After 5 days of book panels, professional sessions and book shopping, the Feria Internacional del Libro de Nueva York (New York International Book Fair) came to an end. Two students on our program, Valentina Lopez Perez and Oriana Galvis Marin, went to some of the events and they share their experience below.
They both attended “El Camino a la traducción” (The Path to Translation) with Mariana Enriquez and Megan McDowell as panelists, and “Encuentro de Traductores,” (Gathering of Translators) a professional session where different translators and publishing professionals were in conversation. On the first panel, with Enriquez and McDowell–her English translator–, topics related to Enriquez’s writing style and its connections with Argentinean politics and history, her experience writing narratives heavily influenced by horror, and the translation process and how her relationship with her translators is, were covered. One of the highlights from this conversation was the importance that the English translations has and how translators from other languages often use the English version of the text as a reference whenever they encounter a difficult section in the story or a word they are not too sure how to translate.
Encuentro de Traductores was a smaller session where, to attend, people were required to apply. The panelists for this professional session were Juliana Barbosa, Megan McDowell, Daniel Saldana Paris, Gabriela Adamo, Esther Allen, and Chris Wait, all translators from Spanish, Portuguese and English, authors, columnists, and publishing professionals. Some of the topics that were covered in this event were: how works in translation have evolved in the last 15 years, going from being less accessible and considered as “high” literature that less people would read to being more accessible to the general public and widely read, how some articles from Times Magazine are now being translated into Spanish for those Hispanic readers in the U.S., and the role that translators have when pitching books to publishers and editors.
This event was a terrific opportunity to get to know more about Hispanic and Latin-American literature, connect with other readers, and network with other publishing professionals.