When thinking about how to describe this brilliant novella by renowned Mexican author Fabio Morábito, the juxtaposition of poetry, oddities and irony seemed to convey its breadth. Have a listen as I and two members of Wayfarers Book Club talk to translator Curtis Bauer, where he shares his approach, insights and takeaways.

~Lisa

Lisa Carter is Founder and Creative Director of Intralingo, helping authors and translators write and readers explore stories. Lisa brings two decades of professional literary experience, including nine books and multiple other pieces published in translation, and nearly as many years of contemplative and compassion practices to her work. Her inclusive, engaged, caring presence inspires people to share their stories, create new ones and feel truly heard.

GET THE BOOKIntralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)Or support the author and translator through your local, independent bookseller or library.

CONNECTCurtis BauerFabio Morábito and Other PressWayfarers Book Club

WATCH THE INTERVIEWVia the BookLove LetterOn YouTube

Thank you for listening!

*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, and will always identify when that is the case. Recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.

Season 03 Episode 05 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast

Max is the most delightful guest who shared much about the wide-ranging themes he wanted to convey in this story and, as an extraordinarily talented and sensitive translator, Ros offered yet another dimension to this slim but deep novel.

~Lisa

Lisa Carter
Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.

00:00:36 – Introduction

00:01:35 – Max shares what he wanted to write about: migration from Africa to Europe, Boko Haram, religion, family and LGBT issues

00:03:33 – Max’s story of leaving Cameroon

00:06:36 – Ros and Max’s collaboration

00:09:00 – The language of Camfranglais

00:12:04 – The politics of translation choices

00:14:00 – Enriched the experience for readers

00:15:25 – A place for glossaries in fiction

00:15:51 – A tip for translators and varieties of English

00:17:20 – Max’s approach to language

00:19:32 – Awareness of English as a colonizing language

00:20:53 – Examples of how Max and Ros collaborated

00:23:17 – Vibrancy of sound, color, action in this novel

00:25:15 – Cameroonian students critiqued Ros’s translation

00:26:44 – The themes at the heart of the book

00:30:55 – Max’s personal connections to the themes

00:33:30 – Cameroon today

00:36:45 – The relationship between the protagonists

00:37:08 – The Gay Book Prize in France

00:39:30 – The universal human experience

00:41:10 – The particular experience Max wanted to explore

00:44:05 – Shame, breaking free and where Max wants to go next

GET THE BOOK

Intralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)

Or support the authors through your local, independent bookseller or library.

THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…

Wayfarers Book Club, learn more at www.intralingo.com/wayfarers 

*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, but our recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.

In Conversation with Michelle Grierson, author of Becoming Leidah

Season 03 Episode 04 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast

We’re so happy to share a truly magical conversation with author Michelle Grierson about her debut novel, Becoming Leidah. This one includes questions from a number of readers and is filled with deeply personal shares and insights.

~Lisa

Lisa Carter
 Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.

00:00:11 – Introduction

00:03:00 – Michelle’s Norwegian ancestry and how “blood memory” played a role in telling this story

00:06:08 – The heart of the book as a mother-daughter story

00:08:52 – The myth of the Selkies

00:11:10 – The shapeshifter as the Norse God Odin

00:12:31 – How the book came to Michelle in “quilt patches”

00:13:28 – The state of liminality throughout the book

00:14:58 – Michelle’s use of trines and the Norse cosmology of time

00:19:05 – The oneness of everything and playing with space on the page

00:20:56 – Reader is completely engaged from the first paragraph

00:25:33 – Story structure and the writing process

00:28:01 – Letting go of a book once it’s published

00:32:07 – The mother-daughter relationship

00:37:00 – The father as the villain in this story

00:41:43 – Two personal things Michelle took away from writing this book

00:46:09 – Reader takeaways from experiencing this book

GET THE BOOK

Intralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)

Or support the author through your local, independent bookseller or library.

THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…

Wayfarers Book Club, learn more at www.intralingo.com

*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, but our recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.

Season 03 Episode 03 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast

I hope you will enjoy this soulful, shifting, emotional –and fun!–  conversation with author Shugri Said Salh about her memoir, The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert.

~Lisa

Lisa Carter
 Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.

00:00:11 – Introduction

00:02:11 – Our shared humanity

00:09:48 – Childhood as a nomad in the desert of Somalia

00:16:45 – Connection to storytelling

00:23:24 – Universal theme and the hardest chapter to write

00:26:18 – An aha moment

00:30:22 – The refugee experience

00:36:26 – Skating, on the river and through life

00:41:01 – The price of trauma and need for closure

00:44:26 – Healing through storytelling

00:48:08 – Supporting and hearing one another

GET THE BOOK

Intralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)

Or support the author through your local, independent bookseller or library.

Shugri talks about the audio version, read by a Kenyan actress, with proverbs recited and songs sung by Shugri herself. Check that out for sure!

THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…

Wayfarers Book Club, learn more at www.intralingo.com

*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, but our recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.

Season 3 Episode 02 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe. 

Lisa Carter talks to Zhang Ling and Shelly Bryant about their novel, A Single Swallow. The discussion covers the themes of trauma, war and memory, informed by Ling’s work as a clinical audiologist, discoveries she made on her research trips to China, the voices of the narrators, the beauty of the language of the original, and so much more.

Zhang Ling is the award-winning author of nine novels and numerous collections of novellas and short stories. Born in China, she moved to Canada in 1986. In the mid-1990s, she began to write and publish fiction in Chinese while working as a clinical audiologist. Since then she has won the Chinese Media Literature Award for Author of the Year, the Grand Prize of Overseas Chinese Literary Award, and Taiwan’s Open Book Award. Among Zhang Ling’s work are Gold Mountain Blues and Aftershock, adapted into China’s first IMAX movie with unprecedented box-office success.

Shelly Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai, a book on classical Chinese gardens, and a short story collection. She has translated Chinese text for publishers such as Penguin Books and various organizations, including the National Library Board in Singapore and the Human Sciences Research Council. Her translation of Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, and her translation of You Jin’s In Time, Out of Place was short-listed for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016. Shelly received a Distinguished Alumni award from Oklahoma Christian University in 2017.

The book is available in all formats and from all sellers. [Affiliate link] https://bookshop.org/a/4438/9781542041508

Join us at Intralingo (https://intralingo.com) to explore the world through books!

Thanks for listening!

~Lisa

Lisa Carter,  Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 
 

Season 3 - Episode 01 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe. 

 I'm so pleased to have spoken to author Nazanine Hozar about her debut novel, Aria -- which Margaret Atwood called the "Doctor Zhivago of Iran"! 

 NAZANINE HOZAR was born in Tehran, Iran, and lives in British Columbia, Canada. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Vancouver Observer and Prairie Fire magazine. 

 The book is available in all formats and from all sellers.
https://bookshop.org/a/4438/9781524749033   [Affiliate link] 

 Join us at Intralingo (https://intralingo.com) to explore the world through books!

 Thanks for listening!

~Lisa

Lisa Carter,  Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 
 

Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

Welcome to the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe.

Children of War, by Ahmet Yorulmaz, translated by Paula Darwish

Some years ago, I visited an abandoned city along the Aegean, where I learned for the first time about the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. It was perhaps the most unsettling place I’ve ever been. 

When I heard about Children of War, by Ahmet Yorulmaz, I couldn’t wait to read it. And then speak to translator Paula Darwish.

“It's very simple book, isn't it?” Paula comments. “There's nothing heavy in it, in a way. Although the topic is tragic, it's very simple. But it's thought provoking. … The best thing about it is, because it's told through a child's eyes, he's just sort of taking things on the surface, saying, "Well, come on. I'm a Cretan. Then how come I was a Cretan and now I'm supposed to be a Turk?"

Based on diaries, the novel reads like an oral story, told by an old man remembering his childhood. It’s full of sensual details: the tastes and smells and textures of home.

Ahmet Yorulmaz devoted his entire career as a journalist, translator and novelist to rapprochement between Turkey and Greece. In Children of War, he offers an engaging, sensitive glimpse into a profound historical event.

Paula feels proud to have translated this book into English, to represent it and what it represents.

“The thing that I'd like people to take away from it is to sort of question our conceptions, if you like, of identity and who belongs, where those perceptions came from, and how long you have to be somewhere before you're not seen as a sort of immigrant.”

Thank you to Neem Tree Press for the review copy.

**

Paula Darwish is a freelance translator and professional musician. She read Turkish Language and Literature with Middle Eastern History at SOAS in London graduating with a First in 1997. In 2015, she was invited to attend the Cunda International Workshops for Translators of Turkish Literature, where she participated in a collaborative translation of the works of Behçet Necatigil. Her submission from the novel Savaşın Çocukları by the late Ahmet Yorulmaz won a prize in the 2015 PEN Samples Translation Pitch competition. In 2017, her translation of the short story Uzun Kışın Suçlusu by Demet Şahin was part of the 10th Istanbul International Poetry and Literature Festival. She has also translated some notable non-fiction works, including a bilingual catalogue of the buildings of the famous Ottoman architect, Sinan. She is a qualified member (MITI) of the Institute of Translators and Interpreters.

www.pauladarwish.com

https://neemtreepress.com/book/children-of-war/

 Ahmet Yorulmaz was a Turkish a journalist, author and translator. He was born in Ayvalik to a family of Cretan Turks deported to mainland Turkey as part of the Greek/Turkish population exchange decreed in the Treaty of Lausanne. He was fluent in modern Greek and translated novels and poems from contemporary Greek literature to Turkish. Most of his original works were written with the aim of making people learn about Ayvalık, the city where he grew up. He dedicated himself to Greek-Turkish friendship and rapprochement.

 **

Thank you for listening and please share your own experience of this interview, the topics, and of course this amazing book. Drop a comment or reach out directly! We’d love to hear from you.

Lisa Carter
 Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.