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 Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among nations in spite of political or international upheavals.
—International PEN Charter
This year's translation feature showcases an eclectic group of writers and translators whose use of history and the language of resistance and survival helps shed new light on current times. Included are works by Assia Djebar, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Irène Némirovsky, László Krasznahorkai, Kang Zhengguo, Kirmen Uribe, and Jaime Saenz. Also featured is To Be Translated or Not to Be, a report on the global state of literary translation, presented by International PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull of Barcelona.
| FICTION
The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry, by Assia Djebar
Translated by Tegan Raleigh
My childhood lasted for ten years, ending when my parents died. I spent no more than two of these years with them. Very early on, Habiba, my mother, involved my father in her trade union activities. In the middle of what would later be called 'the events,' of what must have been around 1957, she was expelled to France and he put on trial. [Read More]
Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Translated by Katherine Silver
I arrived at the house at 1-25 Sexta Avenida sharply at eight-thirty, exactly as I had been instructed, for Pilarica had made it clear to me that this was when the birthday party for Johnny Silverman would begin, a New York Jew and member of the team of forensic anthropologists working with the archdiocese, excavating sites where massacres had been documented to recover the bones of the victims in order to confirm the testimonies and allow the dead to be given funeral services in keeping with the rituals and traditions of the indigenous cultures, even if it was many years later and nobody was able to distinguish precisely the bones of one from the bones of another, for the army had buried so many in mass graves. [Read more]
Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky
translated by Sandra Smith
War & War, by László Krasznahorkai
Translated by George Szirtes
MEMOIR
Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, by Kang Zhengguo
Translated by Susan Wilf
Fourteen rolled a couple of cigarettes with the tobacco from the butts I had gleaned, and I watched as Number Six and Number Nine took on the challenge of lighting them without matches. First, Number Nine extracted some cotton stuffing from my mattress, snapped a few sorghum bristles off our whisk broom, twisted a wad of cotton around each bristle, and laid them on the bunk. [Read more]
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PEN TRANSLATION REPORT
To Be Translated or Not to Be
Foreword by Paul Auster
Doestoevsky, Heraclitus, Dante, Virgil, Homer, Cervantes, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Hölderlin, and scores of other poets and writers who have marked me forever—I, an American, whose only foreign language is French—have all been revealed to me, read by me, digested by me, in translation. Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.
I would like to offer a salute and a declaration of thanks to all these men and women, these translators, who toil so selflessly to keep literature alive for everyone.
>> Download the complete Report
POETRY
Meanwhile Take My Hand, by Kirmen Uribe
Translated by Elizabeth Macklin
Birds in Winter
Saving the birds was our mission that whole winter.
Saving the birds imprisoned in the snow.
All along the beach most of them were hidden,
nestled in the shade of the black sea.
The birds were black, too.
From the covers we’d take them and carry them home
in our coat pockets.
The tiniest birds, barely contained
[Read More]
The Night, by Jaime Saenz
Translated by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson
With an Iron Pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry 1984–2004
Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back
FROM THE ARCHIVES
The Politics of Translation
With Esther Allen, Ammiel Alcalay, Michael Hofmann, Susan Sontag & Steve Wasserman
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