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.

Living legend Margaret Sayers Peden—she’s published over fifty books by such leading Latin American writers as Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz—will be teaching two classes in literary translation on Saturday, July 12, in San Antonio. through Gemini Ink, an astonishing opportunity for Austinites. Run don’t walk to sign up.

UNESCO has just announced that its first update of the world translation bibliography of Index Translationum for the year 2008 is now online, featuring some 75,000 new entries from Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Finland, France, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Romania, Slovenia, and Spain.

This edition of Index Translationum contains some 1,800,000 references (from 1979 to now) on all subjects. Offered are all manner of ways to sort the data—many of them surprising and, as often happens with data, difficult to interpret.

Left to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one.
— Goethe, 1827.

This belief that international literature plays a vital role in book culture is one that is shared by all the publishers and booksellers involved in Reading the World, a celebration of literature in translation to be held at BookPeople on Friday, June 6.

Noted Russian translator Marian Schwartz will moderate the hour-long program, which begins at 7 p.m. and will consist of three parts:

1. Liliana Valenzuela reading from her translation from English into Spanish: Cristina Garcia, A Handbook to Luck/Las Caras de la Suerte

2. Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey reading from her translation from Portuguese: Teeth Under the Sun by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Dalkey Archive P, 2007).

3. Michele McKay Aynesworth presenting Beacons, the literary journal of the American Translators Association, with readings by the following: Liliana Valenzuela, Tony Beckwith, and Rob Cogswell and his translator, Horacio Peña.

This event is hosted by the Austin Area Translators and Interpreters Association. 

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.

The New York Moon, an Internet-based publication, is a collection of experimental, reflective, and imaginative projects that unfold in any medium. The just-released April 2008 issue focuses on translation.

Translation is usually considered a practical activity. Someone who speaks one language needs to understand something in another language. But in our polyglot world and city, it can also be a challenge, a game — the intersection of a dozen cultures. In this edition of the Moon, our correspondents approached the theme from widely different vantages, but each showed that there is a hidden movement to “translation.” After all, the Latin word, translatus, means “carried over.”

Submissions are now being accepted for TransLit Volume 8, a special themed issue titled “Poetry and Short Stories of the Americas” that will be published in spring 2009 by the Literary Translation Collective of the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta (ATIA) in cooperation with the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (LTAC).

Interested translators may submit a short (<2500 words) translation to or from one of the four main languages of the Americas (English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese) or any indigenous language along with the original text. The original or translation must be in English or French. The submission should include brief biographies of the translator and the author, permission to publish from the author and publisher, and bibliographical data for the original.

Send submissions by July 1, 2008 to:

Editors, TransLit Volume 8
School of Translation and Interpretation
University of Ottawa
Arts Building, 4th Floor
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA K1N 6N5

Contact editors Marc Charron or Luise von Flotow for more information.