Finnegan's List 2013
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Finnegan’s List 2013 « Bridging cultures, crossing languages « The European Society of Authors 1 «The European Society of Authors – created in the spring of 2008 – is a network open to all authors, publishers, translators and cultural actors who wish to participate in the creation of an intellectual community in a multilingual and multicultural Europe. Placing translation at the heart of our projects and our thoughts, we favour an approach that takes on differences in terms of sharing and dialogue. The European Society of Authors proposes an annual list of under- translated or forgotten works called Finnegan’s List – the personal choices of a committee of 10 eminent authors from different countries. Each writer selects three titles that make up the committee’s “elective affinities”. With this project, the European Society of Authors strives to revive a literary canon encompassing all languages spoken and written in Europe and beyond. Each author has explained his or her reasons for choosing the books they have in brief articles. Excerpts of these texts can be found in the brochure but we also invite you to visit our website, www.seua.org – which will be redesigned in the coming months – to discover all of them and to find out more about Finnegan’s List and our other projects. If you wish to participate, to contribute or to support our projects, please contact us at: [email protected] Finnegan’s List by Adam Thirlwell It may be that the ideal of literature is Weltliteratur. But it’s also true that however much the world may be the ideal, the medium of literature is language. And language is a sadly nationalist medium for an art that aspires to the gigantically global. Which is why, perhaps, although writers and readers may have wanted to believe in the ideal of Weltliteratur, there have been very few projects in its history to remedy the fact that literature is, very much so, often limited in its geography. There have been very few projects, in other words, devoted to making translations comprehensive. For translation is literature’s antidote to the problem that every language has its own policed borders. And yet the history of translation is a very strange history. It is full of gaps and zigzags, where one might have expected comprehensive flatness – like the ideal set of waves approaching on the horizon for the ideal surfer. Its history is oddly marked by time delays, and absences. And while it might seem that a digital era would offer the perfect conditions to make translations comprehensive, in fact the problem seems no closer to being solved. This is why a project like Finnegan’s List seems to me to be so important. It replaces the usual melancholy with the fizzing excitement of a possible ideal: a total geography. But also – and this is the true beauty of the project – it doesn’t aim for a blanket comprehensiveness. No, its beauty is in its use of writers as selectors, its insistence that translation must proceed, in the end, work by work. For literature might well have the world as its ideal, but this grand ideal will only be formed by the specific unique values of particular works of art. 3 Finnegan’s List committee 2013 « Alberto Manguel Alberto Manguel (born in 1948 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a writer, translator, and editor. At the age of sixteen, while working at the Pygmalion bookshop in Buenos Aires, he was asked by the blind Jorge Luis Borges to read aloud to him at his home. The relationship was pivotal for Manguel’s future literary career. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980), A History of Reading (1996) and The Library at Night (2007); as well as novels such as News from a Foreign Country Came (1991). Manguel has edited a number of literary anthologies on a variety of themes and genres ranging from erotica and gay stories to fantastic literature and mysteries. Today, he resides in a renovated medieval presbytery in France together with his 30,000 books. Ilma Rakusa « Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota (Slovakia) to Hungarian-Slovenian parents. She lived in Budapest, Trieste, and Ljubljana before her family’s move to Zurich, Switzerland. Ilma Rakusa read Slavic and Romance studies in Zurich, Paris, and St. Petersburg. She made her literary debut in 1977 with the poetry collection Wie Winter (As Winter). She is also a renowned translator from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, and French into German (including authors such as Imre Kertész, Danilo Kiš, Péter Nádas, and Marina Tsvetaeva). She has won numerous prizes such as the 2009 Swiss Book Prize for her own literary oeuvre (poetry collections, essays, short prose) as well as for her translations and her work as an editor of literary anthologies. 4 Finnegan’s List committee 2013 « Samar Yazbek Samar Yazbek (born in 1970) is a Syrian writer and journalist. She studied Arabic literature and is the author of novels, poetry collections, short stories, and film scripts. In her first novel, Tiflat as-Sama (Heavenly Girl), she questioned various taboos in Syrian society. Samar Yazbek is a prominent voice in support of human rights in Syria. In 2010, Yazbek was selected as a member of Beirut 39 (39 of the best-known writers of modern Arab literature). She was the editor of Women of Syria, a website dedicated to the rights of women. Samar Yazbek fled Syria in July 2011 and lives now in exile in France. Her latest work, A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, won the English PEN Writers in Translation award. Etgar Keret « Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Etgar Keret is one of today’s most popular Israeli writers. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope. At present, Keret lectures at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has received the Prime Minister’s Literature Prize, the Ministry of Culture’s Cinema Prize, the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize (UK, 2008) and the St. Petersburg Public Library’s Foreign Favorite Award (2010). In 2007, Keret and Shira Gefen won the Cannes Film Festival’s “Camera d’Or” Award for their movie Jellyfish as well as the Best Director Award of the French Artists and Writers’ Guild. In 2010, Keret was honored in France as Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His books have been published abroad in over 31 languages. 5 « Tariq Ali Tariq Ali (born in 1943 in Lahore) is a British Pakistani writer and filmmaker. He studied politics and philosophy at Oxford University and in 1968 became an editor of the New Left Review. Tariq Ali has written books on world history and politics, novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as scripts for the stage and screen. For Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Ali is a “border crosser between the West and East, he understands better than anyone else the conflicts and histories of both sides.” After the publication of his first novel Redemption (1991), he started working on a five-volume cycle of novels about Islam. The first tome of the quintet, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, represents his literary breakthrough. Tariq Ali regularly contributes articles on current politics to numerous international newspapers. Oksana Zabuzhko « Oksana Zabuzhko (born in 1960) is a contemporary Ukrainian writer, poet, and essayist. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts, and has worked as a research associate for the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Since the publication of her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996), which in 2006 was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence”, she has been working as a free-lance author. Zabuzhko’s books have been translated into numerous languages, including one of her latest novels The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009), and were awarded many literary prizes. 6 « Arnon Grunberg Arnon Grunberg (born in 1971 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch novelist and reporter. His first novel Blue Mondays (1994) became a bestseller in Europe and won the Anton Wachter Prize. Another success of Grunberg’s is Tirza, published in September 2006, for which he received a number of prestigious literary prizes. His work is translated into twenty-five languages. Arnon Grunberg also lectures at different universities and writes regular columns for diverse international newspapers and literary magazines. He lives and works in New York. His blog: www.arnongrunberg.com. Georgi Gospodinov « Georgi Gospodinov (born in 1968) is a poet, writer and playwright, and one of the most translated Bulgarian authors after 1989. Four of his poetry collections have been awarded national literary prizes. His Natural Novel was published in 19 languages abroad, including German, English, French, Spanish, and Italian. The novel was praised by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Times, and Village Voice, the critics qualified it as a “small and elegant masterpiece” and a “machine for stories”. And Other Stories (2001), Gospodinov’s collection of short pieces, came out in German, French, English, and other languages. His story “And All Turned Moon” is included in the anthology Best European Fiction 2010 (Dalkey Archive, USA). Gospodinov’s latest book is the novel Physics of Sorrow (2012). 7 Gabriela Adameşteanu « Gabriela Adameşteanu (born in 1942) is a contemporary Romanian novelist, essayist, journalist, and translator. After graduating from the University of Bucharest’s faculty of letters, she made her debut with a short prose piece.