Do you know who should be the next Translator in Residence at the U of Iowa? Tell them to apply!

What is the right descriptor for the Sam Konstas lip curl? Sneer?

Beyond a Boundary is an incredible book!

#AusvInd Wikipedia’s entry 😂

I can’t wait for the many many fan videos subtitling what Sam Konstas is muttering to himself as he faces down Bumrah, Siraj, and now Akash Deep too…

Cricket is an Aristotelian drama, with unities of time, place, and action. And action reveals character. Welcome to the stage, Sam Konstas: an instant major antagonist in the Jasprit Bumrah cycle.

So it turns out China Miéville’s latest was co-authored by some guy called Keanu Reeves. Kinda fun. Best enjoyed after a grading marathon in front of your father in law’s wood stove.

Reading: The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin. Vibe: “Morning came in a thousand thousand minute gradations of blue-white upon blue-white.” Genre play: clever. Beautiful sentences: many. Body count: high. Reminds me of: The Red Dog by Willem Anker, trans. Michiel Heyns.

Three more entries in the burgeoning micro-genre of novels with translator protagonists: Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies (already a mainstay in our undergrad courses); Shuang-zi Yang’s Taiwan Travelogue, trans. Lin King; and Szilvia Monar’s The Nursery. Always eager to learn about more books like this!

Every year we watch the National Dog Show on Txgiving, as if live. Perhaps the essence of sport spectatorship is in its unscripted live nature, which is why watching cricket highlights is never really satisfying. But this does not apply to the doggies… I’d watch that absurd Maltese strut anytime.

Thanksgiving break here, so, of course, I watched most of the IPL auction. The Rajasthan Royals bought a 13-year-old player, Vaibhav Suryavanshi, for around $130k (for 10 weeks of work). Some questions: Locker room teachers? Child labor laws? Allowed to face Joffra Archer in the nets? Night games?

Breyten Breytenbach (1939-2024). My first love in poetry. The first writer who compelled me to translate (so that my English-speaking high school friends could understand). A brilliant, fearless unicum of a man.

Looks like a great book. Only wish I knew about it before teaching the art module in my Congo grad course this semester.

Check out the new issue of Exchanges! exchanges.uiowa.edu/f24spirit-fu...

for anyone keeping track, this is the second year in a row that the National Book Award for Translated Literature has gone to a novel translated by an exophonic translator it's almost like this is a good thing that publishers should be more receptive to www.nationalbook.org/books/taiwan...

Ok. Can I claim “second-biggest fan” then?

We’re delighted to announce that the winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2024 is Revelation Freshly Erupting, by Nelly Sachs, translated from German (Germany) by Andrew Shanks and published by @carcanet.bsky.social.

Thursday Reading: The PEN 1969 Manifesto on Translation. The vibe: “Their names are usually forgotten, they are grotesquely underpaid, and their services, however skillfully rendered, are regarded with the slightly patronizing and pitying respect formerly reserved for junior housemaids.”

Incidentally, all four of these And Other Stories authors are also WWB contributors!

Thursday reading: Fiston Mujila’s Tram 83, trans. Roland Glasser. The vibe: “There are cities which don’t need literature: they are literature. They file past, chest thrust out, head on their shoulders. […] The City-State, an example among so many others — she pulsated with literature.”

Emerging Translators: Apply for the 2025 ALTA Emerging Translator Program. Mentorships offered in 18 languages. I will be serving as the Japanese mentor. Deadline November 30. Apply here 👇 www.literarytranslators.org/2025-mentors...

Tuesday’s rereading (for teaching): China Miéville’s The City & The City. The vibe: “ We had stolen gudcop and badcop from English, verbed them.”

The Humanities in Translation ( HiT!) Prize is open for submissions! @nupress.bsky.social @buffettinstitute.bsky.social nupress.northwestern.edu/humanities-i...

Sunday reading: Jen Calleja’s Goblinhood. The vibe: “AI is a goblin that wants to convince you that you can’t write […]; that you can’t write properly […]; and that you can’t learn a language …[and] foreign languages are just a terrible inconvenience and not linked to a culture or people”

"Publishers usually underscore the lack of interest in translations on the part of the American public, which, though never proved by any survey, functions as a self fulfilling prophecy" — Giséle Sapiro

I recently reviewed the South African writer S.J. Naudé’s new novel, “Fathers & Fugitives,” for @hopkinsreview.bsky.social. Just out from Europa Editions, translated from Afrikaans. hopkinsreview.com/features/thi...

cartoon of the day

This nonsense from a new Grammarly guide encouraging businesses to buy their AI products. Yet again translation gets smeared as the opposite of creative (and, oddly, strategic) ways to spend your time…

Hello world. I’m a translator, translation & literature scholar, teacher, cricket fan, whippet dad.