buddhist in boston

The Buddhist by Dorthe Nors. My translation. The Boston Review Sept/Oct 09. Out now.

(photo from Dorthe's blog)

bargepoles and bestsellers

At 6 am tomorrow, Mich Vraa will receive a mail to which will be attached a file containing Dan Brown's new novel. Then will follow approx. 30 days of nonstop translation work, some 20 pages a day, before Vraa's Danish version is done. In this illuminating article in Politiken, Vraa reveals among other things that he "never reads a book before beginning its translation" and that his 20 pages a day will be mailed to his editor every evening to be edited on the hoof. Interestingly, it transpires that the Swedish translation will be done by a team of six translators working independently - and fast enough to get the book out before you can say "goldmine". Vraa himself, understandably, "wouldn't touch that kind of project with a bargepole."

aidt

Nordic Council Prize winner (for the collection Bavian) Naja Marie Aidt has included on her website my English version of a speech made by Information's critic Lilian Munk Rösing on the occasion of Aidt receiving the Danish Critics' Prize in 2006. Read it here>>. Also included (and a much better English read) is an excellent translation by Anne Mette Lundtofte of one of the stories in that collection, Bulbjerg.

i digress but slightly

Jørgen Leth asked me the other day if I would translate some liner notes he wrote for an upcoming CD-release. It was about jazz, he said. I said I didn't know anything about jazz. He said it didn't matter, it was a lyrical text. I read the text and said yes immediately. It is a lyrical text. An excursion into a recording session in New York in September 2008. An excursion back into Leth's one-time interest in jazz. The recording session at New York's Avatar Studio was to lay down tracks for a new album of compositions by the young Danish guitarist Jakob Bro (here>>). A session featuring a whole array of jazz luminaries, unknown to me, yet brought to life by Leth's liner notes. And suddenly I realised that Jakob Bro until recently also was a member of the Copenhagen indie combo I Got You On Tape, whose first record has been languishing on my computer here without ever really being heard. Now I've heard it, and bought the second, from which the above video is culled. Listen to Jakob Bro's tender guitar.

karate chop

More Dorthe Nors. My translations of the stories Ællingen and Den sommer gik hun på kirkegårde from Nors' acclaimed collection Kantslag (Samlerens Forlag, 2008) will be published in US journal New Letters (here>>). The English titles are The Duckling and She Frequented Cemeteries.

fruelund, river and sound, redivider

Talking of Three Percent, they just directed me on to a new online journal called River and Sound. It looks great. First off, they even have Simon Fruelund's excellent piece Phosphorescence, translated by K. E. Semmel. Read it here>>. Incidentally, Fruelund's short novel Borgerligt tusmørke is well worth a read. Maybe someone will put it out in English. Maybe K. E. Semmel should translate it. Maybe I should.

And now I see that another of Semmel's translations of Fruelund's stories - What is it? - is out here>> in Redivider, a journal I didn't even know about until now. But then, I never did want to know everything.

inger christensen exists

Inger Christensen, Denmark's major modern poet, died a few months back. Her monumental poems Alphabet, It and Butterfly Valley: A Requiem are all available in award-winning English translations by Susanne Nied. Now, Denise Newman has translated Christensen's novel Azorno for US publishers New Directions. It's reviewed here on Three Percent. Newman's translation of Christensen's novel The Painted Room came out in 2000.

There's a five-minute clip from Jytte Rex' 1998 portrait Inger Christensen - Cikaderne findes here>> (Danish).