Living in Translation

So I have been so looking forward to doing something in the lead up to International Translation Day which falls on the 30th of September every year.

On Friday the 27th of September, I will be hosting a conversation with Tiffany Tsao and Chris Andrews at the Peter Shergold Building in Parramatta Square.

The conversation is titled Living in Translation, which is particularly relevant to Parramatta and the surrounding areas where the majority of people speak more than one language. Western Sydney is home to more than 180 languages and it makes sense to have a panel on the subject of language and translation in Parramatta itself.

Tiffany Tsao is the author of The Oddfits series and the novel Under Your Wings (The Majesties is the US title). She is a translator from Indonesian to English and has translated the work of writers such as Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Budi Darma. The conversation will touch in more detail on People from Bloomington, a collection of short stories by Budi Darma that appeared as a Penguin Classic in 2022.

The book features a foreword by the incredible Intan Paramaditha, author of Apple and Knife and then The Wandering which follows the structure of a “choose your own adventure” novel and delighted me to no end when I read it in 2021.

People from Bloomington also has a lengthy introduction by Tiffany Tsao. I always appreciate and read closely any introduction or note by a translator to accompany a translated work.

The second translator will be the one and only Chris Andrews who translates from French and Spanish. He is the translator of Roberto Bolaño, the subject of my essay Vanishing Bolaño and an enduring literary crush. He has translated also César Aira and other incredible writers from Spanish. Our conversation will focus on one of his recent translations from French. The book is A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi and this book is an absolute treasure. I read it in April, and then I read The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud and then The Outsider by Albert Camus, as a little Algeria bubble for that month. A Bookshop in Algiers is a book that fundamentally affected how I see the world and history and empire and the role of books and literature.

All the details are located at the following link.

I hope that one day the month of September is dedicated to translation and translators and works in translation by readers and book lovers. I hope that one day this tiny event will become many more events right around the city, the country and the rest of the world and we all find ways to celebrate translation and the amazing work of translators such as Chris Andrews and Tiffany Tsao.

Here is a newsletter that I wrote for The Circular in early 2021. It is called The Alchemy of Translation and it is titled so because I believe translation is magical, alchemical, and it is the unifier between the languages people use right across the world.