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. 

Due to the conflict with the Old Pecan Street festival and the related parking problems downtown, the LitSIG meeting this coming Saturday, May 3, from 2 to 4 p.m. will be held at the home of Marian Schwartz.

Liliana Valenzuela will coordinate a discussion of the April issue of Poetry magazine, which is devoted to translation.  Last we heard, Liliana had two copies left; contact her to obtain a copy and the prospectus for the discussion.

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.

Literary Special Interest Group