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The Center for the Art of Translation has sent out a plea for donations to their Poetry Inside Out program. The CAT does a lot of wonderful programming, and this is another example—read more (from Scott Esposito at Two Words):

This week, we’re starting a campaign to raise $15,000 to bring Poetry Inside out to 250 new students this fall. We’d like to ask all the translators, publishers, writers, and readers out there to help us. If you love world lit, this is your chance to help bring that literature to young readers.

This is what we do: since 2000 PIO has worked with more than 5,000 students through residencies that place poet-translators in Bay Area classrooms. Our program inspires children from the inside out. They learn to take risks, be creative, and use imagination and critical thinking skills as they read, write, and translate poems by the world’s great poets. Our curriculum includes poems in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Latvian, Italian, and Japanese–children are introduced to writing from all around the world, and hopefully they go on to love translated literature for the rest of their lives!

Over the past decade we’ve forged strong partnerships with schools, but these ties are being threatened. Like many other states, California is out of money. When these cuts take effect, arts-enrichment programs–even ones as rigorous and clearly beneficial as Poetry Inside Out–are often the first things that are eliminated.

That’s why we’re reaching out to the community to offset these budget cuts and continue to offer Poetry Inside Out residencies in Bay Area classrooms. School program fees cover only one third of the cost of the program, and even that is uncertain for the fall.

The $15,000 we’re hoping to raise before June 18 will support 10 in-school residencies–that’s teachers for more than 250 Bay Area kids, who will learn to love translations, world literature, and creative writing.

If you can help, click the link to make a donation. All donations–no matter the size–will help us reach our goal and bring poetry and translation to students.

Click here to see an example of some of the great work these students do. And you can find even more with posts by the PIO instructors right here on this blog.

This week the folks at Three Percent announced their top 25 translated books of the year. We’re so pleased that our most recent book, Ersi Sotiropoulos’s Landscape with Dog, translated by Karen Emmerich, is among the books chosen. You can get it here, or get it from your favorite bookstore. I hope that’s not too old-fashioned to say. Three Percent is directing people to the wonderful Idlewild bookstore in New York, for any of the honored books.

Speaking of Landscape, stories from the collection are out recently in The Literary Review, an international journal of contemporary writing, and in the new issue of Two Lines, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, from the Center for the Art of Translation, both of which are making for great bedtime reading in our house. (By which I mean nothing other than reading. Ah, to be a student, or a ten-year-old, and read all day long.)

—Pam

As a follow-up to my earlier post, the Center for the Art of Translation’s interview with Karen Emmerich about translating Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is now up, check it (and the great blog) out. A favorite passage:

[Karen Emmerich:] … In these stories specifically, plot often seems incidental, secondary to language and to image. It isn’t poetic language, in the usual understanding of that phrase. It’s often very flat, very bare-bones. And the stories sometimes seem like a series of still-lives, freeze frames that show a life or a relationship—from the most involved to the most tenuous—captured at a particular moment, in a particular (sometimes disturbing or estranging, but often tender and fragile) configuration.

SE: … What kind of challenges does this pose to you as the translator? In prose that has been this carefully worked, do you feel like you can adequately bring across things like rhythm and sound?

KE: It’s enormously challenging as a translator—you don’t feel the kind of freedom you sometimes do, with fiction writers for whom plot drives a piece. You have an added sense of responsibility. Not necessarily to rhythm and sound, in this case, but to phrasing. If every word belongs where it is, what do you do when all the words go away and you have to find new ones to take their place?

A brief note: The wonderful Karen Emmerich read at the Center for the Art of Translation this past week—catch a lovely summary of her reading here, at the Quarterly Conversation.

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And to top it off: Three Percent has a note about/summary of Scott Esposito’s summary. Which I think is officially “buzz.” We’re sorry to have missed seeing Karen in person—