CITY LIGHTS LIVE! Jakuta Alikavazovic in conversation with JiaJing Liu

City Lights, Fern Books, Center for the Art of Translation, and Villa Albertine San Francisco celebrate the publication of
Like a Sky Inside
by Jakuta Alikavazovic -
translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
published by Fern Books
Purchase book here:
citylights.com/european-liter...
In March 2020, a young woman spends the night in the Louvre. At home: her nine-month-old son. In her overnight bag: a notebook, a toiletry kit, a duvet, a cube of nougat, and something that shouldn’t be there. In her head: memories of the Venus de Milo, of land art and the American road, of romance and travel and immigration and war - and of her father, who after each of their many visits to the Louvre would ask just how she’d go about stealing the Mona Lisa.
An insightful and heartfelt meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of art, on parenthood and the betrayals of growing up, on foreignness and belonging, and on the secret conversations between our souls and the places that linger in our dreams.
Jakuta Alikavazovic is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. She has received the Prix Goncourt for a first novel and the Prix Médicis for non-fiction, among other European awards and nominations. She is a columnist for the newspaper Libération and the translator into French of authors including David Foster Wallace and Toni Morrison.
JiaJing Liu is a translator (English-Chinese-French), writer, and editor who lives in San Francisco. She studied translation at Université Aix-Marseille, and was a researcher at the Beijing bureau of Libération. Her writings have appeared in Popula, Civil, The Awl, LEAP, The Art Newspaper, and other publications. She recently served as assistant curator for the exhibition, Shifting Fields: Contemporary Chinese Painting, at the Stanford Art Gallery. She is the development manager at Heyday, an independent, nonprofit publisher in Berkeley, California.
The Center for the Art of Translation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, was founded in 2000 by Olivia Sears, an Italian translator and editor who serves as the Center’s board president. In 1993, prior to forming the Center, Sears helped to establish the literary translation journal Two Lines: World Writing in Translation at a time when there were very few venues for translated literature in English, and those handful rarely paid much attention to the translator beyond a brief acknowledgment. Two Lines set out to challenge that trend-to make international literature more accessible to English-speaking audiences, to champion the unsung work of translators, and to create a forum for translators to discuss their craft. In this way, Two Lines serves as the Center’s cornerstone, and the journal’s spirit radiates through all of the Center’s work today.
Villa Albertine San Francisco is a new cultural institution that reinvents the original concept of Villas by going far beyond artists in residency. It aims at leading a future-driven dialogue between artists and communities. Villa Albertine San Francisco was born from the vision that artists should play a central role in our changing world. This institution invite artists to question the world’s most pressing challenges in connection with the Bay Area communities and to give them the opportunity to research, create and engage bold collaborations.
Originally broadcast on Thursday, May 2, 2024.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.