News from the Goethe-Institut Chicago:

Translator Michael Henry Heim has been selected as the recipient of the 2005 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his exceptional translation of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), which was published last year by HarperCollins.

Michael Henry Heim is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He translates contemporary and classical fiction and drama from the Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, Russian, and Serbian/Croatian. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and translation prizes and served on translation juries for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PEN American Center, and the Goethe-Institut. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, which was established in 1996, is awarded annually for an outstanding translation from German into English published in the United States during the previous year. The prize is named for the eminent publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who emigrated to New York in 1941 and distinguished themselves by their promoting of European literature in translation.

I finally have all the literary events for next weekend’s Printer’s Row Book Fair on my schedule. Remember that there’s plenty of other good stuff there as well, including mysteries, nonfiction, etc., which I don’t cover.

But first, there’s this weekend. It’s still McNally-mania here in Chicago, as John McNally appears here, there, and everywhere in support of the paperback release of his great Chicago novel, Book of Ralph. I have a couple of events on my schedule to the right, including tomorrow’s booksigning at Duke’s Italian Beef in Bridgeview. The full list is on McNally’s web site. So swing by one of these events. Pete testifies that McNally in person is as entertaining as McNally in print.

On Saturday night, Daniel Borzutsky and Adam Novy read at the Booster and Seven Gallery, which I only know because I saw it in the Reader today. Borzutsky’s story collection, Arbitrary Tales, just came out last month.

I’ve also neglected to mention that Andrew Winston, he of Looped fame, was recently featured on M. J. Rose’s Backstory blog. “From the day I moved to Chicago I wanted to write a book about the city.” Nice piece. Winston’s going to be on the Chicago Stories panel at Printer’s Row next Saturday, along with Daniela Kuper, Billy Lombado, and Susan Wheeler.

The schedule is finally out for the Printer’s Row Book Fair on June 11 and 12. They’ve added quite a few folks since I last blogged about it, so check it out.

BTW, I got a mailing yesterday for the other big event in Chicago’s literary year, the Chicago Humanities Festival. Writers coming to town for that one, which takes place in November, include Sebastian Barry, Charles Baxter, Anita Desai, Joan Didion, Geoff Dyer, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Mary Gordon, Edward Hirsch, Pico Iyer, Chang-Rae Lee, Hermoine Lee, Susan Orlean, Annie Proulx, Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, and James Wood.

The two festivals are cosponsoring Umberto Eco’s visit next week.

Over at the LitBlog Co-op today, Little, Brown editor Reagan Arthur is guest-blogging about author Kate Atkinson, the book Case Histories, and how pleased she is that the LBC picked the book as its first Read This! recommendation.

I’m a member of LBC: The Next Generation, so I neither nominated nor voted in the first round. But I read the nominees and was greatly entertained and impressed with Case Histories. So head over there and introduce yourself to the editor who brought the book to market.

One of my aimless rambles on a theme …

Many years ago I read an interview with historian Robert Darnton in which he said two things that stuck with me. The first, not entirely surprising from the author of The Great Cat Massacre, was that it is a mistake to think of our ancestors as being “just like us” except in period dress. Darnton’s many years as a historian taught him this: they aren’t like us at all.

The second and more interesting thing Darnton said was that, in France, traveling from the city to the country was like traveling from the present into the past. This struck me as true not just for France but for everywhere else. A good friend of mine and I used to speculate on what year it was back in our respective hometowns in Indiana (his) and Ohio (mine). One of the tricky things about American towns is that they can often seem newer than cities because they tear down the old buildings, where in big cities there’s always a little bit of undisturbed past decades hiding in the sidestreets. Still, towns seem to me to be at least 10 years behind big cities. One of the appeals of living in a big city is that it allows you to live in the present (if you want to).

A few months ago I discovered a related idea in Jung, via J. B. Priestley’s 1967 introduction to Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps. “We are apt to forget — as Jung reminds us — that all humanity is not living with us in the mid-20th century.”

What reminds me of this today, and also brings it back to literature, is a passage I read last night in a chapter from Mark Scroggins’s upcoming biography of Louis Zukofsky, included in the most recent Chicago Review:

… that the “Great Books” were neither museum pieces nor the obsolete records of earlier eras, but living entities of their own right … would become a fundamental article of faith in Zukofsky’s writing and criticism. Erza Pound, one of the “new” poets Zukofsky was reading while at Columbia [from 1920-24] — no doubt outside of any formal syllabus — had written in 1910, in the preface to his The Spirit of Romance:

All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have already been gathered into Abraham’s bosom, or some more fitting receptacle.