The recipient of a Whiting Award in 2016, Mitchell S. Jackson has a bright future. When Roxane Gay reviewed The Residue Years, his 2013 debut novel (or “novel“, as the cover has it; it’s also sort of a memoir), she picked out its language, “flying off the page with percussive energy“, its “warmth and wit”, “a hard-won wisdom”. Set in a Portland that predates the advent of Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, it tells the story of Champ and his mother, Grace; also of crack, prison, and black life in a Northwest Portland free of the hipsterism and postmodern irony with which many readers will be more familiar. Jackson is from Portland and has himself spent time in prison, where he discovered both a love and a major talent for writing (he discusses this transformative experience here). He now serves on the faculty of NYU and Columbia and has become an in-demand speaker, taking a leaf out of his hero James Baldwin’s book and asking “Should ‘blackness’ exist?” in a powerful talk at TED2016. We spoke to Mitchell ahead of his appearance at our next Seriously Entertaining show, Failing Up, on February 7 at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater. Name: Mitchell Jackson. Age: I’m 41. Where are you from? I’m […]

To translate is not just to render in a different language but (done well) to ventriloquize the soul of another. It is to understand undercurrents transcendently, better to realize meaning. Translation isn’t just Babel fishing; it’s screen printing, recreation, midwifery. Idra Novey, the Brooklyn-based novelist and poet who’s translated Clarice Lispector, Paulo Henriques Britto, and Lascano Tegui, last year made the translation-metaphor into a witty, fast-paced debut novel called Ways To Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016; newly in paperback). At its outset, Beatriz Yagoda, one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, disappears up a tree. Thousands of miles away, her English translator, Emma, hears of her strange vanishing and takes the first flight to Rio to get to the bottom of things. But how well does anyone really know her? Yagoda’s daughter, for one, holds no truck with “the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels”. For Emma, though, who used her direct experience and memories of the author “to illuminate the strange, dark boats of Beatriz’s images as she ferried them into English”, there seems to be at least a degree of metaphysical understanding. “For translation to be an art,” Yagoda once told her, “you have to make the uncomfortable but necessary transgressions that an […]