Dalkey Archive Press is pleased to announce that three of the Finalists for the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute 2018 Translation Prize are graduates of Dalkey Archive’s Applied Literary Translation Program. Finalists Erik Kurtzke, Allen Young, and Brendan Riley were shortlisted for the translations they completed as part of the certificate for the program, which is offered in partnership with the University of Houston-Victoria. The fourth Dalkey finalist is also an award-winning translator, Nick Caistor.
The Applied Literary Translation Program is a unique translation program whereby Dalkey Archive publishes an emerging translator’s first book-length translation after three-months of intensely working with a Dalkey editor. Upon completion of their requirements, a certificate is awarded to the translators by the University of Houston-Victoria.
“After finishing their terminal degrees, whether a B.A. or M.A., usually in translation studies, emerging translators had no clear obvious next step to take to become literary translators, except to learn by trial and error, usually finding out that publishers are reluctant to take on a translation from someone who hasn’t had a book published before,” said John O’Brien, Publisher of Dalkey Archive and creator of this program. “The talent is there, but it needs to be shaped and cultivated, and a large part of that is working closely with an editor, as well as seeing the full process for how a translation becomes a book, from acquiring rights to participating in marketing.”
Dalkey Archive is about to publish its 50th title by these emerging translators.
“We hope in the future that this program may become a full-fledged MFA in literary publishing and translation, and with the exception of a few literature classes, the students will spend all of their time involved in translation work and publishing,” said Jacob Snyder, Associate Director. “It’s learning through doing.” The program is currently offered online, with a minimum of one hour per week spent in individual meetings between the translator and editor. In the summer of 2018, a weeklong session will be held in Dublin.
The Irish Sea, by Carlos Maleno (Eric Kurtzke), is a novel masquerading as a book of short stories. It is a meditation on the paradox of nostalgia, which always seems to pine for what never was, and is also a fevered search for order through writing, of truth through literature, of the nodal point where life and literature intersect.
The House of Ulysses, by Julian Ríos (Nick Caistor), is a comic extravaganza that is at once a serious literary excavation and a lecture as delivered by Groucho Marx on the subject of that great (and often imposing) cornerstone of world literature: James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Double Room, by Luis Magrinya (Allen Young), consists of four pairs of stories and is a subtle meditation on the bonds between parents and children, the burdens of illness and grief, and the places we choose to make our home.
Recounting: Antagony, Book I, by Luis Goytisolo (Brendan Riley), surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Alternately modern and historical, Recounting displays intelligent realism, emotional gravity, profane beauty, brute vulgarity, sweeping rhetorical scope, and seamless transitions through long, streaming passages of narrative and introspection.
Dalkey wishes to thank the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute for selecting four of its translators as finalists for this award.
