Friends and fellow book lovers! The Tome Gnome has something very exciting to share with you today. Below is a guest post written by Elisabeth (Lissie) Jaquette, the Executive Director of The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). The Tome Gnome is SO LUCKY to partner with ALTA on this month’s book-hiding leading up to their annual conference, November 8-11, 2023. We hope you’ll support ALTA by attending some of the public events in the “Arizona Translates!” series! So, without further ado… welcome, Lissie! 👏

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Here at the American Literary Translators Association, we are over the moon to be partnering with the Tucson Tome Gnome to bring copies of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead to readers across the city. 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is written by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, and translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It is a murder mystery / eco-thriller / fairy tale, told through the eyes of Janina, an aging astrologist who lives in a rural Polish village. It is also one of my personal favorite books I’ve read in the past decade (shh, don’t tell the other books!), and I can’t wait for readers around Tucson to enjoy it, too. 

It was that feeling—“I just read an amazing book, and I can’t wait to share it!”—that animates the Tome Gnome, and also the feeling that led me to become a translator of literature myself. 

I had been living in Cairo, Egypt, for five years, and just read a fantastic novel in Arabic that felt like George Orwell’s 1984 meets the Arab Spring. I wanted to share the book with my friends, but not many of them read in Arabic. The solution? I decided to translate the book myself… and after much hard work, years later it came out in English as The Queue.

Supporting people who translate books from other languages into English is what we do at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), which has been based in Tucson since 2019. We’re a nonprofit arts organization that provides resources and community to literary translators. We bestow awards to recognize excellence in translation, provide fellowships and mentorships to support emerging translators, and hold an annual conference where 400 translators from all over the country and world come together to celebrate the craft and art that makes world literature possible.

But why does reading literature in translation matter? 

“Translation expands our ability to explore through literature the thoughts and feelings of people from another society or another time. It permits us to savor the transformation of the foreign into the familiar and for a brief time to live outside our own skins, our own preconceptions and misconceptions. It expands and deepens our world, our consciousness, in countless, indescribable ways.”

So wrote Edith Grossman, acclaimed translator of Gabriel García Marquez, in her book Why Translation Matters.

How lucky we are as readers, to enjoy books from all over the world, from hundreds of languages we’ll never learn to speak! That expansive possibility is thanks to the work of literary translators. 

Whether you find a tome on Sunday or not, we hope you’ll find your way to a book in translation soon. The longlists for ALTA’s National Translation Awards—now in their 25th year!—are a great place to start, a collection of amazing titles from across the globe, translated from Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Northern Sámi, Persian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, and Vietnamese.

And we hope you’ll join us this month at one of the public events in our Arizona Translates! series. You can catch snippets of poetry chalked by the Urban Poetry Pollinators around the city, hear poet and Japanese translator Sawako Nakayasu read her work at the Poetry Center on November 10 or watch Russian Roulette, a play translated from Spanish, at the Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre on November 11. And more!

But in the meantime… happy book hunting!