For the Seals

For the Seals

by Juan Manuel Sánchez 

translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Ruth Llana

19pp, paper 

Toad Press, 2019. $5.00 

cover art by Silvia Recharte Hilares

You can purchase a copy of For the Seals here.

Juan Manuel Sánchez was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1983. In 2010, his book Para las Focas / For the Seals won the first prize in poetry from the Casa de los Escritores del Uruguay. He currently works at the Museo Figari, and also as a teacher and a book reviewer for the newspaper La Diaria.

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recent translations include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia and Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren. She has authored fourteen books of poetry and prose including The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize, and the memoir Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association.

Ruth Llana is a Spanish poet, author of four published collections including Tiembla, which won the Federico García Lorca Poetry Prize, and Umbral. She is also the Spanish language translator of the American poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge whose work Me encantan los artistas  will be published in 2019 by Kriller 71 Ediciones.

The Meat Market

The Meat Market

by Shaheen Akhtar and Mashiul Alam

translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya

23pp, paper 

Toad Press, 2019. $5.00 

cover art by Liton Sarkar

You can purchase a copy of The Meat Market here.

Shaheen Akhtar is the author of five novels and four short story collections. In 2004, her novel Talaash won the Prothom Alo Book of the Year award. The English translation of Talaash (The Search, trans. Ella Dutta) was published by Zubaan in New Delhi in 2011. Akhtar was presented with the Sera Bangali 2014 award in the field of literature by India’s leading Bengali news channel ABP Ananda. She received the Akhteruzzaman Elias Katha Shahitya Puroshkar for her novel Moyur Shinghason and the Bangla Academy Shahitya Puroshkar for fiction. Her work has been translated into English, German and Korean.

Mashiul Alam was born in northern Bangladesh in 1966. He graduated in journalism from the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow in 1993. He works at Prothom Alo, the leading Bengali daily in Bangladesh. He is the author of a dozen books including Second Night with Tanushree (a novel), Ghora Masud (a novella), Mangsher Karbar (The Meat Market, short stories), and Pakistan (short stories). His short story “An Indian Citizen in Our Town” (trans. Shabnam Nadiya) was published in Words Without Borders’ 2013 Bangladesh feature.

Shabnam Nadiya is a Bangladeshi writer and translator in California. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2012. Her translation of Moinul Ahsan Saber’s novel The Mercenary was published in 2018 (US edition), and Shaheen Akhtar’s Beloved Rongomala is forthcoming, both from Seagull Books. She has published her own work and translations in journals such as Joyland, Gulf Coast, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Wasafiri, Five Chapters, Bengal Lights, and The Missing Slate, as well as various anthologies. She is the recipient of the 2019-2020 Steinbeck Fellowship.

Experimental Gardening Manual

Experimental Gardening Manual

by Sebastián Jiménez Galindo

translated from the Spanish by Naomi Washer

19pp, paper

Toad Press, 2019. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Experimental Gardening Manual here.

Sebastián Jiménez Galindo is the author of VORACIOUS BLUE LOBSTERS, a sound poetry collection. His audiovisual works have been screened internationally and featured in Ecuador (THE ORDER OF THE SIGNS, 2018) and Norway (LAS BRUJAS, 2019). His writing has appeared in Asymptote, Peculiar Mormyrid, Reflexiones Marginales and other journals in Mexico, the United States and Spain. He's currently pursuing a BFA in Literature and Creative Writing in Mexico City.      

Naomi Washer is the author of two poetry chapbooks: PHANTOMS (dancing girl press, 2019) and AMERICAN GIRL DOLL (Ursus Americanus Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Court Green, Gold Wake Live, Pithead Chapel, Asymptote, Passages North, and other journals. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Studio Faire, Chateau d'Orquevaux, and Columbia College Chicago where she earned her MFA in Nonfiction. She is the editor and publisher of Ghost Proposal.  

Read an excerpt of Experimental Gardening Manual at Asymptote here. 

2019 Chapbook Series

We are delighted to share that the Toad Press International chapbook series will publish three new translations this year:

Experimental Gardening Manual: Create your own habitat in thirty-something simple steps, by Sebastián Jiménez Galindo

translated by Naomi Washer

The Meat Market, stories by Mashiul Alam & Shaheen Akhtar

translated by Shabnam Nadiya

For the Seals, poems by Juan Manuel Sánchez

translated by Jesse Lee Kerchival & Ruth Llana

Look for these titles coming your way in Summer / Fall 2019.  

Thank you to all who submitted your work -- we are grateful to have had the opportunity to read so many of your wonderful translations during our recent open reading period!

Two-Step

Two-Step – a Boolean Comedrama

by Jacques Jouet & Olivier Salon

translated by Emma Ramadan & Chris Clarke

33 pages, paper

cover image is from "Thread," a Coptic textile in the public domain

Toad Press, 2018. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Two-Step here.

Two-Step is a "simultaneous play" written in 2003 as a collaboration between Oulipo members Jacques Jouet and Olivier Salon. It takes the form of two different plays set in two different eras, both of which share a character during several acts. This character's replies use homographic "hinge" words, allowing his responses to signify something different to either storyline.

We translated Two-Step in communication with Messrs. Jouet and Salon, doing our best to replicate their writing process in our translation process. This had us working across the table from each other for certain sections, apart for others, and exchanging one reply at a time by email for another, all between spring 2016 and summer 2017.

- Emma Ramadan

& Chris Clarke 

"It's clever dramatic fun", writes Michael Orthofer, over at The Complete Review

houses | stripped

houses | stripped

by Paola Loreto

translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti

21pp, paper 

poems in Italian and English

cover image is a chine-collé collage by Carol Keller 

Toad Press, 2018. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of houses | stripped here. 

Born in Bergamo, Paola Loreto is currently based in Milan. She is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Milan, where she teaches American literature. She has published five collections of poems, including In quota (2012) and case | spogliamenti (2016), and has won a number of national awards, including the Premio Antonio Fogazzaro, the Premio Benedetto Croce, and the Premio Umbertide. Among her  publications are book-length studies of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Derek Walcott. Her translations into Italian include the work of Richard Wilbur, A. R. Ammons, Philip Levine, Charles Simic, and Amy Newman. She has held a Copeland Fellowship at Amherst College and been appointed poet in residence at the Centre de Poésie et Traduction of the Fondation Royaumont in Paris.

Lawrence Venuti translates from Italian, French, and Catalan. His translations include Antonia Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss (2006), and J. Rodolfo Wilcock’s collection of real and imaginary biographies, The Temple of Iconoclasts (2014). He won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize for his version of Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper: Poems (2009). He is the author, most recently, of Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2013).