 Alright, so my name is Minna Frakher. I edit the literary review, which is a quarterly magazine of translations, as well as fiction and poetry that's been running at a Fairleigh-Beanston University since 1957. I also edit, I also write and I also translate from Italian. And the panel today, it's not a panel, it's a conversation or a round table of editors. And we, and I'm going to introduce our panelists but just so you all know that you're in the right room. And that I don't, I'm hoping that you as a listening audience group will help us guide the conversation. Because we're here to serve your needs in terms of what you want to know. So I would like to have your input on what you want to hear from us. Because it could be basic or maybe you have really exotic questions. So I don't want to anticipate your needs. So I'm going to start out with introducing Kate Bernheimer because she has a really long introduction that I like. And so I'd like to read it. I asked for notes from people and Chris Fishbach, who's next sent me exactly 12 words. And Chris's 12 words are really substantial. And so Kate said also more. Anyway, Kate is the editor of the Fairytale Review. Just sit back. The Fairytale Review is an annual literary journal edited by MFA students, the undergraduate interns and Kate Bernheimer, who teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Fairytale Review is published by Wayne State University Press and is also hosted on JSTOR. Fairytale Review is the only American journal dedicated to publishing contemporary Fairytale fiction poetry and nonfiction in English, as well as new translations of old tales into English. So that's very relevant to us. Fairytale Review sometimes publishes books including Lily Hong's, am I pronouncing her name right? Novel based on the I Ching, Changing, which received the Penn Beyond Margin's Award for Authors of Color in 2008. Espitos, maybe I should have you read this one. Espito Fur's novel, Irlanda. And Johannes Grove Onsen's bilingual Swedish-English poetry book, Pilot or Johann the Carousel Horse. Fairytale Review is dedicated to celebrating the diverse innovative art form of fairytales, a literary tradition with translation at its very foundation. Fairytale Review is proud to have published contemporary fairytales in translation and new translations of old fairytales from French, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, German, Latvian, Swedish, and other languages. Does anyone translate fairytales? Alright, that is very exciting. Is anyone thinking now that they could translate fairytales? 21st century, 20th century, 19th century, 18th century, 19th. And Kate founded the journal in 2005 as a writer frustrated with the narrow style foregrounded in mainstream American literary publishing. Which excluded a diverse range of international approaches and as a reader enamored with fairytale literature across the centuries, a body of work she has only had the gift to encounter because it has been translated into English. I like that. I know you also do the anthology, we can talk about that more, but I'll live on to Chris. So this is Chris Fishbach, who is the publisher of Coffeehouse Press, which is a non-profit press. It only has 18 titles a year. They publish fiction, poetry, and essays. What's interesting about Chris joining us this year at ALTA is that their first translation was actually done in 2014. With Valeria Luis Ali's book Sidewalks. And now Coffeehouse is starting to bring translations onto their list. Their focus is Latin American literature, right? Yep. Kaya, whose last name she gets to pronounce by herself. Strominus. From Open Letters, which she's the editorial director of Open Letter, which is out of the University of Rochester. It is also a non-profit literary translation press dedicated to increasing world literature for English readers. They do 10 titles a year and a 3% website. And Susan, oh no, no, David. David Shook, that's with two O's, at Phoneme Media, which is sponsored by Penn. And I put a question mark next to that because I thought you could elaborate. And then, and you're at the end of your first season. Let's let you read like you said, because I can't read my writing. I don't know. Let me, what should I say? Let's see. Yeah, our first season includes poetry from The Weaker and prose from Cameroon. By the end of spring 2016, we'll have published 17 books from 16 languages. That's very cool. And our first book of poetry, Anna Rosenwong's translation of Rocio Serone's diorama, just won the BTBA. There. Okay, that's David Shook. And then Susan Harris, who was really interesting, and she found Words Without Borders in 2003, which I'm sure many of you know. What was interesting about when I asked Susan to send me her information, it was all numbers. And it was like a data set. And I, but then I realized you were working yesterday. You were on the panel where we were discussing women in translation. And evidently, data is sort of the new thing in translation. It's the new black. It's the new, data is the new black. So, so Susan Harris' self presentation of Words Without Borders is that it publishes monthly, was launched in 2003. And has published over 2,000 pieces from 107 languages from 129 countries. Which is very clear and precise. So that ends all of that data. We are more creative than that. This is amazing. It's an amazing project with a lot of data. Anyway, so those are our formal introductions to us. As you can see, translation is represented here. And these are all the people who, if you are looking to publish translations, are handling your work. One of the, this is a panel that we do, that we do every year. And it's really meant to help have a conversation with you about how to work with us. And vice versa. Maybe you have questions about how we handle translations and what our ideas are. The real question that we start out with is what you look for in a translation. And I'm going to start with Chris. You have this Latin American thing that I find really intriguing. And I, so I really want to know how that came about. And if you can tell us a little bit about your conversion into our world. Sure. Well, I kept hearing from a lot of our authors who themselves are translators. Specifically. Can you hear Chris? By the way, if you can't hear, you need to stammer. Okay. I was hearing from a lot of our authors who read a lot of books in translation and who are translators themselves. Specifically, Brian Evanson and Laird Hunt that they kept urging coffee house to publish more writers because they felt like there's a lot of the people on our list were in dialogue with their own work with writers in translation from all over the world. And so we didn't have any kind of setup. We had no infrastructure to do that. And so after a while looking for funding and being told no, I just said, well, we're just going to start and try to build it on our own. Maybe someone will fund us later. And so we said, but I had to start. I also don't read well enough in any other language to consider myself. And so I had to start by going to Frankfurt where I'd been going for years by looking at books that had already been translated by UK presses. And so that's how I came across to Larry Luiselli who had been published by Granta. So we published Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd, her first two books in 2014. And they did really well. And I realized, so then that I had a lot of contacts with Spanish language publishers because a lot of our books had been selling into Spanish language. And so I just started a lot of conversations and a lot of the editors and shared tastes with me. And so I just decided to basically let's just do that because it made sense that it was very efficient. So that's one reason. The reason is that we traditionally in our mission talked about many authentic voices of the American experience. And I realized like, well, America is not the United States by itself. And so I wanted to start this kind of North-South dialogue. And so that's we then acquired more books written in English by Latin American writers and then more Latin American writers being translated. And so I'm interested in the conversation back and forth and then also kind of across how Latin America and the Americas have conversations with both over the Pacific and the Atlantic. So it's a very, the books that we choose from Latin America so far are books that are in conversation with a larger world literature. Valeria writes from a Latin American perspective, but she also writes from a very European one. And so then we did her next book, Story of My Teeth, which just came out and that was named P.W. Book of the Year this morning, one of them. Oh, really? Yeah. And then Daniel Saldana-Paris is our next book this spring 16 and then Diego Zuniga, Chilean writer, is our next title. And I've made bids on a lot of others but haven't gotten any. So the books that we choose are, it's a gut thing for me and goes along with the aesthetics of some of our other writers. Are your writers the people who are reading the books or do you hire readers' reports or how do you make your final determination? Valeria's translator is the translator for Daniel Saldana-Paris to Christina McSweeney and so that helped because I was able to trust her and Valeria and then some other of the Latin American writers. So it became this kind of like triangulation of taste. So it's not our, Valeria will read stuff for me, but so will there's an editor, Diana Hernandez-Saldana from formerly Blackie Books. She'll read things for me and then I just have a new editor right now who's fluent in Spanish and who's a translator herself, so she's able to read as well. And I read like a tiny bit, but not enough to consider. So there are certain authors that I talk to on the list or if there's expertise, like I'll just ask them. So that's kind of informal advisory council. Is that the way that a lot of, is that the way you would describe the coffee house generally, the way things get published, is that sort of network in talking to authors? Yes, sure. And then David, you just started. Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of phoneme? Yeah, I think phoneme, you know, this is the, we're approaching the end of our first full season with distribution. We've done a couple books before that kind of to see if we could do it. Can you hear him? And when I say we, I mostly mean me, about 80%, though I do have a lot of freelancers and people who help out. Most of our early books were things I solicited like Jeffrey Yang's translation of Amma John Osmond from the Uyghur in Arabic. And most of them came through relationships I had with translators. As a translator and poet myself, you know, I feel fortunate to have had those connections. Even Diorama, which just won the BTBA, came through my relationship with Anna, it's translator. And then basically I started, not poaching exactly, but you know, trying to be pretty quick on the draw with the winners of the Panheim grants and the NEA grants. And just following up, I think we were really fortunate to have good relationships with our fiction writers like Mario Bellatine, who's been very supportive since the beginning. And almost from, well yeah, from the get go, we've been able to acquire poetry of outstanding quality. And I think a lot of what we're doing also stems from relationships with international writers directly. In my former life, I worked in community-based development in East Central Africa and Latin America, which allowed me to meet and interact with a lot of these writers. Roland Ruggero, whose debut novel we're publishing in March, which will be the first novel from Burundi to be published in the United States, that project came through my friendship with Roland, which started, you know, five or six years before phoneme did. So a lot of these books have been really gestating for some time. Susan, you're kind of the real, you're a real veteran at this point, even though I feel like Words Without Borders was just invented, it was just like it was just yesterday and there was like, oh my god, this is a really cool thing. But it's now since 2003. So what's your perspective just sort of listening to these new evolutions and what can you describe what you are doing? I think one of our goals from the very beginning was to present work that has not been, not only individual works obviously that have not been available in English because we do only new translations, but also to introduce work from languages and countries that have been underrepresented in English. Our first three issues were Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, i.e., you know, three of the axes of evil. And that was very intentional because when we know countries through a strictly political prism as we do so much of the world, we miss the essentials of the culture. And as a literary magazine, we're not political, although of course obviously anyone working in translation is doing highly politicized work, but we're not taking a stand, we're not being naive, but we're giving these voices and giving the English language readers the opportunity to experience more of the world than has previously been available. Much of our mission is obviously not, along with introducing these languages and countries and cultures, we're obviously, we're also very committed to introducing writers who have not yet been published in English and who are for that matter often emerging in their own languages. And part of what we're dedicated to is to finding these authors a home, not only in our pages, but also in book form. And we promote very actively to publishers and editors in the field and try to find good fits for work that we publish that we do feel has legs in English. Do you guys look to a word without borders? I do, definitely. It's probably an unfair question. It's totally an unfair question. Oh, they're awful. I feel like we can just ask a lot of unfair questions and then we'll expose ourselves and then we'll put ourselves back together and go out into the rest of the conference. I mean, in terms of your mission, you do reach out to publishers and that's fascinating. The novel that David mentioned, Roland Ruggero, we published an excerpt from, it was either July or August, I have no sense of time, the serial monogamy of the monthly magazine is really exhausting. But if you would like a taste of this novel, which based on the excerpt we published is fabulous, you can find that in our pages. And that's the kind of interaction or cooperation that I really like to have. We also published excerpts from forthcoming books. We also published book reviews. I'm sorry, how's this? I'm sorry, I'm getting over horrible. It's a very noisy room too. Feel free to move up too. I'm getting over plague. We also do book reviews, which of course we are such a crucial part of promoting writers and translation. We're an arena that people come to for work in translation specifically. And we do try to cover books that have not necessarily made it in the mainstream. We did features on Bologna, we would not devote a review slot to Bologna in favor of someone who was not getting the spotlight. Did everybody hear that? That they started incorporating reviews. I think this is an interesting question. The real mission of Words Without Borders is to bring work that isn't already getting attention. So when it comes to Bologna, for example, who is important to all of us because he's one of those C translated books can be really cool. We like to embrace Bologna and celebrate him. But in the review section Susan said they would not highlight Bologna. They would review another book and try to introduce something that people weren't already hearing about. And also I know that I think for all of us, and coming from a magazine where we publish primarily out of the slush pile, we don't, the unsolicited submissions. So whether or not it's a translation, often it's a writer that people haven't heard of. It's a very interesting thing to be trying to bring work that's wonderful out to people who have no familiarity with the authors. And how do you bring them in? And it depends a lot on the kind of, oh, I know about Words Without Borders. So I'm going to go read that because you're not relying on having, you know, Fran's and Slade's diary entry to bring readers to your work. Kaya, you were, hi. So can you pronounce your last name again? Straumanus. Straumanus. Can you say what is, can you describe open letters, taste? I feel like the longer I've worked at the press, the harder it is to sort of pinpoint that. I mean, I guess if you look at our website, I think we describe the books that we publish or are the mission of what we try to find in literature as books that, you know, either books of like classic works in their origin countries that may be yet undiscovered or that deserve to be rediscovered, books that we hope that will be the classics of tomorrow. There's also a certain, I guess it's more of a pattern than a taste if that's a more fair terminology in that a lot of our books are, I mean, we do strive to have everything like a very high literary quality and a lot of our books seem to have this running pattern of, you know, their texts that question, make you question the way that you read as a reader and make you question the way that you have been taught to read. And that's one thing I'll use an example. Our publisher, Chad Post, frequently finds in his classes with his graduate students that they'll say, well, I don't like the book because I couldn't identify with the narrator. And it's like, well, that's how you were taught to read in high school was answering those sorts of questions in book reports and whatnot. So, you know, making, we want to get people sort of to think about what they're reading and how they're reading it. A lot of the books have unreliable narrators, it seems. We sometimes find patterns where one of our more recent seasons, there was like every single book had some sort of semi-horrible death in it and another one had a lot to do with water and boats and we just don't, it's not something that we consciously do, but we lay out the season. We're like, there's a lot of death in this season. We're like, there's a lot of fires in this season. But the simplest way of the taste, I mean, we are, our official masthead is four people and one of them is a poetry editor who does her own thing and officially, Chad Post and I are the first people who will get and read these submissions and we also have our editorial committee and we also have, similarly to Phoni and I believe, people, students and former students and other readers from other languages who externally who help us read and get commentary and readers reports but basically everything we publish is something that we've read and that we've enjoyed ourselves and that we want to share with the wider audience and also going off of that, it's something that we believe fits in with our overall list because there are books, there are submissions that we've read and we've liked but it just, we can't find a place for it and that's sort of a, like, pasted a long game with our colleagues and friends in the publishing business where it's like, well, it doesn't quite work with what we want but it would work somewhere else. So they're just books that we enjoy standing behind and enjoy promoting and have enjoyed reading and want other people to be able to enjoy as well. I like your point, Kaya, about teaching, about altering the way people read. I think that's really, that's what we all want to do as publishers and writers and translators, isn't it? I was also going to add earlier with terms of words without borders and you may have better information than I do in my brain but I know that I frequently will reference words without borders if there's an author whose name has been floating around and that's one of the first sites I will go to to see if there's been something excerpted. Sometimes I will use it as a secondary reference for submissions that we get and I, I mean, I don't know by name but I'm willing to bet that there are at least a handful of authors that we've published that you guys have excerpted or done things with. Absolutely. So, okay. Do you have numbers on that too, Susan? I don't have numbers on what we've excerpted because we've done something. That's actually, oh, another data point. Well, how many things have gone from words without borders into one of these fine houses? That I can tell you. We are aware at this point of around 20, we're aware at this point of around 20 authors who have signed book contracts for works that originally appeared in our pages and in some of these cases, cases the cause and effect is perhaps not 100% direct but in other cases we advocated, we helped one author, we set one author up with an agent and that ended up very successfully. So, again, and we have a number of possibilities in the pipeline and I should add too that some of these books are not, these books are not only going into English because we're read all over the world by people who don't necessarily read texts in their source languages but do read English. A number of our, one of our books, one of our publications sold, a Romanian writer sold Spanish rights because the Spanish editor could read the English but not the Romanian. Correspondingly, I think an Arabic text sold in Germany. So, again, it's this notion of, you know, not only changing the English language market but also making things available in other languages as well. With the fairytale review, how do you, do you have a, do people come to you or do you go looking for them? Do you have fairytales that you want to be translated? Are you going to come sit up here? We would love to have you. All right, well, you can just chime in at any point. So, do you, do you bring, do you, yeah, so do you go looking for stuff? Do you have fairytales that you want to have translated? How does your magazine get put together? Well, it's evolved over the years, the editorial process. When I founded the journal in 2005, it was very much me going out and trying to find things. I started the journal as an emerging author of fabulous fiction, really frustrated with the marginalization of not only fabulous works and translation, but among also American authors. It was sort of like a one per decade type situation room for one author from each country over the decade, you know, we're a 50 year period. I started the journal just knowing there was a great deal of new fiction and poetry influenced, of course, ubiquitously by the brothers Grimm, whose collection was translated into what 300 or 106, I should know the number of languages around the world, outsold the Bible for some, you know, 100 years. I started the journal really word of mouth and it was very much talking to really authors who I knew who helped spread the word. Ilya Kaminsky, who was a great advocate from the beginning of helping bring authors to me. He edits poetry international and is a fantastic poet. But very quickly, well, it was founded as a literary journal and it was word of mouth with literary authors. I found that folklorists, Jack Zeib, Samaria Tatar specifically, who are both professors in Germanic studies and exceptional translators of not only the brothers Grimm, but fairy tale writers around the world that they were starting to recommend work to me and to tell me about somebody somewhere who was working on a very little known body of fairy tales that was archived for a couple of hundred years somewhere, never been locked in a tower, you know, as in a fairy tale. I found that folklorists and fairy tale scholars really excited to be included in a conversation that I had thought was really that was really going to advocate for literary authors who were then really excluded from mainstream publishing venues and even the National Book Awards then excluded fairy tales, folktales and myths from consideration for their prestigious awards. We petitioned to have that reversed and it now quietly disappeared in the night, that exclusion just a couple of years ago though. But it's basically, it's word of mouth, other publishers like Action Books or authors at Coffee House Press like Brian Evanson has brought me a number of authors he knows about who are being translated or that he's translating himself. Word of mouth with scholars, editors and authors and just a ton of solicited submissions. It was surprising and a little bit overwhelming how much demand there was for a journal dedicated to contemporary fairy tales and new translations of old tales and we published work from mainstream to experimental and that's part of our mission is to not have like a signature style but to have diversity. Show the breadth of the fairy tale. The breadth of the fairy tale and because it's so associated with a particular thing after the journal was in print for a number of years I felt like the mission sort of succeeded because Penguin asked me to edit a couple of collections of contemporary myths and fairy tales for which I solicited a lot of translations actually and it's just been really nice. It's been a really welcoming world, the world of translators and especially fairy tale scholars. So I feel lucky the work just comes. We get maybe 3,000 submissions a year by which I mean short stories, poems or essays and I work with a team of screeners not only my graduate students but authors, scholars around the world really asking for feedback on what we get. The man I just accosted when he came in the door is Jim Hicks in the back. He's the editor of the Massachusetts Review and I'm just pointing to I think that our magazine, The Massachusetts Review and the Literary Review apart from the fact that we've been running for two years longer, 1957 and they started in 59 so they're like young. I think our magazines run similarly but since... What? After a certain age that's a good thing. That's a good thing. You're a baby. I'm just pointing them out because one of the things that just has come up repeatedly and you may have noticed is that all the editors have said I knew there's a lot of word of mouth and knowing people and networks and since if you don't know one of us then the way you would get to know us would be here at Ulta so you can get to know him too as well as us. Since that's so evidently the way some of these things happen, right? So before we get to that how do you get to know you? Question? And be your trusty advisors or what not? Can you talk a little bit? I'm interested in the structures of your editorial board versus the screenings. Can you talk about the unsolicited submissions? I guess I was wondering where's the open letter editorial board drawn from? Is it from the University of Rochester? Are they advisors that you have? It's sort of a combination of things so we have... there are professors from the Modern Languages and Cultures Department and the English Department who are part of the editorial board and there are also our readers or I guess the screeners I've never heard that term, it's interesting as well and so we have those people so like I said it's... in terms of receiving things Chad and I are kind of like the gatekeepers to that and then when we find something and we think that it should be considered further then we sort of pass it on to get those other opinions from the MLC Department or the English Department the people who are included in our editorial committee like I mentioned former students there are actually several of the students who have been summer interns at Open Letter who have either started in the Literary Translation Masters Program and then they continue to be our readers and help us out with that and be active and also there are several people who have graduated the program and who we still turn to for kind of feedback on things and that's... And translations too, right? The book I reviewed it was a translator who came right out of the program Yeah, well that's another one of the benefits of the... so Open Letter is very closely tied to the Literary Translation Studies program at Rochester and that's one of the benefits is that and I was in that boat as well but as a student you essentially get a year and a half to pitch your project to the press and it's also interesting because on the press side you get to see as a student is working through the text and you get to know the text from a different level and that is one of the benefits of the program is that the possibility so that your master's thesis is a book length translation which at that point is as close to publishable as you can get it within your graduate student confines and there have been several books since the program started that we have picked up that students have translated and a couple of students whose works we have continued for example Will van der Heiden who translated Carlos Labe's Navidad de Matanza and then Lo Queila Navidad de Matanza was his thesis project and we took that on and we liked it and when he said that Lo Queila was just as good we read that and became interested in it JT Mahaney translated an Antoine Boladine book for us and he's translating another one for us as well and that's sort of a perk is that you get a little bit of an extra time it also of course looks good for the university because your graduate students are being published immediately but it's also by no means just like you don't just get published but the other perk is that if and also something I've noticed is that not a re-student is angling to have Open Letter publish their book but they do know to use Open Letter and the resources that we have to find a press or several presses that they could pitch to and there is that and I forgot the original question was I have a new one can I ask a specific question yes please can everyone hear the question it's about how the poetry submissions work okay well as as I'm not the poetry editor I don't know exactly how she chooses her things I mean we have submissions are online on our website which something that we mentioned yesterday when you are submitting or when a person is submitting something I always would strongly just do it just look at the submission guidelines and figure out because I get sometimes email questions that are answered in the submission guidelines and they're really not that long and everyone has different ones but it's just nice because it shows that you've done you've looked into it the poetry submissions I mean generally she wants she only considers manuscripts that are completely translated I know that much she does accept queries for maybe send you my poetry and she does only accept hard copy manuscripts through the mail so in terms of her reading period I know for a while like two years ago she had chosen the one poetry book that she was going to that she was going to have and had almost locked down the second one and then she took a year off because she was on sabbatical and so for us we basically take her cue or email and she'll say like two years ago she said because of my sabbatical and other things can we just put a date online that I will not start reconsidering submissions until I think it was September 2015 or late summer 2015 which of course once we hit about late August early September there was a huge stack of poetry submissions in the mail for her but her reading period is different from ours I don't know how she chooses what she chooses does she go to the board to, does she I don't know actually I would my sense is no I mean it we'll come back to you with the answer to that so I don't know what her process is I can just tell you what we have on the submission guidelines for her so can each of you answer how do you do you do you choose translators for projects or do you find projects through translators and to what degree can each of you answer that question maybe starting with Kate and going down that way to date I have been approached by translators working on a particular authors work or by an editor who knows of a book being published in translation that the author also has a number of other projects that are as yet untranslated in which case generally the author will know a translator so I've pretty much mainly been approached by translators or by editors of books in translation who are aware of other works that I might be interested in and Chris Valeria came with a translator already and so did Daniel and then Diego's Uniga had already been translated by Megan McDowell and so I have not yet had to go find a translator but some of the books that I've been on that I didn't get I would have had to do that and I would have been kind of that's probably why I'm here and so I can get a sense of the Spanish speaking translations but I would do the same I would just do I would go to people I know and trust who are some of the translators I think we have the similar situation where there are the projects that come in with the translator attached sometimes I know the ITHL in Israel they take the translation and then they just sort of get to you and it's done so you don't really get to choose in that sense but we haven't had any problems, they've been wonderful there are other projects where we've found the book and then either found the translator I can use Volodyna as an example because I think the student JT had been interested in translating it and because we knew Jordan Stump had worked on his work previously there was a discussion with Jordan of oh is this something that you're working on and Jordan's like no it's cool he can do it and then I know that they have their translator discussion about it so it's a lot of also word of mouth from other translators if there's a language pair that we know a translator but we also know that translator is swamped with other projects we will very likely go to them and say do you have any recommendations is there anyone who you would recommend or trust who could work on a project like this so it is mostly word of mouth but I feel like for the most part the projects do in some way so you really get a mix books that come in from translators and books that come in in other languages that are just looking if you like them will need translators is it like 50-50? I'd say for phoneme we're about 60-40 with the 60% being books that are brought to my attention by translators right now I'm looking for a Lingala translator for a novel so if any of you are working with Lingala please do let me know did you all hear that? in our case we also have both when we are doing when we're doing an issue for example we do more or less an annual Spanish language issue from one of the countries and when we get a batch of work from the consulting editor for that issue we often have to place that now in our case we have an extensive pool of Spanish translators so that's never a problem in other cases when we're working with a consulting editor she will not only have the connections with the literature but also the connections with the translators as was the case in our November issue which will be Cambodia we'd never published Cambodia and we had no context in the field but she did so those are two examples on either side for the literary mag for TLR and correct me if it's different for Massachusetts review but all of the work we publish in translation is coming through translators who submit to us through the submissions process we never as far as I know we have never had a piece in another language that we then commissioned a translation for which is financial occasionally we'll have a serial it'll come to us already like from open letter archipelago that will come already translated but otherwise it's the translators who generate our international work is that the same with the Massachusetts review? yeah it's almost always that way a couple of times I'd send us anything yes I have a question about publishing like contemporary people as opposed to people that are already dead so I've been working on Louis Aragon's friend language and we find that a lot of journals and publishers are like they say contemporary and I'm just wondering I'm just wondering what the rationality is I wouldn't answer that way probably for TLR unless it was a work that if it's a re-translation it has to bring something really interesting but contemporary writers that has to do with the mission of your publishing house and it's not necessarily the case for all of you right? no we like dead people you do dead people we publish a lot of dead people Princeton has a series called oddly modern fairy tales it's great they're bringing out a lot of writers who have been overlooked over the centuries I certainly am open to reading dead guys or dead ladies so far I think I've only published one fairly recently dead guy but it mostly has to do with conversing with the rest of our list and kind of making sense within the broader scope of what we're doing and I think because most of our books are so contemporary it has to be the right fit we publish contemporary lit that's our mission and there are lots of places that don't do you dead people contemporary does have rather a it's a flexible category we don't even really have a year cut off but certainly we have the dead or the better that's a translator job it's for securing rights nothing like public domain to free up that budget but we certainly have had contemporary writers who are not still actively writing to put it politely it's a mission statement is that your question though you're just curious why we all care so much about contemporary literature I guess it goes to contemporary in 1982 there is a very revolutionary writer getting written now so I mean by I would say it's completely contemporary when did you stop writing I apologize I'm not familiar with his work I think he wrote well again if that were something that fit in something else we were doing certainly it would I would not reject I mean when we say contemporary we don't do 19th century we don't even do really first half of the 20th century and then it gets a little foggy but in terms of contemporary that to me is still I mean that's not a living writer but I would still characterize him as at least on the cusp of contemporary but again flexible definitions obviously there's a way to answer that more broadly which is that each of the and there's so many wonderful independent publishers and more and more that are doing translations in particular and from a literary magazine point of view there are like 700 million of us online and in print and we're all really good that each press has its own identity and I think that when you're looking to find a place to publish whatever you should be working on what's in your heart to work on I'm not having trouble publishing the stuff I'm just working on this wonder is there sort of a general general question is contemporary stuff more interesting to readers at the point of view of editors or not I think it has to do with who your readers are for example when I'm editing fairy tale review my mission is to reach as many readers both general and scholarly as possible so I'm trying to proliferate the scholarship around a diverse pool of international authors working in the fairy tale tradition whether hundreds of years ago or today when I was editing books for Penguin the mandate was that they be contemporary works and I'm there the marketing of that book it's a machine I know nothing about and I think the mandate of the publisher is very different into the model by which they're looking at what they're doing is different it's not a reprint series if it's on translation so it has to do with the mission of the place whatever the assumptions that she was working on I think I come to translation from a Frankfurt point of view and so because they haven't gone to Frankfurt for almost ten years like that does everyone know what Frankfurt means the Frankfurt International Book Fair where it's everyone and editors meeting and selling rights to each other and that's a contemporary like those are all contemporary conversations and I think that's and those are international literary publishers and those editors are talking to each other like that's an engine of translation that makes a lot of decisions for the rest of a translating literature around the world and that English is very much at the center of that because it most of the people there they all read English that's the one you consider once something is translated in English then it can be considered by everyone else and then published so it's almost like administrative answer I disagree because that's not true I think that if you're interested in literature helps solve the world's problems by keeping language fresh and I think that our interests that's part of our mission is to publish works that's publish work that is stretching the language so that we can solve the new problems with new language and so that's more along the line of like it's almost anyway that that's what I think I think that that's very interesting about the Frankfurt process I have a kind of upstream view a number of the things I've done have been for Swedish publishers or agents who are taking them subsequently to Frankfurt I've translated some stuff I thought was great but then it goes into the publisher it goes off to Frankfurt and I never hear anymore now I don't have any particular personal responsibility for seeing that my sample of 60 pages it's placed somewhere that's their job but what could I do to promote the process is it procedural or even ethical for me to say hey Xpress they've got this this is really nice you might be interested in it absolutely I mean word of mouth is huge in our business it wasn't the Frankfurt Frankfurt is so much bigger than me I mean I'm so little potato Frankfurt is really these guys it's the largest publishing book fair in the world it happens every October and it's it's the entire industry but then it's the literary point of view it's all editors meeting with each other and selling rights over drinks apparently based on the Facebook pictures I think what Susan was saying when in fact you've been commissioned to do a sample by a larger house not a little magazine but a larger house and they bring your work to Frankfurt and the question is can I shoot some emails off to publishers who are going to Frankfurt and say take an extra look at this I thought it was really good and Susan's answer is absolutely as it's interesting you say absolutely because I'm published by Coffeehouse Press as a fiction writer and so Chris or it brings my book to Frankfurt but if I independently contacted an editor and said hey I know Chris is at Frankfurt and saw my book that would be you would be quite you wouldn't like that yeah answer that question so it's interesting and author of the question what have you been up to I think we might be talking about two different things here because you are as a translator you have an inside track to something that a publisher might not now I'm not saying that you mount a promotional campaign and send out your sample but for example I'm often in touch with people who a lot of the translators I work with do these samples for publishers and I'm always checking to say what are you doing for Frankfurt is there anything I might be interested in and that's not the same as say Kate promoting her book independently of a publisher promoting a book independently of a publisher and obviously what you're doing is just alerting someone who might be interested and you're not cold calling I'm assuming you're talking to people there's a reason that you might be interested but again you do have you have no I hate this expression but you have no particular skin in the game but if it's something you feel would benefit kind of this sounds so self-righteous but would benefit the community well Lola you do so many you do so many samples because that's just the submission process that's just the definition of the submission process is that I've done some samples for the Life in Literature Center that I know they've taken to Frankfurt but as a translator myself I don't that's just part of a submission process with literature Center has it I don't have a contract there's no contract I've just done sort of a pro bono like you want to take something to Frankfurt I yeah I don't I don't see why you shouldn't be able to because you just be submitting something and you could either submit it to a publisher and say whether or not I would be the translator for it this is something I think that you would like to consider as a publisher and then the publisher could make that decision after that point but yeah I don't see why you shouldn't I think of it less as a submission process than a conversation and I'd also say that I should think that if you did a sample that you really liked and thought was promising I should think that when you were a publisher you could say would you would you approve of my sending this to journal right that's a good idea in the white shirt when you receive an unsolicited script do you expect at that time to have permission from the authors so often we we know the authors were translating and we work with them but sometimes it gets confusing really who has the rights an author will think that they have the right but it's very somewhere not only with that publishing firm that publishing firm is owned by somebody first woman so it gets really international intellectual property all of this beyond most of that and so do you expect us to provide you with the time of the manuscript permission do you help seek rights it gets very confusing who owns rights and then at many times for international authors I want to say that it's going to be different for magazines and book publishers and I think it's different yet again for Susan but for the literary magazines if you're submitting a short story or a poem even though it's semi unethical we ask the translator to make sure that they have the rights and to not submit unless they have the rights and that's a question of resources so for literary magazines we would like you to come with the rights or a note from the author or a sense that you can do it I think it's totally different for publishers correct yeah I mean I don't we don't explicitly expect you to have that but it certainly helps because I think it also to a certain point shows that you have done your research I have had people submit things where I've gone to find out more about the author only to discover that the book they submitted was published six months previously which is kind of uncomfortable because you've submitted something that someone already published and you didn't do the work so it's not expected but it helps I mean we've or even if you have a lead you know if you say I've kind of looked around the author thinks they have it but they're not sure and I mean as a publishing house I guess it's fair to expect that we would have certain connections to be able to figure that out so I we don't expect it but it's definitely helpful in the same way and this is off topic but in the same way it's helpful if you know that there's a cultural institution or something that can offer funding possibly just just like little things where we don't it doesn't make or break it but it's just little facts and information that's helpful to know when you do submit something we clear rights for everything we publish and we season there's right yeah yeah we secure we secure rights for everything that we publish we pay both our authors and our authors or publishers and our translators we are not really looking at unsolicited work but when people bring us work we do we we do want to know we want to know who controls the rights or at least at the minimum the original publication information because then we can track it from there but you know again otherwise you end up with a situation like Kai described where someone finds something probably fell in love with it and went right into it without without checking does that answer your question yes a lot of this conversation has been around networking and friendships and reliance on people we already know I know isn't that frustrating great but especially for beginning translators you may not know those translators what sort of benchmarks or eight posts or sign posts would you be most interested in seeing from somebody you did not know if you were looking in your splash pile what would distinguish for you a translator that you might feel more confident at least spending the time to go through the excerpt from the poem or whatever my answer is the easiest so I'm just going to make the first for the literary for a literary magazine we I for example don't even recover letters I go right to the submission so I'll be looking at the work before I look at anything else so the only benchmark for our process for submitting and being accepted has to do with whether or not we like the work if it gets into what we're doing right then and we don't care if it's the first thing or the 10,000 thing we're looking really at the work and I think that is that true for the Massachusetts review more or less yeah and so I think that that's the and that would be true for a few percent of you too so we don't and people with literary magazines we're always really pleased when it's a debut project it's a first publication by someone it feels like a discovery those are our little amulets of pride we get to wear so there's so for beginning we're totally open there's no benchmarks I think for you guys when you're for being translators that's a different matter right I think if it's something where I would be I would be hesitant to commission a translation from someone I had not worked with and but I would not be hesitant if that person and again this goes back to networking I'm sorry this is the way the world works but people who have gone through say the BCLT's workshop training program or sorry what training program the British Center for Literary Translation does a translators workshop every summer in which and people who that's a rigorous application process we've found many new translators through that people who are in graduate programs where people we know teach and obviously people who have earlier publications I know this is just like I know this is chicken and egg you can't publish if you don't have publications etc so you can publish in TLR and then write to Susan and say minute things are great would you consider thinking I'm great right absolutely do it absolutely we at fairy tale review are dying for more translations to be submitted and we're looking to expand beyond sort of the usual Western European canonical tales again contemporary 200 years old we don't care so we please send to us that's how you get published by us so apart from the BCLT BCLT BCLT is it lunchtime yet yeah BCLT program what are the other benchmarks do you guys have similar benchmarks you have the University of Rochester program and and in terms of things that you can say let me be part of your group I mean I don't know status markers how do you judge that this is a person I want to talk to as opposed to I don't think that we really do that I mean there I generally do read the cover letters but I will be honest in terms of I don't look at the translator author CV and go oh this person has two pages and this person has one line because I don't I think that it's fully possible that you can be you know a first year translator let's just say and be just as good as someone who's been doing it for decades I mean I think it's fair also to say that as a first year translator we'll need more direction and some more reshaping than someone but I I don't think I don't think that we have like a translation ageism in terms of career I we don't look at that as it's the same with with you guys that we look at the work first and foremost also David mentioned the Penheim translation fund and the project that you're interested in that is applying for that obviously winning it but getting your name out in those contexts is also very valuable I forgot about that any time that there are any kind of I do think that that's an excellent I think poets have to do that too but translators I think the more translation prices there are the more that you're applying for those the more when we're looking I mean we certainly pay attention to who wins the pen translation thinking what we can do with that information but does that help I mean in here yes to start way in the back way in the back my thing I think I speak to someone who's published fairly regularly and online magazine published books I don't know if you'd like to refer you and you said something and it's unacknowledged I don't mind getting receptive but there seems to be an awful lot of time just like those that are ghosting where you just come up and you're walking about like ghosts but how often do you guys think not especially on the magazines you acknowledge the meanings so we how am I understanding your question and I think I have an answer with this we have an online submission process that's what it's called submitable and when you submit it auto-generates an acknowledgment that we received it I think you're not talking about the auto-generated response yeah so we're very slow and so frequently you may think we have an answer to you but it may just be that you have to wait another five months I know there's some people in here who are still waiting here for me for a morning interview we're talking about things that have many non-conferential people maybe they didn't deal with the old set you're not getting anything back for it except you don't want to engage it and it's almost like there's a fundamentality when you say five months I'm not going to submit and it's a very reasonable choice and in fact not like you care about our internal workings and I'm pointing to one of my colleagues at TLR here because we've been working on it but we're actually our goal for 2016 is to have a six month response time which has everybody in the office trembling and I say everybody none of us are in the office, we're all remote we all have other jobs and there's a lot of submissions so all of the magazines are working with very limited resources in terms of reading time but we're aware that it's that in terms of respect we'd like to show as much respect as possible to our contributors because they're everything and the fact that it takes us so long to get back is not something we're proud of but it is the reality of our process in terms of resources now and I don't know if you guys have something else to say and I don't know if that satisfies you I'm ashamed of it but I do I compare it to the old town transfer deck in Australia and you're right and with it coordinated down to the back usually now we're interested in and things like and then there are places you know you've got them and then two of those places aren't as good as we are though do you have some responses? I do so at Open Letter like I said there are two of us who are the gatekeepers and by the two of us I mean frequently if someone emails I mean there is an email address on the website for submissions and that gets rerouted to my email address and frequently if someone writes to our publisher that's what's on my placard that's my job is to receive those submissions I try as best as I can to at least get out that response email that initial response email which is a form email that just says we've received your email thank you for getting in touch with us we'll do our best to we'll read it when we can and just to reiterate there are three of us in the office full time one of these two people is the arts and operations person so he's not reading the submissions because there are three of us I'm just my daily thing I read submissions, I answer emails I'm fielding questions from translations I'm editing manuscripts I'm packing up books for our subscribers and our reviewers my 40 hour work week is what I go to work with and Min and I were talking about this the other night I take work home with me so I'm working 24-7 translators don't sleep on the weekends neither do I, so I'm fielding emails all the time sometimes because we are human I actually would love to have a submitable that does these form emails just to that you've received them and then I could keep track of them I don't actually know why we don't have that but I don't know I wrote it down and there's a star next to it so maybe this is going to be my number one thing when I get back on Monday but at the end of the day I'm only human and if I'm one of the first gatekeepers and something that Min has said last year where it's not out of the ordinary for a smaller outfit to take three months to get back to you because we are getting multiple submissions and that's an understatement per day and it's not that we're ignoring and it's not that we're being disrespectful I mean sometimes just that we forget there I had one translator come up and ask me about something that has literally been open on my desktop for the last two months during which time my sole purpose in life has been preparing for our press's first ever annual celebration gala so my only response was exactly which is also that so in addition to my regular job I was finding sponsors and auction donors and sending out invitations and going around town so there are so few of us and I would love to be able to do that once and I'm getting giddy on the inside thinking that's a beautiful number and I would love to be able to do that but it's we don't mean to disrespect and I also translate so I also have those concerns as a translator of sending out things and getting those responses and I mean I can apologize and it's like 50, it is earnest but it's only like a half hearted earnest because there are so many other things that are going on 100% earnestly love to be on top of it all the time but getting those emails out and that's also why in our submission guidelines and I'm sure other I know other presses have the same thing in other journals where we also don't have the time to answer queries so if a month goes by or I've even had someone I've done the form email and say I've gotten your submission blah blah blah and a month later I'll get an email asking well did you get to it yet to answer you why I haven't gotten to it yet and I'm sorry and I know that it's frustrating but that's why we have those things online just to save you and to save me from feeling awkward at Ulta when we meet opposite the iced tea bar and we're both going and then that so I'm sorry I'm just sorry I think one of the beautiful things about what's happening in publishing right now is that there's a lot of small presses there's a lot of art houses there's a lot of translation presses David you just started one that's a very exciting thing that there are more places but you're starting out of your living room I have an office but can you describe a little bit I mean you just started a press it's very exciting but it is your sort of the resources even when we're starting these are limited and I think like I said that's the trade off of in some sense of working with translated literature unfortunately you know those of us who are publishing it are doing it because we love it not because we're cashing in on any secret supply of money and you know I while I also endeavor to respond I know that there's a lot of lag time even often times for translators whose books I'm publishing it's just a matter of of the hours in the day and the very small you know like I said I do about 80% of everything I have one one partner and we outsource our design and type setting and then I have a single intern wonderful intern from Pomona College who actually has serious responsibilities because of our size but you know basically if you submit to phoneme at some point it has to come through me and I've only got so so much time so in terms of being the person submitting to any of you are you all open to being nagged after a certain period is it okay to query how's it going is there a period of time thoughts about bad or nagging bad guidelines on for fairytale review there are guidelines on our submission link that's we use submitable so we auto generate a reply it's awesome but then the website says specifically two things one if you have not heard back after three months please feel free to query which means basically please don't before that I'm a full time professor and I edit the journal with no release time no money etc it's it's hard but the second thing that we do because it can take a certain period of time to get back to people is we invite simultaneous submissions which means if you submit to me you may submit anywhere else that accepts simultaneous submissions the risk is that we might lose fabulous work because we didn't respond quickly enough but the benefit for you is that you don't have to wait to hear from us before you send elsewhere and some journals don't allow that it's important to know but Chris do you do the unsolicited process yeah two months here September and March I think September March and you open up to submissions and that runs like a well oiled machine no I guess the work like it's what I what takes years off of my life also honestly this is making me like I was like I guess so many meant people to get back from it it's what I think about all the time more than money and I'm in charge of money and personnel so I think I have a similar you know I say don't query before three months but I'll like you a lot more if you don't query ever so you know I like being nagged so see I have enough nagging in my life for you I think I also think there's a difference when you say the word nag I mean I don't I think there's a there's an art to a query email or a reminder email I personally don't like the emails that give me a specific time frame like well it's been a month since you wrote to me and I'm going shit where did that month go because I didn't realize it was November already and the ones that just you know the ones that are I prefer passive queries that are just sort of you know just checking in and I think I think if you three months is a good is a good time frame especially if you understand the inner workings of the press you're submitting to if you understand it's a small like I said a smaller outfit you kind of do the mental math and think how much can you know three to six people physically and emotionally handle if if six months have gone by and you haven't heard then I'm totally okay with you know a passive or just a regular query because it's possible that it's been behind you know my like Excel spreadsheets for a month and I for those six months and I just didn't realize and like I said we're human we forget sometimes or frequently actually but that's just what happens so I think the most important thing in your queries is the tone that you use in them because if you do send something that I feel is naggy and kind of finger wagging I'm going to go that's another month that I'm not going to get it because you have to engage in a passive aggressive conflict situation with Payette I'd say I'd love to get more amusing queries though like a joke or a amusing photograph it's a comic hand drawn by the person going I have a question and I promise will answer it because my question is real quick what if you're a translator and you really want to be in words without borders how do you get in words without borders I actually have a very concrete answer for that using an example a couple of a couple of altas ago a young translator emailed ahead of the conference and asked if we could meet and we made an appointment and she said to me I was looking at your site and I see that you have not published anyone from X country and that's a particular interest of mine and so we talked about possibilities and she's put together an issue for us now that is an example of someone and again I realize not everyone has this kind of flexibility but that's an example of someone thinking I want to be in this magazine because my work fits what this magazine does and I want to find a way that we can collaborate obviously I'd like to think everyone would like to be in our magazine we have only a limited number of slots of course but I think that all of us would agree that if you want to be in a magazine you can't just have a kind of a platonic ideal you have to know what the magazine does you have to have a sense of what the magazine publishes you have to again read the submissions guidelines we all get very annoyed if you don't because they're right there on the site and it's a question too of figuring out where you fit there are so many of us nobody fits everywhere okay now flat sure I to keep talking about the submissions problem as a translator I tend to originate from casual conversations I have with publishers or at various events in New York I live in New York so I see a lot of publishers doing quite frequently but I've never submitted something to a publisher without knowing in advance that it was something that they were interested in because we've had a short conversation where I've said oh I have this author that I've been doing something on who I find is really interesting and they've said oh I'd be interested in hearing more about that I wonder if the people who publishers were not a New York translator or in places other than the publishers would you guys welcome a short little email saying with like pre sentences like I have this author that I'm interested in is this something you would be interested in seeing submitted so that you could do a quick little yes or no and then that would I feel like that would save people a lot of trouble but I also feel like from what you've been saying Kaya and what other people have been saying so much to do that it's a query basically do people want to see queries in lieu of a cocktail party conversation I mean sometimes sometimes there are queries that are very clearly like you're saying Sean that there are specific things that you know that it's like a trigger word for the press that will get our attention and other times I mean in terms of the fiction queries we talked about our editor but our poetry editor can invite queries but generally my stance is I'll look through it and I think 95% of the time I'm just going to answer yes because I don't have the time to click through wiki links that are attached to query emails and that doesn't sound like what you are describing but we have received query emails to know this author with this book and then like 40 wiki links that I don't have the time to look through and so I'd much rather prefer a simple query like that and I think generally because we are interested in reading new things be it for something that we want to publish or just something that I would like to read published by someone else and for the most part I think that my sort of across the board answer would be sure we'd love to look at it because you never you never know I mean sometimes your query description turns out to be completely not what the book is and it could go either way but I don't mind those. I think an elegant informed query letter that shows that you know what the mission of the press is etc I love those and if it's something I can't do if it sounds great I'll refer that person to an editor I know or forward with permission the email to somewhere else it's a conversation I welcome that but it might be slow to respond two months well to me submitable has changed that whole thing because it doesn't before I when I started it was all query letter sample manuscript and had to do with space and time but now it's electronics it doesn't matter so I don't care like it doesn't because it's you do the query letter and it just happens to have the manuscript there that I can read further but that's no I understand for translation I know it's different but I mean like that that's just like that can still be submitted through submitable and that's fine yeah yeah okay so I sometimes don't read the cover letter that was just a threat but I sometimes do so you should always send a cover you should always send a cover letter because I think we all agree it's a professional interaction and you should present your work in the most professional life which means you just have a cover letter and it should be kind of like in English properly you know nice and everything get the right name on it that kind of thing not dear Mr. Mr. Proctor but with a translation and I'm going to defer to Jesse but I think we do like a little description of who the person is I don't think you ever need to tell us the plot points of what we're then going to read but we do like the context for the author but you don't need to describe the work that we're about to read you don't need to do that for a literary magazine you might need to do it for a full length manuscript they're shaking their heads so for a full length manuscript you should give a plot synopsis for a literary magazine it's different would you want like a horse that the author just won readership other languages I think whatever is interesting about the author if the author is really interesting because they win a lot of prizes then yeah if the author is really interesting because they're 12 then yeah if they're a bear if the author is a bear that's really interesting so I would need that information anything that's like the most interesting thing about the author we're supposed to wrap up does anyone have any more questions okay and we're here for you if you have other questions at other points in the conference that's our job