39th Annual Conference American Literary Translators Association October 6–9, 2016 Oakland, CA Join AmazonCrossing editors and translators for a discussion on crime fiction in translation. Translators will share favorite passages from recent translations, discuss their approach, and give away copies of their works. Date: Friday, October 7 Time: 11-12:15pm Location: OCC 210-211 AmazonCrossing is a proud sponsor of The American Literary Translators Association Conference. For more information on AmazonCrossing, please visit www.amazon.com/crossing A powerful novel by one of the most important The first English translation of Muhammad Zafzaf’s novel twentieth-century writers of the Armenian diaspora. of a coastal Moroccan city and its gritty underbelly. “An indelible portrait of a man in transit and a country in transition. “An incandescent translation by Zafzaf writes without indulgence, yet Manoukian and Jinbashian and with sympathy and humor, about life an indispensable afterword by in the coastal town Essaouira, where Nichanian, foremost reader and locals and tourists mingle, mutually critic of modern Armenian litera- exposing their hypocrisies. A gritty, ture, make the publication of The powerful novel by one of Morocco’s Candidate an indisputable event, greatest writers.” as readers of English can finally pay close attention to the words —Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account of Zareh Vorpouni.” “A welcome addition to the canon — Gil Anidjar, Columbia University of works of Moroccan literature in translation.” —William Hutchins, translator of Naguib Paper $19.95s 978-0-8156-3468-3 Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy Paper $18.95 978-0-8156-1077-9 SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu ALTA HAFT PG ad.indd 1 8/23/2016 1:23:41 PM welcome elcome to Oakland, and to the 39th annual meeting of the American Literary Translators Association! This year we again surpassed all previous years in the record number of exciting proposals received for panels, roundtables, workshops, and readings, and we ended up with an overflowing schedule that reaches out into the community, with partners across the Bay Area. WPlease join us for the offsite opening event on Thursday evening, sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines Press, at the Parliament Event Venue, a short walk from the conference hotel. Afterward, a Literary Death Match, co-sponsored by New Directions, Graywolf, New Vessel, and Open Letter, and featuring translators alongside authors alongside comedians, promises to be fatally entertaining. Don’t stay out too late on Thursday night because the conference proper starts on Friday morning, and the first day’s programming will carry us through lunchtime readings to the ALTA Fellows Reading, the ALTA Awards Reception, and two offsite bilingual reading bashes. Pace yourselves, however, because Saturday’s schedule starts at 9:15 a.m. (ouch!) and again takes us into the evening, with a captivating keynote presentation by Don Mee Choi, more offsite reading parties, and the ever popular Declamación. After another full day of programming, the conference officially winds down on Sunday evening with a closing event co-sponsored by San Fransciso’s own City Lights Books. Don’t miss this year’s book exhibit, which is being run by our friends at E.M. Wolfmann General Interest Small Bookstore in the Grand Ballroom FGH. The store itself is just a block away at 410 13th Street, near Broadway. Please support our bookstore partner by buying the books they ordered for you! And while you are feeling generous, don’t forget ALTA, which is in the midst of a fundraising campaign, with $10,000 of matching funds provided by a handful of your colleagues and friends from within the association. Please join them and us by contributing what you can — every little bit helps! Just go to www.literarytranslators.org and click on the “donate” button, or you can write a check to “The American Literary Translators Association” and hand it to an ALTA board member during the conference. The “crossings” theme of this year’s gathering is something all translators feel in their bones, probably because we practice it so frequently. I have long suspected that the practice of translation encourages a level of attention to others’ words that many other aspects of our culture tend to ignore, to the extent that listening while you express yourself might even sound somewhat like a contradiction to some. It isn’t, of course. As this is my final welcome letter as president, I want to emphasize the immense pleasure it has been to serve ALTA, an association of people who cross. With best wishes for a warm and successful gathering. Russell Scott Valentino, ALTA President 1 e are delighted to acknowledge the generous support for this year’s annual gathering, Wprovided by the following individuals and organizations: AmazonCrossing | The Center for the Art of Translation | City Lights Books | The Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University | Graywolf Press | Literary Death Match | The MFA in Literary Translation at Mills College | New Directions Publishing | New Vessel Press | Open Letter Books | Two Lines Press We are also grateful for the exceptional administrative talents of Interim Managing Director Brittany Penzer; the planning expertise of Brandi Host and her colleagues at IU Conferences; the enthusiasm of ALTA Publicist Rachael Daum; and the efforts of a number of student assistants and volunteers, including Jordan Hussey-Andersen. We offer special thanks to Alexis Levitin for his assistance, once again, with the ever- popular Bilingual Readings Series, now in its 28th year with record participation of over 150 acknowledgments readers and texts from over 30 different languages. Big thank-you’s are also due to Elizabeth Harris, who is serving as mentor to the 2016 ALTA Travel Fellows; to Allison Charette for coordinating the second year of the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorships; and to the following generous sponsors of the mentorship program: the Book Department of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the Russian Federation Institute of Literary Translation, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. Once again, we are pleased to thank Barbara Paschke for her efforts in organizing Declamación, one of the most cherished traditions at the ALTA Conference. We are also indebted to the members of the 2016 ALTA Conference Organizing Committee, who helped to pull everything together: Susan Bernofsky, Nancy Naomi Carlson, Allison Charette, Ezra Fitz, Aviya Kushner, Cathy Nelson, Marian Schwartz, and Committee Chair, Chad Post. We are also grateful to our local conference chairs, Barbara Paschke and Diana Thow, for their invaluable efforts working alongside the conference committee. Finally, we also wish to thank former Executive Director Erica Mena for her years of service with ALTA, and for laying the foundation for a wonderful conference in 2016. 2 fellowships ALTA TRAVEL FELLOWSHIPS Each year, between four and six $1,000 fellowships are awarded to emerging (unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for hotel and travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference. ALTA Travel Fellowships are funded by a combination of member dues and private donations, often generously given by established translators and other devoted supporters of the craft and art of literary translation. 2016 marks the first year of the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship, preferentially awarded to an emerging translator of color or a translator working from an underrepresented diaspora or stateless language. Bruna Dantas Lobato (2016 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow) Originally from Natal, Brazil, Bruna Dantas Lobato began to teach herself her first sentences in English at the age of seventeen. Learning English changed her life: it made her aware of the failings and strangeness of language, which is to say, it made her become a writer. She first began translating from English into her native Portuguese at Bennington College, where she earned a BA in literature and Latin American Studies. She tried her hand at excerpts from Annie Dillard’s book of narrative nonfiction Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in a literary translation class taught by translator and mentor Marguerite Feitlowitz. Soon after, she translated Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer-winning poems into Portuguese for Brazil’s Jornal Rascunho and committed herself to translating Brazilian literature into English. It was also at Bennington where she first began writing her own fiction, mostly short stories centering on displaced characters. Before her senior year at the College, she was awarded the Undergraduate Writing Fellowship in Fiction and had the opportunity to study with writers Jill McCorkle and Amy Hempel during the summer residency of Bennington’s MFA program. After graduation, she returned to her hometown in Brazil and began translating into English Caio Fernando Abreu’s 1989 collection of short stories set during the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Dragons Haven’t Been to Paradise — a book she’d first encountered in a high school classroom. As a translator of Brazilian literature, Bruna hopes to traverse the works of writers who report from the margins, essential works that question boundaries and invite her to re-imagine what centering the margins truly means. Most recently, she translated Caio Fernando Abreu’s minimalist short story “Beauty, a Terrible Story” for the Brazil issue of Words without Borders. Bruna is currently