MEMBER BLOG TAG: pen world voices festival
| Thursday, April 28, 2011 2:26PM | | | | It’s an Audience, Not a Market | Tags: PEN World Voices Festival, audience, translation
| | | | After defecting from the Festival for a day to attend a showing at the Tribeca Film Festival and a performance of an exiled theater troupe from Belarus that should have been part of the World Voices Festival [see boxes], I rode the Madison Ave. bus to the French Embassy’s Cultural Services department for the “Authors and Audiences” panel. On the panel were Bookforum editor and panel moderator Albert Mobilio, Spanish novelist Manuel de Lope, Israeli novelist and screenwriter Yael Hedaya, Israeli novelist and translator Asaf Schurr, French novelist Laurence Cosse, and Irish novelist and screenwriter Irvine Welsh. The empty chair at the beginning of this panel did not symbolize an imprisoned writer or even Mario Bellatin, who could not attend for other reasons, but was... | | | | | | | Tuesday, April 26, 2011 9:29PM | | | | Opening Night: Written on Water | Tags: Pen World Voices Festival, water, reading
| | | Maybe it’s the location—the Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, next to the Hudson River—and maybe it’s the fact that many predict global conflicts over scarce water resources to dwarf conflicts over oil in future decades, but water served as the theme of the Opening Night reading at the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival. Much about this event was new—the downtown venue, the Stand-Up Critics who introduced their recommended books in five categories (contemporary novel, classic novel, translated work, small press title, and a surprise) before the main event, and the energetic new Festival Director Laszlo Jakob Orsas who greeted the capacity crowd.
When the Stand-Up Critics arrived to a stage containing only one podium I feared another Festival feature—the empty chair that symbolizes writers unable... | | | | | | | Sunday, December 21, 2008 1:43PM | | | | Learning to Speak, Part Four | Tags: Xiaolu Guo, the novel, the dictionary, learning a new language, language and identity, 2008 PEN World Voices Festival, panel moderated by Sam Tanenhaus
| | | Learning to Speak, Part Four
IV.
Xiaolu Guo's linguistic marriage of two tongues and their temperaments corresponds, in her novel, to the mating of a British man and a Chinese woman. Her book, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, might be called mongrel, but is it promiscuous in the Johnsonian sense? Maybe not. Eventually, her lovers part, after Z. has an abortion and after her application for an extension of her visa to stay in England is denied by the Chinese government. This was never to be a sunnily post-romantic, twenty-first-century tale of girl-meets-boy, nor a serene account of language-meets-language. Instead, the mergers are difficult, fractious, violent, incomplete, short-term, as notable for their conflicts and contradictions as for anything shared harmoniously in common.
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