The 7^th edition of National Translation Month was a tremendous success! And we are very grateful to all the authors, translators, and event organizers who celebrated with us, and to our 6,000+ followers on social media whom we sought to inspire and engage.

We close National Translation Month 2019 on a high note: September 30 is celebrated worldwide as International Translation Day. We’re leaving you with the frank and moving short story Be Grateful by Éva Veronika Kalapos translated from the Hungarian by Timea Balogh. It’s a compelling read that deals with issues of body image in a refreshing and refined way.

Stay tuned for translation news, collaborations, and publishing opportunities we’ll continue to post throughout the year. Join our mailing list, follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. And, if you like what we’re doing, support our efforts with a small donation here. It will help us bring more literary translations to an even wider audience next year.

We hope you’ll continue to celebrate translations throughout the year. If you think of a way you’d like to celebrate NTM in 2020, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to include it in our next year calendar. The world lies open—take time to explore it. And celebrate the craft of translation in September and beyond.

—Claudia Serea & Loren Kleinman

Today we’re delighted to share the frank and moving short story Be Grateful by Éva Veronika Kalapos translated from the Hungarian by Timea Balogh. The translator included a note on her process which gives some background on Kalapos’ work and speaks about the narrator’s “complicated relationship with her own body in a refreshing and refined way. She turns an often-sensationalized phenomenon into a touching account of a woman’s relationship to her body’s mysteries in just a few short pages.” This is a compelling read about body-image with profound observations about the thin public’s view of fatness, like how “people look at fat people as if their fat were a costume they can step out of if they want to badly enough, as if their real body lies somewhere underneath.” Happy National Translation Month and happy reading!

Click HERE to read Be Grateful: A Short Story by Éva Veronika Kalapos Translated from the Hungarian by Timea Balogh

—Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman

Today, we continue National Translation Month’s tradition of featuring Iranian women writers and translators. We’re delighted to share an excerpt from the new collection of short stories The Book of Tehran published in March 2019 by Comma Press. We selected Betrayal by Azardokht Bahrami, translated by Poupeh Mizrahi, a short story that won the 2004 Sadeq Hedayat Award. Betrayal is a humorous take on the act of surveillance, highlighting the way people’s behavior changes when their relationships are examined under a microscope. Azardokht Bahrami often uses humor in her writing which include screenplays and novels. Her collection of short stories Wednesday Nights received the 2007 Rouzi-Rouzegari Award as well as the Press Writers and Critics Award.

Poupeh Missaghi is an accomplished translator, writer, educator, and also Iran’s Editor-at-Large for Asymptote. We fell in love with her translation and you will, too.

We’d love to hear from you! Let us know how you like our posts, or attend, share, and spread the word about our readings. Open your heart to new experiences and the beauty of the world, and celebrate its cultures and new voices with us using #NTM2019. Happy National Translation Month and happy reading!

Click HERE to read The Book of Tehran (excerpt) Betrayal by Azardokht Bahrami Translated from the Persian by Poupeh Missaghi

—Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman

Today’s exquisite translation is an excerpt from the novel Swedish by the accomplished novelist Gábor Schein, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. Swedish narrates the story of an orphan, Ervin, given up for adoption by his fanatically Communist mother after the defeat of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet forces in 1956, and later consigned to a psychiatric ward. In this excerpt from Chapter Two, ‘I’m Flying in the Airspace of the Room’, one of the wards is described, offering a rare glimpse into the psychic conditions of the final decades of communist rule.

For her translation of Swedish, Ottilie Mulzet received an America PEN Heim Translation Grant in 2019. We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt as much as we did. Let us know what you think, using #TranslationMonth.

Happy National Translation Month and happy reading!

—Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman

Click HERE to read I’m Flying in the Airspace of a Room: Excerpt from Swedish by Gábor Schein Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

Today, we continue National Translation Month’s tradition of featuring Arab women writers in translation. We’re delighted to share an excerpt from the new collection of short stories The Book of Cairo edited by Raph Cormack and published by Comma Press in May 2019.

We selected The Other Balcony by Nahla Karam translated by the accomplished Andrew Leber, a short story that takes the reader inside two Cairene houses. Its love affair across a small alley is simultaneously a critique of the problems of gender in modern Egyptian relationships and a tale of an opportunity suddenly and inexplicably lost. We thought this story gave a good sense of life in Cairo and hope you’ll like it as much as we did.

We’d love to hear from you! Let us know how you like our posts, or attend, share, and spread the word about our readings. Open your heart to new experiences and the beauty of the world, and celebrate its cultures and new voices with us, using #NTM2019. Happy National Translation Month and happy reading!

Click HERE to read The Book of Cairo (excerpt) The Other Balcony by Nahla Karam Translated by Andrew Leber

—Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman

We’re very excited to share with you 3 prose poems by the award-winning Bronka Nowicka translated from the Polish by Marek Kulig. They are part of Nakarmić kamień (To Feed a Stone, Biuro Literackie, 2015), a collection of prose poetry that won the Nike 2016 Literary Award, the most prestigious Polish literary prize. Full of vivid but intimate imagery with a slightly surreal twist, their length belies their depth, and they pack a punch. They question our relationships with the objects in our world and excite the reader’s imagination. We hope you’ll agree and they’ll become your new favorites.

Speaking of favorites, our favorite thing to do in September is celebrate translations. There are thousands of ways to celebrate National Translation Month in 2019. We’ve developed this list of 30 ways to celebrate NTM to get you started, but we’re open to suggestions and encourage you to find your own way to celebrate. You don’t need our permission to celebrate, just as you don’t need anyone’s permission to celebrate Black History Month, or National Ice Cream Month in July.

We’d love to hear from you! If you think of a way to celebrate National Translation Month in 2019, email us at nationaltranslationmonth@gmail.com. We’re always open to any collaboration ideas. Find us on Twitter @TranslateMonth, tag us using #TranslationMonth, join our mailing list, submit a translation month event, or like our Facebook page. And, most importantly, celebrate your favorite authors in translation this September and all year round.

—Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman

Click HERE to read Buttons and Spoons on a Window Sill: 3 Prose Poems by Bronka Nowicka Translated from the Polish by Marek Kulig

Today, we’re proud to present an exciting selection of poems by the acclaimed Romanian poet Nora Iugatranslated by Adam J. Sorkin and Diana Manole. Don’t let their brief appearance fool you: these eleven short poems burn and slash their way out into the open with their searing language. It’s such a joy to feature one of the most significant women poets from Romania whose work we cherish and admire.

We’d love to hear from you: find us on Twitter @TranslateMonth, tag us on Twitter @TranslateMonth and share using #NTM2019 and #TranslateMonth2019, join our mailing list, submit a translation month event, or like our Facebook page. We hope you’ll join us and celebrate your favorite translations of women poets throughout September.

Click HERE to read Throw More Wood on the Fire: Poems by Nora Iuga Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Diana Manole

—Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman

Today, we’re excited to share the fiery poem This Valley of Death is Not My Country by the revolutionary Bengali poetNabarun Bhattacharya translated by the award-winning Somrita Urni Ganguly. In this poem, tand through his audacious metaphors, fiery rhetoric, and studied images, Bhattacharya recreates the dream of a world without state-sponsored violence, a socially just world, one where there is freedom, equality, and dignity for all. We just know you’ll be inspired by it, so we’re happy to bring it to you.

We’d love to hear what you think! Find us on Twitter @TranslateMonth, tag us using #NTM2019 and #TranslateMonth, join our mailing list, submit a translation month event, or like our Facebook page. And celebrate your favorite translations from all over the world this September and beyond.

Click HERE to read This Valley of Death is Not My Country: Poems by Nabarun Bhattacharya Translated from the Bengali by Somrita Urni Ganguly

—Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman

We’re excited to share with you today the work of another 2019 PEN Heim Translation Grant winner, Hope Campbell Gustafson, for her impressive translation of the novel Il comandante del fiume by the award-winning author of Italian-Somali descent, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah. This powerful novel is the coming-of-age story of the teenager Yabar, and it deals with war, colonialism, terrorism, racism, Islam, relationships, trauma, memory, as well as the movement and mixing of people and cultures and languages. And a street mural in London, with its haunting eyes of a young migrant, is the perfect accompaniment for the text.

This is a compelling read that we hope will transport you into a new world. Tell us what you think using @TranslateMonth and #TranslationMonth!

—Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman

Click HERE to read Say Wallahi An excerpt from Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s Il comandante del fiume Translated from the Italian by Hope Campbell Gustafson