Criticism & Features

NBCC Reads

Translation Panel, San Francisco, October 13

By Eric Banks

NBCC READS: Translation Panel

National Book Critics Circle, Litquake, and City Lights present
Collapsing Borders: Reading Global Culture Through Literary Translation
City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway (North Beach), San Francisco
Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 7:00 P.M.

Oscar Villalon, former SF Chronicle book editor and currently McSweeney’s publisher
NBCC board member Jennifer Reese
Scott Esposito, editor of The Quarterly Conversation
VQR blogger Michael Lukas
Katherine Silver, translator of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s She-Devil in the Mirror and Senselessness, a runner-up for the Best Translated Book Award.

In its NBCC Reads series, the National Book Critics Circle canvasses the membership (as well as former winners and nominees) regularly for recommendations. The latest survey asked: Which work in translation has had the most effect on your reading and writing? Our panel will discuss these works and place them in context to the field of world literature. Emphasis will be placed on how literature-in-translation explores global sociopolitical currents and what the role of the translator is in a world of rapidly crumbling borders.