Beyond The Beyond

*Well, the filmi life at parties isn’t all peaches and cream.

*I wonder what’s worse: getting strobe-flashed like that, or having the kind of birthday party where all your dear friends have to get strobe-flashed.

*”A vast compendium from the Tang Dynasty of weird scientific and ethnographic information and generally strange stories.” I dunno. A weird business, literature.

PEN AMERICAN CENTER ANNOUNCES THE 2012 TRANSLATION FUND GRANT RECIPIENTS

Click here to read excerpts from the winning manuscripts!

Year after year the PEN Translation Fund facilitates the elegant translation into English of works from around the world, helping to make important writers accessible to an Anglophone readership and to open our minds and hearts to other peoples. The crucial cultural work of the Fund and of the translators it recognizes goes to the very essence of why PEN was started 90 years ago.

—Peter Godwin, President of PEN American Center

The PEN Translation Fund, now celebrating its ninth year, is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s competition. From a field of 130 applicants, the Fund’s Advisory Board—Susan Bernofsky, Barbara Epler, Edwin Frank, Michael Reynolds, Richard Sieburth, Eliot Weinberger, and Natasha Wimmer, and chaired by Michael F. Moore—has selected the following twelve projects for funding:

Bernard Adams for his translation of Andrea Tompa’s A hóhér háza (The Hangman’s House), a poignant and beautiful novel about a girl growing up in a Romanian-Hungarian family during the 70s and 80s in Ceauşescu’s Romania. The translation combines a fine-fingering attention to detail with a powerful emotional sweep. (Available for publication)

Alexander Booth for in felderlatein (in field latin) by Lutz Seiler. Widely acknowledged as one of the major German poets of his generation, the work of Seiler has been translated only sporadically. Booth’s translations give a strong sense of Seiler’s poetic voice, with an incessant use of fragmentation as he attempts to pin down memory (usually childhood memory, sometimes of traumatic events) and the stark imagery of his terse lines. (Available for publication)

Brent Edwards for L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa) by Michel Leiris. A diaristic account of Leiris’s activities as the “secretary-archivist” of Marcel Griaule’s Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931-33), often compared to Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques for introducing a path-breaking critical self-reflexivity into the discourse of anthropology. (Seagull Books)

Joshua Daniel Edwin for kummerang (gloomerang), the first book by young German poet Dagmara Kraus. These translations display an explosive inventiveness and poetic intelligence that find surprising, engaging ways to render Kraus’s poems. They appeal as much through their sly punning and syncopated rhythms as they do through the stories told between the lines. (Available for publication)

Musharraf Ali Farooqi for his translation from the Urdu of Muhammad Husain Jah and Ahmed Husain Qamar’s Hoshruba: The Prisoner of Batin, the second volume of an 8,000-page late-nineteenth century epic of magical fantasy based on the popular oral narrative tradition. (Random House India)

Deborah Garfinkle for her translation of Worm-Eaten Time: Poems from a Life Under Normalization, a selection of hallucinatory poems that were banned by the government and circulated in samizdat copies, by the Czech poet Pavel Šrut. Šrut’s poems were written during the Prague Spring of 1968 and then, after a ten-year silence, in the 1980s before the fall of Communism. (Available for publication)

Hillary Gulley for the translation of Marcelo Cohen’s El fin de los mismo (The End of the Same). A formal experimentation and sci-fi-inflected mini-plots—including a prison on the beach and a man in love with a woman with three arms—shape this finely wrought Argentinean novel. (Available for publication)

Bonnie Huie for her translation of Notes of a Crocodile by the Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin. The only novel published by Qiu before her suicide at 26, this work is an extraordinary combination of mash note, love story, comic shtick, aesthetic manifesto, and spiritual autobiography. It is a groundbreaking queer novel and a classic of modern Taiwanese literature. (Available for publication)

Jacquelyn Pope for her translation of Hester Knibbe’s Hungerpots, from the Dutch. These wry, unsentimental poems gently upend myths of domestic life and wax anti-poetically (yet beautifully) on the most ordinary manifestations of nature. (Available for publication)

Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad for a delightfully light-on-its-feet translation of the novel in Urdu Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi. Tracing an arc of nostalgia between Pakistan and India, its main characters are all Indian Muslim immigrants in Pakistan whose struggles veer from the comic to the tragic. The translators’ touch is graceful, lively, and supple. Humor can be the hardest element to successfully bring into a new language and they carry over the singularly elastic wit of Yousufi with considerable aplomb. (Available for publication)

Carrie Reed for a complete translation of Youyang zazu (Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang) by Duan Chengshi. A vast compendium from the Tang Dynasty of weird scientific and ethnographic information and generally strange stories. (Available for publication)

Nathanaël for The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert, a posthumous collection of the private journals that the well-known novelist and AIDS activist kept from 1976-1991—a series of literary snapshots of the author’s various objects of desire and mourning and already a classic of French autobiography. (Available for publication)

The Advisory Board is also pleased to announce that its nominee for a 2012 New York State Council on the Arts translation grant, Ana Božičević, was awarded a grant in January for her translation of Snow on Fire by Serbian poet Zvonko Karanović. Karanović, a countercultural icon, writes in a vivid, sophisticated vernacular of desire and transcendence amid cultural and political change. (Available for publication)

Publishers and editors who wish to express an interest in any of these projects are invited to contact Paul Morris (Paul@pen.org ) or Michael Moore (michael.moore@esteri.it).

The Fund gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of Amazon.com, which has assisted the Fund’s work this year with a gift of $25,000.

*If you get involved in this and you somehow become all cosmic and also Italian, don’t you come crying to me.

http://www.cosecosmiche.org/index.html

COSMIC PRIZE

What makes you say that a thing-situation-event-creation is Cosmic? It is something which goes beyond the parameters we are used to and which are given by the contingency, by our generation, epoch, planet.

The Arthur Cravan Foundation, in the occasion of Cosmic Things #3 will award a funding for the realization of a project which can be defined as Cosmic, and that has the following characteristics: it shouldn’t have aim and function nor objective or justification; in short it must not be dependable and justifiable in the economic,
moral or artistic points of view. All this but with a high content of future vision.All the projects will be presented to the public during Cosmic Things #3 and the last day the winner will be proclaimed by a jury of scientist, critics, artists, boxers (((way to go, Arthur Cravan))) and collectors.

We disclose that the jury’s members will have a fundamental role. They will not only have the responsibility of choosing the winning project: they will contribute to increase the prize amount (juror supporter €50, juror senior €20, Juror enthusiast €5, juror without portfolio €2).
To each judge will be given a certificate recognizing that he/she has contributed to the realization of a Cosmic thing.

The deadline for submitting projects is 26 September 2012.

e-mail: mail@cosecosmiche.org or at Galleria Artra, via Burlamacchi 1, Milano.
Sponsored by COSE COSMICHE & Arthur Cravan Foundation

For more information www.cosecosmiche.org
or call 3335346000 (Helga ) or 3497936240 (Silvia)

COSE COSMICHE is a platform in which artists, scientists and researchers of various fields are asked to present a reflection, a thought on space, time, energy, matter, void.
Through language we have defined the universe in which we live in with concepts like space, time, matter, energy. Cose Cosmiche will be developing in three moments to give the invited researchers the opportunity to know each other and to interact for collaborations and productions that will be presented in the next stages.

Curated by di Helga Franza e Silvia Hell. Supported by Arthur Cravan Foundation and Galleria Artra, Milano.

www.cosecosmiche.org contact: mail@cosecosmiche.org

*Notable Australian artist gearing up to get even more notable.

*Hazel Dooney isn’t for everybody and that’s what I always liked about her.

http://hazeldooney.blogspot.fr/2012/07/second-act.html?zx=3d4ce16416e7e9b1

*New biomimetic soft robot legs.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9380391/Household-robots-a-step-closer-scientists-invent-new-biomechanical-legs.html

(…)

“The research appears on Friday in a peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Neural Engineering.

“The sensors are one component in a triple system that aims at imitating the human gait, which has been honed by millions of years of evolution to be as smooth and energy-efficient as our anatomy will allow.

“The “skeleton” of the legs copies the three joints in the lower anatomy – the hips, knees and ankles – and the muscles are straps, which move up and down as actuators.
The actual movements are determined by an electronic imitation of the central pattern generator (CPG), a neural network in the lower region of the spine that is semi-autonomous from the brain.

“The CPG generates rhythmic muscle signals after gathering information from various parts of the body that respond to the environment. This explains why we can walk without having to think about it.

“We combined the three elements, the biomechanics and a complex central pattern generator with sensory feedback,” Lewis said in an interview with AFP.
“When we put all three together, the resultant movement was very much like a human being’s…”

(((Robot tactility.)))

Robots Get A Feel For The World from USC Viterbi on Vimeo.

Robots Get A Feel For The World

by USC Viterbi PLUS 4 weeks 2 days ago

“What does a robot feel when it touches something? Little or nothing until now. Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering publish a study in Frontiers in Neurorobotics showing that specially designed robots can be taught to feel even more than humans.”