Join us for the last Another Way to Say of 2024 at Molasses Books this Friday, December 13 at 8 PM for works in translation from Argentinian Spanish, Japanese, and French, namely Alexis Almeida's translation of Roberta Iannamico's Many Poems (The Song Cave), like "coming across a vibrant patch of wildflowers unexpectedly," (Mónica de la Torre),  Amy Obermeyer's translation of Hirabayashi Taiko's (timely?) "At the Charity Clinic" (Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation), and Kenneth Reveiz's translations of poetry from Our Americas by Stéphan Bouquet (seeking publisher!): "Stretched out along the poems / like entire days i waited / stretched out amongst the withered hand of the ferns, / and the crinkled sound of the leaves" ("The Trees in Succession" for Circumference Magazine).

Read on for reader bios***

Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. She is the author of the chapbooks I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), and Things I Have Made a Fiction (Oversound, 2024). Her translation of Roberta Iannamico's Many Poems is recently out from The Song Cave, and her first full-length collection, Caetano, is forthcoming from The Elephants in 2025. 

Amy Obermeyer was the first managing editor for Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation, where she is a founding member of the editorial collective. She is particularly interested in early twentieth-century women's literature, and translates primarily from Japanese into English. For her day job, she serves as Director of Student Affairs and Associate Faculty at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and her literary scholarship focuses on questions of gender and subjectivity in Japanese and Latin American fiction.

Join us on Friday, September 27th at 8 PM at Molasses Books for the Fall edition of the series -- an all-alumni event featuring Nicholas Glastonbury debuting his translation of Summerhouse by Yiğit Karaahmet (Soho Press), a gay thriller, "...dishy, suspenseful, boiling over with black humor," "The Birdcage as done by Highsmith," Marine Cornuet with the first English translation of French-Algerian poet Anna Gréki's Algeria, capital: Algiers (forthcoming Pinsapo Press), written in prison after Gréki was arrested for participating in the Algerian liberation movement against French rule, and K. B. Thors with a collection translated from Icelandic: Herostories by poet-historian Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, and an essay by the same author about a queer turn-of-the-century midwife.

***  

Nicholas Glastonbury is a writer, translator, and editor from the Florida backwaters. His translations of Turkish and Kurdish fiction and poetry have appeared with or are forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press, Comma Press, Soho Press, Sandorf Passage, Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and lives in Crown Heights.

Marine Cornuet is a Brooklyn-based translator, poet, and editor. Algeria, capital: Algiers, her translation of French-Algerian poet Anna Gréki’s collection, is forthcoming with Pinsapo Press and Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative in the fall of 2024. Recent translations include Cloche Pèlerine (Le Castor Astral, 2024), a French translation of Kaveh Akbar's collection Pilgrim Bell. She is the presse manager and a member of the editorial collective at Ugly Duckling Presse.

June 14 at 8PM, at Molasses Books we're welcoming back Daniel Owen with his revised translation of Document Shredding Museum by Afrizal Malna, whose poetry "moves from intimate encounters between lovers and friends to mass environmental and semantic destruction, engaging with Javanese literary tradition and the archives of colonial and postcolonial violence" (World Poetry), Chloe Tsolakoglou with her translation of The Commune by Marios Chakkas, a novel written in 1972 under the military junta regime in Greece (great review of the novel in Jacobin here) in its first English publication (Inpatient Press), and Sarah Riggs with her translation (w/ Lindsay Turner) of Liliane Giraudon's Love is Colder than the Lake (Nightboat Books) where, at a certain point,  "we can note the numerous accommodations / for violence // hunger misery death seem / always necessary to the proper functioning / of the State." Read on for reader bios and further still for several highly recommended translation/literary events.

Daniel Owen is a poet, editor, and translator between Indonesian and English. Recent publications include a revised translation of Afrizal Malna's Document Shredding Museum (World Poetry Books, 2024). Daniel edits and designs books and participates in many processes of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and is a PhD candidate in the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.

Chloe Tsolakoglou is a poet, translator, and PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Sarah Riggs is a prize-winning poet and translator, as well as visual artist and filmmaker. Her eighth book of poetry, Lines, is forthcoming with Winter Editions in 2025. She has translated from the French in recent years Etel Adnan, Olivia Elias, and Liliane Giraudon, and has co-edited with Omar Berrada Another Room to Live In, an NEA award-winning collection from the Tamaas Translation Seminars of fifteen Arab poets (Litmus, 2024). She lives in Brooklyn, where she writes, paints, and produces films, including the forthcoming Outrider, a documentary on the poet Anne Waldman.

***

June 14 - 16 at 41 Cooper Square: the Typographic Book Fair 2024 featuring presses, publishers, galleries, booksellers, etc., with lots of beautiful books. 

June 15 is the East Village Zine Fair at St. Marks Place, a celebration of  underground printmaking.

July 23rd - 25: Summer lectures hosted by the British Center for Translation and the National Center for Writing, tune in virtually!, for "Translating Don Quixote into Arabic" with Shadi Rohana, "Translators as Labour Organisers" with Mayada Ibrahim, Kira Josefsson, and Alex Zucker, and "The Place of Digital Publishing" with Sohini Basak, Eric M.B. Becker, Andrew Felsher, and Rachael Daum

This month features Janet Hendrickson and her translation of Francisco Pino's Unfaithful Translation of the Raven by Edgar A. Poe, ALTA Travel Fellow (2023) Mayada Ibrahim, who's co-translation of Samahani by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin with Adil Babikir is forthcoming from Foundry Editions, as well as Korean poet Seo Jung Hak and translator Megan Sungyoon with The Cheapest France in Town (World Poetry), "You, enjoying loose obsession, You, waiting for something mystical. You, lonely. You, bored. Pre, ssitp, ressit, press it."

***  Janet Hendrickson translates from Spanish and Portuguese to English. Her experimental translation of Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (New Directions, 2019), which turns a 1611 dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias into a series of prose poems, was longlisted for a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She also translated The Future Is Not Ours (ed. Diego Trelles Paz, Open Letter, 2012), a generation-defining anthology of new Latin American fiction. She teaches writing and translation in Liberal Studies at NYU.

Mayada Ibrahim is a translator, editor, and writer based in Queens, New York, with roots in Khartoum and London. She works between Arabic and English, and edits at Tilted Axis Press. 

Megan Sungyoon translates between languages and across genres. Sungyoon’s work has appeared in World Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Asymptote, Columbia Journal, SAND Journal, and The Margins, among others. Based in Seoul and New York, Sungyoon holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University. The Cheapest France in Town (World Poetry) is her first book of translation.

Mark your calendars for our AWTS fall edition this September 22nd, at 8PM at (of course) Molasses Books featuring: Alex Braslavsky, who will be reading her translation of Zuzanna Ginczanka's poetry collection On Centaurs & Other Poems (World Poetry Books), "Here I preach passion and wisdom / tightly conjoined at the waist / like a centaur"; Jennifer Zoble with Sweetlust by Asja Bakić (Feminist Press), a heady fusion of feminist critique and science fiction, "Occasionally disturbing and always intoxicating," (that's BUST), as well as Kosovo-born Finnish author Pajtim Statovci (with many thanks to Todd Portnowitz and Rose Cronin-Jackman at Knopf/PRH) who will be reading from Bolla, translated by David Hackston, an incredible novel set during and in the aftermath of the Bosnian War...there is ill-fated love at first- and last-sight, the two men swept up in each other, their linguistic-escape:  "...and when I see that his books are in English we switch languages. Though improbable, random even, it feels natural, because by speaking English we can be different people, we are no longer ourselves, we are free of this place, pages torn from a novel." 

***

PAJTIM STATOVCI was born in Kosovo to Albanian parents in 1990. His family fled the Yugoslav wars and moved to Finland when he was two years old. He holds an MA in comparative literature and is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki. His first book, My Cat Yugoslavia, won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for best debut novel; his second novel, Crossing, was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Bolla was awarded Finland’s highest literary honor, The Finlandia Prize. In 2018, he received the Helsinki Writer of the Year Award.

JENNIFER ZOBLE translates Balkan literature into English. Recent books include Sweetlust by Asja Bakić (Feminist Press, 2023) and Call Me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić (Sandorf Passage, 2021). Her translation of Mars by Asja Bakić (Feminist Press, 2019) was named one of the Best Fiction Books of 2019 by Publishers Weekly. Zoble is on the faculty of Liberal Studies at NYU, where she teaches writing and translation, and coordinates the university's new undergraduate minor in translation studies.

Friday, June 23rd, 8PM, at our beloved Molasses Books spot, AWTS is celebrating the recent and forthcoming releases of new work in translation from Spanish, Italian, and German,

~featuring~

Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas -- whose translations of Silvia Guerra wonderfully recall H.D.'s "Oread" --  will be presenting their co translation of Uruguayan poet Mariella Nigro's Memory Rewritten (White Pine Press); Alta L. Price will be reading from both Mithu Sanyal's Identitti (a highly recommended review by Susan Bernofsky for LARB can be found here) as well as a forthcoming translation from World Editions, About People by Juli Zeh; Hope Campbell Gustafson will read from Commander of the River by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (Indiana University Press), a coming-of-age story that runs parallel to recurring exile, “The sound of the ocean, its roar, is the leitmotif of my childhood."

***

I am so excited to be presenting the readers for our next event at Molasses Books at 8 PM on Friday March 24th. 

Greg Nissan, a poet and translator and former poetry editor of SAND: Berlin's English Literary Journal, will be reading from their NEA Grant translation project: Ann Cotten's Banned! An Epic Poem, a plot-line with "[...] gryphon-like creatures and women who take over the island from men to run utopian small presses." Sara Khalili, whose body of translation/articles for Words Without Borders is something I highly recommend perusing, will be reading from selections from Iranian author and journalist Shahriar Mandanipour's Seasons of Purgatory. And you will certainly know Sam Bett, one of the best co-hosts of Us&Them, who has translated and co-translated several shimmery/dark modern/contemporary voices from Japanese: Yukio Mishima, Fuminori Nakamura, Osamu Dazai, Mieko Kawakami, more still, reading selections from Izumi Suzuki's Hit Parade of Tears forthcoming from Verso Press. 

(Also highly recommended: This lovely reflection on bathhouses as a yearnful third place by Tatsushi Fujihara for Circumference.) 

Read on for translator bios, and on and on for a list of local translation events happening elsewhere throughout March and early April. You can also find us on Instagram @anotherwaytosay

Greg Nissan is a poet and translator living in New York. They are the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press) and the translator of War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions) and kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books, forthcoming September 2023). They are the recipient of Fulbright and NEA fellowships for translation.   Sara Khalili is an editor and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. Her translations include Seasons of Purgatory, Moon Brow, and Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour, The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons by Goli Taraghi, The Book of Fate by Parinoush Saniee, Kissing the Sword by Shahrnush Parsipur, and Rituals of Restlessness by Yaghoub Yadali. She has also translated several volumes of poetry by Simin Behbahani, Siavash Kasraii, and Fereydoon Moshiri. Her short story translations have appeared in AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, EPOCH, GRANTA, Words Without Borders, The Literary Review, and PEN America, among others. 

Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he has worked on translations shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. His versions of Izumi Suzuki include the short story "Night Picnic" published in Terminal Boredom and the stories "My Guy" and "Trial Witch," both collected in Hit Parade of Tears. This coming May, Soho Crime will publish his translation of The Rope Artist by Fuminori Nakamura, a torqued detective novel that looks into the underworld of Japanese shibari bondage. ELSEWHERE:

Saturday March 25th at Poetry Society of America, Nightboat Books presents Stéphane Bouquet's Common Life with the translator Lindsey Turner and Peter Gizzi 

March 30th at Book Culture 112th, the Hellenic Studies Program in the Classics Department at Columbia University celebrates the bilingual publication of ΑΛΛΩΝΩΝ/LIFTED with Karen Van Dyck and Eleni Bourou. Also joining in conversation: Maureen Freely, Toby Lee, Mark Mazower, Jennifer Van Dyck, and Lawrence Venuti

As part of McNally Jackson's Translation Conversation Series, Brazillian author Stênio Gardel and the translator Bruna Dantas Lobato will discuss his debut novel The Words That Remain on Friday March 31st at McNally Jackson's Seaport location

We are so excited to be bringing you a special evening that features literature-in-translation-standard-bearer Archipelago Books titles and translators for our next event at Molasses Books on Friday, December 9th at 8PM. Archipelago's distinctively beautiful books are a personal reference point for what books can feel like, look like, do to us. 

(Keep the high of Giving Tuesday going! Also Archipelago's membership options are worth it.)

***Featuring*** three translators working primarily from Spanish/Galician, Greek, and French: Jacob Roger's translation of The Last Days of Terranova by Manuel Rivas from the Galician is particularly suited to the space as the narrator and bookstore owner Vicenzo Fontana contemplates in memory the bookstore a place that is both a refuge from as well as an actor in Argentina's revolutions. Karen Emmerich's co-translation (with Edmund Keeley) of Diaries of Exile by Yannis Ritsos won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation 2014; of her translation of Good Will Come From the Sea by Christos Ikonomou, Maggie Nelson for NYT Book Reviews writes, "[the first story in the collection] blew my head off with its tender and awful brutality." Mark Polizzotti's translation of the recently-released Kibogo by Rwandan-French author Scholastique Mukasonga has received much praising, but here is perhaps my favorite: "A searing tale of contending gods, religions, and economies in colonial Rwanda [...] Pensive and lyrical; a closely observed story of cultures in collision." (Kirkus, starred.) Read on for more about the readers, and further still for a list of upcoming literary/translation events in the upcoming weeks around  the  city .      

***

Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish. He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the PEN/Heim translation fund. His translations have appeared in The Offing, Arkansas International, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, and Epiphany, among others. His translation of The Last Days of Terranova, by Manuel Rivas, was just released by Archipelago Books.

Karen Emmerich's translations from the Greek include books by Margarita Karapanou, Amanda Michalopoulou, Sophia Nikolaidou, Ersi Sotiropoulos, and Vassilis Vassilikos. Her translation of Miltos Sachtouris for Archipelago was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and her translation of Yannis Ritsos's Diaries of Exile with Edmund Keeley won the 2014 PEN Literary Award. She teaches at Princeton University.

Mark Polizzotti is a biographer, critic, translator, editor, and poet. In 2016, he received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His translation of Scholastique Mukasonga's Kibogo was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2022 and his translation of Eric Vuillard’s The War of the Poor was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. Polizzotti’s books include Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton; Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited; a monograph on Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados; and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. He has translated over fifty books from the French, including works by Patrick Modiano, Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Raymond Roussel, André Breton, and Jean Echenoz. He directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

***

This Saturday, DECEMBER 3RD, 4:30 - 6:00 PM, "Preeminent translator of Russian verse and prose" Ainsley Morse reads a selection of her translations for Translation Mixtape at the Harriman Institute Atrium 

DECEMBER 6TH, 7:00 PM @ The Rockwell Place and hosted by Greenlight Books: Translators Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes will be discussing their translation of The Easy Life by Margeurite Duras with Stephanie LaCava

Circumference Magazine launches their 10th issue at Black Spring Books on DECEMBER 10th, 7:00 PM, with readings by Mayada Ibrahim, Eunice Lee, Ostap Kin, John Hennessy, Matvei Yankelevich, and more!

We're ringing out National Translation Month at Molasses Books, September 3oth at 8PM, with an incredible trio of translators-writers. Plugging Asymptote hard here to direct you to both S.J. Pearce's new translation(s) of Psalm 9 that reveals the psalm's many-voiced awe and resentment, and a selection of Suzana Vuljevic's translation of "Airplane Without an Engine" by Ljubomir Micić with a white sharp "Hellooooooooooooooooooo / I leap headlong into my ideoplan". If you had the good fortune to attend Us&Them's November 2021 reading, you'll remember Jennifer Shyue, whose translations of Julia Wong Kcomt's poetry has been published by Ugly Duckling Presse's Señal series as Vice-Royal-ties.

*** S.J. Pearce is a writer and translator who lives in New York City. Her poetry has appeared in The Laurel Review, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Orotone, and Second Chance Lit, as well as in the anthology Strange Fire (Teaneck, 2021); she has also work forthcoming in Asymptote and The Plenitudes. Her first chapbook manuscript was a finalist for the Laurel Review's 2021 Midwest Chapbook Competition and she was long-listed for the 2021 River Heron Review Poetry Prize. She is a member of the 2022 cohort of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program. In the scholarly realm, she publishes on the history of translation in the medieval Mediterranean world. Her first academic monograph was the recipient of the 2019 La Corónica International Book Award. Suzana Vuljevic is a historian, writer and translator who works from Albanian and Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. Suzana holds a Ph.D. in History and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her writing and translations have appeared in Zenithism (1921–1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2022), AGNI, Asymptote, Eurozine, Exchanges, and elsewhere. She is a 2022 ALTA Travel Fellow and an editor at EuropeNow. & Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish and an assistant editor at New Vessel Press. Her work has appeared most recently in AGNI, Astra Magazine, and Poetry Daily. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s chapbook Vice-royal-ties (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) and Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu (Archipelago Books, 2023). She can be found at shyue.co. *** THROUGHOUT THE REST OF SEPTEMBER Trafika Europe Radio's programming will feature international authors and works in translation from the likes of Thora Hjörleifsdóttir with translator Meg Matich, Victor Jestin with translator Sam Taylor, Italian poet and novelist Daniele Mencarelli, and more!

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 19 at Greenlight Bookstore's Fort Greene location, Emma Ramadan presents her translation of Barbara Molinard's Panics in conversation with Kate Zambreno SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 25th at the Parkside Lounge, the Spoken Word Sunday Series presents a special event for National Translation Month featuring Soodabeh Saeidnia and Adriana Scopino.

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 27th in the virtual realm, Words Without Borders presents World in Verse: a Reading and Celebration of International Poetry with Najwan Darwish, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Samira Negrouche, Marilyn Hacker, Jeannette Clariond, Samantha Schnee 

Come join us at Molasses Books on July 1st at 8PM for a selection of prose and poetry translated by Elisa Taber (there's a wonderful conversation between her and Ugly Duckling Presse editor Silvina López Medin about re: Taber's approach to Paraguayan poet Miguelángel Meza's Dream Pattering Soles at Poetry Foundation here), Marine Cornuet (a selection of her translation forthcoming from Pinsapo Press of Anna Gréki's devastating poetry can be read in Asymptote's latest issue here), and Lin King, who also appeared in the last Asymptote with an twisted-twisty story from the Japanese by mystery-thriller writer Edogawa Ranpo.

***

Elisa Taber is a writer, literary translator, and PhD candidate at McGill University. She wrote An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country (11:11 Press), and translated Horacio Quiroga’s Beyond (Sublunary Editions) and Miguelángel Meza’s Dream Pattering Soles (Ugly Duckling Presse). Elisa is also Co-Editor of SLUG, Editor of Words Without Borders’ Indigenous Writing Project, and Editor at Large at Seven Stories Press.

Marine Cornuet is a translator and poet based in Brooklyn, NY. Her most recent publications include a transcription-translation into English of activist Françoise Vergès' talk on "Decolonial Methodology", published in Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative in their Light Relief series, and a translation of three poems by the French-Algerian poet Anna Gréki featured in Asymptote. Her translation of Gréki's poetry collection, Algérie, capitale Alger, is forthcoming with Pinsapo Press and Lost & Found in early 2023. With Francesca Hyatt she is the co-founder and co-editor of Clotheslines, a literary journal that explores what it means to be in relation.

Come join us for the first *in-person* Another Way to Say readings in translation event since 2020 at Molasses Books on April 22nd at 8PM! I'm especially excited to relaunch the series with Max Lawton (whose translation of Vladimir Sorokin's "Tatar Raspberry" for The Baffler is at first dreamy before turning nightmarish -- and unsettling where the art world celebrates trauma), Mike Soto (I cannot recommend highly enough Teatro Dallas's production of Soto's A Grave is Given Supper), and Ainee Joeng, whose review of Sawako Nakayasu's Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From for Hopscotch Translation astutely explores the hybrid space of translation and the possibilities of what we call "process". 

Stay where you are, we’re bringing Another Way to Say to you on May 30th for our first (probably not our last) virtual event. I’m especially excited to have Allana Noyes read. The distance between us meant that short hopping a plane, there was just no way... until now.  

Charlotte read at one of AWTS’s first, and I’ve been hoping to have her back since. And Marcella Durand’s translations of Michèle Métail’s polymath poetry, at once sculpture and text, in the dizzying alliteration of a dance faster, slower, faster had me immediately needing to know more about her work.

We’re starting 8 p.m. sharpish on May 30th. Watch this space for the Zoom link as the date approaches.      

Charlotte Whittle’s translations and writing have appeared in The Literary Review, Los Angeles Times, Guernica, Electric Literature, BOMB, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her translation of Norah Lange's People in the Room was longlisted for the BTBA and shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the Society of Authors First Translation Prize, and her translation of Jorge Comensal's The Mutations was published in 2019 by FSG. She is editor of Cardboard House Press, a bilingual publisher of Latin American and Spanish poetry. She runs cartonera workshops and teaches literary translation at Brooklyn College.  

Marcella Durand's most recent books include The Prospect from Delete Press (2020) and her translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Earth's Horizons (Black Square Editions, 2020). Other publications include Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017); Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.), with French translations by Olivier Brossard (joca seria, 2016); Deep Eco Pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh, (Little Red Leaves); AREA (Belladonna); and Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem), written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is currently working on a new book-length poem, forthcoming from Black Square Editions.

We'd love to see you at the next Another Way to Say readings in translation at Molasses Books on January 18th, at 8 p.m. We're stepping into the future, imagining it, with prose and poetry by international authors who are digging into the rough edges of modern linguistics tensions, gesturing towards what literature can be, as if "their souls will find themselves new shelter on the earth, their countless children will rise as furious suns, full of honey and wine, and they will inherit the earth." (Alla Gorbunova trans. Elina Alter.)     Elina Alter's reading at Molasses for Us&Them in the Summer of 2018 was especially memorable for me (see her translation of "Two Poems" by Alla Gorbunova in the Nashville Review) and so was very happy to reconnect at ALTA 2019, where she had been a Travel Fellow just year before, and even happier to learn that she will be resurrecting Circumference: Poetry in Translation as editor. I first heard Larissa Kyzer read at the poetry slam for last year's PEN World Voices festival, and was there very taken with what of her process we in the audience were privy to and the thoughtful furl of the words as we descended Gerður Kristný's poetry. Her translations from Icelandic has been featured among Library Juornal's Best World Literature 2019 and was awarded the American Scandinavian Foundation’s 2019 translation prize (for Kristin Eiríksdóttir's A Fist or a Heart), and nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize (for her translation of a poem by Kári Tulinius in Spoon River Poetry Review). Aaron Robertson will be reading from Igiaba Scego, whose memoir he is currently editing, and whose Beyond Babylon has received praise from Jhumpa Lahiri for The New York Review of Books ("This is a novel not only about the importance of living astride more than one language, but about a woman writing herself, with her own words, and thus her own language, into being."), The Times Literary Supplement, Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, other places, and longlisted for PEN's Translation Prize 2020.   (See below for complete bios!)&RSVP on Facebook here. And Wait There's More... translation and bilingual events this month that I'd love to see you at in January including: diSONARE's issue launch and poetry reading at The Brooklyn Rail on Jan 15. Larissa Kyzer's own translation series for woman in translation Jill! at Pen & Brush on Jan. 16th. US & THEM: A Writer/Translator reading series also at Molasses Books on Jan. 25th.   The New York Review of Books 20th Anniversary Reading at Unterberg Poetry Center On Jan. 27th. & Translators Jeffrey Zuckerman and Charlotte Mandell will be discussing their translation of Jean Genet's collection of essays The Criminal Child at McNally Jackson Books, Prince St. on Jan. 28th. ***

Elina Alter is a writer and translator from Russian. Her work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, The Paris Review Daily, and The New England Review. She is the editor of Circumference, a journal of translation and international culture.

Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic literary translator. She was Princeton University’s fall 2019 Translator in Residence and is a member of Ós, an Iceland-based international literary collective, as well as the American Literary Translators Association. Her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s A Fist or a Heart (AmazonCrossing) was awarded the American Scandinavian Foundation’s 2019 translation prize. She is co-chair of PEN America’s Translation Committee and runs the bi-monthly, NYC-based Women+ in Translation reading series Jill! https://www.facebook.com/JillReadingNYC

Happiness, it's Wednesday.

If you're looking ahead at the week, and at Thursday in particular, we'd love to see you at the next Another Way to Say event at Molasses Books. I'm especially excited to have Jonathan Larson back, who since he last read, has translated two collections with Song Cave. (Find him interviewing Friederike Mayröcker (Scardanelli) in the lastest BOMB). We'll be especially poetry-heavy, for Joan Xie has a thumb on the pulse of contemporary Chinese poetry, and Hope Campbell Gustafson's translations of poet/novelist/playwright Ubah Cristina Ali Farah works from an Italian also informed by resistance to Italian.

****

Jonathan Larson is a poet and translator living in Brooklyn. His translations of Friederike Mayröcker's Scardanelli and Francis Ponge's Nioque of the Early-Spring appeared on The Song Cave. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, and Gulf Coast.

Hope Campbell Gustafson has an MFA from the Literary Translation Workshop at the University of Iowa and a BA from Wesleyan University. Her translations can be found in Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail, EuropeNow, Nashville Review, and Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations (Comma Press/Deep Vellum). Hope was a 2018 resident at the Art Omi Translation Lab with writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, and she received a 2018 Pen/Heim grant for her translation of Ali Farah's second novel. A Minneapolis native, Hope currently resides in Brooklyn.

Joan Xie, poet, lawyer, translator. Born in Shanghai, Xie came to the United States in 1988 to study business and law. In 2000, after receiving an MBA and J.D., she established her law practice in New York City, specializing in immigration law. Xie is a prolific writer of poetry and essays, both in English and Chinese, as well as a poem translator from both languages. In 2018, her first poetry collection Nothing Made Me Happier than Finding These Objects was published by Beiyue Literature and Art Publishing House in China, and her translation of 13 contemporary leading Chinese poets Thirteen Leaves was published by Three Owls Press in the US. In 2019, her poems were selected into an analogy of poetry Thirteen Chinese Poets in New York. An award winner at the 2017 First Moganshan International Poetry Festival in China, her poems and translations are widely published in both countries.

***

RSVP optional but impressive. I'd love to see you, 'til then,