The focused residency provides an integral stage of refinement, allowing translators to dialogue with the writers about text-specific questions. Following in the tradition of the Art Omi: Writers residency as started by Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, the Translation Lab emphasizes translation as a means towards cultural exchange. It serves as an essential community builder for English language translators who are working to increase the amount of international literature available to American readers, as it is currently estimated that less than three percent of all books published in the United States are translated works.
The residency is a rare and unique opportunity for writers and their translators to work together, considering that most writers never meet their translators in person. All text-based projects—fiction, nonfiction, theater, film, poetry, etc.—are eligible.
Translation Lab is fully funded, including travel, room and board, meals, and workspaces and are made possible in part by Amazon.com.
Translation Lab participants will also be featured at the ALTA conference in Rochester in a panel discussion of their work on Friday, November 8.
Art Omi Translation Lab 2019 at ALTA42 Conference in Rochester, NY
Friday, November 8, 10:45 AM
Join the writers and translators from Translation Lab 2019 as they share and discuss their work. Every fall, Art Omi: Writers, a residency program in New York’s Hudson Valley, hosts four Englishlanguage translators along with the writers whose work is being translated into English. Translators working on various types of texts—from fiction and nonfiction to theater and poetry—enjoy a short, intensive residency that provides them with an integral stage of refinement and the chance to dialogue with writers about text-specific questions. Translation Lab also serves as an essential community-building environment for English-language translators who are working to increase the amount of international literature available to English-language readers.
Marta Orriols is emerging as one of finest of the recent fine crop of female prose stylists from Catalonia. Also the author of a 2016 short story collection, she studied creative writing at the Barcelona Athenaeum. This is her debut novel, which sold to several languages even before its original Catalan publication appeared and earned her the Òmnium Award for Best Novel of 2018.
Learning to Talk to Plants / Aprendre a parlar amb les plantes
Paula Cid is a reserved, hard-nosed NICU doctor in her early forties, who’s been engaged to Mauro for so long she doesn’t even wear the ring anymore. Their staid relationship ends abruptly when he announces that he leaving her for another woman. A few hours later, he’s killed when his bicycle is slammed by a car. The shock of her not-exactly widowhood is refracted through the latent grief over her mother’s death decades earlier.
Orriols’ finely hewn prose is infused with frank emotion and at times staggering bluntness, acknowledging the coexistence of true grief with true life: true anger, true desire, and true relief. Paula's life is cleaved in two; her self-image and way of being in the world are irrevocably changed by Mauro's death, forcing her to grapple with numbness, longing, passion, solitude, her evolving relationship with her aging widower father, other people’s expectations, and—most importantly— her own.
Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by Jaume Cabré, David Trueba, Albert Sánchez Piñol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron, Marc Pastor and Toni Sala, among others, and shorter fiction by such authors as Juan Marsé, Rodrigo Fresán, Pola Oloixarac, Teresa Colom and Alba Dedeu. Her translation of The Whispering City, by Sara Moliner, recently received an English PEN Award and two of her translations were nominated for the 2016 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
