Peter Bush, former director of the British Centre for Literary Translation and acclaimed translator of authors including Juan Goytisolo, Juan Carlos Onetti, Fernando de Rojas
and most recently Quim Monzó, will be speaking this Thursday at Baruch College on the topic “Tyrant Banderas: Translating a Dictator. Bush spoke on one of the panels I moderated at ALTA this week – on the panel about the future of translation studies – so I can attest that he is wildly knowledgable and a very engaging speaker. He also used to work down the hall from W.G. Sebald at the University of East Anglia, so you can ask him about that as well. Here’s the event description:
At the height of the Arab Spring a long review of Ramón Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas (1926) appeared in the Barcelona daily, La Vanguardia, which pointed out that Valle’s narrative of a civil war read like a fiction written for our times. Written in reaction to the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in Spain, translated to an imaginary Latin American republic, Valle-Inclán’s story was to be an extraordinarily perceptive anticipation of the Spanish civil war as well as the literary model for subsequent novels of dictatorship written by Miguel Angel Asturias, García Márquez and Roa Bastos. The translator will discuss his experience of reading the novel and the challenges of writing a new translation – the first into English since 1929 – of Valle’s Cubist, cartoon and camp representation of dictatorship in Latin America.
Bush’s translation of Tirano Banderas was just published by New York Review Books Classics, with a prologue by Alberto Manguel. Here’s where/when: Modern Language Conference Room 6-210, Baruch Vertical Campus, 55 Lexington Ave. (at 25th St.). Thursday, Oct. 11, 12:30 p.m.