2 and 2

Greek News Online offers an interview with Ersi Sotiropoulos and Karen Emmerich on the stories in Landscape with Dog (conducted while Ersi was a guest at the sixth International Poetry Festival in Granada, Nicaragua).

Greek News: What do you think is most significant about [the stories] as works of art? What is significant about Ersi as a Greek writer/international writer?

Karen Emmerich: It’s hard for me to think about Ersi’s work in those terms; I just think of her as a writer.  She cares so deeply about language –and not just the Greek language.  Yes, she can spend months writing and rewriting the same paragraph in Greek until it’s just right, just how she wants it.  But she also cares just as deeply about her works as they move into other languages, of which she happens to speak many.

For me it sometimes seems like this impulse to think of writers as representatives of their language or literary tradition — Ersi as a literary ambassador of Greece, in a way — confines them to too small and constricting a box.  For sure, Ersi’s writing is often wrapped up in the lived reality of Greece.  But she also reads widely in many languages, travels widely, and is part of literary conversations that are happening across languages as well.

Advice from renowned sports writer Robert Lipsyte on how to watch the Olympics (or read or go to movies, etc) on Laura Flanders’s great show, GRITtv.

Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is featured today at Three Percent, as one of the works of fiction longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award—here’s an excerpt:

From the very first story, there is a familiarity that draws the reader in, that reminds of something comforting. But Sotiropoulos layers on top of that security a sense of foreboding. There is an ambiguity to her scenes and to her characters so that we are left to question our own instincts. She infuses the narrative of each story with a controlled terror that makes characters’ relationships seem like they could snap at any moment. Yet, she never gives us that release or makes it that easy for the reader, that definitive. The beginnings, middles and ends are blurry and we are left to decide where the story began and ended. This is not to say that the stories in this collection are not definitive, they are. They present the moments in life that fall into the grey area, that at one point may look white and then years later, pitch black. This requires a very deliberate prose, a deep understanding of narrative tension and skilled working knowledge of human behavior. Even more impressive is that Karen Emmerich’s translation lets all of Sotiropoulos’ style and depth showcase itself in a sparse fluidity. …

Read the rest here—

January’s issue of ForeWord Magazine includes a fantastic review of Rien ne va plus:

Rien Ne Va Plus tricks its reader by a rapid mid-point shift from realism to metafiction—but only after the reader has fallen in love with Karapanou’s writing, and her inimitable main character…

Read more!

The January issue of the exciting new review venue Critical Flame brings George Fragopoulos’s fascinating essay on Margarita Karapanou, considering Kassandra and the Wolf, Rien ne va plus, and (forthcoming next fall from Clockroot!) The Sleepwalker.

Karapanou’s work then gives the impression of being constantly in motion, an active critique, perhaps, of Nietzsche’s claim that we need to read slower. When reading Karapanou one cannot read quickly enough. There is a velocity to her texts, both in the obvious sense of their structure and pacing as well as a visceral sense akin to vertigo. They seem always to be spinning wildly and recklessly towards unknown destinations (often that destination is death) or, rather, they seem to emphatically evade any firm lodging or easy comfort. Rien ne va Plus is a prime example, a novel that asks us, after a certain point, to return to its beginning and to question everything we have just read. Karapanou knew, as Deleuze did, that flight was by no means a passive activity, but rather the complete antithesis of passivity; that, in the wake of escaping, art could follow.

Read the full here—

A wonderful review of Landscape with Dog and Other Stories by George Fragopoulos at the Quarterly Conversation.

I think this is the best part of being a publisher: reading these responses, magically getting to see works one had thought one knew inside out anew.

Reading Ersi Sotiropoulos’s collection of short stories, Landscape With Dog, brings to mind the Surrealist masterpiece by Giorgio de Chirico, “Melancholy and Mystery of a Street.” Much like Chirico’s painting, most of Sotiropoulos’s stories are textual cul-de-sacs, seemingly expansive but surprisingly claustrophobic, tinged with dark corners, a series of streets that lead nowhere, leaving readers to puzzle over wonderfully unrealized moments and conclusions. There are no easily recognizable beginnings, middles, or ends in these stories.

Read in full here.

O (otherwise known as the Oprah magazine), following their excellent review, has just posted a great list of reading group questions for Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel.

—Pam

Applications for NEA translation fellowships are due tomorrow! For more information, go to the website or email flaniganm@arts.gov.

Grants of $12,500 to $25,000 are awarded annually to translators of poetry and prose who are working on specific translations of published works from any language into English. Applicants must have published at least 20 pages of translation in literary publications or in book form between January 1, 1995, and January 7, 2010. Using the online submission system, submit 10 to 15 pages of translation and the original work, a project description, a resumé or biography, and the resumé of the writer of the original work with proof of eligibility by January 7, 2010. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for the required entry form and complete guidelines.

National Endowment for the Arts, Translation Fellowships, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20506. (202) 682-5772. Maryrose Flanigan, Literature Division Specialist.

And, there’s just a little more time (another week—due January 14, 2010) to apply for the PEN Translation Fund Grants: Grants of $3,000 are given annually to support the translation of book-length works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an “egregiously flawed” translation. Submit eight copies of 10 to 12 pages of translation and the original passage, a short biography, a curriculum vitae, and statement outlining the work by January 14, 2010. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for the required entry form and complete guidelines.

In the spirit of blog as Wunderkammer: this is not new, but new to me: a delight by Jay Thompson courtesy the Kenyon Review blog, on among other things Alice Notley—whose Grave of Light I have just begun and am being wonderfully undone by—hybridization; the post-avant-garde; the “most messed-up work of James Tate”; and an animated puppy who explores such delicious wonderings as

Where are the non-American poets in post-avant-garde poetry?
Where are the conversations about class, history, and ideology?
Where are the lunatics?

When I read and write, I want to feel watchful and small, angry and serene and skeptical, butting with questions about power and chatter about sex and death and pop culture, self and knowing.

Check out the whole at “Thoughts of a Magic Puppy in the Tillages of Modishness and Doubt.”

—Hilary

Seems we’ve been silent too long on this blog! Caught up in the first fall of Clockroot—

A quick link to Nir Rosen’s excellent recent work in the Boston Review: “An Ugly Peace,” an article on counterinsurgency in Iraq, and “Something from Nothing,” on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. I’ve heard several of Rosen’s interviews on Democracy Now!, and this summer read his The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter’s Journey into Occupied Iraq, which like all the work of his I’ve seen is deeply felt, rigorous, right there on the ground, and recommended.