with part of Fresán's novel Kensington Gardens):

In El fondo del cielo (The Bottom of the Sky), Fresán writes the book that will come immediately after the era of apocalyptic books—the era that began with the Bible and the Aeneid, and culminated with postmodern books about the end of all possible worlds. It’s the book of the future, the book that begins to write itself when everything has ended: the story of two young people in love with planets, and of a disturbingly beautiful girl. Between Bioy Casares and Philip K. Dick, but with a voice all its own, it is both powerful and artistic.

Check out the rest.

As the eagle-eyed (and long-memoried) M.A. Orthofer points out, we did something similar in PEN America 2: Home and Away, asking members of PEN “What great books have never been translated into English?” We got great responses from Ariel Dorfman, Lily Tuck, Harry Mathews, Geoffrey O’Brien, and many others. (Dorfman, by the way, managed to sneak in another recommendation in our latest forum: Ayer ya es maňana, or Yesterday Is Already Tomorrow, by Eduardo Vladimiroff).

That forum led to PEN Recommends, an updated feature on the PEN website which lists books not yet translated into English.

Orthofer also flagged a response to the same question by the translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in an interview for The Millions by Anna Clark. Surprisingly, Pevear and Volokhonsky—best known for their translations of Anna Karenina and other Russian classics—did not focus on Russian writers in their reply, but Italian ones, singling out Alberto Savinio, Cristina Campo, and Guido Ceronetti.

And yet another reply appeared on the film blog that Richard Brody—who won the 2009 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography* for Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard—maintains for The New Yorker. In The Quarterly Conversation, Turkish writer Murat Nemet-Nejat suggested Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Brody seconds that suggestion before adding:

...another Godard-related book is desperately in need of translation: “En Attendant Godard” (“Waiting for Godard”), the journalist, novelist, and (later) screenwriter and director Michel Vianey’s account of accompanying Godard through the production of “Masculine Feminine,” in 1965-66. It’s the most illuminating and evocative book about movie-making I know; it came out in 1967 and has never even been reissued in France. (The author, who became a close friend of mine, died last December at the age of seventy-eight.)

* The deadline to submit a book for the 2010 award is Monday. Deadlines for other PEN awards are mostly in January. More information here.

The Private Lives of Trees

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post of Open Letter has been running a series of brief profiles with accomplished translators called “Making the Translator Visible.” Each post includes a photograph of the featured translator and a short Q & A. The idea was hatched by Chad and Megan McDowell, herself a translator—the first to be profiled in the series (note: that is not Megan on the right; see below).

Chad asks the translators for their favorite words (in any language) and the best translations they feel they’ve done so far. Megan McDowell’s favorite word is murcielago, Spanish for “bat” (a popular choice, it turns out), and the best translation she’s done so far, she says, is The Private Lives of Trees—which, as it happens, will be published by Open Letter in May and is excerpted in the new issue of PEN America.

The Private Lives of Trees is by the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra (pictured above); it’s a beautiful, beguiling book that centers on a young, self-deprecating professor named Julián:

Lately he has started to think he should have been a dentist or geologist or meteorologist. For now, his actual job seems strange: professor. But his true calling, he thinks now, is to have dandruff. He imagines himself answering that way:

“What do you do?”

“I have dandruff.”

Julián has a stepdaughter named Daniela, and one night, while he waits for his wife Verónica to return home, he “distracts the little girl with a story about the private lives of trees.”

The poplar and the baobab are talking about the crazy people who visit the park. They agree, beforehand, that there are a lot of crazy people who go to the park. The park is full of crazies, but my personal favorite crazy person, says the baobab, is a woman with very long arms who came to talk to me one time. I remember it like it was yesterday, although it was long ago, I must have been barely two hundred fifteen or two hundred twenty when she came, you hadn’t even been born yet.

Immediately Julián realizes he has made a mistake: Daniela awakes from her doze, surprised by the poplar’s age, and especially because she thought that the poplar and the baobab had always lived together, that’s why they were such good friends, because they had spent their lives planted in the park together. To get out of it, he makes up a nervous string of dates, from which is gathered that the baobab is one thousand five hundred years old and the poplar barely forty. Daniela is still confused and Julián continues, conscious that he will have to work hard to recuperate the tale.

Zambra’s work has also been featured in Zoetrope: All Story and discussed at length in The Nation by the critic Marcela Valdes. His first book, Bonsai, won Chile’s Literary Critics’ Award for Best Novel; it was translated into English by the American writer Carolina de Robertis and published by Melville House. Zambra’s writing is lyrical and funny and smart; check it out.

Poems by Liu Xiaobo, translated by Jeffrey Yang, read by Paul Auster

I’ve mentioned Liu Xiaobo before. The renowned literary critic, writer, and political activist was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in 1989 when he decided to return to China to support the pro-democracy movement. He staged a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square and led calls for a broad-based, sustainable democratic movement. He helped prevent further bloodshed by supporting and advancing a call for non-violence.

He spent two years in prison for his troubles, and three years of “reeducation through labor” beginning in 1996 after he publicly questioned the role of the single-party system and called for dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

More recently, he co-authored Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reform that has been signed by hundreds of individuals from all walks of life throughout China. He was detained in December of last year and formally arrested in June, charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” If convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison. Liu Xia, his wife, has only been permitted to visit him twice.

Friends of Liu gave some of his poems to Larry Siems and Sarah Hoffman, who have been spearheading PEN American Center’s China Campaign, last year, and for the most recent issue of PEN America, the excellent American poet Jeffrey Yang (who earlier this year won the PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry) translated four of them. Liu dedicated each one to his wife, Xia. Judging from the dates, most (and perhaps all) of the poems appear to have been composed during his three years of “reeducation.” Paul Auster read the poems at our launch party, and later recorded his readings. Here is the first of the poems that he read:

One Letter Is Enough

for Xia

one letter is enough
for me to transcend and face
you to speak

as the wind blows past
the night
uses its own blood
to write a secret verse
that reminds me each
word is the last word

the ice in your body
melts into a myth of fire
in the eyes of the executioner
fury turns to stone

two sets of iron rails
unexpectedly overlap
moths flap toward lamp
light, an eternal sign
that traces your shadow

8. 1. 2000

You can both read and listen to all the poems here. The U.S. Congress, by the way, passed a resolution calling for Liu’s release just a few weeks ago. You can sign a petition calling for his release here, and you can hear, and watch, Liu himself talking about democracy and free expression here.

Maziar Bahari and the situation in Iran; plus, Tariq Ramadan news

Earlier this month, PEN American Center and PEN Canada sent an open letter signed by over 100 of the world’s most prominent writers -- among them Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, Orhan Pamuk, Don DeLillo, Ma Jian, Umberto Eco, and Nadine Gordimer -- calling for the release of Canadian-Iranian journalist and playwright Maziar Bahari, who has been held incommunicado in Tehran since June 21, 2009.

The letter expresses concern that Bahari’s detention reflects a wider crackdown on freedom of expression in Iran. “His continued detention casts serious doubt on Iran’s commitment to a free exchange of information and ideas and to international guarantees of freedom of the press,” the letter reads. “We urge you to release Mr. Bahari, and all others detained in connection with their post-election reporting in Iran, immediately and without condition.”

PEN has now compiled a resource page devoted to the goings-on in Iran; it includes, among many other things, the video below of the July 18 conversation featuring Shaul Bakhash, Roger Cohen, Haleh Esfandiari, and Karim Sadjadpour:



You should also check out, if you haven’t already, the online translation slam devoted to a political slogan which has been taken up by protesters in response to an insult levied at them by president Ahmadinejad -- a slogan that is based in part on a poem by Rumi.

In happier news, a United States appeals court reversed an earlier decision excluding the Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan from the United States. PEN is hopeful that the Obama administration will now act quickly to issue Ramadan a visa and permit him to visit the United States. In 2004, government officials cited a provision of the Patriot Act that bars entry to those who “endorse or espouse terrorism” as the reason for the cancelling Ramadan's visa. PEN and the ACLU went to court to challenge the cancellation, believing that Ramadan, an outspoken critic of U.S. policies in the Middle East, was being denied entry to the United States under post-9/11 policies that amounted to ideological exclusion.

Our contributors elsewhere + other links

Words Without Borders has a new anthology coming soon: The Wall in My Head features “fiction, essays, images, and original documents” that aim “to pick up where most popular accounts of the Cold War end, and trace the path of the revolutionary spirit of 1989 from its origins to the present day.”

Among the many intriguing pieces in the book is an essay by Judith Sollosy that began as a guest post for this very blog: “Regardless of the Cost,” on Péter Esterházy’s Revised Edition. (You can see the table of contents at Three Percent, the blog for Open Letter, which is publishing the book.)

You can read Judith’s piece here, and read all our guest posts—including Wayne Koestenbaum on Elizabeth Hardwick, Amy Bloom on Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, and more—here.

James Yeh, whose story “Some Kind of Change” appears in PEN America 10, has just had a one-line short story illustrated by Arthur Jones for his Post-It Notes Stories Project. James also recently published a very funny interview with Gary Shteyngart on the subject of meat, and another interview, in the new online publication The Faster Times, with John Wray, on the topic of writing on the subway.

Scott Esposito finds something Barack Obama and Roberto Bolaño have in common: each has had his books banned from an American prison.

PEN’s latest online translation slam features a political slogan that has been taken up by Iranian protesters in response to an insult levied at them by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The “structure of the slogan recalls a ghazal included in the collection Divaan-eh Shams by Rumi, the classic 13th century Persian poet” which suggests “the extent to which poetry plays a role in the Iranian upbringing and consciousness.” Ahmadinejad referred to them as khas-o-khaashaak, meaning dirt and dust, scraps and bits. Here’s Niloufar Talebi’s version of the reply:

You’re just riffraff, lower than dirt,
I'm the aching lover, blazing and lit.
You’re the black halo, oppressive and blind,
I’m the brave hero and this land is mine!

Lastly, a reminder: tonight at 7 pm Shaul Bakhash, Roger Cohen, Haleh Esfandiari, and Karim Sadjadpour will discuss Iran at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

Guest post: Tomasz Rozycki on “Scorched Maps”

Tomasz Rozycki’s poem “Scorched Maps,” reprinted below, appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself. Both the poem and this guest post were translated by Mira Rosenthal, who received a grant from the PEN Translation Fund to translate Rozycki’s Colonies, a book of seventy-seven sonnets.


Scorched Maps

I took a trip to Ukraine. It was June.
I waded in the fields, all full of dust
and pollen in the air. I searched, but those
I loved had disappeared below the ground,

deeper than decades of ants. I asked
about them everywhere, but grass and leaves
have been growing, bees swarming. So I lay down,
face to the ground, and said this incantation—

you can come out, it’s over. And the ground,
and moles and earthworms in it, shifted, shook,
kingdoms of ants came crawling, bees began
to fly from everywhere. I said come out,

I spoke directly to the ground and felt
the field grow vast and wild around my head.


The poem “Scorched Maps” came out of a trip I took to Ukraine in 2004, when I was invited to a literary festival in Lwów. I took the opportunity to visit the places associated with the history of my family, who were resettled from that area after the Second World War because of the agreement between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, who won the war. At that time the borders of Poland were shifted west, and the Poles who lived in the area that was lost to the Soviet Union were transported by freight train west to Pomerania and Silesia, where I live today. These changes affected several million people, who had to abandon their homes, neighbors, traditions, memories, and God knows what else—everything that had happened on that ground for centuries. The Second World War in particular afflicted those living in this area, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Armenians—everyone who had helped form the unusual mosaic of cultures and languages there over the centuries. They experienced the terror of Soviet occupation—mass executions and the transportation of millions of victims to the Gulag and forced labor camps deep within Russia—which met with the terror of the Nazis as the Germans, in a systematic way during the extermination of the area’s population, prepared their future “living space.” Inconceivably, at the same time a brutal domestic war continued between Ukrainian nationals, who cooperated with Hitler during the period, and the Polish resistance—a war in which neighbors murdered neighbors and the number of victims and the atrocity of what happened calls to mind ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. My family was one of those that experienced all of the terror and mourned each of the victims.

It is impossible for me to write about this poem without such a lengthy introduction, which is probably unnecessary in the end and obscures more than it illuminates. I went to Ukraine with all of this on my mind in an attempt to free myself from this terrible history. I went to the spot where my grandmother’s house stood before the war. My ninety-year-old grandmother—when she found out I would be going there for the first time so many years after the nightmare of the war—wanted me to tell her if there was any sign of her house left, even though she didn’t have much illusion that there would be. Yet she couldn’t help but hope that there would still be a brick shrine with the figure of Our Lady standing in front of the house, some kind of specific recognizable sign of the house and her entire life there, Our Lady who—as my grandmother believed—saved her and her children’s lives many times.

Despite the fact that I had a small map drawn according to my grandmother’s memory, I wasn’t able to find the house or the shrine. Out of everyone living there, I couldn’t find anyone who remembered her or anyone whatsoever from the neighbors she had mentioned, regardless of whether I used a Polish, Ukrainian, or Jewish surname. So I wandered around the forest, around the meadows and fields. It was already getting dark, and I felt more and more desperate and awful. I even thought that I must have gotten the spot mixed up, that it was all a big misunderstanding. And just when I had to leave for my return train to Lwów, I found someone who helped me, who showed me the way. There wasn’t a house, or a shrine, not even a tree remained in the garden—someone had rubbed out all the signs. But I found one of my grandmother’s neighbors, an old woman who remembered how they used to play together when they were young. She showed me the one thing that remained of the house—a brick cellar, half-buried, next to a dirt road that runs today over the spot where the house once stood. It was the only reminder of all the people whose tracks I was searching for.

When I returned, I found out that my friend, Jacques Burko, the translator of my poetry into French, carried out a similar journey a month later in search of traces of his Jewish family. I then wrote this poem and dedicated it to him.


Tomasz Rozycki has published six books of poetry, including Colonies, The Forgotten Keys, and the book-length poem “Twelve Stations,” winner of the Koscielski Prize. He has been nominated twice for the Nike Prize, Poland’s most important literary award. He lives in his hometown, Opole, with his wife and two children.

Mira Rosenthal has received NEA and Fulbright grants and held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, Slate, Notre Dame Review, and other journals. She is also the translator of Tomasz Rozycki's The Forgotten Keys.

Iran reading this Saturday + links

This Saturday, July 11, from 2 to 5 pm, the Bowery Poetry Club will host a free event entitled “Literatures of Resistance: An Afternoon in Solidarity with the Iranian People.” Among the readers are PEN Award-winner Dalia Sofer and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose writing appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

The following Wednesday, as previously mentioned, PEN is co-sponsoring a forum on Iran with The New York Review of Books and the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

The translators’ roundtable over at The Observer Translation Project has been fairly widely noted; also worth reading there is the “Letter from Chişinău,” by Moldovan journalist Leo Butnaru, about the relationship between literature and politics -- and, more specifically, the current political situation in Moldova.

And speaking of writers and politics: Liu Xiaobo was formally arrested on June 23 and charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” PEN considers this arrest “transparently abusive” and “a deeply disappointing and anachronistic denial of Liu’s right to freedom of expression under Chinese and international law.” Liu Xiaobo is one of the authors of Charter 08, calling for democratic reform in China; you can sign a petition to free him here.

And lastly, a plea for the theremin, the musical instrument that inspired Petr Zelenka’s play, which itself is about -- among other things -- the arts under communism. Part of the play appeared in PEN America 8: Making Histories, and was read, on one occasion, by Edward Albee and Sarah Ruhl.