Casey Roberts wins John Glassco Prize for literary translation

The Literary Translators’ Association of Canada awarded this year’s John Glassco Prize to Casey Roberts. The $1,000 award – Canada’s only prize honouring emerging literary translators – is given annually to the translator of a first published book-length work.

Roberts won for Break Away: Jessie on My Mind (Baraka Books), an English translation of the French 2009 YA novel Panache (vol. 1 of Aréna) by Sylvain Hotte, a story about “hockey, love, and the wilderness,” published by Les Intouchables.

The prize jury, comprised of Sheila Fischman, Nelly Roffé, Lori Saint-Martin, and chair Karin Montin, praised Roberts’ work:

The translator met the challenge of rendering the teenage narrator’s lively and quirky voice in a faithful yet inventive idiom. Break Away: Jessie on My Mind is a re-creation that reads as smoothly as the original.

Hélène Dorion named Officer to the Order of Canada

In a ceremony Friday morning, Governor General David Johnston bestowed the honour of Officer of the Order of Canada on francophone poet, novelist, and essayist Hélène Dorion. In a press release issued by the Governor General’s office, Dorion is described as “a leading figure in contemporary francophone literature” who has created an “impressive body of work in which she questions the very essence and unchanging nature of human beings.”

The author of Days of Sand (Cormorant Books), No End to the World (Guernica Editions), and The Edges of Light (Guernica), Dorion’s work has been translated in more than 15 languages. The Order is the latest in a series of prestigious honours and awards she has won throughout her career, including the Governor General Literary Award for Poetry (2006), the Prix Anne-Hébert (2004), and the Alain Grandbois Prize (1996). In 2005, she was the first female poet from Quebec to win France’s Mallarmé prize. Dorion was previously named a knight of the National Order of Quebec and a member of the Quebec Academy of Letters.

Daily book biz round-up: March 1

• “Carefully curated” indie e-book publisher Ebookling sells 1,000 downloads in two weeks
• An infographic look at the 40-year history of e-book publishing, starting with the 1971 digitization of the U.S. Declaration of Independence
• This virtual letterpress iPad program won’t get your hands dirty
• Shelagh Rogers gets competitive with CBC’s So You Think You Can Talk Books
• “Plainspoken and disarmingly down to earth” memoir from Bristol Palin confirmed by William Morrow
• Getting political with Arabic and Hebrew literary translations

The key to selling translations = field trips?

Every agent and publisher knows how difficult it is to sell foreign rights these days. It’s hard enough to find readers in the domestic market, right? Chad Post, founder and editor-in-chief of Open Letter Press at the University of Rochester, thinks the key to selling more foreign rights is the radical, old-school notion that editors and agents from different countries should – gasp – meet each other in real life. In an essay on Publishing Perspectives he writes:

It’s cliché, but there’s nothing like face-to-face meetings, and as objective, bottom-line focused we can try and be, learning about another country — its literary history and cultural heritage — really works to get editors invested.

Post also offers a list of tips for successful editorial trips, including tip #5: explain different business models:

Although Americans love to tell people why things won’t work in our country, we are always curious about other models — especially considering how the publishing industry always seems to be perennially about to implode and eat itself. It’s fascinating to learn about fixed book price laws, different e-book distribution schemes, bookseller training systems, and the like. We’re all looking for new good ideas, and by learning about the way things function in other places, the more likely we are to come up with a useful innovation.

Murakami’s new book arrives shrouded in mystery, and weighing a ton

Haruki Murakami’s first novel in five years, a two-volume work called 1Q84, arrived in Japan’s bookstores today. The plot details of the work have been kept tightly under wraps by both the author and his publisher, though earlier this week, the combined page count was released: a whopping 1,055 pages. Despite their overwhelming size, the two volumes occupy the top two spots on Amazon Japan’s book rankings. The Millions comments on the potential for an English translation of the work:

Although I’ve yet to find confirmation of who is doing the English translation or when it will be released, English translations of Japanese text tend to be 1.5 to 2 times longer than the source text. In other words, you won’t want to drop this on your toe.

An article on CBC.ca mentions some of the current theories behind the novel’s strange and as yet unexplained title:

Critics are wondering if the title, translated as 1984 because the “Q” in Japanese has the same sound as “nine,” is a reference to George Orwell’s classic. It also may be a tribute to The True Story of Ah Q, a novella by Chinese writer Lu Xun, whose work is said to have influenced Murakami.

The initial print run of the work is 300,000 copies of the first volume and 280,000 copies of the second.

147 authors up for the Impac Dublin Prize

The longlist for the richest award for writing in English has been announced. And the longlist is, in fact, long, with 147 authors in contention for the 2009 Impac Dublin prize of £100,000.

From the Guardian:

The list, drawn from any fiction published in English — including translations — is made up of nominations from 157 libraries in 117 cities and 41 countries worldwide. Selected books include most of the literary novels rewarded elsewhere in the last year, as well as titles less familiar to British readers. Perhaps the most unexpected appearance on the list is from Ken Follett, best known for his bestselling techno-thrillers, whose World Without End is the sequel to his medieval epic The Pillars of the Earth.

The selected titles now go forward for judging to a panel of five novelists — Gabrielle Alioth, Rachel Billington, Vesna Goldsworthy, James Ryan and Timothy Taylor — chaired by the former U.S. appeals judge Eugene R. Sullivan.

Canadian contenders on the list include Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, which was nominated by 13 libraries (making it the second most-popular book, behind A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which received 18 nominations); Effigy by Alissa York; Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay; October by Richard B. Wright; Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani;  Soucouyant by David Chariandy; Spanish Fly by Will Ferguson; The Architects Are Here by Michael Winter; The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill; The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland; The Lost Highway by David Adams Richards; The Milk Chicken Bomb by Andrew Wedderburn; and The Outlander by Gil Adamson.

Rawi Hage took the prize last year for De Niro’s Game.

Haruki Murakami on translation

Mainichi Daily News – yes, we read ‘em all – has an interview with novelist Haruki Murakami on the recent work he’s done translating some classic American novels into Japanese:

Over the past few years, Murakami has rendered into Japanese four full-length novels – J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s – as they are important novels “I really wanted to translate,” he says.

Murakami worked on these now-published translations from 2003. The novels are not just representative works of their famous authors, but also stories Murakami has read repeatedly since his high school days and, he says, “I personally like them.”

“I’ve always translated Fitzgerald, but otherwise concentrated on contemporary works,” Murakami says, adding there were three reasons why he decided to take on the “classics.”

“I’ve gradually worked out my translation style and thought it was about time I gave them a try myself,” he says, outlining the first of his motives. “And, there’s a use-by date for translations and the old translations have reached that time.”

His final ground for updated translations was that “young people should translate new works by contemporary writers.”

Murakami says the “use-by” date on translations means they have a “50-year limit” of effectiveness because of changing writing styles in Japanese. Murakami says that the flood of works translated into Japanese during a literature boom here in the 1960s are now reaching their “use-by” dates.

Bookmarks (Middle East edition)

• In the face of all-too-obvious problems, small publishing houses and modern printing facilities are popping up throughout the Arab world (Bookseller.com)
• Dubai adds a literary festival to its cultural boom (Kipp Report)
• Iraq’s National Library soldiers on after being looted by vandals and neglected by the occupying powers (The Nation)
• An interview with Bahaa Taher, winner of this year’s inaugural International Prize for Arabic fiction (The Guardian)
• Two independent U.K. publishers join forces to create a list devoted to translations of new Arabic fiction (Bookseller.com)
• And finally, an overview of the progress made by all this progress (The Independent)
• Bonus gossip! Tabloid star Salman Rushdie has a new girlfriend, got writer’s block after divorcing Padma Lakshmi, is appearing as a gynecologist in a film, and was lying when he said he loved Islam.

Burning books for bilingualism

From CBC.ca:

A surge of bilingualism in Quebec has one of the province’s most popular writers threatening to burn his entire body of work if something isn’t done to stop it.

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, the author of some 70 works of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry, is giving the province two months to correct what he considers its errant linguistic ways, or the books will burn.

Beaulieu, 62, started making good on his symbolic ultimatum earlier this week by tossing a copy of his most recent novel, La Grande Tribu (The Big Tribe), into the wood stove at his remote cottage northeast of Quebec City.

Tabarnac – il lui manque des bardeaux!

Bookmarks: a new Alice Munro story, a fake Robert Fisk biography of Saddam Hussein, and a complaint about pokey publishing

Some book-related links:

• “Free Radicals,” a new short story by Alice Munro (The New Yorker)
• Robert Fisk’s bio of Saddam Hussein is selling well – except he didn’t write it (The Independent)
• Why does it take so long to publish a book? (The New York Times)
• How the online archive of one student’s books became the behemoth that is LibraryThing.com (The Wall Street Journal)
• The trouble with translations (Times Online)
• Alberto Manguel on Dante’s Divine Comedy (The Globe and Mail)
• An interview with critic James Wood (Financial Times)