My main source on all things translation-related, Brett Jocelyn Epstein (her Brave New Words blog is linked to the right) has recently published an excellent article (“Educating the Customer”) in Translation Journal that calls to mind many of the issues other freelancers/writers share when it comes to getting paid a fair wage for their work. Read it!
As our newsletter readers already know, I’m about to leave for a writing residency. So in all likelihood, I’ll be taking a complete break from the blog for the next month. But I’ll leave you with a virtual grab bag of items to keep you busy for at least a little while. And don’t forget to check our links, archives, Web site, and e-books while we’re gone.
Have a great October!
* National Endowment for the Arts Announces International Literary Exchanges: This press release details a new program “to initiate literary translation projects and publications between the United States and other countries.”
*No-cost (no entry fee) contest: Genealogy Essay Competition (via PayingWriterJobs)
* Profile of new magazine, Sherman’s Travel, over at Bacon’s The Navigator.
*And finally, from PoetryFoundation.org:
“How To (and How Not To) Write Poetry”
Selections from Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska’s Polish newspaper column.
“Rejection Slip? What Rejection Slip?”
Daniel Nester’s profile of Lyn Lifshin, “who might be one of the most prolific poets in the universe.”
You may already have heard that President Bush’s summer reading included Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Poets & Writers tells us about some of the other titles on his recent list online.
Wonder if the President would now enjoy my review essay on Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, in the Winter-Spring 2006 Chattahoochee Review.
That piece is only available in print, but I’ll give you (and the President, of course) a peek here into the first several paragraphs:
Albert Camus entered my life in 1986, when I was a high school junior assigned to read The Stranger in French IV class. As a college sophomore studying Modern European History and Literature a few years later I read The Plague. And our relationship could have ended there. That’s about as much Camus as most Americans will ever read.
But Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 (he was then 43 years old) and died in an automobile crash three years later was, as I learned during my junior spring semester in Paris, much more than a mere novelist. He was a journalist, too.
And he was a journalist in difficult times, including the moment of German occupation. In fact, it was en pleine occupation that Camus became editor-in-chief of Combat, a resistance newspaper published clandestinely and irregularly until the liberation in the summer of 1944. This translation of Camus at Combat, which was originally produced in France in 2002, collects 165 of his Combat editorials and articles, some attributed to him from Combat‘s clandestine phasae, but most dating from the post-liberation and early postwar period.
It is a tremendous book. And it is significant not only for those, like me, with longstanding intellectual and emotional attachments to the author and the original texts (that junior spring I chose the postwar purges of French writers and journalists as my senior honors thesis topic; before I left France that summer I spent many hours in the French National Library, reading Camus’ many Combat editorials on the subject on microfilm), but for anyone interested in history, politics, or journalism.
Two Lines, a journal of world literature translated into English, is now seeking work for its 2007 annual anthology of international writing. They’re looking for “original translations into English of writing from any genre–including fiction, poetry, drama, reportage, proverbs, song lyrics, diaries, oral histories, case studies, essays–and short articles concerning the translation process.” They’d be especially happy for “works in new genres and rarer languages,” as well as “submissions of writing from non-European authors.”
Two Lines pays $35 for each accepted submission that’s published (“a group of works by one author is considered a single submission”).
Deadline: October 12, 2006.
AND, if you have an anthology proposal in mind, they’d like to hear about that, too.
Full guidelines here.
(via CRWROPPS)
Awhile back I mentioned a great new resource for translators: Brett Jocelyn Epstein’s Brave New Words blog. Recently Brett’s been posting on the subject of finding translation jobs. Read this post for some good leads/links.