Translations

Small Blue Planet, Episode 3: Brazil

~ Cheryl

It lives! Karen Burnham has just posted the latest episode of Small Blue Planet to the Locus Roundtable blog. You can find it here. Many thanks to Fábio Fernandes and Jacques Barcia for being such great guests. I particularly enjoyed the tale of author Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro who maintained a female alter-ego for 6 years, producing the Xochiquetzal stories along the way. So, break out the Caipirinhas and head on over to Locus for some fine entertainment.

Meanwhile I am lining up the guests for the next three episodes. In the next few months we will be visiting France, Israel and The Philippines.

India and Brazil

~ Cheryl

Today I spotted an academic paper on this history of science fiction written in Hindi. You can read it here. It is great to know that people were writing SF in Hindi at the end of the 19th Century.

And talking of SF that I can’t read, this evening I recorded episode 3 of Small Blue Planet. It features Brazil, and the guests are Fábio Fernandes & Jacques Barcia. Karen Burnham should have it online in a week or so. We talked about a whole range of issues, from Brazilian steampunk to a male author who created a female alter-ego and kept up the masquerade for 6 years, and of course caipirinhas.

Small Blue Planet #2 – China

~ Cheryl

The second episode of Small Blue Planet is now available from the Locus Roundtable blog. in this one Karen Burnham and I make a virtual trip to China with the help of the multiple-award-winning Ken Liu and one of China’s hottest young SF writers, Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan).

This one was a blast to record. While the Finnish episode was mostly about hanging out with dear friends, this one was more a discovery of many new things. Some of the language issues are fascinating. I’m in awe of Stan having written a story in Classical Chinese (which is roughly akin to someone like Tolkien having written a story in Anglo-Saxon). One of the best things about Finnish is that is has no gendered pronouns. Chinese has something just as spectacular. If you don’t know what it is, it will blow your mind when you get there.

Next month we’ll be off to Brazil in the company of Fabio Fernandes and Jacques Barcia. And I guess I’d better line up some future episodes. Hmm, who do I know in France…?

Pachyderme

~ Cheryl

Here’s another graphic novel for your Hugo consideration. I discovered Pachyderme via Edward Gauvin, who did the translation into English. The original version was written and drawn by Swiss artist, Frédérik Peeters. The English edition is published by Self Made Hero, the same people who brought you Ian Culbard’s comic version of At The Mountains of Madness.

Check out a review of Pachyderme (for example this one on the FPI blog) ans you’ll see mention of David Lynch. That’s no accident. Moebius, in his introduction to the book, claims to have found frequent references to Mulholland Drive in the text (though he’s not sure if Peeters intended them). In any case, by the time you get to the end you’ll not be at all sure what really happened, and will suspect that much of the narrative may have been a dream. After all, episodes like this can’t possibly be real, can they?

Page from Pachyderme

The lady in the picture is Carice Sorrel. She gave up a promising career as a concert pianist for love, but her husband turned out to be more interested in his job than in her. She’s just written him a letter asking for a divorce when she hears that he’s been struck by a drunk driver and is in hospital. Getting to see him proves more difficult than you might expect.

Along the way we encounter the lecherous Dr. Barrymore, and Audrey, a young girl who has a crush on her piano teacher, Mme. Sorrel. Not to mention a very mysterious gentleman who claims to be a secret service agent. There may, or may not, be a plot to plunge the world into a nuclear war, which may explain why M. Sorrel is so distracted by his work at the UN. It is all very deliberately mysterious. And even if I could work out what is going on I suspect I would not be allowed to tell you. Indeed, as Moebius says, “In Pachyderme lies something mysterious and obvious that must, above all, not be explained.”

What I can tell you is that the art is very striking, and that Gauvin’s translation is superb. It is a beautiful book and I’m delighted to have a copy.

Sadly, on the Hugo front, Pachyderme won’t be available in the USA until later this year, so it will probably get caught in the split vote trap, but it is well worth looking out for.

Self Made Hero also sent me another Gauvin translation: We Won’t See Auschwitz by Jérémie Dres. This appears to be autobiography — the story of how Dres and his brother made a pilgrimage to Poland to seek out their grandmother’s roots. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, and it doesn’t appear to be Hugo material, but it does look fascinating. Here’s a Guardian review if you are interested.

An Essential World SF Reference Work

~ Cheryl

Today I received a review copy of World SF in Translation, a bibliography of around 3,500 science fiction novels and stories that have been translated into English. It covers 1165 authors from 54 different countries. The author is Finnish scholar, Jari Koponen, and the book’s brief preface is printed in Finnish, Swedish and English. The vast majority of the content, however, is in English because it is titles of books and stories. The book is readable by anyone who can read English.

Sadly, having come from a Finnish publisher, Avain, the book isn’t easily available. It is also quite expensive, being a specialist work. It looks like you can buy copies here. Possibly someone from Finland will know of a better source. Anyway, it is an amazing resource, and one that deserves to be more widely known.

Also, Best Related Work. It will be on my ballot.

Small Blue Planet Update

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday Karen Burnham and I recorded episode 2 of Small Blue Planet, with special guests Ken Liu and Chen Qiufan. It will be a week or two before it goes online because there is a substantial time lag on Skype calls to Beijing and Karen needs to clean up the recording to get rid of all the silent pauses. It was, however, great fun to do,and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did when it finally airs. Ken had some really interesting things to say about translating from Chinese, and we discussed lots of interesting Chinese writers.

In the meantime, of course, episode 1, on Finland, is available from the Locus Roundtable blog. I’ve had quite a bit of feedback from listeners in the Nordic countries, but nothing much from elsewhere. This is a country bidding for a Worldcon, folks. You should be finding out about them.

New Podcast – Small Blue Planet

~ Cheryl ~ 12 Comments

Yes, I know, the last thing I should be doing right now is starting a new project. Don’t I have enough to do already? I thought of that myself. But this was such a good idea, so I’m doing it.

I blame Karen Lord. I was chatting on email to her and Karen Burnham, mainly about their awesome SF Crossing the Gulf podcast. Ms. Lord said something to the effect that someone should do a podcast about translation. Oh, I thought, that had better be me. Fortunately Ms. Burnham thought it was a good idea too, and offered to produce it and get it online. All I have to do is find the guests and interview them. And that, I can assure you, will be a pleasure.

The podcast will be called Small Blue Planet. The basic idea is that each month I will have two guests on the show, spotlighting a different country each episode. The guests will mostly come from countries where English is not the dominant language. They will be readers, writers and translators of science fiction and fantasy. I’ll get them to talk about the SF&F scene in their country, and also about their language. We’ll talk about conventions and fanzines, about their local writers, about what English-speaking writers are popular in their country, and about the pros and cons of their language and culture for writing SF&F.

Karen will be putting the finished podcasts up on the Locus Roundtable blog. And hopefully she’ll ask a few questions of her own during the discussion.

There was no question which country I should start with. Our guests for January will be Jukka Halme and Marianna Leikomaa. They have both chaired successful Finncons. Jukka is one of Finland’s foremost SF&F critics, and Marianna is an experienced translator. And yes, we will talk a bit about that Finnish Worldcon bid. We’ll also talk about Johanna Sinisalo, Hannu Rajaniemi, and many wonderful writers that you are probably not yet familiar with.

We will celebrate the Chinese New Year in February by talking to Ken Liu and Stanley Chan (Chen Qiufan). Ken is the first person ever to win the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award for the same story (“The Paper Menagerie”). Together they won the 2012 SF&F Translation Award: Short Form for Ken’s translation of Stanley’s “The Fish of Lijiang” (Clarkesworld #59). Stanley works for Google in Beijing and has won several awards for his fiction in China.

In March we move on to another emerging economic power: Brazil. Our guests will be Fábio Fernandes and Jacques Barcia. You probably know Fábio from his articles on SF Signal and other places. You may not know that he is the Brazilian Portuguese translator for Neuromancer, Snow Crash, A Clockwork Orange and many other fine books. Jacques is an author and musician. Several of his stories have appeared in English.

That’s as far as the planning goes right now. In April and May I’m likely to be at conventions in Europe and hope to do some live recordings there. I also have plans to reach out to Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Occasionally we’ll visit countries that we might think of as English-speaking, but which have a wide range of local languages as well; places such as India and South Africa. Some of you are probably thinking that I’ll be pestering you soon, and you may well be right. Email if you are keen.

The plan is to try to do one episode a month. However, I’m not going to advertise a precise schedule. It all depends on when our guests are available. Also Karen has her job at NASA and a small son to worry about, and I have a publishing company and bookstore to run. Don’t worry though, we’ll both blog and tweet about new episodes as they become available.

I am so excited about this. Initially it will give me a chance to promote the work of some talented friends, and longer term I’m hoping I’ll make new friends in countries I know little about. I know I’ll learn a lot, and I hope you will too.

New From ISF

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Roberto Mendes has been very busy, and I have been very remiss in not tweeting about it. Issue #2 of International Speculative Fiction came out just before Winterval (well, during it, as my thoroughly pagan holiday begins with the equinox). I put the email to one side then, and forgot about it. I should not have done, as the issue contains, amongst other things, fiction by Ken Liu and Lavie Tidhar, plus and interview with Rachel Haywood Ferreira. And it is free. Get it here.

Issue #3 should be with us fairly soon. The table of contents is available here, and the thing I’m really interested in is “Pulp Scifi under German, Russian, Japanese and Spanish Totalitarism” by Jess Nevins. How Jess finds out about all this stuff I do not know, but he’s always a fascinating read.

ISF #2

Coming in 2014 from Finland

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Talking of foreign authors, I have some good news from Finland. Tero Ykspetäjä reports that Finnish writer, Emmi Itäranta, has been signed to a two-book deal with HarperVoyager. Like Hannu Rajaniemi, Emmi lives in the UK, so she may be doing the translations herself, or they may still be looking for someone. The first book, Memory of Water (Teemestarin kirja in the original Finnish), will be published in spring 2014. According to to the official HarperVoyager press release:

The book is set in a future Scandinavian Union where clean water is in short supply and most people survive on desalinated rations from the new government. There are serious consequences for water crime: if found guilty, people simply disappear, leaving behind a mysterious blue circle which appears on their doors.

The book has already been a success in Finland. Last week Emmi was one of three writers to be awarded the €16,000 Kalevi Jäntti Literary Prize for young authors.

Translation Awards Eligibility Lists

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Over at the Translation Awards website I have posted the lists of works we have been able to find that are eligible for next year’s awards. (There are also a couple of 2011 works published towards the end of last year that we missed.)

I’m delighted to see so many interesting books and stories listed. As always, the indefatigable Brian Stableford has produced a torrent of translated books from Black Coat Press. Those are mainly quite old books, but I’m pleased to see that Black Coat are doing books by contemporary French writers such as Sylvie Miller and Philippe Ward. Haikasoru and Kurodahan are continuing to do excellent work with Japanese translations, and it looks like we can now rely on Beijing Guomi Digital Technology for a steady supply of translations from Chinese. Lavie Tidhar’s Apex Book of World SF series continues to produce interesting stories. And thanks should go to my friends at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath who supply me with lots of interesting translated works from non-genre publishers that nevertheless seem to fit our remit.

One thing I am sure about, however, is that I won’t have got everything. There are bound to be short stories in online magazines that I have missed, for example. If you know of something you think the jury should be looking at, and it isn’t listed, please let me know, either here or over on the Translation Awards website.

International Round-Up

~ Cheryl

Why yes, Virginia, there is science fiction written in Arabic. It even gets written by women. See here for an interview with Arab writer, Noura Noman.

You may also want to check out this article about Tunisian literature. Naturally the Tunisians have a strong interest in Carthage.

Meanwhile the tireless Jonathan Clements has made a major update to the China entry at the SF Encyclopedia. He talks about it here.

And finally, Small Beer Press have announced a new novel by the great Argentinian science fiction writer, Angélica Gorodischer. Translated by Amalia Gladhart, Trafalgar will be available in February 2013.

Interview with Karin Tidbeck

~ Cheryl

Via friends in Spain I have discovered this interview with Swedish writer, Karin Tidbeck. If you are still wondering whether to buy a copy of Jagannath (which is one of the best-selling titles in my store right now) then perhaps reading the interview will help you make up your mind.

In the interview Karin talks, amongst other things, about why she has chosen to focus on creatures from Scandinavian folks tales, such as the vittra, rather than the much better known Norse gods. She also talks a bit about her debut novel, Amatka, which is currently only available in Swedish but will appear in English in due course.

The Original Time Machine

~ Cheryl

Those of you who remember my posts about the science fiction exhibition at the British Museum might recall my mention of a novel about a time machine that preceded the one by H.G. Wells. Why do so few people seem to know about this? Because it is in Spanish, of course, and we English speakers are very bad about noticing things in other languages.

But no longer. The fine folks at Wesleyan University Press have produced an English language edition of The Time Ship, by Enrique Gaspar, translated by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán & Andrea Bell. The book contains illustrations by Francesc Soler from the original 1887 edition. I quote briefly from the blurb:

Dr. Sindulfo is joined by a motley crew of French prostitutes and Spanish soldiers, traveling to exotic locales like Paris, Morocco, China, Pompeii and even the beginnings of the universe.

I’m delighted to see that the good Doctor thought to equip his craft with a washing machine and various automatic cooking devices, though possibly this is because he felt that his female passengers had more important things to do than housework.

The book is available from the usual outlets, including ebook editions. It is a bit expensive as it is from an academic press, but I guess the market for this sort of thing is quite small.

Of course it goes straight onto the jury’s reading list for next year’s Translation Awards.

Also in the package from Wesleyan that arrived this morning was a copy of Starboard Wine by Samuel R. Delany, which Matt Cheney describes much better than I could (given that Wesleyan had him write the introduction).

Anne Leinonen Interview

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The International Speculative Fiction blog is running an interview that I did with Finnish writer, Anne Leinonen. It talks mainly about the award-nominated YA dystopia series that Anne is writing with her friend Eija Lappalainen, and the problems of trying to sell such books in translation. You can read it here.

Podcasty Goodness

~ Cheryl

In the latest Locus Roundtable podcast Karen Burnham conducts a fascinating interview with Anil Menon and Vandana Singh in which they talk, amongst other things, about the large amount of science fiction and fantasy written in India that is largely unknown outside of the country because it is written in various local languages and only published in India. Hopefully we’ll be getting to read some of that in English soon.

Talking of India, on my way to and from Finncon I read Samit Basu’s fine debut novel, Turbulence. This is a story about Indian superheroes. It is delightfully different, and a lot of fun. There will be a review coming soon.

Meanwhile, back on the podcasts, the latest Outer Alliance episode contains an interview with the very wonderful Elizabeth Hand. Liz talks very openly about her latest book, Radiant Days, about the influence of Patti Smith on her writing, about Rimbaud, and about some very personal stuff as well. As Julia Rios notes, Liz has always had LGBT characters in her work. That reminds me that I should thank Liz for Waking the Moon again.

Introducing Sjón

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Last night I attended a reading at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath. The guest was Icelandic poet, lyricist and novelist, Sjón. He was on his way home from the Hay Festival, and I’m seriously impressed that Mr. B’s got him. Why is he such a big name? Well, he wrote the lyrics for the opening song of the Athens Olympics. He was nominated for an Oscar for a song from the Catherine Deneuve film, Dancer in the Dark, which he wrote with his friend and frequent collaborator, Björk. His novel, The Blue Fox, won Iceland’s top literary prize, has been translated into 23 languages, and in the UK was a finalist for The Independent‘s Foreign Fiction Prize. He’s good.

The main reason I was there is that his novel, The Whispering Muse, has just been translated into English, and it definitely counts as fantasy. It is the sort of book that UK literary critics will be able to pigeonhole as “magic realism” so that they can read it without catching fantasy cooties, but there’s a very strong mythic element to it. One of the characters is a Greek hero who sailed on the Argo and is still alive in 1949.

So I went along to see if I could get this guy to send the jury his book for next year’s Translation Awards, and we ended up having a lovely conversation that ranged from Phil Dick and Robert Sheckley to Johanna Sinisalo and the Avengers movie. Win!

I’ll have a review of The Whispering Muse up in a few days time.

Taking Translators For Granted

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

As many of you will know, I’m quite keen on promoting translation of literature from one language to another. In order to make that happen, we need talented people to do the translating. It is well known that translators are pretty badly paid, but that’s nothing compared to how poorly translators of the Harry Potter books have been treated by Warner Brothers. Gilli Bar-Hillel explains.

New International SF Website

~ Cheryl

Via the good folks at the World SF Blog, I have discovered a new website devoted to science fiction from non-Anglophone countries: International Speculative Fiction. Run by Portguese fan, Roberto Mendes, it aims to publish stories by non-Anglophone writers, primarily in English translation. It will also publish articles and interviews focused on SF from non-Anglophone countries. Roberto has no revenue as yet, so he can’t pay, but most of us are in that boat. Here’s hoping that it is very successful.