Here is a look back at the time when NTM got started on the PCCC Writing Center blog in February 2013: a group of ghazals by Persian poet and mystic Hafez translated by the accomplished poet and academic Roger Sedarat. This was our 2nd post from February 2013, and one of our most popular ever, so we carried it through the archives when we moved to our current web site in 2014.
We’d love to hear what you think! Find us on twitter @TranslateMonth, share using #TranslationMonth, join our mailing list, submit a translation month event, or like our Facebook page. We hope you’ll join us and celebrate your favorite poems in translation throughout September.
Welcome to National Translation Month 2022!!This year is even more special, as National Translation Month celebrates its 10-year anniversary with exciting selections of poetry and prose in translation, as well as virtual and in-person readings. We hope you’ll be delighted and surprised every day in September and join us in our month-long celebration.
It’s been quite a ride! Since 2013, we published poetry and prose from 53 countries, including work from lesser-known languages, underrepresented voices, and spotlights on writers from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. We featured established translators such as Nicky Harman, Diana Arterian, Cola Franzen, Margaret Jull Costa, Martín Espada, Sean Cotter, alongside emerging voices, and rising stars. We promoted classic authors, including Pablo Neruda, Osip Mandelshtam, Carmen Boullosa, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, together with hot new names like Nadia Anjuman, Xu Xiaobin, and Daniel Saldaña París. We partnered with numerous journals and organizations, including ALTA, Pen America, The Select Center in Singapore, The Harriman Institute at Columbia University, as well as many publishers of works in translation,promoting their work. We also organized an international reading series with events in 17 locations such as New York, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, Richmond, and London. You can see our growing list of Friends of NTM and our In the Media page for all our partnerships and projects over the years. Follow us throughout the month to see our most popular posts and take a look back at our (and your!) favorites.
Celebrate with us! To participate in #TranslationMonth, visit our web site for ideas or submit your event by emailing us at nationaltranslationmonth@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter @TranslateMonth, share your favorite translations using #TranslationMonth, join our mailing list, and like our Facebook page.
Let’s get started with five new poems by one of the first award-winning poets of Roma ethnicity in Romania, Emil-Iulian Sude, beautifully translated by the accomplished poet and translator, Diana Manole,who also included an insightful translator’s note with additional details about the poet and the translation process.These visceral poems will grab and rattle you with their surreal details, leaving you shaken and wanting more. We look forward to Sude’s upcoming collection in Manole’s masterful translation.
Happy National Translation Month and happy reading! —Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman
Part II of our Special Feature dedicated to Ukrainian poetry in translation includes the poetry of Pavlo Tychyna and Kateryna Babkina translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, Mykola Vorobiov translated by Maria G. Rewakowicz, Serhi Zhadan translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, Lyudmyla Khersonska translated by Grace Mahoney, Olga Livshin, and Nina Kossman, Boris Khersonsky translated by Martha M. F. Kelly, Olga Livshin, and Nina Kossman, Oleg Kadanov and Halyna Kruk translated by RB Lemberg, Iryna Starovoyt translated by Grace Mahoney, and Dmitry Blizniuk transated by Nina Kossman.
Our gratitude goes to the editors at Lost Horse Press for their unwavering support and to all the editors of journals, collections, and presses where some of these poems previously appeared. Many thanks to all the poets and translators who spread the word and sent us poems in just a few days, and to our newly appointed Translations Editor, Dana Serea, who edited this special feature.
We’d also like to request your support for these tremendous poets and their translators.Many of them are still stuck in Ukraine, dealing with unthinkable difficulties—so please consider donating to the organizations below.
Send to Serhiy Zhadan’s PayPal account for humanitarian relief Name: Сергій Жадан PayPal address: sirozhazhadan@gmail.com
In addition, our Romanian-American editors recommend donating to Immigration Research Forum and Blue Heron Foundation, two organizations with volunteers on the border with Romanian and Moldova, helping Ukrainian refugees.
We will return to our regular #TranslationMonth edition in September, when we’re celebrating our 10 year anniversary. Until then, please keep sharing Ukrainian voices and stand united against the horrors of this war. Thank you all for being part of this project. #StandWithUkraine —The Editors
Calling all writers and translators! Consequence is looking for submissions for their next issue. Submissions are considered for either print (Consequence journal) or their website (Consequence online). They are interested in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, reviews, visual art, and translations focused on the human consequences and realities of war and geopolitical violence.
The 7th 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 donationhere. 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!
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!
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
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!
