I’m in Philadelphia — the modern City of Brotherly Love, not  the ancient one of the Roman world where Asia began.  The folks here last night were too dispirited at the Phillies loss to the Giants in the NCLS playoffs to go hunting San Franciscans, much less worrying about their position in the Book of Revelations and the end of times….

The annual ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) Conference is here this year and I’ve come to get my fix of new authors-not-writing-in-English and their translators, old friends and new.  The menu this morning had panel discussions such as “Performing Translations: Chekhov as a Case in Point,”  and “Transporting the Id: Carrying the Cultural Cues and Ideas across the Language Bridge.”

Translators read short pieces from such writers as Abel Prieto (Cuba),  Juan Gelman (Argentina), Mercedes Cebrian (Spain), H.E. Sayeh (Farsi), Amina Zeidan (Arabic.)

Most translators are sympathetic to those they translate from and by extension to everyone who hasn’t shown their viciousness to others.  So, there was a collective gasp at the shared headlines this morning at breakfast — The Blackwater Prosecutions were falling apart, and the Tea Party’s proud stance in Nevada favoring tents in the desert for all “illegals.”

Damn! It would be good for a Moises led migration out of that state of all Hispanics and let the pale-faces do for themselves what they count on the invisible people to now do for them.

Speaking of translations, following the suggestions of the Kutub reading group in Dubai which I mentioned a while back, I am reading Men in the Sun, a slim volume of short fiction by the deceased Palestinian writer,Ghassan Kanafani, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick.   It was available in the local library and I’m enjoying the read, the first of which are about different men trying to get into Kuwait, often in the trucks and cars of smugglers, to find work – no longer available in the Palestine of their birth.