Today’s Wall Street Journal gives a glowing review of Marian Schwartz’s translation of White Guard, the first novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940), famed Soviet-era author best known for Master and Margarita.

Written in the 1920s, White Guard focuses on the household of Dr. Alexei Tuchin, his sister and brother, and assorted military officers and friends.

The unnamed urban locality at the novel’s center is clearly Kiev a year after the Bolsheviks seized power.

The remains of the Russian Empire are in turmoil, none more so than Ukraine, where the civil war is raging with particular ferocity. No fewer than 18 different regimes — led by Germans, Poles, Ukrainian nationalists, monarchists known as the Whites and the Bolsheviks themselves — will eventually claim control of Kiev, lifting their banners over the ancient city.

With this edition of White Guard, translator Marian Schwartz has done a handsome job of matching Bulgakov’s rich Russian vocabulary and attention to meticulous detail.

Elke Wehr — one of Germany’s best known Spanish translators — died last Friday in Berlin, at age 62, according to Suhrkamp Publishers of Frankfurt. Wehr gained notoriety with her translations of key works by Javier Marías of Spain, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, Julio Cortázar of Argentina, and Octavio Paz of Mexico, among others. In 2006, she was awarded the Paul Celan Prize by the German Literary Fund in recognition of her works, particularly her translation of Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos’ masterpiece Yo, el Supremo which was considered the most difficult adaption.

She was not only an extraordinary translator, but also took it upon herself to discover new authors, according to Jürgen Dormagen of Suhrkamp. Wehr’s last translation was the novel Los días azules by Colombian author Fernando Vallejo, whose German edition will be published this August.

The final issue of The AATIA Letter is now online. This (July 2008) issue provides advance details about September’s Translation Tools workshop, led by Jost Zetzsche, and AATIA’s July 12 member meeting, which will spotlight Austin’s Sister Cities.

It also contains farewells from regular columnist and cartoonist Tony Beckwith and editor Michael Conner, plus a recap of entries posted on the blog in the period since the previous issue of the newsletter.

Citing an increased work load in his freelance translation business, Al Favela has announced that he is stepping down from his position as AATIA Director of Finance, effective immediately. The Board is grateful to Al for his years of service to the Association in this capacity.

Members interested in volunteering for the role of Director of Finance are asked to contact Secretary Julie Nordskog.

AATIA business member McElroy Translation Company is partnering with automated translation technology provider Asia Online Portals to collaborate on new technologies based on the symbiotic relationship between machine translation (MT) and human translation. The partnership combines Asia Online’s statistical MT platform and interactive continuous improvement environment with McElroy Translation’s linguistic expertise in technical and patent translations.

Source: Multilingual News, May 28, 2008; thanks to Julie Nordskog for the tip.

Words Without Borders, the online magazine for international literature, recently published Marian Schwartz’s translation of Mikhail Shishkin’s short story Calligraphy Lesson.

Schwartz introduces the translation with some thoughts about the specific problems she faced in conveying the story’s description of the calligraphy of Cyrillic letters to an English-speaking reader. She decided not only to translate the word in question, but also to reproduce the Russian word.

In the predigital era, when Cyrillic characters were technically difficult to reproduce and so were rarely included in translations, I might have been inclined (or forced) to go the other way. Thanks to modern technology and to the fact that Shishkin’s description was based on the letters’ visual characteristics, which English readers could see and appreciate for themselves, I did not have to forgo Shishkin’s tour de force….

Martyn Hitchcock’s translation of the poem "Da waren Deutsche auch dabei" ("Germans Among Them Did Abound") has been published in Schulhaus Reporter, the newsletter of the German-Texan Heritage Society.

Hitchcock describes the poem as "19th-century German-American chauvinistic doggerel." The author, Konrad Krez, was born in 1828 in Landau (Palatinate), Germany. He is one of several "1848′ers" who fled political repression. He was a lawyer, poet, and active in Wisconsin politics. He died in 1897 in Milwaukee.

Belgian Paul Verhaeghen, who won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel Omega Minor, has decided to donate his prize money to the ACLU. Normally the prize is split between author and translator, but having translated his own novel into English from the original Dutch, he won the entire prize.

An excerpt from his acceptance statement (which can be found in its entirety on his blog Babylon Blues:

…to avoid supporting the regime with more tax dollars than I already owe them, I have asked the Arts Council England to donate the money associated with the Prize, all 10,000 pounds of it, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink - its cost is currently 3,810 dollar per second - but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it.

We are not immune to history. But neither is history immune to us.

Thanks to Marian Schwartz for passing along this amazing news, which she found on E.J. Van Lanen’s Three Percent.