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Category Archives: Interviews
The Congo in Blood River
Tim Butcher is indeed no ordinary journalist. He has made a career of writing from awkward places at awkward times. Born in 1967, he spent his childhood in the British Midlands. After a year of climbing mountains in New Zealand, he read politics, philosophy and economics, earning a degree from Magdalen College, Oxford. Since 1991, he has worked for The Daily Telegraph, covering crises from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, to the allied invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Israel’s 2006 struggle with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Currently, he works as the paper’s Middle East Correspondent based in Jerusalem. He and his partner, Jane, have a toddler, Kit, an infant, Tess, and a Jack Russell, Betty. Continue reading
Drawing New Circles
In this conversation, Victoria Chang shares with Greta Aart her thoughts and experiences as a woman poet who writes with a strong, unbashful Asian-American voice. Editor of the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois, 2004), she published Circle (Southern Illlinois University Press) a year after, a debut that earned the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award. “Nailing it down” is how she describes her own writings—wry, economical, dark, and sharp, with a journalistic eye of happenings from her historical past and immediate surroundings. Salvinia Molesta is her second book, forthcoming this fall as part of the VQR Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press). Living in Irvine, California, Chang is a mother of two who balances a career in the corporate world, while continuing to pursue her writing vocation. Her most recent poetry appeared in New England Review, Southwest Review, Gulf Coast, and Kenyon Review, among others. You can also visit her website. Continue reading
Translation as Breathing New Life in a New Language
Concerning the silence of translators, why are they so often overlooked or comparatively ‘little’ credited in our society? What do you think can help lend them a stronger literal and social voice?
That’s such a difficult question, especially in America, which is such a monolingual society. It is often said that translated books don’t sell as well as ‘original’ books, so sometimes publishers try to downplay the fact that a book was translated. There’s a good amount of xenophobia in the publishing world, I think. I’m a member of the PEN Translation Committee, which tries to stress the importance of royalties for translators, for example. But it will be a long time before translators are regarded as being as important as the authors they translate. Which is ironic, since without us those authors wouldn’t exist in English! Continue reading
