The Bancroft Library will house the extraordinary collection, which arrived in 62 boxes that include some never-before-seen writing.
By Dan Vaccaro
February 12, 2025
Χάρισε ή μάλλον πούλησε ακριβά το αρχείο της και καλά έκανε.
Απόσπασμα:
Σημείωσε επίσης την απροθυμία της να μοιραστεί το περιεχόμενό της - για το οποίο άρχισε να τη ρωτούν λίγο μετά τη δημοσιοποίησή της - για λόγους ιδιωτικότητας, αυτοσυνειδησίας και φόβου ότι οι μελετητές θα την ανέλυαν μέσα από έναν πολύ στενό φακό.
Τελικά, η Tan είπε ότι ήρθε στην ιδέα, εν μέρει λόγω της εμπιστοσύνης της στη βιβλιοθήκη The Bancroft. «Αν και δεν μπορώ να πω τι είναι τυπικό σε ένα δελτίο τύπου - «Είμαι ενθουσιασμένος και με τιμά» - είμαι πραγματικά βαθιά ευγνώμων που οι άνθρωποι ενδιαφέρονται τόσο πολύ για το τι συνέβη στο γράψιμό μου», είπε.
Το αρχείο Amy Tan, το οποίο ήρθε στο UC Berkeley σε 62 κουτιά, είναι μια εξαιρετική καταγραφή της μοναδικής λογοτεχνικής καριέρας και της προσωπικής ζωής του συγγραφέα. Περιέχει προσχέδια και χειρόγραφα των δημοσιευμένων έργων της Ταν, συμπεριλαμβανομένου του μυθιστορήματος που καθορίζει την καριέρα της, The Joy Luck Club.
Han Kang’s Nobel win underscores essential role of translators as literary tastemakers
By Mike Fu Oct. 11th, 2024
Han Kang’s eminence in the literary world was reaffirmed by the Swedish Academy’s announcement on Thursday that she will be conferred this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
Though she has been publishing in her native South Korea since the early 1990s, the 53-year-old Han was virtually unknown to Western readers until the English translation of “The Vegetarian” in 2016. Her meteoric rise since attests to the outsize influence that individual translators can exert on the literary world and a burgeoning global interest in East Asian storytelling.
Deborah Smith, the British translator of “The Vegetarian,” decided to learn Korean in 2009 on a lark. Freshly graduated from college, she found herself floundering in the wake of the global financial crisis and thought that learning a language would be “useful and enjoyable.” She chose Korean specifically because there was “barely anything available in English ... so the work had to be out there.”
A few years later, Smith encountered Han’s writing while pursuing a PhD in Korean literature. She won over an editor with her sample translation of “The Vegetarian,” which had been released in Korea in 2007. The book, Han’s first to appear in English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015 and received the International Booker Prize the following year.
Since then, three more of Han’s novels have appeared in English: “Human Acts” (2016), “The White Book” (2017) and “Greek Lessons” (2023), all of them translated by Smith, the last in partnership with Emily Yae Won. A fourth — “We Do Not Part,” translated by Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris — is scheduled to be released in January 2025.
“The Vegetarian” has now been translated into more than 30 languages. The author acknowledged that the dramatic increase in translated literature from Korea in recent years may be partially tied to her high-profile Booker win, but is also connected to the country’s soft power cachet in the film and music industries.
Smith founded Tilted Axis Press in 2015, a translation-focused publishing house that has put out works such as “Tokyo Ueno Station” by Yu Miri (translated by Morgan Giles), winner of the 2020 National Book Award, and “Love in the Big City” by Sang Young Park (translated by Anton Hur), an English-language debut that was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.
A person examines a stack of Han Kang's novels in English at a book store in Seoul. Translations of Han into English and other languages paved the way for her consideration by the Nobel Committee for Literature.
The impact of these titles, among others, demonstrates that literary translators are not simply advocates of individual authors and facilitators of cultural flow, but have the potential to be outright tastemakers for a worldwide literary audience.
For better or worse, the prevalence of English as a global lingua franca means that anglophone translators wield more power than their compatriots. Years before Smith’s translation drew worldwide attention, the Japanese edition of “The Vegetarian” by Kim Hoon-ah had been published as “Saishoku Shugisha,” in 2011. Kim had majored in Japanese literature at university and was motivated to translate from Korean to Japanese, in particular, when she discovered the lopsided nature of the literary flow between the two countries.
Han’s other essays, poetry and fiction appear in Japanese translations by Ayako Furukawa, Shunsaku Ide and Mariko Saito. Meanwhile, more than a dozen translations of “The Vegetarian” appeared following Han’s global debut via the International Booker Prize.
Han’s Nobel win marks the first time a Korean-language author has received this top accolade. She is only the fifth author (and first woman) from East Asia to be recognized, after Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe broke ground in the 20th century, followed by Chinese writers Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan.
As recently as Tuesday, Han had been given 33-to-1 odds on winning the Nobel Prize by a prominent U.K. betting outlet. Rumors were flying that Can Xue, an avant-garde Chinese writer whose sensibilities have been described as Kafkaesque, would clinch the prize.
Besides the Nobel, major industry accolades like the U.K.-based International Booker Prize and the United States’ National Book Award for Translated Literature also have a record of spotlighting East Asian authors in translation — including Bora Chung (translated by Anton Hur), Ge Fei (translated by Canaan Morse), Yoko Tawada (translated by Margaret Mitsutani) and Yang Shuang-zi (translated by Lin King) — on their shortlists.
These nominations and awards may represent a peak in a writer’s career, but one must not lose sight of the fact that Western institutions and judging committees would have no access to these literatures at all were it not for the painstaking effort of translators and the publishing houses that make space for them. The abysmal statistic of 3% — the proportion of new translations published annually in the anglophone sphere, an already tiny number that gets further parceled out across all languages and comes with a heavy European bias — means that every title is a leap of faith.
“The challenging task for any translator is to navigate through this dark tunnel of loss,” Han ruminated in a 2023 interview with the Booker Prize Foundation, regarding the impossibility of finding perfect commensurability between languages. But only by moving through this tunnel can one find communion, on the other side, with readers who would never be able to undertake the journey themselves.
With its million-dollar purse and instant prestige, the Nobel Prize in Literature can secure or even revive a literary career. Yet the prominence from such an award applies a pressure that many writers cannot withstand. After his 1968 win, Yasunari Kawabata abandoned a serialized novel and never published another piece of writing in his lifetime. Others feel the pull of public affairs, deploying their newfound power in support of both domestic and international causes and turning their literature into activism.
Such seems to be the case for Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize in 2018. Beginning with the 2007 publication of her Man Booker International Prize–winning novel, Flights, she has fallen into a rhythm, following each mystically inclined, formally challenging work with a light genre riff more focused on dictating a salient political message than pushing the bounds of art or reality. Unfortunately, her newest novel, The Empusium, only amplifies this pattern.
Published in Poland in 2022, and translated this year by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the book opens in mid-September 1913. Mieczysław Wojnicz, a young Polish engineer in training, has arrived at the sanatorium in Göbersdorf, a resort town in the Silesian mountains near the current Polish-Czech border. Wojnicz is a delicate, sensitive man, with an “exaggerated fear of being spied on” and an uncomfortable relationship with his father, and he has come to the sanatorium to cure his tuberculosis. Standing atop an underground lake, Göbersdorf’s air is simply better than elsewhere, a natural cure in which treatment becomes inseparable from life. “Merely breathing will stop the process of decay in your lungs,” explains his doctor. “Every breath is curative.”
Göbersdorf is a popular destination with patients from across Austro-Hungary and further afield. So popular, in fact, that he cannot yet get a room at the sanatorium. Instead, he lodges at the Gästehaus für Herren, a small, damp establishment run by a gruff local and his strange, slightly animalistic servant. His fellow guests are also patients, including Longin Lukas, a Catholic traditionalist from Prussia, the Viennese scholar and socialist August August, and Thilo, a fey, morose art student from Berlin who is perpetually on the brink of death. Together, these men eat, drink, and talk, while attempting to gloss over the death already inside their bodies.
The Empusium is clearly in conversation with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, another tale of a young man who arrives at a mountain sanatorium where, through his participation in a series of philosophical conversations, scientific observations, and occult experiences, he comes to a form of self-knowledge. Tokarczuk’s book is also full of conversations — arguments, really — without beginning or end, in which the humanistic August and the authoritarian Lukas duke it out over questions of nationalism, democracy, race, and art. Yet there is something pointedly off about these dialogues. Unlike the figures in The Magic Mountain, whose opposing viewpoints are substantive and supply the young Hans Castorp with viable interpretations of reality, Tokarczuk’s characters lecture; they speak in bromides, and their conversations never build, develop, or resolve. In fact, in this place of supposed healing, Wojnicz begins to notice a certain strange dissipation, as if no one were actually getting better at all.
The reader will have guessed this long before our humble protagonist. In English, the book is subtitled A Health Resort Horror Story, and Tokarczuk works hard to insinuate an undercurrent of dread through all the proceedings. From the first pages, she hints at a secondary, mystic reality just beneath the surface of our own. Wojnicz’s sequences are narrated in a standard past-tense third-person, rarely straying from his thoughts and memories. Yet every so often, the prose will switch into a slippery, present-tense collective voice, a “we” that can slide through walls and floors, peer into sick lungs, and feel the pulsing of the natural world. This is the voice of the Tüntschi, a mysterious forest-dwelling force that seems to exist outside time. In these moments, the novel’s otherwise dull prose style becomes supple and slippery, expanding the reader’s vision beyond the tiny, cloistered world of its characters and embracing the potential of fiction to alter a viewer’s vision of the world. It resembles the liberatory moment in Tokarczuk’s 2013 Books of Jacob (translated by Jennifer Croft), when the dying Yente swallows a spell and her soul flies off through the night, part of that wind that is really “the vision of the dead.” In changing her perspective, the old woman has liberated herself of body, sex, nationality. “Yente’s vision knows no such borders, after all.”
This collective voice irregularly erupts into The Empusium, to remind the reader that much more is going on than initially seems. And in Göbersdorf, threats certainly loom. Centuries before, the region was the site of horrible witch hunts; many women were said to have fled into the forests and never returned. Wandering those woods with his companions, Wojnicz comes upon soot-faced charcoal burners, near-wild men who mock the genteel patients and copulate with feminine dolls sculpted from the materials of the forest floor. And as Thilo discovers at the cemetery, one man from the village dies every November.
Horror stories are often about the disjuncture between appearances and depths and turn on a change in perception: the genteel aristocrat who is in fact a monster, the idyllic town that conceals a dark secret. Using the tools of the novel, Tokarczuk is trying to lead us to an understanding of the horror at the basis of European culture. The residents of the guesthouse consume Schwämerei, a local liquor distilled from mushrooms with ostensibly hallucinogenic qualities. Those hoping this will unlock the author’s mystic side will be disappointed; its effect is much more convenient. The drink spurs the characters to talk, and it allows Wojnicz to sense those strange voices whispering at the periphery of consciousness. It grants him an (irritatingly rare) insight: “Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion … eventually led to women.”
Many of the characters, including Lukas and August, have a lot to say about women. Women are weak; too close to nature; at an earlier stage of evolution; overcome by their emotions; of low morals. They cannot raise children, or understand real art, or think deeply about anything at all.
More so than race, nation, culture, or politics, misogyny is at the core of all their beliefs. This gives the novel’s endless conversations a deadly flat quality because the ideas in question are not meant to be substantive. They are feints, leading us back to a fundamental misogyny. The arguments feel cobbled together from external sources because they are: In her author’s note, Tokarczuk attributes “all the misogynistic views on the topic of women” to past authors as diverse as Augustine, Darwin, Ovid, Pound, Wagner, Freud, Plato, and Jack Kerouac. That last one is key. Rather than an interrogation of the beliefs of particular people at a particular place and time, Tokarczuk’s novel presents an undifferentiated compendium of eternal misogyny.
Thomas Mann began work on The Magic Mountain in 1912 with the intention of writing, as he put it in a 1915 letter, “a story with basic pedagogic-political intentions.” Mann spent the following years cheering on the German war effort and fighting with his brother, the left-wing novelist Heinrich, in the press. Yet Mann’s initially conservative views changed with the world, and by the time he published the novel in 1924, the supposedly simple, straightforward story had become a long, ambivalent work.
Even before his Nobel win in 1929, Mann was the most prominent German novelist of his era. So too is Tokarczuk in contemporary Poland. She has placed herself in direct opposition to reactionary currents in Polish politics and culture, writing against those who scapegoat “the so-called crazy leftists, queer-lovers, Germans, Jews, European Union puppets, feminists, liberals and anyone who supports immigrants.” Using her Nobel money, she set up the Olga Tokarczuk Foundation to support the arts and human rights in Poland and abroad.
Despite its historical setting, it is impossible to extract The Empusium from this context. The novel was written during the majority rule of the right-wing Law and Justice Party and published before a center-left coalition pushed L&J out of power in 2023. Like her 2009 murder mystery, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, it attacks contemporary political problems through the lens of genre fiction. These novels transform Tokarczuk’s enemies into a set of significant types — intellectuals, priests, doctors, fur farmers — and then begins to pick them off.
Yet there is no real mystery in Plow: Tokarczuk presents her doddering old narrator as an essentially righteous avenger, cutting down those despoilers of the earth whom the vegetarian author abhors. The Empusium similarly crams potentially interesting ideas inside the straitjacket of a basic horror plot. Whatever her attraction to genre material, Tokarczuk does not write gripping narratives, and her new one jerks irregularly along, introducing plot threads — the voices, the dead men, the strange chair in the guesthouse’s attic, then dropping them, sometimes for hundreds of pages, so that we can listen to more philosophizing. Again and again, Wojnicz will find himself compelled by something strange, or even frightening, only to abruptly pull back, drawing Tokarczuk’s conceit thinner and thinner until you can only see the seams of what she is teaching you.
Yet the best word to describe Empusium would not be horror but fear: not the reader’s, or any character’s, but the author’s. Tokarczuk seems desperately afraid that you not miss the point of her book or take away the wrong lesson. Philosophical ideas are presented only in their bluntest, most outrageous form because she can’t risk allowing the reader to believe them. She finds their misogyny odious, and so you must, too. Rather than learning from the novel, it ends up instructing you. So, too, the characterizations, which dictate exactly how we are meant to respond.
No one frightens her more than Wojnicz. In Illness As Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes that tuberculosis was believed to purify those who suffered from it. TB was the illness of innocents: “The virtuous only become more so as they slide toward death.” The Polish student reads as a parody of this tendency. Shy and naïve, he has nothing to contribute to the arguments at the guesthouse. He does not have philosophical ideas of his own, and he does not seem to think about women much at all. Because he is ignorant, he becomes completely innocent, exempting him from their misogyny and from the reader’s scorn. Just about every memory of his father and uncle turns on the question of masculinity, how manly qualities must triumph over the pitiful feminine. “His father believed that blame for both national disasters and educational failures lay with a soft upbringing that encouraged girlishness, mawkishness and passivity.” These memories arise instructively, pre-interpreted, with no space for the reader to reflect or respond.
There is a deeper explanation for this, which, in a crass, regressive move, the author waits a full 236 pages to reveal, and even then only via a leering, Crying Game–style focus on his genitalia. Though described and perceived as male (and gendered as such in the narration, hence my persistent use of his), Wojnicz is in fact intersex, with both penis and uterus, a much more serious medical problem, in his father’s view, than his TB. This revelation reframes much of the earlier novel, from his paranoia to his discomfort in stiff formal clothing to his father’s obsession with manliness. Yet this does not deepen our understanding of Wojnicz, only replacing it with another justification for his essential innocence. He exists for her as a purely symbolic creature, real only in what he signifies. As Wojnicz’s doctor explains in a long speech late in the novel, “You will be a clear reminder that the vision of the world as black and white is a false and destructive vision … You treat us to a land ‘in between,’ which we’d rather not think about.”
This unintentionally describes the novel’s treatment of Wojnicz. His middleness becomes a muddle. At no point does she allow him to have flaws, to hate, to hurt others, be mistaken — be human. You sense her always protecting him from culture, time, environment, guiding him away from saying or doing anything that might impugn him in the eyes of the reader. Tokarczuk cannot even risk having Wojnicz view himself negatively after all those years of observation and persecution. “Well, he was as he was,” she writes during the big reveal. “He couldn’t help it. He thought of himself as normal.” A born victim, he remains eternally innocent.
It is a good, pure-hearted choice, an attempt to refute her right-wing critics and affirm the marginalized people they attack. An intersex person like Wojnicz is nothing more than an idea, a symbol to these people. Yet in trying to oppose these bigots, she capitulates to them, orienting her novel as an inversion of their beliefs, rather than using it to express the messy, ambiguous, disappointing truth of life. Even if she is writing against them, she is still writing on their terms, and her book ends up feeling cramped and small.
A work of literature is at bottom a mechanism for the generation of meaning. The author brings the material and shapes it into a desired form. We bring ourselves to the work, make connections, read other works, allow our thoughts to spiral off into unexpected places. This is how an artwork continues to live. But in order to do so, space must be made for the reader to make their own associations and draw their own conclusions. Irony, ambiguity, ambivalence: all create a chance for misunderstanding. But they also create the necessary gap between author and reader that creates the space for meaning.
In her best work, Tokarczuk has created that gap through voice and form. Jacob convincingly resurrects a dead world of magic and superstition through confidence and humor; the fragmented structure of Flights enlists the reader in its reconstruction. When it heeds the call of the Tüntschi, The Empusium approaches those earlier heights. But for the most part, she has settled on something much closer to Mann’s original “story with basic pedagogic-political intentions” than the great novel he ended up writing. The novel might end with a moment of possibility, with Wojnicz embracing the possibility of his own multiplicity, of deploying appearances to transcend them. But The Empusium is rarely more than it appears and frequently much less.
I hadn't realized that the European Union Prize for Literature has announced a new format. Previously, each of the nations involved in each cycle (a third of the 41 participating countries each year, i.e. 13 or 14 at a time) announced a winner. Now:
The 2022-2024 cycle introduces a new format for the EUPL Prize: initial book selection for each participating country will be conducted xby national organisations, each entitled to submit one book that is of high literary quality with potential for translatability. A second round of selection will be conducted by a seven-member European jury, who will thus select an overall Prize winner and five special mention awards.
I've always had some difficulties with this prize, not least because it is decided by national juries; I'm not sure that this will be a big improvement (though at least it will be a single prize now, for just one book, rather than the dozen or so we got each time previously). Meanwhile, the European Writers' Council -- part of the consortium that coördinates the prize -- also takes issue with the changes, to the extent that they've now announced that they have withdrawn from the consortium, complaining that:
Furthermore, as the selection processes have changed considerably at national as well as pan-European level, the EWC Board concluded that the new EUPL concept does not promote multilingualism as key to the European language diversity, and is not following our convictions of equal treatment for all countries.
Discovering a wide range of new authors every year was a highlight for us and the core meaning of the EUPL. As this approach has now changed, the EWC no longer wishes to endorse this format.
It will be interesting to see whether the EUPL reconsiders -- specific aspects, or perhaps the whole prize(-procedure).
For distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).
The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
A majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination.
WINNING WORK
The Night Watchman
By Louise Erdrich
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WASHINGTON POST, AMAZON, NPR, CBS SUNDAY MORNING, KIRKUS, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING BEST BOOK OF 2020
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?
Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.
Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.
In The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.
-- from the publisher
BIOGRAPHY
Louise Erdrich is the author of sixteen novels, volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her fiction has won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa, lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.
FINALISTS
Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 2021:
Telephone, by Percival Everett (Graywolf Press)
A novel of narrative ingenuity that includes both a heartbreaking illness and a crime story in its exploration of discontent, loss and the possibility of redemption.
A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason (Little, Brown and Company)
A collection of stories with themes of class division, the artist's role in society and our need for love and belonging, reflecting a prowess with language and a mastery of the short form.
Ακούγεται πολύ ευρωπαϊκό ως βραβείο, στην ουσία είναι "εθνικό" αφού προτείνεται από κάθε χώρα από μια μικρή επιτροπή. Απονέμεται στις μισές χώρες μια χρονιά και στις άλλες μισές την επόμενη. Λεπτομέρειες:
European Union Prizes for Literature
They've announced the winners of the latest batch of European Union Prizes for Literature, for works by: "emerging fiction writers" from the 41 countries participating in the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Fourteen countries were to announce winners in this particular cycle but:
After further consideration of the shortlist suggested by the Moldovan jury, the EUPL Steering Committee could not confirm the proposed candidates as emerging authors. Therefore, there will be no Moldovan laureate in 2021.
Given how little Moldovan literature ever makes it beyond the local borders I'd argue that pretty much anything from there should count as "emerging", but I guess they saw things differently. (The books that are in the running, and then the winners, are decided on by national juries -- i.e. each country names its own finalists and then winner, a less than ideal way of doing things ..... See also my recent mention about some of the disqualified finalists for these prizes.)
There's no question, however, that the European Union Prize for Literature does help get attention for the winning titles; we're fairly certain to be seeing quite a few of these in English translation in the next couple of years. (Some of these authors already have other titles available in translation, e.g. Armenian winner Aram Pachyan.)
(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)
EUPL disqualification(s)
The European Union Prize for Literature announced its shortlists -- 14, for the fourteen countries eligible for the prizes this year -- a month ago, with the winners to be announced next week. The shortlists are selected by national juries -- but there's now some outrage over the EUPL having rejected one of the shortlisted titles, Maltese selection Għall-Glorja tal-Patrija ! by Aleks Farrugia; see, for example, Matthew Vella's report in Malta Today, Aleks Farrugia disqualified by EU Literature Prize over SKS’s ‘Labour’ affiliation. The issue is apparently that the book was published by a publishing house (SKS) affiliated with a political party, which the prize considers unacceptable. Understandably, they want to keep politics out of it, but it's unfortunate that books can be disqualified just because of who the publisher is -- which can obviously be a problem for smaller markets, where there are very few commercial publishers of any kind. (I'd argue the much bigger problem is leaving the selection process in national-jury hands rather than trying to make things truly European, but I do understand the difficulty of finding sufficient outside jurors capable of assessing works in Maltese, etc. .....)
This meant that a book by author Aleks Farrugia, who was one of Malta’s five shortlisted books but is published by SKS, was eliminated from the process, together with another two books that were eliminated for other reasons.
As you can see from the shortlist, countries each have up to five titles in the running -- but some have considerably fewer (including Malta, with just two). Were they all allowed to shortlist five -- and were numerous titles then eliminated for various reasons ? (I, for one, would love to know what reasons the other two Maltese titles were eliminated for .....) It's a shame that there seems to be no transparency here, especially for outsiders; were it not for this kerfuffle I would never have known that there were originally (meant to be) five shortlisted Maltese titles -- and, presumably, five for each country -- and that numerous titles were, without public knowledge (much less explanation), excluded.
We are delighted to announce the 34th Annual Translation Prize finalists, a group of ten exceptional English translations of French works of fiction and nonfiction.
FICTION
Jordan Stump’s translation ofIgifuby Scholastique Mukasonga Archipelago Books
Mark Polizzotti’s translation ofInvisible Ink: A Novelby Patrick Modiano Yale University Press
Olivia Baes’s translation ofJean-Luc Persecutedby Charles Ferdinand Ramuz Deep Vellum
Natasha Lehrer’s translation ofThe Last Days of Ellis Islandby Gaelle Josse World Editions
Chris Andrews’s translation ofOur Richesby Kaouther Adimi New Directions
NONFICTION
Catherine Porter’s translation ofDenaturalized: How Thousands Lost their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy Franceby Claire Zalc Belknap Press of Havard University Press
Jody Gladding’s translation ofFinding Dora Maar: An Artist, an Address Book, a Lifeby Brigitte Benkemoun Getty Publications
Willard Wood’s translation ofMachiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What to Fearby Patrick Boucheron Other Press
Hoyt Rogers’s translation ofRome, 1630: The Horizon of the Early Baroque, Followed by Five Essays on Seventeenth-Century Artby Yves Bonnefoy Seagull Books
Laura Marris’s translation ofThose Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe– A Memoir, A History, A Warningby Geraldine Schwarz Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster
Τα βραβεία μυθιστορήματος The Athens Prize for Literature, που θέσπισε το 2006 το λογοτεχνικό περιοδικό δε|κατα, εξαιτίας των επιλογών τους, χαίρουν ιδιαίτερης εκτίμησης στον χώρο των κριτικών λογοτεχνίας, των δημοσιογράφων, των εκδοτών, των συγγραφέων, των μεταφραστών, των επιμελητών, των ανθρώπων του βιβλίου εν γένει. Εφέτος, 14η χρονιά διοργάνωσής τους, λόγω καραντίνας, δεν έγινε ζωντανή τελετή απονομής των βραβείων. Πρόκειται για βιβλία που κυκλοφόρησαν το 2019.
Το βραβείο Ξένου Μυθιστορήματος απονέμεται στην μεξικανικής καταγωγής αμερικανίδα Valeria Luiselli για το βιβλίο της Το αρχείο των χαμένων παιδιών , σε μετάφραση από τα αγγλικά Βασιλικής Κνήτου, εκδόσεις Μεταίχμιο. H Valeria Luiselli, μία επιδέξια συγγραφέας, αφυπνισμένη κοινωνικά και πολιτικά, στο βραβευμένο βιβλίο της καταπιάνεται με μεγάλα θέματα, ανανεώνει τους σύγχρονους τρόπους αφήγησης, γνωρίζει και αξιοποιεί στο κείμενό της τις τάσεις της παγκόσμιας λογοτεχνίας, την οποία διαβάζει όχι μόνο ως συγγραφέας αλλά και ως αφηγήτρια του εαυτού της.
Το βραβείο Ελληνικού Μυθιστορήματος απονέμεται στον Ευάγγελο Αυδίκο, για το βιβλίο του Οδός Οφθαλμιατρείου, Βιβλιοπωλείον της Εστίας. Ο Ευάγγελος Αυδίκος με άψογη αφηγηματική τεχνική (μικτές διηγήσεις, ευφυής χειρισμός ιστορικού χρόνου, γλωσσικά άλματα, στοχαστικές παρατηρήσεις), επιτυγχάνει να δώσει άλλη προοπτική στη μυθιστορηματική βιογραφία συνδέοντας το λογοτεχνικό μας παρελθόν με τις προκλήσεις του.
Και τα δύο βιβλία, λαμπρά δείγματα ρεαλιστικής μυθοπλασίας, ξεχωρίζουν για τη στιλπνότητα του λόγου, την πυκνή γλώσσα, τον ποικίλο κόσμο των εννοιών και το χτίσιμο χαρακτήρων, αποκαλύπτοντας τις αντιφάσεις μέσα στις οποίες ζούμε. Bασικό κριτήριο υπήρξε η λογοτεχνικότητα και ο συνδυασμός ύφους, πλοκής, γλώσσας και περιεχομένου.
Τα βραβεία THE ATHENS PRIZE FOR LITERATURE θέσπισε το 2006 το λογοτεχνικό περιοδικό δε|κατα. Χορηγός τα εργαλεία γραφής Mont Blanc.
ΟΙ ΒΡΑΧΕΙΕΣ ΛΙΣΤΕΣ/SHORT LISTS
ΞΕΝΟ ΜΥΘΙΣΤΟΡΗΜΑ/FOREIGN NOVEL
Antonio Ferrari, To μυστικό, η αληθινή ιστορία της απαγωγής του Άλντο Μόρο, μετάφραση από τα ιταλικά Δημήτρης Μαμαλούκας. Κέδρος
Mahir Guven, Μεγάλος αδελφός, Μετάφραση από τα γαλλικά Λίζυ Τσιριμώκου. Ίκαρος
Patrick McGrath, To φάντασμα του βεστιάριου, μετάφραση από τα αγγλικά Μιχάλης Μακρόπουλος, Μεταίχμιο
Valeria Luiselli, Το αρχείο των χαμένων παιδιών , μετάφραση από τα αγγλικά Βασιλική Κνήτου, Μεταίχμιο.
Elizabeth Macneal, Το Εργαστήριο με τις κούκλες, μετάφραση από τα αγγλικά Μιχάλης Μακρόπουλος, Ψυχογιός
Don Delillo, ZERO K, μετάφραση από τα αγγλικά Λαμπρινή Κουζέλη, Βιβλιοπωλείον της Εστίας
Michel HOUELLEBECQ , Σεροτονίνη, μετάφραση από τα γαλλικά Γιώργος Καράμπελας, Βιβλιοπωλείον της Εστίας
Αlessandro Piperno, Εκεί που τελειώνει η ιστορία, μετάφραση από τα Ιταλικά Άννα Παπασταύρου, Πατάκης
Annie Proux. Άνθρωποι του δάσους, μετάφραση από τα αγγλικά Γιώργος Κυριαζής. Καστανιώτης
Κikke Ferrari, Από μακριά μοιάζουν με μύγες, μετάφραση από τα ισπανικά Άννα Βερροιοπούλου. Καστανιώτης
Για το έτος 2019 οι συγγραφείς - κριτές των ξένων μυθιστορημάτων ήταν οι Θεόδωρος Γρηγοριάδης, Νίκος Δαββέτας, Φίλιππος Δρακονταειδής, Σοφία Νικολαΐδου και Κοσμάς Χαρπαντίδης.
ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΟ ΜΥΘΙΣΤΟΡΗΜΑ/GREEK NOVEL
Ευάγγελος Αυδίκος, Οδός Οφθαλμιατρείου, Βιβλιοπωλείον της Εστίας
Μάρω Βαμβουνάκη, Ένας αφηρημένος άντρας, Ψυχογιός
Λουκία Δέρβη, Θέα Ακρόπολη, Μεταίχμιο
Άντζελα Δημητρακάκη, Τίνα. Η ιστορία μιας ευθυγράμμισης, Βιβλιοπωλείον της Εστίας
Φίλιππος Δρακονταειδής, Η πρόσοψη, Κέδρος
Μήτσος Κασόλας, Η γερακίνα, Καστανιώτης
Θωμάς Κοροβίνης, Ολίγη μπέσα ορέ μπράτιμε, Άγρα
Ηλίας Μαγκλίνης. Είμαι όσα έχω ξεχάσει, Μεταίχμιο
Καρολίνα Μέρμηγκα, Κάτι κρυφό μυστήριο, Μελάνι
Γιώργος Σκαμπαρδώνης, Casa Μπιάφρα, Πατάκης
Για το έτος 2019 οι συγγραφείς - κριτές των ελληνικών μυθιστορημάτων ήταν οι Κωνσταντίνος Μπούρας, Ντίνος Σιώτης, Δημήτρης Σωτάκης και Κώστας Χατζηαντωνίου.
Οι Κριτικές Επιτροπές του Αναγνώστη ανακοίνωσαν τα Λογοτεχνικά Βραβεία 020 για την εκδοτική παραγωγή του 2019. Τα Βραβεία παρουσιάστηκαν την Πέμπτη το βράδυ στις 8μμ σε livestreaming από το cafe τουΒιβλιοπωλείου Ευριπίδης στην Κηφισιά με την τεχνική επιμέλεια του Παναγιώτη Σιδηρόπουλου και της Bookia.gr.
Με παράδειγμα το βιβλίο «Χριστόφορος Κάσδαγλης, 1983, σχεδίαση εξωφύλλου Κλαίρη Σταμάτη, σχεδίαση έκδοσης Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη» η Κριτική Επιτροπή βραβεύει όλη τη σειρά των εκδόσεων Καστανιώτη αυτού του τύπου. Υπενθυμίζουμε ότι η επιτροπή στοχεύει στην ανάδειξη των επιμέρους στοιχείων -σχεδιασμός σελίδων, επιλογή γραμματοσειρών, πρόταση χαρτιών, εκτύπωση και βιβλιοδεσία- που απαιτούνται για αποτελέσματα υψηλής τεχνικής και αισθητικής στην μορφοποίηση του βιβλίου που θα εμφανιστεί στους πάγκους και τα ράφια των βιβλιοπωλείων
Δημήτρης Αρβανίτης, σχεδιαστής, μέλος της AGI.Μιχάλης Αρφαράς, καθηγητής στην Ανωτάτη Σχολή Καλών Τεχνών και διευθυντής του Τομέα Χαρακτικής .Γιώργος Δ. Ματθιόπουλος, Καθηγητής εφαρμογών (Τμήμα Γραφιστικής, Σχολή Καλλιτεχνικών Σπουδών – ΤΕΙ Αθήνας), Τυπογραφικός σχεδιαστής (Εταιρεία Ελληνικών Τυπογραφικών Στοιχείων).
Στο Δημαρχιακό Μέγαρο στην Πλατεία Εθνικής Αντιστάσεως (πρώην Πλατεία Κοτζιά), απονεμήθηκαν εφέτος, για 13η συνεχή χρονιά, τα βραβεία μυθιστορήματος The Athens Prize for Literature του περιοδικού (δε)κατα.
Η ανακοίνωση των νικητών και ταυτόχρονα η απονομή έγιναν την Δευτέρα 16 Δεκεμβρίου 2018, στις 1 το μεσημέρι. Τα βραβεία απένειμε o Δήμαρχος Αθηναίων Κώστας Μπακογιάννης.
Οι συντονιστές των δύο επιτροπών συγγραφείς Θεόδωρος Γρηγοριάδης και Κωνσταντίνος Μπούρας αναφέρθηκαν, εν συντομία, στις δύο βραχείες λίστες.
Τα βραβεία The Athens Prize for Literature χαίρουν ιδιαίτερης εκτίμησης λόγω των επιλογών τους στον χώρο των κριτικών λογοτεχνίας, των δημοσιογράφων, των εκδοτών, των συγγραφέων και των μεταφραστών.
Χορηγός τα εργαλεία γραφής Mont Blanc.
Στην «Πατρίδα» του Φερνάντο Αραμπούρου δόθηκε το Βραβείο Ξένου Μυθιστορήματος των βραβείων The Athens Prize for Literature!
Το βιβλίο του Φερνάντο Αραμπούρου «Πατρίδα» που κυκλοφορεί από τις Εκδόσεις Πατάκη τιμήθηκε με το Βραβείο Ξένου Μυθιστορήματος.
Ο συγγραφέας έστειλε μήνυμα για τη βράβευση που διαβάστηκε από την εκδότρια Άννα Πατάκη, η οποία παρέλαβε το βραβείο.
Το μήνυμα που έστειλε ο Φερνάντο Αραμπούρου:
"Η είδηση ότι το μυθιστόρημά μου «Πατρίδα» τιμήθηκε με το Athens Prize for Literature 2019 μου προκάλεσε μεγάλη χαρά. Επιτρέψτε μου να μην περιοριστώ σ’ αυτές τις ευχαριστήριες αράδες στο να εκφράσω την προσωπική ικανοποίηση ενός ανθρώπου, η μόνη αρετή του οποίου έγκειται στον καθημερινό μόχθο με τις λέξεις στη μοναξιά του σπιτιού του. Το Athens Prize for Literature συνδέει, με την ευκαιρία αυτή, το έργο ενός Ισπανού συγγραφέα με μια πόλη από την οποία κανένας Ευρωπαίος πολίτης (ίσως και κανένας πολίτης του κόσμου) που τρέφει αγάπη για τη γνώση και την τέχνη δεν μπορεί να θεωρηθεί ξένος. Σήμερα, όταν κάποιοι αμφισβητούν την προσέγγιση των ευρωπαϊκών χωρών ή συμβιβάζονται με μια απλή γραφειοκρατική ή μερκαντιλιστική σχέση μεταξύ τους, δεν μπορώ παρά να επικροτήσω την ύπαρξη ενός βραβείου που ενώνει τους πολίτες στη χρήση του λόγου για καλλιτεχνικούς ή δημιουργικούς σκοπούς• του λόγου, που από τα πρώτα μας χρόνια μάς βοηθά να γίνουμε πραγματικά άνθρωποι. Βραβεύετε ένα έργο που δείχνει τις τρομερές συνέπειες στους ανθρώπους από τη συστηματική χρήση της βίας σε μια πολύ όμορφη γωνιά της Ευρώπης η οποία ονομάζεται Χώρα των Βάσκων. Σας ευχαριστώ όχι μόνο για την τιμή που μου κάνετε απονέμοντάς μου το βραβείο, αλλά κυρίως για τη συμβολή που αυτό το βραβείο προσφέρει προκειμένου να μην ξεχαστεί ένα θλιβερό και τραγικό κομμάτι της ιστορίας της ηπείρου μας".
Για τα βιβλία του 2018 οι συγγραφείς - κριτές των ξένων μυθιστορημάτων ήταν οι Θεόδωρος Γρηγοριάδης, Νίκος Δαββέτας, Σοφία Νικολαΐδου, Nτίνος Σιώτης και Κοσμάς Χαρπαντίδης
Στο "Γάλα Μαγνησίας" του Κώστα Ακρίβου δόθηκε το Βραβείο για το καλύτερο ελληνικό μυθιστόρημα. Κυκλοφορεί από τις εκδόσεις Μεταίχμιο.
Η ΒΡΑΧΕΙΑ ΛΙΣΤΑ για το ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΟ ΜΥΘΙΣΤΟΡΗΜΑ
Κώστας Ακρίβος, Γάλα Μαγνησίας, Μεταίχμιο
Μίνως Ευσταθιάδης, Ο δύτης, Ίκαρος
Νίκος Κατσαλίδας, Περί ομονοίας και άλλων δαιμονίων, Νίκας
Δήμητρα Κολλιάκου, Αλφαβητάρι εντόμων, Πατάκης
Λίλα Κονομάρα, Ο χάρτης του κόσμου στο μυαλό σου, Κέδρος
Άγης Πετάλας, Εις την ψυχήν ελπίδα, βιβλιοπωλείον της Εστίας
Αλέξης Σταμάτης, Ο άνδρας της πέμπτης πράξης, Καστανιώτης
Νίκος Χρυσός, Καινούργια μέρα, Καστανιώτης
Για τα βιβλία του 2018 οι συγγραφείς - κριτές των ελληνικών μυθιστορημάτων ήταν οι Φίλιππος Δρακονταειδής, Κωνσταντίνος Μπούρας, Δημήτρης Σωτάκης, Κλαίτη Σωτηριάδου και Κώστας Χατζηαντωνίου.
