They are making a movie adaptation of William Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and it will be directed by Scott Cooper. (Here's my review of the dark, strange, humid story.) But be ware of news reports like this one, about the actresses vying for the role of Peyton Loftis, that describe Peyton as the main character of the book. That. Is. Not. True. The protagonist would be Milton Loftis, Peyton's father.

Deeply disappointing news: Orange, the mobile services company, has pulled its sponsorship for the Orange Prize, which is the prestigious award that has elevated and supported excellent literary fiction for seventeen years. With an explicit intention of elevating fiction written by women -- which, as the VIDA numbers persistently point out, is still quite necessary -- the Orange Prize has brought worldwide attention to the extraordinary fiction of Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (that's her, pictured above), Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Rose Tremain, Lionel Shriver, Téa Obreht, Carol Shields, Anne Michaels (for Fugitive Pieces, which is so, so good), and many others.

From the report in The Guardian:

The prize, which was set up to "celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from around the world", is given annually to the best book by a woman written in English. Winners ... are presented with a cheque for £30,000 and a bronze figurine known as "the Bessie".

The prize money itself is supplied through the endowment of a private donor, but the remainder of the award's expenses have been met by Orange's sponsorship since the prize was launched in January 1996. After this year's award is presented on 30 May, Orange ... will withdraw its support of the prize in order to focus on film industry sponsorship.

Then there's some blah-blah-blah statement from Orange about how they're pleased with the impact of their support over the years, and how literary fiction by women is worthy of support (albeit not by them anymore), etc.

Kate Mosse, the author and co-founder of the award, tells The Guardian that the Orange Prize organization is actively looking for a new sponsor that will carry the award into its next seventeen years. She adds:

"It's very rare for a sponsorship like this to come onto the market - the investment generates something in the region of £17.5m a year in advertising, and the cultural capital of the women's prise for fiction is practically second to none. The potential is very exciting."

The shortlist for this years prize are:

• Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
• The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright
• Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding
• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
• Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick
• State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

The winner will be crowned next week in what is expected to be the most downbeat awards ceremony ever.

The New Yorker's new Page-Turner section quickens my heart with another brilliant look at the purpose and possibilities of literary translation, this time featuring Judith Thurman's thinking. I knew Thurman from her famous biography of Isak Dinesen ("the life of a storyteller"), which won a National Book Award; I had no idea that she is a translator from Spanish and French as well. She's magicked her way through the poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Louise Labé; she saw her biography of Dinesen translated into languages she cannot read; she is reading Lydia Davis's rendition of Madame Bovary in English for the first time.

She has things to say. And she offers asides about Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and second-wave feminism along the way. She pairs a close reading of a a few lines from Davis's Madame Bovary with a panoramic look at the art of twinning a writer.

Translation is a mysterious process, and just as the noun “mystery” is religious in origin, so is the verb “to translate.” Its first meaning is “to remove the body or relics of a saint or hero from one place of internment or repose to another.” Its second meaning is “to carry or convey to heaven without death.” That, of course, is what one aspires to do when one translates a work of literature: to convey a vital essence, which has been buried in the crypt (encrypted) of an alien lexicon, to a place in the light where it can endure.

Biography and translation are related enterprises. In neither case does a literal transcription produce the most desirable result: it refuses the risks—the deep adventure—of the poetry. The transcription school sticks timidly to the shore of fact, accounting for every petty quarrel, doctor’s appointment, cup of coffee, thank-you note, orgasm, and pair of gloves. Such biographies may be useful to the scholar, but they cheat a lay reader of something more vibrant and sensuous, which only comes through an imaginative connection. When one translates the story of another life—an epic with many ellipses, lost passages, and obscure references—it is always into one’s own sentences, and if the essential question of biography is Who are you?, the only way to hold a steady course toward the answer is to keep asking, at frequent intervals, Who am I?

Albert Camus's strange little novel bears an evocative and famous first line: "Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Ryan Bloom takes a look at how various translators have rendered the sentence into English in The New Yorker, with particular attention two the two decisions that they seem to keep getting wrong. One of them stretches back to the original English translation:

Stuart Gilbert, a British scholar and a friend of James Joyce, was the first person to attempt Camus’s “L’Étranger” in English. In 1946, Gilbert translated the book’s title as “The Outsider” and rendered the first line as “Mother died today.” Simple, succinct, and incorrect.

In 1982, both Joseph Laredo and Kate Griffith produced new translations of “L’Étranger,” each opting for Gilbert’s revised title, “The Stranger,” but preserving his first line. “Mother died today” remained, and it wasn’t until 1988 that the line saw a single word changed. It was then that American translator and poet Matthew Ward reverted “Mother” back to Maman. One word? What’s the big deal? A large part of how we view and—alongside the novel’s court—ultimately judge Meursault lies in our perception of his relationship with his mother. We condemn or set him free based not on the crime he commits but on our assessment of him as a person. Does he love his mother? Or is he cold toward her, uncaring, even?

First impressions matter, and, for forty-two years, the way that American readers were introduced to Meursault was through the detached formality of his statement: “Mother died today.” There is little warmth, little bond or closeness or love in “Mother,” which is a static, archetypal term, not the sort of thing we use for a living, breathing being with whom we have close relations. To do so would be like calling the family dog “Dog” or a husband “Husband.” The word forces us to see Meursault as distant from the woman who bore him.

Mexico's great literary legend, Carlos Fuentes, died today at age 83. The prolific author and winner of the Cervantes Prize published his first novel at age 29; his final book will come out next year. His imaginative life was twinned with his political one: he was a sharp critic of corruption, censorship, and policies that perpetuate and criminalize poverty. He wrote nonfiction and journalism, but his critique of Mexico's drug wars came in the form of the novel Destiny and Desire, which is narrated by a severed head (and translated into English by Edith Grossman). Fuentes is also a former ambassador in France -- a position he resigned in protest of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz being named ambassador to Spain; Díaz Ordaz had been Mexico's president in 1968 when national troops opened fire on student protesters. In Fuentes's double life as a diplomat and fierce writer, he reminds me of Pablo Neruda, and makes me think of "Politics and the English Language" a touch differently: holding in my mind these men who danced with language wearing very different gowns.

From Anthony DePalma's remembrance of Fuentes in the New York Times:

Mr. Fuentes was one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s, known as El Boom. He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love.

And this is fascinating (emphasis mine):

Mr. Fuentes received wide recognition in the United States in 1985 with his novel “The Old Gringo,” a convoluted tale about the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a best seller north of the border ...

El Universal in Mexico has an enormous banner retrospective on Fuentes, which includes gathering the reflections of other writers. Jorge Volpi named him "el mayor novelista de México." Xavier Velasco said this:

Es un golpe muy fuerte, no creo que estemos a tiempo de hacer la mínima reflexión que nos acerque a aquilatar lo que acabamos de perder ... Es el novelista más grande que ha dado México, es el hombre que nos puso en el mapa, sin Carlos Fuentes no se donde estaría"

We can thank Dalkey Archive Press for being one of the publishers who has been key to bringing Fuentes' books into English, including Terra Nostra (reissue edition), Christopher Unborn, Where the Air is Clear, and Distant Relations. Dalkey will publish a Vlad, a novella, this summer ("Where, Carlos Fuentes asks, is a modern-day vampire to roost?") and Adam in Eden, another novella, in autumn. Next year -- and I cannot wait for this -- it will have for us "Fuentes's ambitious survey of Latin American fiction," called, of course, The Great Latin American Novel.

I remember the first time I uncovered Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books: it was sometime in the early 1990s, it was an old worn paperback on a friend's shelf that I began paging through while said friend was off doing something else. (Aside: this kind of chance wonder is one of the unique purposes of print books.) Brief and strange, brimming with leaps and language that dances as language, this kind of writing is hard to shake off. And while the books are intended for young adult audiences, they seem to sit on rare air that we all would do well to breathe. Lesser known than Block's Weetzie Bat is The Rose and the Beast, her "fairy tales retold." The one called "Snow" begins like this:

When she was born her mother was so young, still a girl herself, didn't know what to do with her. She screamed and screamed -- the child. Her mother sat crying in the garden. The gardener came by to dig up the soil. It was winter. The child was frost-colored. The gardener stood before the cold winter sun, blocking the light with his broad shoulders. The mother looked like a broken rose bush.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has an audio interview with Block, complete with Iggy Pop music. And Bennett Madison has an accompanying essay on "Weetzie Bat Meets the Genie," in which he celebrates the breathless stories set squarely in "Los Angeles Rococo."