SDSU Press Author Clarissa Clò Wins MLA Translation Award for Amir Issaa's THIS IS WHAT I LIVE FOR!

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From: William A. Nericcio <bnericci@sdsu.edu>

Date: Tue, Dec 10, 2024 at 9:34 AM
Subject: CALfolk: Fwd: Fabio Battista and Clarissa Clò and Donatella Melucci Receive MLA Award; David Font-Navarrete Also Honored
To: Clarissa Clo <cclo@sdsu.edu>, <calfolk@sdsu.edu>

Felicidades to our friend and colleague Clarissa Clò!  This is a huge achievement -- I am thrilled that Clarissa and Amir Issaa chose San Diego State University Press as their go-to for this vital volume!  See the book here and read the MLA Press release below!

THE MLA’S LOIS ROTH AWARD GOES TO FABIO BATTISTA FOR THE QUEEN OF SCOTS / LA REINA DI SCOTIA AND TO CLARISSA CLÒ AND DONATELLA MELUCCI FOR THIS IS WHAT I LIVE FOR; DAVID FONT-NAVARRETE RECEIVES HONORABLE MENTION

New York, NY – 10 December 2024 – The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is presenting its seventeenth Lois Roth Award for a translation of a literary work to translators of two works. Fabio Battista, assistant professor of Italian at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, is receiving the award for his translation of Federico Della Valle’s The Queen of Scots / La Reina di Scotia, published by the University of Toronto Press. Clarissa Clò, professor of European studies at San Diego State University, and Donatella Melucci, teaching professor of Italian at Georgetown University, are receiving the award for their translation of Amir Issaa’s This Is What I Live For: An Afro-Italian Hip-Hop Memoir, published by San Diego State University Press. An honorable mention will be given to David Font-Navarrete, associate professor of music at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, for his translation of Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte: Notes on the Religions, Magic, Superstitions, and Folklore of the Black and Creole People of Cuba, published by Duke University Press. The late Lois W. Roth worked for the United States Information Agency as an advocate for the use of literary study as a means of understanding foreign cultures.

The Lois Roth Award for a translation of a literary work is one of twenty-three publication prizes that will be presented on 10 January 2025, during the association’s annual convention, to be held in New Orleans. The prize is awarded annually for a translation into English of a book-length literary work. From 1999 until 2016, the prize was offered biennially, alternating years with the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work. The two prizes are now both offered annually. The members of the selection committee were Yvonne Fuentes (Univ. of West Georgia); Jacques Lezra (Univ of California, Riverside), chair; Patricia A. Sieber (Ohio State Univ., Columbus); and Amy D. Wells (Univ. de Caen Normandie).

The selection committee’s citation for Battista reads:

This comprehensive edition makes available for the first time in English, with facing Italian original, the text of Federico Della Valle’s important and influential play of circa 1590, “the first major dramatic contribution in the Italian language to the subject of Mary Queen of Scots,” as Fabio Battista’s introduction puts it. Battista’s impeccable translation—lucid, energetic, and accurate—is supported by a generous and enlightening apparatus: a superb introduction, clarifying interpretative notes, an appendix of the facing translation of Sartorio Loschi’s 1587 account of the queen’s execution, and a bibliography. Publication of The Queen of Scots / La Reina di Scotia is a major event in the fields of comparative early modern drama, translation studies, and studies of Anglo- Italian relations in early modernity.

The committee’s citation for Clò and Melucci’s work reads:

This Is What I Live For, by Amir Issaa (a pioneering Afro-Italian hip-hop artist and antiracism advocate), is the living, vibrating fulcrum around which a bilingual edition celebrates the joys of collaboration and community building across continents, people, and disciplines. A tribute to and an embodiment of transformative translation pedagogy, This Is What I Live For started as a hands-on student project in an Italian translation course at Georgetown University. Enriched by a prelude by the author, personal photos, and essays on the significance of the text, the history of hip-hop, and the author’s interactions with American students; on the collaborative translation process, led by Clarissa Clò and Donatella Melucci; and on the power of hip-hop to engender and power new conversations among diasporas, This Is What I Live For is exemplary in its freestyle remix of leaning into the impossible in life, in the arts, and in teaching.

The committee’s citation for Font-Navarrete’s translation reads:

The first English translation of El Monte: Notes on the Religions, Magic, Superstitions, and Folklore of the Black and Creole People of Cuba is as rich in English as it is in its original version. David Font-Navarrete’s beautiful translation of Lydia Cabrera’s groundbreaking compendium on the history, contributions, rites, and customs of the Afro-Cuban is a masterpiece. The jargon-free introduction and translator’s notes serve as a guide to understanding el monte, the forest, a place where the appetites of humans are shared by gods, and the healing essence of the forest appears in all its glory. The extensive annotated botanical encyclopedia as well as the references and index confirm the painstaking care that went into this translation.

The Modern Language Association of America and its over 20,000 members in 100 countries work to strengthen the study and teaching of languages and literature. Founded in 1883, the MLA provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy. The MLA sustains one of the finest publication programs in the humanities, producing a variety of publications for language and literature professionals and for the general public. The association publishes the MLA International Bibliography, the only comprehensive bibliography in language and literature, available online. The MLA Annual Convention features more than 750 scholarly and professional development sessions. More information on MLA programs is available at www.mla.org.

The Lois Roth Award is presented under the auspices of the MLA’s Committee on Honors and Awards. Other awards sponsored by the committee are the William Riley Parker Prize; the James Russell Lowell Prize; the MLA Prize for a First Book; the Howard R. Marraro Prize; the Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize; the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize; the MLA Prize for Contingent Faculty and Independent Scholars; the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize; the Morton N. Cohen Award; the MLA Prizes for a Scholarly Edition and for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship; the William Sanders Scarborough Prize; the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies; the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies; the MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; the Matei Calinescu Prize; the MLA Prize for an Edited Collection; the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes for Comparative Literary Studies, for French and Francophone Studies, for Italian Studies, for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, for a Translation of a Literary Work, for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, for African Studies, for East Asian Studies, for Middle Eastern Studies, and for South Asian Studies; and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. A complete list of current and previous winners can be found on the MLA website.

 

While a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University, Lois Wersba Roth won a Fulbright grant to Uppsala University in Sweden, after which she worked for the American Scandinavian Foundation in New York. Her only literary translation, Roseanna, the first of the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö to appear in English, was published in 1967, the same year that she began working for the United States Information Agency. While with the USIA, she lived abroad and learned Persian, Italian, and French. Her work was devoted to literary concerns, notably translations. She was instrumental in the establishment in France of the Maurice Coindreau Prize for best translation of American literature. The Lois Roth Award was established to enhance recognition of translation as a humanistic discipline. Lois Roth died in 1986. Her husband, Richard T. Arndt, and David Lee Rubin, of the University of Virginia, established the award.

______________________________________________

Dr. William Anthony Nericcio

Director (MALAS) | Professor (ENGL)(CCS)(CLAS)

Director (SDSU PRESS) | Publisher (Amatl Comix) |

Core Faculty (Digital Humanities) | Lead Faculty, Comics @ SDSU

San Diego State University | The California State University System

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San Diego, CA 92182-6020 | office phone: 619.594.1524

email: memo@sdsu.edu or bnericci@sdsu.edu

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Xopan Books and Ralph Inzunza Featured at Sacramento Chicanx Youth Event! Border Citizen, A Mexican American Young Adult Fiction Classic

 

An Interview with Ralph Inzunza, Author of Xopan Brooks’s "Border Citizen"

Ralph Inzunza is the author of The Camp and Border Citizen. Armed with political experience as a Democratic political consultant, his books focus on struggles against the political system. "Border Citizen" is published and available for sale on Amazon or directly through Xopan Books our new young adult imprint. This interview was conducted in February of 2024 by Toki Lee, senior editor and marketing associate of SDSU Press. This is a lightly edited version of the interview; a full, unabridged version can be found on YouTube.

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SDSU Press: Please introduce yourself and your new book in as many or few words as you'd like.

Inzunza: My name is Ralph Inzunza, and I am the new author of this book right here called Border Citizen [editorial associate holds up book] yeah! there you go! Toki has it! It's a great project that I was lucky enough to do with Dr. Bill Nericcio from SDSU Press and with Nayeli Castañeda-Lechuga, who was my editor, who also is an alumn of San Diego State and has worked for Dr. Bill Nericcio. So, we put out this young adult book; it's the first with the Xopan Book imprint—that is the young adult series for SDSU Press—and I'm very proud of it and very proud of the team. I think we did a good job.

SDSU Press: It's a very lovely book, I've had the opportunity to read it and the dialogue is very snappy, the characters are very well-characterized; it was nice reading a YA book in a long time—this was a great introduction back to the genre.

This is your second novel, with the first being The Camp. Border Citizen differs in a couple of ways—like I just mentioned, it is a YA novel. I wanted to know how this being marked as a YA novel changed your writing experience; was it difficult writing a younger character as opposed to The Camp? Did you use any personal references?

Inzunza: The Camp is an adult fictional book, and—so, you know—you can just write like the age that you are. When I wrote The Camp, I was 48 years old and so I wrote it like I was, you know, 47-48 years old and the language is there—and it's colorful language, not really appropriate for teenagers, and so when I started writing this book, I was cognizant of the fact that I want this book to be in classrooms. I want this book to be in high schools and middle schools, maybe colleges. I didn't want to have a bunch of tough language or cursing or sex or violence. So, yeah, you take a different approach when you know—hey, these are 14 to 15 year olds that are going to read this and you want to get a message across, but you want to do it in a manner that's respectable to them, their parents, and the teachers.


SDSU Press: That's something I've noticed when you bring up
classrooms: the main character's father of this book—the one who's running for office, I believe—is a schoolteacher and I've also noticed from the back of the book that your wife is also a schoolteacher. Was education and getting this to classrooms a big focus of the novel?

Inzunza: It is, and it's the primary reason I wrote it, for it to be in classrooms. I do not believe this is going to be a bestseller at Barnes and Noble, or even on Amazon—you know, selling one book at a time from people in Wisconsin or Florida. Stephen King has nothing to worry about!

SDSU Press: [laughs]

Inzunza: That wasn't the reason I did this. I did it primarily because I have 2 kids that just graduated from high school and, as they were going through middle school and high school and I would look at their literature or history books, I didn't see a lot of books that talked about the Latino experience, or that were multicultural enough, whether it dealt with African-Americans, or Asians, gay, Latinos—I didn't see enough of those books. So, I wrote this book based on some experiences I had, but also to educate some younger minds about how things used to be; the discrimination that took place along the border, and the people, and how Latinos eventually entered the political arena and decided to run for office. That's why I wrote it: I want the next generation to at least have a base as to how things occurred and why things are the way they are today. So yes, I wrote it with the idea that this book would be in classrooms.

SDSU Press: Speaking of Latino representation, both politically and in the literary field, I think—I'm not sure if, for the audience, this is a well known fact—but you were in the political field for quite some time, and in terms of politics and the literary field, did you find that representation and fighting for representation in both were similar, or were they different? Did you have to incorporate different ways of representation into one or the other?

Inzunza: Yes and no. I think the one thing I told Dr. Nericcio—and I might have told Nayeli, my editor—is that I don't think I'm a good writer. I'm a good storyteller. I'm a politician—a recovering politician. When you're a politician, you're telling stories all the time—most of them truthful—but you are telling stories, and you're out there, on the stump, giving speeches, trying to get elected, trying to get votes, sway people… So, I basically took some of the storytelling ideas I have, and I just started writing. I think I got mainly C's, maybe a couple of B's, in high school and college English and Literature. So, I'm not a writer. My wife, on the other hand, she's an educator—she's very good at grammar and she can write. I'd like to see her write a book, to be quite honest. I think she'd write a much better book than me.

But I started writing, and I just started writing the way I talk, and the way I would tell a story. So, my idea was to take the protagonist, Carlos Reyes, and he's going to take you through a journey as to what he's experiencing and seeing as a 14 year old growing along the border and trying to figure things out as a new guy who's watching his dad and his parents who are struggling in the activism of the day. At the same time, he's going to school in Mexico, where he's a bit ostracized. He's not accepted as a Latino here, and then when he goes to Mexico, they sorta see him as an American. That's an experience I had growing up. I went to school in Tijuana for 2 years, and I didn't feel like I fit in either side of the border—hence, the title Border Citizen. We don't really feel like we're US citizens or Mexican citizens—we're border citizens. We're Chicanos that try to create our own pathway along the US-Mexican border.

SDSU Press: That's a good point, and I definitely see that reflected in some Asian communities too. If you're born in the United States rather than in Korea, in my example, you're definitely seen more as American than Korean, or even Asian. I think it's a point that definitely resonates with a lot of communities, but especially the Asian and Latino communities you've been talking about.

Inzunza: I have friends in the Asian community who are Korean and gone back to Seoul, Filipino and gone back to Manila, or Japanese and gone back to Tokyo, and their cousins and their families and friends, they try to say "oh, well, you know, you're Americanized. You're from America. You don't know how to eat the food or speak the language. You don't speak Korean perfectly." They make fun of you, and it's supposed to funny, but after a while, it's like "okay, I get it." So, I felt that. I felt like I wasn't Mexican enough, but I got through it.

SDSU Press: For me, definitely reading this book resonated with my own experiences, which is very beneficial for education. Even children who aren't on the border or necessarily Mexican can definitely relate to this book in their own ways, which is just beautiful and fantastic.

Inzunza: I think what we're looking at right now in California—and hopefully across the United States, eventually—is to have ethnic studies at the high school and college level. What I told some of the superintendents and school board members that are starting to purchase this book and putting it into their schools already, is that this is not the only book. This is one of, I hope, to be 30 or 40 books. I want to see the African-American books, and the Asian books, and the feminist books, and the gay books—I want to see a representation of all walks of life. So, this is one in the pile. This isn't the only one by any means. There's a lot of stories by a lot of us in our diverse communities that need to be addressed.

SDSU Press: It's only one book of the big, hopefully growing, syllabus.

Going back to dialogue, you mentioned that you kind of write like you talk, and I've noticed that a lot of the dialogue is snappy and very realistic. It's very back and forth—did you ever struggle with trying to make dialogue sound realistic or feel realistic?

Inzunza: I am not one to take credit for this book—I did lay out the stories, and then Dr. Nerricio right away saw "okay, you know, there's some things we can work on, some things we can make changes on." Nayeli, my editor, was a tremendous help. She had a lot of good ideas. She really added things that made a difference. My wife also would proofread it and proofread it. It was a team effort. Yeah, the ideas were mine and so was the story in my head, but in order to make it smooth—to be able to transition the dialogue or the different settings or different locations—it's a team effort. There is no good writer out there that doesn't have a good editor, a good publisher, and a team behind them. That's why you always have, at the end of the book—even the best writers!— they're thanking like 17 people, because they know it's an effort. You don't do it by yourself.

SDSU Press: That was fantastic, I think that because the author's name is the first name on the page, the other editors and publishers are neglected, so thank you for mentioning that.

Inzunza: I mention them in my book, I thank them. Right away, if you go to the author's note, you'll see I didn't take all credit for this book.

SDSU Press: Pivoting ever so slightly, for anyone who doesn't know, this book focuses on, for me, a lot of love, a lot of family, but also about politics and Latino representation about politics, which I know is reflected in your own life. Growing up in a political family, did you find it harder or easier to write this book? Did you find it was easier because of all the personal references, or harder to get all the intricacies correct?

Inzunza: It was both. It was easy in the sense that this was what I lived. If I had lived in, let's say, Hawaii, and I grew up in a surfing community since I was 4 years, and now I'm 50 years old and writing a surf book, people would say "obviously, you know everything about surfing, you know who the legends are, you know the best surf spots," and go on and on.

For me, I grew up in politics. I didn't know any better; both my parents ran for the school board of San Ysidro, where they beat two incumbents, when I was 5 years old. I was in Kindergarten. Since then, I haven't looked back. I'll be 55 this year, so I have 50 years of looking at this. I did want to get a lot of it right, because it really does explain something that happened that is really critical and important to San Diego's history, and for that matter all of the Southwest United States. For a long time, Latinos—as well as so many other groups of people—were activists, and they wanted to change their community. They wanted to stop police brutality, the immigration rage, some of the jobs they weren't able to qualify for, and they did that for many many years. I went to some of those protests and marches with my parents. Eventually, there comes a time when something so dramatic happens that you feel "hey, we have to now take power into our own hands, we just can't rely on others—we have to have one of our own up on the city council." So, they decided to enter the political arena, and so about half of this book is the activism, and then there's an incident that happens—I won't spoil it for our readers—and then we kick off into the political arena. So, all of that is taking place, and that really is how my life was. I mean, this book is based on many realities I lived.

Inzunza at a book signing.

SDSU Press: Beautifully said. It's grounded in a lot of historical context and political context too, and I'm really happy that none of that was simplified or dumbed down just because it's a YA novel. Other than that, is there anything else you wanted to say or touch upon? Any closing remarks you have?

Inzunza: I feel that I'm really excited about the outreach I've gotten from school boards and teachers. We've sold quite a few books, and we're gonna sell a heck of a lot more. I'm supposed to have about 2 or 3 thousand sold by the end of this year, which is pretty good for a YA book. They say if you can sell a thousand, you can get people's attention and they like it.

The only thing I would say is that I have a third book in the works, which is a sequel to this book. It's Carlos Reyes, and Carlos Reyes is now four years older, and he's entering his first year in college. So, it's about the trials and tribulations that a young kid goes through when entering college, and he's still political, so he's going to get some people to run for office and get involved, and do a whole bunch of different things. I hope to have that book completed and maybe out in a couple years—two or three years,we'll see.

I still have a life trying to pay the rent and pay the mortgage. I run political campaigns for a living, so this is a very busy time of the year for me—the primaries coming up in a couple of weeks, you have the general November… In between running these campaigns, I try to be disciplined and write a couple pages a day and all that. The next book—which I'm calling The Society—which I'll explain in the book, is about Carlos Reyes's first year in college and some of the politics and discrimination issues that go on being a young Latino student, or a person of color in a major university campus.

SDSU Press: Do you think that will also be a YA novel, or do you think it'll grow with your audience and evolve into an adult novel?

Inzunza: I think this one will still be a young adult novel, but on the older aside. I was asked the other day by a teacher what the 2-3 year target age is for Border Citizen, and I said 8th, 9th, and 10th grade. If you forced me to pick one year, I would say 9th graders. I think it's perfect for 9th graders. The next book, I would say 11th, 12th, and first year of college. But, I'm writing it for seniors in high school. The ideal thing would be there are some 9th graders that start school this Fall, and they read it, and by the time they start their senior year, they'll have my next book to read. Here I am wishing for things—you can't control everything—but if I had my druthers, that would be it. There would be a bunch of Fall freshman in high school that will read Border Citizen, and three years later, they'll read The Society. That would be really ideal.


SDSU Press: We'll be looking out for it, certainly. I hope that SDSU Press will be the ones to be involved in it,

Inzunza: Me too! Tell Dr. Nericcio! You tell Dr. Nericcio!

SDSU Press: I will, me personally! Thank you so much for being with me, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Anything else you want to say?

Inzunza: I love what you're doing, I think it's so good that you have this blog and put things on YouTube, and you get people talking a little about literature. In this day and age there's so much social media, it's so easy to get caught up on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, but every now and again, it's okay to open up a good book and enlighten yourself on a subject you may not know all that about. I think what you're doing is healthy and I really thank you for it.

* * *

Purchase "Border Citizen" now through Amazon! 

Ralph Inzunza Debuts BORDER CITIZEN, Our New XOPAN BOOKS Title in San Francisco!

Check out Ralph Inzunza's community outreach work below. Here are some pictures from his recent reading in San Francisco

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