Jill Schoolman on Haitian Poet/Artist Frankétienne, Knausgaard Frenzy, & More at BOMB

We've always had a soft spot for Archipelago Books and Jill Schoolman, who publishes some of the most "tender and startling and deeply literary" international literature in translation of any press, not to mention small. If you don't know their edition of Georg Büchner’s Lenz, translated by Richard Sieburth, for instance, get thee hence! Schoolman talked with Bibi Dietz for BOMB about the literary frenzy surrounding Karl Ove Knausgaard (whose My Struggle series was originally published by Archipelago), the spirits that commune with Julio Cortázar, book as artifact, bookstores in NYC, and the Haitian writer Frankétienne:

BD The Haitian writer Frankétienne will visit New York in September for the Brooklyn Book Festival, and you’ll publish the first English translation of his 1968 novel Ready to Burst (Mûr à crever) this fall. He’s been called Haiti’s most important writer. Why do you think this is?

JS Frankétienne is a force of nature. Not only is he is a vital poet, novelist, visual artist, musician, and founder of a new cross-pollinating genre called Spiralism (where poetry, art, and word-collage are woven together to extraordinary effect), he has also devoted his life to being a vocal advocate of the people. He remained in Port-au-Prince throughout some inconceivably difficult years and allowed the political turbulence and kaleidoscopic energy around him to nourish his work. He is also a great advocate for the Haitian Creole language, speaking out whenever possible for more classic literary and scientific texts to be translated into it. His writings, activism, art, and deep love for the Haitian people have elevated him to an almost sacred place in Haiti.

OH and the recommendations!

BD It’s vital to read literature from around the world. For those of us striving to find more international literature, which books would you recommend or deem unmissable?

JS Oh, there are so so many books that I feel close to. For starters, the novels by Céline and Ondaatje and Krasznahorkai and Nabokov, Hrabal, Rulfo, Elias Khoury and Magdalena Tulli; and stories by Jergović, Gombrowicz, Cortázar, Calvino, Sait Faik Abasıyanık, and Borges. Héctor Abad’s Oblivion, Breytenbach’s A Season in Paradise, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and Antonio Tabucchi and Josep Pla; the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, José Ángel Valente, Nichita Stănescu, Ingeborg Bachmann, Różewicz, Césaire, Soyinka, Leopardi. More and more I am drawn to books that defy genre, like Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys or Railtracks by John Berger and Anne Michaels.

Read it all at BOMB Magazine.