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May 1, 2023:
A look back in pictures at the events of this past week in Chicago and New York.
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APRIL 26, 2023:
Dear friends,
Writing today with the thrill of yesterday’s incredible online program and the evening’s absolutely delightful event at Molasses Books.
Thank you to everyone who participated, with such panache. Carmen Boullousa and Samantha Schnee brought The Book of Eve to life, and Carmen regaled us with a piloncillo, new fable of Eve, emerging from Pocopatèptl—not to be missed. Clyde Moneyhun did moving readings of Maria-Mercè Marçal, Anna Dodas, and Dolors Miquel (and, after seeing Carmen’s contribution, vowed to be “more creative” next year). I would love to hear Anton Hur’s audiobook of I Went to See My Father, but for the time being, we will have to buy the paper or e-version. It is thrilling to have offered translations from Spanish (Mexico), Amazigh (the territory of Tamazgha, as Brahim El-Guabli explained so eloquently), Korean, Catalan…
We would like to sing the praises of partnerships: the Institut Ramon Llull funded the Special Catalan Issue of Hyperion magazine, and Rainer Hanshe brought together an extraordinary collection of unpredictable translations of Catalan authors: Xavier Mas Craviotto, in James Hawkey’s wonderful translations; Raül Garrigasaït (unfortunately not able to participate); Paul Spaulding Mulcock brought Pepe Salas to life—so vividly!—as Tiago Miller, the translator, is on newborn duty; Dr. AKaiser gave us a taste of her wonderful work on Cebrià Montoliu, an underappreciated forger of links between Catalonia and the U.S. (among other qualities: early urban planner, etc.); I was thrilled to bring Eugeni d’Ors into this rich mix.
At the wonderful Molasses Books (used and new books, vinyl dj’ing, including sardanas!, snacks and general good stuff) Sam Rutter interviewed Jacob Rogers about the peculiarities of translating Galician literature (what is an aldea?), Manuel Rivas—and his perfect ear for colloquial Galician—, and Jacob read from the topical and, at times, hilarious Last Days of Terranova. Sam Rutter also read from his own forthcoming translation of Hebe Uhart short stories (Archipelago) and I am on tenterhooks.
In a just under an hour we will be enjoying a new program, with translations of Larissa Kyzer from Icelandic, Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir’s The Fires; Lyn Miller-Lachmann from Portuguese, Pardalita (don’t miss her wonderful Lego city in the background). Michael F. Moore brings The Betrothed to life with Renzo's crossing the Adda River to freedom. And in the arena of tyranny and freedom, Marguerite Feitlowitz brings us Ennio Moltedo’s Chilean Night. We will continue with Hyperion’s Catalan extravaganza, with a tête-à-tête between author Núria Perpinyà and writer Jaume Pons Alorda, and a reading by Rainer Hanshe of Mara Faye Lethem’s new translation of And, Suddenly, Paradise, a novel about internet addiction, soon to be published by Contra Mundum.
A note on this year’s festival: collaborating with Archipelago Books has been a dream, and we are so pleased also to be presenting works from New Vessel, New Directions, and HarperVia. The works they publish are essential to the translation landscape, as attested to by Kira Josefsson’s translation of The Details, by Ia Genberg, VIctoria Caudle’s translaiton of Walking Practice by Dolki Min (embodying queerness in text), Elena Pala’s translation of The Whirlpool; and a conversation between Winifred Bird and Emily Balistrieri on their translations of Timihilo Morimi. From New Directions, a tour-de-force of translation and conversation between Katrina Dodson and Flora Thomson-DeVeaux about classic Brazilian texts Macunaima: The Hero with No Character (been awaiting this for so long!) and The Apprentice Tourist. From Archipelago, Tess Lewis continues to bring us the haunting evocations of Slovenia from Maja Haderlap with A Distant Translit. And New Vessel closes the afternoon with Stênio Gardel's The Words That Remain, in Bruna Dantas Lobato’s translation; Hans von Trotha’s Pollak’s Arm in Elisabeth Lauffer’s version; and Adrien Goetz’s Villa of Delirium, read by Natasha Lehrer. More praise for partnerships!
If you are in the New York area, please join us this evening for two wonderful events at Unnameable Book: Natasha Wimmer and Jennifer Shyue will discuss the latter's translator of Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, sure to be as insightful as Sam Rutter and Jacob Rogers. And, after a wine break, we will continue with Max Besora and me, discussing Mara Faye Lethem’s translation of the memorable (and unrememberable) The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia. Also online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apyCCCD9ZFw
That will be the farewell to the in-person events, but stay tuned tomorrow for a final day of online readings. And I will stop and take a breath, so I can tune in, too. Please join us in the chats, please share the program on the socials, please follow us on youtube, and enjoy our fabulous playlist of music selected by the featured readers and translators and curated by Laia Cabrera!
APRIL 25, 2023:
Dears,
This afternoon, from 2-5 p.m. on the East Coast, 1-4 p.m. on the Third Coast, and 8-11 p.m. in Catalonia, we will be broadcasting your beautiful readings. Please take a look at the schedule at santjordiusa.org/program.
This evening we are grateful to our hosts, Molasses Books, for their hospitality in welcoming Jacob Rogers, translator of The Last Days of Terranova, by the beloved Galician author, Manuel Rivas. There is a certain poignancy, and also vitality, in the stubbornness of doing a book event about the demise of a bookstore, at a bookstore… If you are in the NYC area, come join us at 7:30 p.m. at Molasses Books (770 Hart Street, Brooklyn) and raise a glass to booksellers!
But first… In our online omnibus, we are privileged to present Carmen Boullosa, the great Mexican novelist and essayist, with her translator, Samantha Schnee — The Book of Eve is hot off the presses, “a brilliant, feminist twist on the Book of Genesis.” Catalan poets will abound with Clyde Moneyhun reading Anna Dodas, Dolors Miquel and Maria-Mercè Marçal; Anton Hur brings us Shin Kyung-sook’s I Went to See My Father, a study in filial love and recent Korean history. Danielle Peratti brings us a conversation with author Maria Borio about her luminous poetry collection, Transparencies. It is also a thrill to present Brahim El-Guabli’s introduction to Amazigh literature, “The Construction of an Indigenous Consciousness,” with a reading of his translation of two poets who write in Amazigh.
And, finally, what a thrill to shine a spolight on the special Catalan issue of Hyperion magazine, which includes a very groundbreaking sampler of Catalan literature, current and historic. Where but here could you find early 20th-century figures like Cebrià de Montoliu (presented by Dr. AKaiser) and Eugeni d’Ors (tr. Mary Ann Newman) beside 70s iconoclasts like Pepe Salas (translate by Tiago Miller and presented by specila guest Paul Spalding-Mulcock), and absolutely cutting-edge writers like Anna Gual (tr. AKaiser), Felicia Fuster (tr. Marialena Carr), and Núria Perpinya, in a conversation with author Jaume Pons-Alorda and whose translation by Salomè Munk is read by editor Rainer Hanshe. Rainer offers an overview of Hyperion and Contra Mundum Press, which will be publishing Perpinyà’s …And, Suddenly, Paradise, in 2024. This is truly a titanic issue (in honor of Hyperion…), a compendium of unexpected juxtapositions.
Please share the links to your readings and invite people to join in the conversation.
As always, we are grateful for the support of the Delegation of the Government of Catalonia to the United States and the Institut Ramon Llull, which also supported Hyperion magazine.
Love to all, please share!
Mary Ann
APRIL 24, 2023:
Dear friends,
As we wrap-up the amazing Sant Jordi USA-Chicago and the gorgeous event at the Center for Fiction with Irene Vallejo, Sarah Ruden, and Charlotte Whittle, we are gearing up to view the first day of Sant Jordi USA online! Tune in for Samantha Schnee and Jeannette Clariond, Paul Holdengraber, Vicenç Altaió and Marialena Carr, Xavier Mas Craviotto, and many more.
The Focus on Jill! features the influential work of this ongoing reading series of that spotlights women, trans, and/or nonbinary translators or translators of women, trans, and/or nonbinary authors. Get a taste of their work here, and follow them at https://www.jillreadingnyc.com/.
This is also just a first taste of Catalan women poets and their translators, with Anna Gual and Gemma Gorga, translated by Ann Kaiser and Sharon Dolin.
Please spread the work, and join us online and chat with viewers. The youtube chat is great fun!
Una abraçada!
Mary Ann
APRIL 23, 2023: Happy Sant Jordi’s Day from New York City!
In keeping with NY tradition, whereby April showers bring May flowers, it has been raining like crazy all night, and will continue throughout the morning. Fortunately, our partners in everything Sant Jordi, the Catalan Institute of America, have arranged for there to be hot chocolate and xurros at the NYU-KJCC. We will exchange books—bring a book you have read, take a book someone else has loved-- see movies, take pictures, and get nice and toasty with our hot chocolate. Oh! And give away roses!
It does seem, though, that there is a chance the sun will come out for this afternoon’s conversation with Irene Vallejo, author of Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, and her translator, Charlotte Whittle, and the great great Classic scholar, Sarah Ruden. A conversation for the ages! Come to the Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Avenue, in Brooklyn, at 3 p.m. Get your books and roses on! (And dragons.)
APRIL 22, 2023: Sant Jordi Returns to America!
Followers of Sant Jordi USA, we are thrilled to greet you once again!
Sant Jordi has been riding and defending literature in translation in New York since 2014.
From 2014 to 2017, we sponsored lit crawls in neighborhoods, or events at bookstores and cultural centers. Translators from many languages and literatures took part, and its popularity grew.
In 2020 we were planning to do lit crawls in five NYC neighborhoods, when the pandemic shut us down. With artists Laia Cabrera and Isabelle Duverger, we leapt online with this beautiful Madison Square landing page: santjordiusa.org/home2020. Many festivals joined us: Neue Literatur, PEN World Voices, and others. We introduce the web-AR baby dragon, roses, and books that you could bring into your house, like a Pokèmon. Good news: the baby dragon—Dragonet—is back this year. Take it home with you!
The pandemic had lessons for everyone: breadmaking, meditation, self-care, cottage businesses, moving to the country… The lesson for Sant Jordi NYC was that our little festival of literature in English translation could have a world-wide audience. That year we had viewers from Japan, Finland, Iraq, Germany, and many more, and of course our viewers in the U.S. and Catalonia, where Lleida edged out Barcelona as one of the places with the most viewers. We went from 600-700 visitors for a week-long in-person festival to 7,000 viewers online, for 24 languages from 45 countries. It was an epiphany.
Since 2020 we have continued to be online, and we continue to grow Last year we had almost 65.000 views on youtube, of an average of 5 minutes each. But we missed everyone — the warmth, the hugs, the wine and cheese — and last year we went hybrid, with our beautiful host at the Jersey City Theater Center, Olga Levina, who welcomed three exhibitions by Catalan artists — Under the Light of the Sea, by Espe Pons, an exhibition about the absences left by Francoism, There is Still Someone in the Woods, an installation and documentary about the survivors of the Bosnian War, by the Catalan activist collective, Cultura i Conflicte, and a stunning immersive cinematic installation of Catalan landscapes and architecture, Close-Up/Primer Pla, by Laia Cabrera and Isabelle Duverger. There was also a striking and charming dance performance by David Rodríguez and Luke Prunty, Things They Said/Coses que s’han dit, and a moving staging of the texts from Brigadistes: Lives for Liberty by Jordi Martí-Rueda (Pluto Press) by dramaturge Maria Litvan and her graduate students at CUNY.
In September we did a trial half-year Sant Jordi in Chicago, curated by Alta L. Price, with the collaboration of the Third Coast Translation Collective (TCTC) and the support of DCASE, the Chicago Arts Council. Events were staged at Haymarket House (20th-Century Catalonia: Aristocrats, Revolutionaries, and Hermits, Mary Ann Newman in conversation with Erik Noonan); Seminary Co-Op (Infiltrating Language Itself: Memory, Justice, and Poetry in Translation, Daniel Borzutzky and Lucina Schell in conversation with Jose-Luis Moctezuma); and Exile in Bookville—if Seminary Co-op were not already my favorite bookstore in the world, Exile in Bookville would be (New Takes on Exile Literature: Transcending Bodies and Borders, Izidora Angel in conversation with Alta Price.) In light of the wonderful Chicago hospitality—we crashed a Sunday Salon Chicago lit party and had a grand old time—we have launched Sant Jordi from the Windy City, and the first event, Poems and Power: Translation as Intimate Philosophy with Kristen Renee Miller and Alta L. Price—making Agamben approachable, yay, Alta—was brilliant. More today and tomorrow, see santjordiusa.org.
This is just a recap and a welcome to the Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, Roses & Dragons. We will be bringing you news and updates throughout the festival, April 21 to 27. There will be in-person events throughout the week, online readings each day, a playlist prepared by the authors and translators to enhance the readings, there will be chats online as the events are posted, and there will be a baby dragon! Take Dragonet home with you!
Today's Program:
Saturday April 22: 3:00pm CDT: City Lit Books - 2523 N Kedzie Blvd, Chicago
ONLINE > WATCH HERE
The World Blossoms in Chicago: Translation as Connection with Winifred Bird and Ellen Vayner
Join us for readings from new Japanese and Russian books in translation! Hear Winifred Bird on translating Tomihiko Morimi’s latest collection Fox Tales, and Ellen Vayner with Red Crosses and Not Russian on translating contemporary fiction from Russian into English
APRIL 21, 2023:
“Dragnet” was a 1950’s and 60’s TV show that portrayed police procedures in Los Angeles. A dragnet is a fishing web that dredges up everything in its path. Dragnet, the show, had a characteristic music that was unmistakable—dum-ta—dum-dum—and the protagonist, Detective Joe Friday (actor Jack Webb), spoke in a flat deadpan voice and had a catchphrase for interrogatiions, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Sant Jordi doesn’t only live in Catalonia. Saint George is alive and well in the U.S. Stan Freberg, the comedian, did a parody of Dragnet titled “Saint George and the Dragonet,” that we are delighted to present to you here. Even though Dragnet is set in California, the accents of the characters in the parody are very clearly from New York. Enjoy!
APRIL 21, 2023:
Chicago, City of the Big Shoulders, City of the Nine Dragon Wall
Sant Jordi would have had his work cut out for him in Chicago. Nine dragons instead of one! Maybe, just maybe, Josep Carner had the answer to his problem:
THE DRAGON
"This is the very first time
I correct a timeworn mistake
I never met St. George
nor of lamb did I partake,
never flew above the mountains
never killed or pierced or twisted,
for a very simple reason:
I have simply never existed.
You can see I'm not to blame
and you really shouldn't hate me
if some coward dreamed me up
and some painter rushed to paint me.
But, oh!, the strange desires
and deliriums of a ghost:
To see myself as painters see me
is what I'd like the most."
EL DRAC
–És la primera vegada
que ataco un erro molt vell:
no he mai topat un Sant Jordi
ni mai tastat un anyell,
ni he volat damunt les serres
ni he fet cap mort ni ferit,
per la raó, tan senzilla,
de no haver mai existit.
Capireu que no tinc culpa
ni em sabríeu condemnar
si un poruc va somiar-me
i un pintor se’m va empescar.
I vegeu si en són d’estranyes
les manies d’un boirós;
com em reca de no veure’m
com em veien els pintors!
(From Barcelona Bestiary by Josep Carner, tr. Mary Ann Newman, Triangle Postals Barcelona 2013)
Break a leg, Chicago! May the dragons bring you good luck and the books and roses sustenance and perfume. Happy Sant Jordi’s Weekend!
APRIL 18, 2023:
Please join Archipelago and Open Letter in the garden at Unnamable Books (615 Vanderbilt Ave, at St Marks—Clinton/Washington C train or Grand Army 2/3/5) for a fabulous Sant Jordi NY event on April 26th! Wine and cheese will be served!
7pm EST: Natasha Wimmer will talk with Jennifer Shyue about her translation of Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu and the entanglements of Japanese-Peruvian identity it reveals.
Wine and cheese will be served!
8pm EST: The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpi, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia, with author Max Besora, in person, publisher Kaija Straumanis, and Catalanist Mary Ann Newman -- who will discuss the influence of North American writers of the 60s and 70s on contemporary Catalan literature.
We'll raise a glass of Cava to all the cultural cross-pollinators! Can't wait to see you on the 26th in the Unnameable garden!
APRIL 17, 2023: We're back!!!
Sant Jordi in New York will launch on Sant Jordi Day with a celebration of the invention of books in the ancient world, presenting Irene Vallejo, Sarah Ruden, and Charlotte Whittle on Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World at the Center for Fiction.
The Sant Jordi Festival of Books & Roses in Barcelona is one of the most delightful and colorful book fairs in the world, combining outdoor bookstalls and flower stands up and down the boulevards of Barcelona and throughout Catalonia. It celebrates Saint George, the dragonslayer, of whom the legend claims that when he wounded the dragon’s wing, a rose bush spraing up from the drops of blood that fell to the ground. A fitting context for the swashbuckling story of Papyrus, The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, in which Irene Vallejo tells the tale of book collecting including the Ptolemies’ campaign to create the world’s greatest library. Join us for a conversation with Irene Vallejo, Sarah Ruden, renowned translator of Greek and Roman classics, and translator Charlotte Whittle. There will be roses, and maybe dragons!
Sant Jordi USA
Made in New York
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© 2020 Sant Jordi USA
Interactive platform created by LAIA CABRERA & CO.
(Isabelle Duverger & Laia Cabrera)