BookLove Letter

When thinking about how to describe this brilliant novella by renowned Mexican author Fabio Morábito, the juxtaposition of poetry, oddities and irony seemed to convey its breadth. Have a listen as I and two members of Wayfarers Book Club talk to translator Curtis Bauer, where he shares his approach, insights and takeaways.

~Lisa

Lisa Carter is Founder and Creative Director of Intralingo, helping authors and translators write and readers explore stories. Lisa brings two decades of professional literary experience, including nine books and multiple other pieces published in translation, and nearly as many years of contemplative and compassion practices to her work. Her inclusive, engaged, caring presence inspires people to share their stories, create new ones and feel truly heard.

GET THE BOOKIntralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)Or support the author and translator through your local, independent bookseller or library.

CONNECTCurtis BauerFabio Morábito and Other PressWayfarers Book Club

WATCH THE INTERVIEWVia the BookLove LetterOn YouTube

Thank you for listening!

*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, and will always identify when that is the case. Recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Hello, BookLoves.

In this episode of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, I offer a short reading from the book Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka, by Chris Lockhart & Daniel Mulilo Chama.

Below, I offer a whole lot more about it, what I took from it, and what I hope you might too.

From the publisher:

For readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Nothing to Envy, this is a breathtaking real-life story of four street children in contemporary Zambia whose lives are drawn together and forever altered by the mysterious murder of a fellow street child.

This book is nothing short of a dedicated miracle.

Over a period of years, the co-authors, a graduate student and a team of four former street children lived and worked in the vast slums of Zambia’s capital city, getting to know a cross section of the population, taking hundreds of pages of notes and over a thousand hours of recordings.

When a young boy, who became known as the Ho Ho Kid, was found murdered at the city dump, the team dedicated their efforts to following the investigation in real time and discovered a connection to many of the children they were already in contact with.

Lusabilo, a self-titled “chief” and waste picker at the dump finds the Ho Ho Kid’s body and is forced to assist the police in their investigation. Along the way, he is led to Moonga, a recent arrival who has turned to begging, become hooked on sniffing glue and dreams of going to school; Timo, an ambitious and ruthless gang leader; and Kapula, an exhausted brothel worker who is saving to get out of the slum.

The connections between these four kids, who each eke out a brutal existence, and the murdered child is told unflinchingly, unsentimentally, yet with emotion and compassion.

Knowing they wanted to reach the wider public, to tell a very specific story that would humanize these individuals, rather than perpetuate the tropes or appeal only to a small circle of insider professionals, Lockhart and Chama cowrote these intertwined stories as a work of narrative non-fiction.

I felt a stabbing pain at how every one of these kids had been abandoned by family and society, left to survive on their own in unimaginably unforgiving conditions. And every time I felt compelled to DO SOMETHING, the authors reminded me how well-meaning but utterly ineffectual foreign “aid” often is.

Lockhart, an American medical anthropologist who has worked in Africa for decades, and Chama, a Zambian social worker who himself was a street child, hold nothing back. They expose what seems to be an unsolvable tragedy of poverty and corruption, helped little or even made worse by Western notions of “development.”

And yet they present a story that is ultimately one of hope.

In their preface, they say:

“If you were to ask us what we hope you learn from this book, we would say we hope you learn a little bit about the day-to-day lives and realities of street children and a great deal about the power of the smallest good.”

Walking the bowl—offering what little you can to another—is at the heart of this story. It’s a tale the Outreacher shares with every kid in the slums and with the White Man.

(And it’s the reading I offer here, in this podcast episode.)

Toward the end of the book, Kapula tells the Outreacher:

“I wonder how different things would be if everyone did the small things you do for us every day. Even if they only did one thing in their whole lives, especially if that one thing was passed on to others—like in your story. Myself, I think it would be a very different world.”

Myself, so do I.

This book achieved its aim. I learned a little about others and a lot about how I can live a more powerful life. I was reminded that I don’t have to go to Africa. I don’t have to change the whole world. All I have to do is offer a simple kindness to another, right where I am, right here, consciously, whenever I can.

Read this book. Because it’s good for you. For us. For humanity. Because it’s beautiful. Deep. Impactful. Necessary.

But above all, walk the bowl. Please, may we all walk the bowl.

~Lisa

Lisa Carter is Founder and Creative Director of Intralingo, helping authors and translators write and readers explore stories. Lisa brings two decades of professional literary experience, including nine books and multiple other pieces published in translation, and nearly as many years of contemplative and compassion practices to her work. Her inclusive, engaged, caring presence inspires people to share their stories, create new ones and feel truly heard.

My thanks to Hanover Square Press for the review copy.

We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, and will always identify when that is the case. Recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Season 03 Episode 06 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast 

I’m here today with a little something different: a short reading from the novel The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak, and an offer. 

~Lisa

Wayfarers 360° Experience

The Wayfarers 360° Experience is a whole body, whole-hearted exploration, through the pages of a book. Over six weeks (Feb 5-Mar 12, 2022), we’ll read a novel together, at a
leisurely pace, savoring it from the outside in and looking at it from our inside out. At the end of each week, we’ll meet live, online to delve deep and share.

Week 1, we’ll set our intention and consider how we might read more mindfully. On each of weeks 2 through 5, we’ll move through the book on our own, at the same pace, reading
just a few chapters at a time. Then, when we gather, we might explore the setting through body and senses, delve into our heart reactions to the story and characters, or examine themes and topics with our minds. Finally, in Week 6, we’ll reflect on all we’ve discovered.

Our experience unfolds in a welcoming, expansive, deeply held space. It’s a place where you can be fully you, expressed and appreciated. Together, in our small group, we’ll open ourselves up and deepen our connection to “the other” in books and one another in reality.

See details and register for the February-March 2022 session here: https://intralingo.com/wayfarers-360-experience

Lisa Carter is Founder and Creative Director of Intralingo, helping authors and translators write and readers explore stories. Lisa brings two decades of professional literary experience, including nine published books and multiple other pieces, and nearly as many years of contemplative and compassion practices to her work. Her inclusive, engaged, caring presence inspires others to share their stories and feel truly heard.

GET THE BOOK
The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/island-of-missing-trees-9781635578591/

Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Season 03 Episode 05 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast

Max is the most delightful guest who shared much about the wide-ranging themes he wanted to convey in this story and, as an extraordinarily talented and sensitive translator, Ros offered yet another dimension to this slim but deep novel.

~Lisa

Lisa Carter
Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.

 

00:00:36 – Introduction

00:01:35 – Max shares what he wanted to write about: migration from Africa to Europe, Boko Haram, religion, family and LGBT issues

00:03:33 – Max’s story of leaving Cameroon

00:06:36 – Ros and Max’s collaboration

00:09:00 – The language of Camfranglais

00:12:04 – The politics of translation choices

00:14:00 – Enriched the experience for readers

00:15:25 – A place for glossaries in fiction

00:15:51 – A tip for translators and varieties of English

00:17:20 – Max’s approach to language

00:19:32 – Awareness of English as a colonizing language

00:20:53 – Examples of how Max and Ros collaborated

00:23:17 – Vibrancy of sound, color, action in this novel

00:25:15 – Cameroonian students critiqued Ros’s translation

00:26:44 – The themes at the heart of the book

00:30:55 – Max’s personal connections to the themes

00:33:30 – Cameroon today

00:36:45 – The relationship between the protagonists

00:37:08 – The Gay Book Prize in France

00:39:30 – The universal human experience

00:41:10 – The particular experience Max wanted to explore

00:44:05 – Shame, breaking free and where Max wants to go next

 

GET THE BOOK

Intralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)

Or support the authors through your local, independent bookseller or library.

 

THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…

Wayfarers Book Club, learn more at www.intralingo.com/wayfarers 

 

*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, but our recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.

Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

In Conversation with Michelle Grierson, author of Becoming Leidah

 

Season 03 Episode 04 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast

We’re so happy to share a truly magical conversation with author Michelle Grierson about her debut novel, Becoming Leidah. This one includes questions from a number of readers and is filled with deeply personal shares and insights.

~Lisa

Lisa Carter
 Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.

 

00:00:11 – Introduction

00:03:00 – Michelle’s Norwegian ancestry and how “blood memory” played a role in telling this story

00:06:08 – The heart of the book as a mother-daughter story

00:08:52 – The myth of the Selkies

00:11:10 – The shapeshifter as the Norse God Odin

00:12:31 – How the book came to Michelle in “quilt patches”

00:13:28 – The state of liminality throughout the book

00:14:58 – Michelle’s use of trines and the Norse cosmology of time

00:19:05 – The oneness of everything and playing with space on the page

00:20:56 – Reader is completely engaged from the first paragraph

00:25:33 – Story structure and the writing process

00:28:01 – Letting go of a book once it’s published

00:32:07 – The mother-daughter relationship

00:37:00 – The father as the villain in this story

00:41:43 – Two personal things Michelle took away from writing this book

00:46:09 – Reader takeaways from experiencing this book

 

GET THE BOOK

Intralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)

Or support the author through your local, independent bookseller or library.

 

THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…

Wayfarers Book Club, learn more at www.intralingo.com

 

*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, but our recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.

Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Season 03 Episode 03 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast

I hope you will enjoy this soulful, shifting, emotional –and fun!–  conversation with author Shugri Said Salh about her memoir, The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert.

~Lisa

Lisa Carter
 Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.

 

00:00:11 – Introduction

00:02:11 – Our shared humanity

00:09:48 – Childhood as a nomad in the desert of Somalia

00:16:45 – Connection to storytelling

00:23:24 – Universal theme and the hardest chapter to write

00:26:18 – An aha moment

00:30:22 – The refugee experience

00:36:26 – Skating, on the river and through life

00:41:01 – The price of trauma and need for closure

00:44:26 – Healing through storytelling

00:48:08 – Supporting and hearing one another

 

GET THE BOOK

Intralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)

Or support the author through your local, independent bookseller or library.

Shugri talks about the audio version, read by a Kenyan actress, with proverbs recited and songs sung by Shugri herself. Check that out for sure!

 

THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…

Wayfarers Book Club, learn more at www.intralingo.com

 

*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, but our recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.

Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Season 3 Episode 02 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe. 

Lisa Carter talks to Zhang Ling and Shelly Bryant about their novel, A Single Swallow. The discussion covers the themes of trauma, war and memory, informed by Ling’s work as a clinical audiologist, discoveries she made on her research trips to China, the voices of the narrators, the beauty of the language of the original, and so much more.

Zhang Ling is the award-winning author of nine novels and numerous collections of novellas and short stories. Born in China, she moved to Canada in 1986. In the mid-1990s, she began to write and publish fiction in Chinese while working as a clinical audiologist. Since then she has won the Chinese Media Literature Award for Author of the Year, the Grand Prize of Overseas Chinese Literary Award, and Taiwan’s Open Book Award. Among Zhang Ling’s work are Gold Mountain Blues and Aftershock, adapted into China’s first IMAX movie with unprecedented box-office success.

Shelly Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai, a book on classical Chinese gardens, and a short story collection. She has translated Chinese text for publishers such as Penguin Books and various organizations, including the National Library Board in Singapore and the Human Sciences Research Council. Her translation of Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, and her translation of You Jin’s In Time, Out of Place was short-listed for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016. Shelly received a Distinguished Alumni award from Oklahoma Christian University in 2017.

 

The book is available in all formats and from all sellers. [Affiliate link] https://bookshop.org/a/4438/9781542041508

Join us at Intralingo (https://intralingo.com) to explore the world through books!

Thanks for listening!

~Lisa

Lisa Carter,  Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 
 

Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Season 3 - Episode 01 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe. 

 I'm so pleased to have spoken to author Nazanine Hozar about her debut novel, Aria -- which Margaret Atwood called the "Doctor Zhivago of Iran"! 

 NAZANINE HOZAR was born in Tehran, Iran, and lives in British Columbia, Canada. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Vancouver Observer and Prairie Fire magazine. 

 The book is available in all formats and from all sellers.
https://bookshop.org/a/4438/9781524749033   [Affiliate link] 

 Join us at Intralingo (https://intralingo.com) to explore the world through books!

 Thanks for listening!

~Lisa

Lisa Carter,  Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 
 

Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Welcome to the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe.

Children of War, by Ahmet Yorulmaz, translated by Paula Darwish

Some years ago, I visited an abandoned city along the Aegean, where I learned for the first time about the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. It was perhaps the most unsettling place I’ve ever been. 

When I heard about Children of War, by Ahmet Yorulmaz, I couldn’t wait to read it. And then speak to translator Paula Darwish.

“It's very simple book, isn't it?” Paula comments. “There's nothing heavy in it, in a way. Although the topic is tragic, it's very simple. But it's thought provoking. … The best thing about it is, because it's told through a child's eyes, he's just sort of taking things on the surface, saying, "Well, come on. I'm a Cretan. Then how come I was a Cretan and now I'm supposed to be a Turk?"

Based on diaries, the novel reads like an oral story, told by an old man remembering his childhood. It’s full of sensual details: the tastes and smells and textures of home.

Ahmet Yorulmaz devoted his entire career as a journalist, translator and novelist to rapprochement between Turkey and Greece. In Children of War, he offers an engaging, sensitive glimpse into a profound historical event.

Paula feels proud to have translated this book into English, to represent it and what it represents.

“The thing that I'd like people to take away from it is to sort of question our conceptions, if you like, of identity and who belongs, where those perceptions came from, and how long you have to be somewhere before you're not seen as a sort of immigrant.”

Thank you to Neem Tree Press for the review copy.

**

Paula Darwish is a freelance translator and professional musician. She read Turkish Language and Literature with Middle Eastern History at SOAS in London graduating with a First in 1997. In 2015, she was invited to attend the Cunda International Workshops for Translators of Turkish Literature, where she participated in a collaborative translation of the works of Behçet Necatigil. Her submission from the novel Savaşın Çocukları by the late Ahmet Yorulmaz won a prize in the 2015 PEN Samples Translation Pitch competition. In 2017, her translation of the short story Uzun Kışın Suçlusu by Demet Şahin was part of the 10th Istanbul International Poetry and Literature Festival. She has also translated some notable non-fiction works, including a bilingual catalogue of the buildings of the famous Ottoman architect, Sinan. She is a qualified member (MITI) of the Institute of Translators and Interpreters.

www.pauladarwish.com

https://neemtreepress.com/book/children-of-war/

 Ahmet Yorulmaz was a Turkish a journalist, author and translator. He was born in Ayvalik to a family of Cretan Turks deported to mainland Turkey as part of the Greek/Turkish population exchange decreed in the Treaty of Lausanne. He was fluent in modern Greek and translated novels and poems from contemporary Greek literature to Turkish. Most of his original works were written with the aim of making people learn about Ayvalık, the city where he grew up. He dedicated himself to Greek-Turkish friendship and rapprochement.

 **

Thank you for listening and please share your own experience of this interview, the topics, and of course this amazing book. Drop a comment or reach out directly! We’d love to hear from you.

Lisa Carter
 Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 

Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Welcome to the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe.

Margaret Davis Ghielmetti is a traveler, writer and live lit storyteller whose memoir is about setting off with her husband as he took on roles managing exclusive hotels around the world. In discovering the world, Margaret discovered herself.

I felt a kindred soul in Margaret and all she shares in Brave(ish): A Memoir of a Recovering Perfectionist. We talk about looking outward, to other people and cultures in this world, while also looking inward, at ourselves. We talk about the process of becoming who we truly want to be by recognizing what she calls “The Family Handbook”: the rules and ways of being we inherit.

Over the course of her time abroad, from country to country, and returning to the US to look after her aging parents, Margaret was able to take the best parts of those rules and release the rest.

“To quote Mary Oliver: ‘What will we do with this one wild precious life?’ [...] That's definitely my hope with this book that maybe people will give some thought to. ‘Oh, okay. I see that maybe, maybe I can be brave enough to try to do things differently for a greater expression of selfhood.’”

Finding and expressing our selfhood does indeed take bravery, but as Margaret shows us in this memoir, it’s not necessarily cape and crown, all-capital BRAVE. Brave(ish) is more than enough.

I hope that you too will travel far, and wide, and deep within through this wonderful memoir and all Margaret shares with us in this conversation.

Thank you to She Writes Press for the review copy.

Bio: Margaret Davis Ghielmetti is a writer, "live lit" storyteller, solo performance artist, and photographer.  She and her Swiss husband have lived on four continents and have visited nearly fifty countries. Those journeys inform her rallying cry ("The world is not my enemy!") and her creative work (including winning two StorySLAMs with the storytelling show, The Moth.)  

Ghielmetti's solo show, “Fierce,” is about re-claiming her creative expression in mid-life . . . and she wrote Brave(ish): A Memoir of a Recovering Perfectionist to inspire readers that it’s never too late to learn to live our own lives – if we dare to let go of outdated roles and rules we thought kept us safe.  

She also hopes to entertain readers with her adventures and mis-adventures abroad, and to share what each country taught her that she never would have learned on her own. 

Proud to have been included in Newcity’s LIT 50 2020 (“Who really books in Chicago,”) Margaret is over the moon to have just had her book launch on October 1 with Chicago indie bookstore www.womenandchildrenfirst.com 

Please visit www.margaretghielmetti.com to find video/audio of her stories, her Instagram photos, and links to purchase Brave(ish): A Memoir of a Recovering Perfectionist (which may be ordered through any bookseller, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.)  What Margaret loves most is genuine connection with other human beings!  She’d love to be in touch and to hear about your journey and how you experience the world.  

Sincere thanks to Intralingo and Lisa Carter for this wonderful opportunity!  

**

Thank you for listening and please share your own experience of this interview, the topics, and of course this amazing book. Reach out! We’d love to hear from you.

Lisa Carter
 Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 

Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com