My good news streak continues ... If you live in Serbia, you will soon be reading An Elegy for Easterly in Serbian. The Serbian rights have been sold to Samidat B 92, the book arm of B 92, a large media company. Samidat B 92 also publish Art Spiegelman, Alexander McCall Smith and Ali Smith among others. I am really happy about this. When I agreed last year to go to the Kikinda Short Story Festival and to do readings in Belgrade, Srdjan Srdic, the festival organiser, told me that lots of good luck came to the writers who took part in Kikinda. This may be some of that luck.
More translation news, and this time from Zimbabwe: Charles Mungoshi and Musa Zimunya have agreed to edit a collection of short stories for Weaver Press. Here is the super-thrilling bit: the anthology is in Shona. They have chosen to include The Mupandawana Dancing Champion which will be translated by Musa Zimunya. I have said many times that Charles Mungoshi is my favourite Zimbabwean writer, and that his books in Shona are, to me, the finest in Zimbabwean literature. So it is wonderful to be spoken of in the same breath as him. I completely adore Musa too, he gave the keynote address at my book launch in Zim. I had lots of fun translating the thoughts and language of my characters from Shona to English: I hope Musa has as much fun translating it all back.
Finally, here is some more award news. My book is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum First Book Award. I am beyond thrilled about this. The other finalists are Paul Harding, for Tinkers, Philipp Meyer, for American Rust, Daniyal Mueenuddin, for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and my doppelganger Wells Tower, for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. To read about the finalists in other categories, including a special award to be given to Dave Eggers, click here. I have been invited to the awards ceremony on 23 April, and will also take part in the Los Angeles Times Book Festival at UCLA. I am definitely on a lucky streak with newspaper-sponsored awards ...
3 comments:
All the best, hope you win!
One question:
Why would you choose someone else to translate your work into your mother tongue rather than do it yourself?
Roger:
I did not "choose someone else" to translate my story into Shona: Weaver Press did. Mungoshi and Zimunya will translate about ten stories. Besides, my Shona is good, but it is nowhere near as good as Musa and Charles. They did not have the misfortune of missing 6 years of Shona at a Group A school like I did. So my written Shona would have none of the richness of these two. Just as not every English speaker is good enough to write a novel in his own language, many Shona speakers are not good enough in Shona to write in their language.
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