ATBTM on WBUR's "Here & Now"

Jim Kates of Zephyr Press spoke very generously of All This Belongs to Me in a January appearance on WBUR's "Here & Now," hosted by Robin Young. Listen to the interview here.

More on the NTA for ATBTM

The news that All This Belongs to Me is the winner of this year's National Translation Award was officially announced by ALTA yesterday, with repeats of the news at the Literary Saloon, a three-liner at Words Without Borders, and of course the notice from our steadfast supporter Stephan Delbos at the Prague Post.

(Delbos, who did an interview with me in September, also notes that Petra will be appearing in Prague Nov. 17 at Veletržní palác as part of a discussion on the state of literature in the digital age.)

And the ever-growing, bilingual Portál české literatury/Czech Literature Portal, ably (inside joke) managed by Jaroslav Balvín and Viktor Debnár, has posted the magnificent news in Czech and English alike.

The ALTA press release quotes from the lovely comments in the reader's report that jury member Sidney Wade read out loud to the audience at the award ceremony last Thursday night, describing All This Belong to Me as a:

“beautifully fluent translation that portrays each character in convincingly idiomatic English, and yet still manages to distinguish the five closely related main characters according to their individual temperaments. The story is compelling on personal and broader, political levels, the characters are deeply human, and their difficult choices are portrayed with great dignity. All in all, this is a book to be savored and treasured.”

As Borat would say, very nice!

ATBTM takes home National Translation Award

October 21, at the Downtown Marriott in Philadelphia, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) presented the 2010 National Translation Award to Alex Zucker for his translation of Petra Hůlová's debut novel, All This Belongs to Me (Northwestern University Press, 2009).

Criteria for granting the award, which this year came with a prize of $5,000, are "(1) the significance of the literary contribution of the original as well as of the translation; and (2) the success of the translation in recreating the artistry of the original."

Sidney Wade, a member of the jury, in her remarks said that 109 books were nominated for the award and 15 of them made it through to the final round—more finalists than in any year before. For information on past NTA winners, click here (and scroll down).

First to report the news was Zdeněk Fučík of the Czech News Agency ČTK, whose dispatch rapidly made its way into the Czech press, first on aktuálně.cz, then on ihned.cz, a service of Hospodářské noviny.

Asked to comment on receiving the award, Zucker told ČTK:

"First and foremost, for me personally it is an enormous honor. Second, it means that ALTA recognizes the importance of small presses (in this case, Northwestern University Press) in keeping literary translation alive. Third, it is a recognition of the forward thinking Northwestern showed in choosing to publish what may be the first Czech novel ever translated that is not about Czechs or the Czech lands. This is a major landmark."

Belletrista "Celebrates" ATBTM

"Hůlová's writing is rich, evocative and really enjoyable." For the full review, click here.

ATBTM makes the grade for Kansan librarian

A shout-out to the librarian at the Johnson County Library in Overland Park, Kansas, who chose All This Belongs to Me as her or his staff pick this month.

The anonymous bibliognost, who goes by the handle "bornm," is apparently a native Czech, as s/he states that s/he actually read the book twice: "Once in my native language Czech to keep up with the contemporary Czech authors and also my native language, and the second time in English to compare the precision and style of the translation."

Inquiring minds would love to know bornm's thoughts on the translation's precision and style, but alas, we are left unsated.

Florida prof first to make ATBTM required reading

I'm proud to announce that Dr. Eva Wampuszyc, of the University of Florida, in Gainesville, has become the first university professor to place All This Belongs to Me on her required reading list! It's for a spring 2010 course titled "Women from the 'Other' Europe: Femininity and Fiction in Central and Eastern Europe."

Looks like a great course, by the way, and I've written Dr. Wampuszyc an e-mail to thank her. The other required books are How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (Slavenka Drakulić), Snow White and Russian Red (Dorota Masłowska), and The Appointment (recent Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller).

Not to mention, Wampuszyc's students will get to watch Daisies, by Věra Chytilová, and Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble and Man of Iron. Good times! This is the kind of course that I ate up when I was in grad school!

All This Belongs to Me reviewed in TLS!

Here it is — from the most prestigious literary review in the English language, published in the edition of January 8, 2010, on page 21, under the title "What belongs," by Madeline Clements:

Petra Hůlová's first novel, which tells the imaginary life stories of three generations of twentieth-century Mongolian women, caused a sensation when it was first published in the Czech Republic in 2002. The author, then a twenty-three-year-old student of Mongolian Studies, attributed the book's popularity partly to her youth and good looks, but also, more interestingly, to its unusual setting within a Euro-Asian culture, poised between Russia and the East.

The novel's appeal does not lie in Hůlová's provision of colourful snapshots of a remote foreign landscape. Her bleak depictions of life spent on Mongolia's rural steppe in the longed-for capital, Ulan Bator, are far from picturesque. Even the moments when the book briefly lightens are grounded in a gritty realism: the yielding of a love-starved kitchen girl in a cheap city guanz to the touch of a greasy maternal hand in her hair; an ostracized old lady's proud self-enthroning "like a khan princess" outside her yurt, where she may finally find rest. These five bitter narratives of female abuse, exploitation and loss — often enacted by women on women — are, like the lives of the novel's protagonists, monotonous, and at times hard to endure.

Alex Zucker's English title draws attention to the Mongolian characters' need to belong to — and be able to claim ownership of — a home place, powerfully symbolized here by the family yurt or ger. It also highlights one of the novel's central ironies: that while the story may take the reader into the heart of the traditional Mongolian home, the tale that is told is one of estrangement from that sheltering centre. Hůlová's main narrator, Zaya, and her younger sister, Nara, are the illegitimate products of their mother's sexual encounters with Chinese and Russian men, and are rejected as erliz or half-breeds by their clan. Sent to the city by their mother, the two girls are recruited as prostitutes in their aunt's brothel, thus losing ownership of their bodies. Both bear illegitimate children. Zaya keeps her baby and becomes a single mother; Nara gives hers up, and remains childless. As a result they are further isolated from their pure-blooded Mongol sister and excluded by their xenophobic tribe.

The poetic passages which frame the novel's start and close, lyrically translated by Zucker, offer a poignant illustration of Zaya's status as "other" in her society. We are aware of this throughout the narrative, but she and her sister barely acknowledge it, either to themselves or to one another. We first meet Zaya as a stolid little girl, seated "at home" in front of her parents' ger in a dust storm, childishly confident in spite of growing doubts about her Khalkha purity. At the end of the novel, having returned to her home town of Bashkgan somon, she takes up her stance as an old woman before the dilapidated ger she has on temporary loan from her sister. When her fantasies of ownership and citizenship are stripped away, what "belongs" to Zaya is immaterial: her knowledge of the harsh landscape she surveys, and the colour and scent of old memories.

The novel may leave the reader with a feeling of emptiness, but All This Belongs to Me is an acutely observed account — compelling despite its grimness — of the lives of its semi-nomadic subjects. Yet, while this European author's novel may seem to reinforce Western assumptions about the oppressed lives of women in developing countries, the representations here are not straightforward. Hůlová has said that her characters and the realities they face were modelled on Czech subjects, transported in fiction to a distant setting, where their emotions and relationships might be pursued in a purer form uncluttered by European ephemera. The seemingly authentic Mongolian characters, European projections onto an Asian landscape, are in fact ambiguous cultural hybrids. Their experiences of racism and sexism reflect not only on the Mongolian society Hůlová appears to scrutinize, but also on the Czech one that informs her subject matter. While the original Czech title, Paměť mojí babičce or "Memory for My Grandmother," hints at an intimate relationship between the author and the women of the novel, the connection is severed in the English version. One hopes that the complex dual perspectives such contemporary "writings from an unbound Europe" can offer are not overlooked as a result.

ATBTM Review in TLS?

A friend texted Petra this morning that a review of All This Belongs to Me appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. A quick online search revealed that it was in last week's issue, dated 8 January 2010, so I haven't got my hands on it yet, and it isn't available online anywhere that I can find, but as soon as I see it, I'll post what it says.

Kind words from a blogger in Prague

"If you think life is hard, give Mongolia a try!" (Thanks, Terry. Glad you liked it.)

Petra's first post v překladu

My rough translation of Petra's first post, banged out last night and this morning:

"First of all I'm enormously happy it worked out. Now it's up to the book. The umbilical cord is severed. Now the only question is whether or not anyone in faraway America will notice you, dear book . . . Alex said that they don't have any novels from contemporary Mongolia yet, so that sounds hopeful . . .

"When Alex and I were in Chicago two weeks ago to promote the book, Andrew Wachtel from Northwestern University Press said: Americans can talk on and on about things they don't know about at all, while Europeans can't talk about anything even when they know a lot about it. He was referring to academics but I have a hunch it's the same way with writers. Or at least with me. What could I say about my own book? That it’s a piece of my life? Not interesting. An attempt at a portrait of the Mongol mentality? Written by a Czech? Hmm. But don’t Americans write about other countries, too? That it’s a portrait of a post-communist country wrestling with the challenges of newly gotten freedom like the Czechs in the 1990s? In one review in a German newspaper they wrote that the book was a metaphor for post-revolution Eastern Europe. That it isn’t actually about Mongolia. Sometimes that’s what I tell people — the ones who are afraid of Mongolia and who are interested more in good old Europe than in Central Asia — to try to appeal to them.

"Luckily, at the readings in New York and Chicago, the audience had enough questions that I didn’t have to babble on in desperation.

"It was my first time in Chicago. I lived more than a year in New York at one point, and there was a time when I wanted to stay there for good. Until I started to panic that I was losing my Czech and I was talking to myself in Czech so I wouldn’t get out of practice. Without Czech is like having one leg for me. So I live in Prague. My books travel. I wave across the ocean at them from my windowless room that I climb up a ladder to reach, the former darkroom where I’m now at work on my next novel."

Petra's first post! (in Czech, of course)

Především mám pořád ohromnou radost, že se to povedlo. Teď už je to na knize. Pupeční šňůra je přestřižená. Teď jen: zdalipak si tě v té daleké Americe někdo všimne, milá kniho . . . Alex říkal, že tam ještě žádný román ze současného Mongolska nemají, tak to zní nadějně . . .

Když jsme byli s Alexem před dvěma týdny propagovat knihu v Chicagu, prohlásil tam na univerzitě Andrew Wachtel z NWP: Američané, ti se dokáží namluvit o něčem, o čem ani nic pořádně nevědí, zatímco Evropané nedokážou pořádně hovořit ani o něčem, co velmi dobře znají. Řeč šla o akademicích, ale se spisovateli je to tuším podobné. Nebo alespoň se mnou. Co bych tak o téhle vlastní knize řekla? Že je to kus mého života? Nezajímavé. Pokus o portrét mongolské mentality? Hmm. Ale psaný Češkou? A Američané snad o jiných krajích nepíší? Že je to obraz postkomunistické země potýkající se s nešvary nově nabyté svobody podobně jako Česko devadesátých let? V jakési recenzi v německých novinách psali, že kniha je metaforou porevoluční východní Evropy. Že o Mongolsko v ní vlastně až tolik nejde. Občas to takhle lidem říkám - těm, co mají strach z Mongolska a víc než Střední Asie je zajímá stará dobrá Evropa a já se je snažím zlákat.

Ještě štěstí, že na čteních v New Yorku a Chicagu mělo tolik posluchačů připravené otázky a tak jsem nemusela z bezradnosti mlít páté přes deváté.

V Chicagu jsem byla poprvé. V New Yorku jsem žila déle než rok a kdysi jsem tam snad toužila zůstat napořád. Než jsem zjistila, že panikařím, když se mi čeština začíná ztrácet a já si sama pro sebe melu česky, abych nevyšla ze cviku. Bez češtiny jsem jako bez nohy. Takže žiji v Praze. Cestují moje knihy. Mávám jim přes oceán z komůrky bez oken, do níž se leze po žebříku, z bývalé fotokomory, kde právě pracuji na dalším románu.

Czech press jumps aboard ATBTM bandwagon

And I mean it in the most positive way.

For those of you who know Czech, at novinky.cz you can read ČTK correspondent Zdeněk Fučík's article about last week's event here in New York, which also ran in Saturday's edition of the daily newspaper Právo. A different version of Fučík's story ran on Friday in České noviny.

For those of you who don't know Czech, you can read (and listen to) the latest interview with Petra on Czech Radio, posted just yesterday, in which she discusses her memories of the Velvet Revolution as a ten-year-old child, her sometime preference for setting her stories in other countries, and her views of the older generations and the place of women in Czech literature.

ATBTM A-OK in NYC

Thursday night's reading at the Czech Center New York went swimmingly, with approximately thirty people in attendance (including ČTK correspondent Zdeněk Fučík, one of the translators of Gravity's Rainbow into Czech!) and many interesting questions posed from the floor. Photos of the event, courtesy of Jan Žahour, can be viewed at the All This Belongs to Me Facebook page. Our good friend Jirka Zavadil also shot some nice pics, which are posted there as well.

Meanwhile, there are already two customer reviews posted at Amazon, and we're looking forward to some attention from the press after October 30, the official publication date.

Thanks to all of you who came on Thursday, and we hope you enjoy the book!

Takin' it on the road with ATBTM

City of Big Shoulders take heed! Petra Hůlová is coming in for a landing Thursday, October 15, courtesy of the Czech Consulate General in Chicago.

As part of a program titled Velvet Redux: 20 Years of Freedom in Central and Eastern Europe, the Consulate General and Northwestern University, in cooperation with the Prague Committee of Chicago Sister Cities International Program, Andrew Wachtel, dean of Northwestern's Graduate School and editor of the Writings from an Unbound Europe imprint at Northwestern University Press, will be moderating a reading and roundtable titled Twenty Years of Laughter and Forgetting: Eastern/Central European Literature Since 1989. Besides Hůlová, on behalf of the Czechs, the other writers will be Ferenc Barnás of Hungary and Drago Jančar from Slovenia.

Petra, I must say with pride, features prominently on the page pushing the event, taking place from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., in the Forum Room of Northwestern University Library, 1970 Campus Drive, 2-South, Evanston, IL 60208. It is free of charge and open to the public. Hope to see you there.

Prague Post profile of Petra pleasingly positive

All credit to Lisette Allen and the Prague Post for running the first newspaper article about All This Belongs to Me. In it, Hůlová discusses the origins of the novel in her 2000–2001 stay in Mongolia as an undergraduate student at Charles University; her close collaboration on the translation with Alex Zucker (y. truly); whether or not the Czech Republic can be compared to Mongolia; and whether or not being a writer makes one intelligent, interesting, or wise.

Welcome, dear readers of up-to-the-minute Czech lit!

This blog, along with the Facebook page that I've set up, exists for no other reason than to let the online world know about the fabulous first novel by Czech author Petra Hůlová, All This Belongs to Me, now available for purchase from Amazon.com (at a 33% discount!) as well as a host of other sites selling books in cyberspace.