Best European Fiction 2017
Page 33
IVAN TOKIN was born in Belgrade in 1971. His first novel, Najnormalniji čovek na svetu (The Most Normal Man in the World), published in 2014, had eight reprints in less than a year and was shortlisted for the annual NIN Award for Best Novel of the Year 2015. His collection of short stories Molekuli (Molecules) was also published in 2015. He lives in Belgrade. He hopes for the best.
TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHIES
KRISTIN ADDIS translates primarily between Spanish or Basque and English, and is one of few who translate directly from Basque into English. She specializes in literary translation (short stories, novels, poetry) and has also translated works about the Basque language and culture. Ms. Addis has spent many years in the Basque Country; she currently resides in Iowa.
MARTIN AITKEN is the translator of a host of works from Danish, including books by Kim Leine, Peter Høeg, Dorthe Nors, and Helle Helle. His translation of Ida Jessen’s novel En ny tid (A Change of Time) will be published in the US by Archipelago Books.
ALISTAIR IAN BLYTH was born in Sunderland, England, and attended the universities of Cambridge and Durham. He ended up in Romania at the end of the last century and has remained there ever since. His translations from the Romanian include, most recently, the novel The Bulgarian Truck by Dumitru Tsepeneag, published by Dalkey Archive Press.
DAVID BURNETT was born in 1973 in the Greater Cleveland area and has lived in Leipzig, Germany, since 1995. His first book-length translation was the East German novel New Glory by Günter de Bruyn, published by Northwestern in 2009. He received a 2014 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Pragueborn Johannes Urzidil, a selection of which is forthcoming from Pushkin Press.
GREGOR TIMOTHEY ČEH was born and brought up in a bilingual family in Slovenia. After studying at UCL in London he taught English in Greece and then completed a Masters at Kent. He now lives in Cyprus and regularly translates contemporary Slovene literature for publishing houses and authors in Slovenia with translations published in both the UK and US.
PAUL CURTIS DAW is a lapsed lawyer whose translation of Evelyne Trouillot’s novel Memory at Bay was published in 2015 by the University of Virginia Press. His work also appears in Words Without Borders, Best European Fiction 2016, Subtropics, Cimarron Review, K1N, carte blanche, Indiana Review, and nowhere. He serves as an officer and director of the American Literary Translators Association.
PAUL FILEV is a freelance translator and editor living in Melbourne, Australia. He is the recipient of a Dalkey Archive Press Fellowship. He translates from Macedonian and Spanish. His translations from Macedonian include The Last Summer in the Old Bazaar by Vera Bužarovska and Alma Mahler by Sasho Dimoski, forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. He is currently working on the translation of a novel from Spanish, Blue Label by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles.
MARGITA GAILITIS was born in Riga, Latvia, immigrating to Canada as a child with her family. Gailitis returned to Riga in 1998 to work as a translator of Latvian laws into English in support of Latvia’s application for membership in the European Union, achieved in 2004. Today Gailitis focuses her energy on literary translation and poetry. She has translated some of Latvia’s finest poetry, prose, and dramaturgy and is a tireless advocate for Latvian literature worldwide, for which she was awarded in 2011 the prestigious Three Star Order by the President of Latvia. Gailitis’s own award-winning poetry has been published in periodicals in Canada, the US, and Europe.
MATTHEW HYDE is a literary translator from Russian and Estonian to English. He has had a number of translated short stories and novels published by Dalkey Archive Press, Words Without Borders, Pushkin Press (forthcoming), and Vagabond Voices (forthcoming). Prior to becoming a translator, Matthew worked for ten years for the British Foreign Office as an analyst, policy officer, and diplomat, serving at the British Embassies in Moscow and Tallinn, where he was Deputy Head of Mission. After that last posting Matthew chose to remain in Tallinn with his partner and baby son, where he translates and plays the double bass.
JOVANKA KALABA is a Belgrade-based literary translator, passionate about finding exceptional pieces of Serbian and Yugoslav fiction and contributing to their worldwide recognition through her translations. Her most important translations include Jovanka Živanović’s novel Fragile Travelers (2016, Dalkey Archive Press) and “Mila and the Stranger,” a story by Ivo Andric, the Yugoslav winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
ROMAS KINKA works as a forensic linguist and literary translator; he believes one discipline complements the other. His translation of Kristina Sabaliauskaitė’s Vilnius Wilno Vilna: Three Short Stories was published in 2015 and his translation of Undinė Radzevičiūtė’s novel Žuvys ir drakonai (Fishes and Dragons) is scheduled for publication at the beginning of 2018.
VIJA KOSTOFF is a linguist, language teacher, writer, and editor. She has collaborated with Margita Gailitis in translating the novels, short stories, plays, film scripts, and poetry of many of Latvia’s major writers. Born in Latvia, she now resides in Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada.
ELIZABETH LOWE is the founding director of the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and currently teaches in the New York University MS in Translation. She has translated both Brazilian and Lusophone writers, including Clarice Lispector, Euclides da Cunha, Machado de Assis, J.P. Cuenca, Antônio Lobo Antunes, and most recently João de Melo. Her translation of J.P. Cuenca’s The Happiest Ending for a Love Story is an Accident (2013) was a finalist for the IMPAC award. The Brazilian Academy of Letters recognized her for the second translation of the national classic Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha (Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, 2010). She resides in Gainesville, Florida.
ERIKA MIHÁLYCSA teaches twentieth-century British and Anglo-Irish fiction at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj. She is the editor, together with Rainer J. Hanshe, of the arts journal Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics (Contra Mundum Press), and is a prolific translator of contemporary British and Irish fiction and poetry into Hungarian. Her translations of contemporary Hungarian writing have appeared in World Literature Today, Two Lines, Trafika Europe, and Numéro Cinq.
ANDREW OAKLAND is a translator of fiction, poetry, and biography from Czech and German. Novels in his translation include Radka Denemarková’s Money from Hitler (Women’s Press, Toronto, 2009) and Michal Ajvaz’s The Golden Age (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010; a 2011 BTBA Fiction Finalist) and Empty Streets (Dalkey Archive Press, 2016).
SARAH OSA studied Japanese and Chinese Studies at Cambridge University, UK, and Arts and Cultural Management at Pratt Institute, New York. She has worked in the classical music industry since 2005 in New York, London, and Oslo, and is also active as a freelance translator. She lives in Zurich.
URSULA PHILLIPS is a British translator. Her translation of Zofia Nalkowska’s 1927 novel Choucas (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014) won the Found in Translation Award 2015, while Nalkowska’s Boundary appeared in May 2016 (also from NIUP). Other translations include Maria Wirtemberska (Malvina, or The Heart’s Intuition), Narcyza Zmichowska (The Heathen), and Wieslaw Mysliwski (The Palace).
TEGAN RALEIGH is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Santa Barbara. She has translated works of both fiction and non-fiction from French and German into English, for which she has received awards that include the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association.
JAMIE RICHARDS is the translator of several works from Italian and Spanish, including Giovanni Orelli’s Walaschek’s Dream and Serena Vitale’s interviews with Viktor Shklovsky, Witness to an Era. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon.
BRENDAN RILEY is an ATA Certified Translator of Spanish to English. He holds degrees in English from Santa Clara University and Rutgers University and certificates in Translation Studies from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois. His translations include Álvaro Enrigue’s Hypotherm
ia, Juan Filloy’s Caterva, and Carlos Fuentes’s The Great Latin American Novel.
DOUGLAS ROBINSON has been translating from Finnish since 1975, including entries in BEF 2010 and BEF 2015. His most recent translation is of Aleksis Kivi’s great 1870 novel Seitsemän veljestä, which he has translated as “The Brothers Seven.” He is Chair Professor of English at HKBU in Hong Kong.
ANGELA RODEL is a literary translator living in Bulgaria. She received a 2014 NEA Translation Grant for Georgi Gospodinov’s novel The Physics of Sorrow. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2016 PEN Translation Award. Six novels in her translation have been published by US and UK publishers. Her translations have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including McSweeney’s, Little Star, Granta, Two Lines, The White Review, and Words Without Borders.
PETRA ŠLOSEL is a translator and art historian, holding a double MA in Translation Studies and Art History from the University of Zagreb. Currently working on a research project for the Croatian Association of Visual Artists, she is simultaneously pursuing her interest in literary translation. She lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.
JAN STEYN is a literary translator and critic who works on modern and contemporary texts written in Afrikaans, Dutch, English, and French. His literary translations include Newspaper, Works, and Suicide by Edouard Levé; Orphans by Hadrien Laroche; and Alix’s Journal by Alix Cléo Roubaud.
KAREN VAN DYCK directs Hellenic Studies at Columbia University. Her recent translations include The Scattered Papers of Penelope (Graywolf, 2009), a Lannan selection, The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2009), and the Guardian Poetry Book of the Month Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (Penguin 2016).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PUBLICATION OF BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2017 was made possible by generous support from the following cultural agencies and embassies:
DGLB—The General Directorate for Books and Libraries / Portugal
Etxepare Basque Institute
Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles
Illinois Arts Council
Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago
Kulturstyrelsen—Danish Agency for Culture
Lichtensteinische Landesverwaltung
Norwegian Literature Abroad
Polish Cultural Institute
Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council
Slovenian Book Agency
Welsh Books Council
RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS
A as in Anything © 2006 Iana Boukova. Translation © 2016 Angela Rodel.
“Bad Town” © 2015 Liza Alexandrova-Zorina. Translation © 2016 Matthew Hyde.
“Beba” © 2011 Snežana Mladenovska Angjelkov. Translation © 2016 Paul Filev.
“Chafer” © 2013 Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. English version © 2013 Ann Cotten.
“A Comfort of Sorts” © 2013 De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam. Translation © 2016 Jan Steyn.
“The Commander’s Endless Night” © 2007 David Machado. This story was written for Scritture Giovani 2007, promoted by the Festivaletteratura Mantova in collaboration with The Hay Festival, internationales literaturfestival berlin, and Bjørnsonfestivalen Molde. Translation © 2016 Elizabeth Lowe.
“Confectionery 1952” © 2016 Zsuzsa Selyem & Jelenkor Kiadó. Translation © 2016 Erika Mihálycsa.
“Death by Laughter” © 2014 Nino Aragno Editore. Translation © 2016 Jamie Richards.
“The Dogs Down South” & “The Rower” © 2010 Mikko-Pekka Heikkinen & Johnny Kniga/WSOY. First published in 2010 by Johnny Kniga, an imprint of Werner Söderström Ltd., with the Finnish titles “Etelän koirat” and “Soutaja” in the short story collection Nuorgamin alkon tuho ja muutama erätarina. Published by arrangement with Bonnier Rights Finland, Helsinki. Translation © 2016 Douglas Robinson.
“Don’t Ask for Gagarin” © 2014 Carlos Robles Lucena. Translation © 2016 Brendan Riley.
“Duran” © 2002 Cló Iar-Chonnacht Teo. Translation © 2016 Daithí Ó Muirí.
“Everyone’s the Same Inside” © 2016 Wayne Price.
“Haritina” © 2005 Ruxandra Cesereanu & Editura Polirom (Iaşi, Romania). Translation © 2016 Alistair Ian Blyth.
The Hunger of Women © 2012 Piero Manni s.r.l. Translation © 2016 Jamie Richards.
Jonny and Jean © 2014 Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. Translation © 2016 David Burnett.
Last Night © 2014 Meandarmedia. Translation © 2016 Petra Šlosel
“Lion Cubs” © 2014 Jiří Hájíček & Host – vydavatelství, s. r. o. Translation © 2016 Andrew Oakland.
“The Mirror” & “The Scream” © 2016 Karmele Jaio. Translation © 2016 Kristin Addis.
Molecules © 2015 Ivan Tokin. Translation © 2016 Jovanka Kalaba.
“Moondust” © 2016 Jonathan Huston. Translation © 2016 Jonathan Huston. The English translation of “Mondstaub” will appear in the Spring 2017 issue of Quiddity.
Not as in Paradise © 2013 Agnieszka Taborska. Translation © 2016 Ursula Phillips.
“Opium” © 2015 Undinė Radzevičiūtė & Baltų lankų leidyba. Translation © 2016 Romas Kinka.
“Postcard to Annie” © 2013 Ida Jessen. Translation © 2016 Martin Aitken.
Stand-by-the-hour (Debout-payé) © 2014 Le nouvel Attila—Paris, France. © Société nouvelle des éditions Anne Carrière—Paris, France. Translation © 2016 Tegan Raleigh.
“Surrounded” © 2014 Forlaget Oktober. Translation © 2014 Aschehoug Agency.
A Taste of Lead © 2015 Dienas Grāmata. Translation © 2016 Margita Gailitis.
“Think of Me in the Good Times” © 2011 Maja Gal Štromar. Translation © 2016 Gregor Timothy Čeh.
“The Two Writers” © 2014 Editions L’Age d’Homme. All rights reserved for all countries. Translation © 2016 by Paul Curtis Daw.
“The Untrodden” © 2015 Elena Penga. Translation © 2016 Karen Van Dyck