The next AATIA Literary Special Interest Group will meet Saturday, January 12, from 2 to 4 p.m. Traci Andrighetti will present an excerpt from Rossana Campo’s The American Actor for review. Contact LitSIG Coordinator Marian Schwartz for directions. By way of introduction, Andrighetti had this to say:

This excerpt is from the latter pages of Rossana Campo’s The American Actor, a novel about an Italian journalist who decides to spend the holidays in New York hunting down an American actor with whom she had a one-night stand following the opening of his latest film in Paris, where she lives and works.

At this point in the story, our protagonist is in the process of discovering that the actor, Steve Rothman, with whom she is by now completely infatuated, is less like his character in the recent love story he has made and more like his characters in the gratuitously violent films “Dangerous Men” and “Bloody Brothers.”

Incidentally, the “storm” she refers to in the opening sentence of the excerpt has to do with the first sign she has seen of Steve’s dark side the previous evening.

Rossana Campo, born in Genoa to Neapolitan parents in 1963, writes novels, short stories, and theater. Her writing, recognized as part of an innovative literary style known as “New Fiction,” incorporates youth jargon and irony in the depiction of issues affecting the lives of women and has earned Campo recognition in Italy and abroad. She was a finalist in 1994 for the Premio nazionale di narrativa Bergamo and again this year for the Premio Ricercare. In 1999 her first novel, In principio erano le mutande (Feltrinelli, 1992), was made into a film directed by Anna Negri, for which Campo co-wrote the screenplay. In addition, several of her novels have been translated into Spanish, German and French, and one of her short stories has appeared in English.

Despite the paucity of her work in English translation, Campo’s fiction is often the subject of study in universities in both the United States and Great Britain. Because her work is closely related to the American postmodernist culture of quotation and parody, I believe that Campo would enjoy a wide audience in the United States. Unfortunately, not all of the university presses I have approached agree with me.

Colleague and friend A. Leslie Willson Jr., highly respected educator and translator of contemporary German literature, died December 28, 2007, in Austin.

Among many accomplishments, he served for eight years as chairman of the German Department at UT-Austin, and for 20 years he edited Dimension, a groundbreaking bilingual literary magazine dedicated to the presentation of contemporary German-language authors. He was a co-founder and first president (1978 – 1979) of the American Literary Translators Association. He also served as president of the American Translators Association (1991 – 1993). He was recognized for his scholarly work with awards from the Goethe Institute and German government. An obituary appeared in the Austin American-Statesman.

Download the January issue of The AATIA Letter.

This issue contains articles by regular contributors Tony Beckwith and Frank Dietz, plus a recap of recent meetings and news.

A preview of Tony Beckwith’s latest wordplay:

They say if we bring the kit, they’ve got the kaboodle.

The Double-Tongued Dictionary offers the following new term: Growing numbers of Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants are marrying and having U.S.-born children, creating mixed Latino families with ties to three countries at once. The mixture has become so common in Phoenix, some community members have even coined a name “Guatemexicoestadounidenses,” or Guatemexiamericans, to describe the families.

Much of the day-to-day work of interpreters is performed in courtrooms, at meetings, and in medical examining rooms. But occasionally they work in the public spotlight. At the next AATIA member meeting, Tony Beckwith will talk about interpreting the Democratic Presidential Candidate Debates for Univision Television Network.

In addition, Michele Aynesworth and Liliana Valenzuela will report highlights from the recent ALTA conference. According to Director for Membership Maurine McLean, the meeting will include updates on the AATIA website and previews of upcoming workshops, as well as door prizes, refreshments, and networking. Newcomers welcome!

Next AATIA member meeting: 1:00 p.m., January 5, 2008, Austin History Center (9th and Guadalupe) Note: due to scheduling conflicts the meeting will be held the first Saturday in January instead of the regular date.

From xcdc, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language: a commentary on the national language debate. 

A recent post on Language Log pointed to a GI Joe Navajo Code Talker action figure (it speaks seven phrases in Navajo and English) with a link to the Amazon page where it’s sold.