blog.rightreading.com

I’ll be on the road for a while, and posting could continue to be light until mid January.

Meanwhile, I’ve agreed to be a reader for this translation award. Books translated in calendar 2008 by writers based anywhere  between Fresno and the Oregon border are eligible. So far these are on my reading list:

• Castellanos Moya, Horacio, Senselessness, translated by Katherine Silver (New Directions)
• Do, Nguyen, and Paul Hoover, eds., trans., Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed)
• Holderlin, Friedrich, Odes and Elegies, translated by Nick Hoff (Wesleyan)
• Holderlin, Friedrich, Selected Poems, translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover (Omnidawn)
• Nobuo, Ayukawa, America and Other Poems, translated by Shogo Oketani and Lez Lowitz (Kaya)
• Peri Rossi, Christina, State of Exile, translated by Marylin Buck (City Lights)
• Rodamor, William and Anna Livia, eds., trans., France: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts)
• Rojas, Gonzalo, From the Lightning: Selected Poems, translated by John Oliver Simon (Green Integer)
• Saba, Umberto, Songbook, translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan (Yale)
• Talebi, Niloufar, ed., trans., Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians around the World (North Atlantic)
• Toussaint, Jean-Philippe, Camera, translated by Matthew B. Smith (Dalkey Archive)
• Zambra, Alejandro, Bonzai, translated by Carolina de Robertis (Melville House)

This is a pretty strong group of candidates. It makes me feel encouraged about the state of literary book publishing today (but notice all were published by independents or university presses — corporate publishers have abandoned the the kind of publishing that built houses like Knopf).

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