KGB Bar

Celebrate the launch of the 17th volume of Two Lines--titled Some Kind of Beautiful Signal--with an all-star reading of foreign literature. Co-editors Natasha Wimmer and Jeffrey Yang bring along Heather Cleary Wolfgang and Matt Reeck to introduce you to literature from Chile, China, Argentina, and India. Hear 2,000-year-old poetry from the Uyghurs of Central Asia, an essay by Roberto Bolaño, a story about smells from India, and more.  Plus, you’ll have a chance to be the first to buy Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. Featuring translations from Lydia Davis, Natasha Wimmer, Marian Schwartz, and over 30 more leading translators, this book opens up worlds never before seen in English.

Natasha Wimmer is the translator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007) and 2666 (2009).  She has also translated novels and nonfiction by Mario Vargas Llosa, Rodrigo Fresan, Laura Restrepo, and Gabriel Zaid, among others.  She is a regular contributor to the Nation, and has written for the New York Times, the Believer, and the American Scholar.

Jeffrey Yang is a poet, translator, and editor at New Directions Publishing Corp. He translated the Qian Jia Shi under the title Rhythm 226, and his poetry has appeared in the Nation, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Yang is the recipient of the PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry for his debut collection An Aquarium (Graywolf, 2008).

Heather Cleary Wolfgang’s translations into English of the poetry, prose, and literary criticism of Oliverio Girondo, Sergio Chejfec, and Mariano Siskind have been published in journals such as the Literary Review, New York Tyrant, and Habitus, and in the anthology Reading Otherwise: The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). She received a PEN Translation Fund grant for her work with the poetry of Oliverio Girondo in 2005 and is currently working toward a PhD in Columbia’s department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Matt Reeck is a writer living in Brooklyn. Midwinter, his third chapbook of poetry, was released in January 2010, by Fact-Simile Press; My Dictionary, his fourth, is forthcoming from Dirty Swan Projects. He has translated work from the Urdu of Saadat Hasan Manto, Premchand, and Patras Bukhari.