Contributions by Addie Leak
Addie Leak has translated, among other things, the subtitles for Martinican Fabienne Kanor's film Husbands of the Night, Khaled Khalifa's pleas for raised consciousness about Syria in the Huffington Post (Feb 2012), and the Congolese short story "Me and My Hair" by Bibish Marie-Louise Mumbu, forthcoming in 91st Meridian. While she still translates primarily from French, she entered into Spanish-language literature through Lorca, Cernuda, and Goytisolo and came to Borges’ short stories through his translation theory, thereby discovering a love of Latin American literature. Most recent favorite read (more accurately, most recent obsession) in translation: Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva, translated by Stefan Tobler.
I’ve Lost Everything I Loved (excerpt)
from J’ai perdu tout ce que j’aimais by Sacha Sperling
translated by Addie Leak
I had decided that my name would be Sacha Sperling and that my life would be dazzling and spectacular.
I’d understood that the only way to exist was to become someone else.
I’d written a book.
The book was a success.
It was translated into languages I didn’t speak.
For two years, the foreign versions accumulated in my bookcase. My face was on some; on others, young Asian boys in suggestive poses. Most of the covers looked like the anti-tobacco posters stuck to the walls of school infirmaries.
The book was simple. It was a bunch of scenes telling the story of a lost teenager in love with his best friend. A fourteen-year-old boy almost mechanically recounting the dissolute lives of his … Read More »
Revealing the local
translated by Addie Leak
The vicissitudes of literary endogamy can be highly enigmatic; in some cases, they can be equally wonderful. Javier Calvo, the most prolific and delightfully eccentric of Spain’s contemporary novelists, also happens to be the translator of David Foster Wallace, J. M. Coetzee, Michael Chabon, H.G. Wells, among others. Here he discusses the market for translations in English and in Spanish with fiction-writer and translator Mara Faye Lethem. A native New Yorker now living in Barcelona, Mara is Javier’s wife, the mother of his children, and his translator. She is also the sister of Jonathan Lethem, a writer introduced to Spanish-language readers by his brother-in-law, Javier. Following this conversation, we are pleased to present an excerpt from Javier’s latest novel, The Hanging Garden, awarded the Seix Barral Biblioteca Breve Prize, in Mara’s translation.
* … Read More »
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