SFScope reports that Spanish writer Domingo Santos has sold a novella to Analog, to be translated by editor Stanley Schmidt himself:
Analog editor Stanley Schmidt tells us he’s completed translating a novella called “The First Day of Eternity”, by Spanish author and editor Domingo Santos. Schmidt expects to publish the story in Analog‘s January/February 2011 double issue.
SFScope asked Santos to tell us a bit about himself, since he may be mostly unknown to English-speaking audiences.
The story is Schmidt’s first publication as translator, but it’s not Santos’ first sale “to the Anglo-Saxon market. A long time ago, the short story ‘The Song of the Infinity’ (a philosophical story about an astronaut lost in space) was published in UK in New Writings of SF 14 (edited by E.J. Carnell in 1969). And some years later Donald A. Wollheim included ‘Turn and Turn and Turn Again’ (a sarcastic story about the problems of circulation) in his anthology The Best of the Rest of the World.” He’s also had stories translated into French, Italian, Swedish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Russian, and Japanese. Additionally, his novel Gabriel “was translated to French from Denoël (40 years ago!), and my anthology No lejos de la Tierra (Not Far from the Earth) was translated into Bulgarian, from an editor and with an unknown title (I no read Bulgarian!)”
The current story, “The First Day of Eternity” is “part of a voluminous book (175,000 words), titled Homenaje (Homage), that pays homage to some to the authors of sf and fantasy that have inspired my literary career (Asimov, Ballard, Bradbury, Clarke, Hodgson, Hoffmann, Lovecraft, Matheson, Orwell, Poe, Tolkien, and Wells; in this case the author is, evidently, Clarke). It is in process of publication in Spain, but should not appear before January 2011. Ergo, the publication in Analog will be the first in the world.”
Asked about himself, Santos says, “My literary career covers 50 years. In this time I have published more that a dozen books (novels and anthologies), and I have translated 200 or 250 books from English, all of them sf and fantasy. I have also been an editor for several Spanish publishers (Acervo, Martinez Roca, Ultramar, Destino, Jucar, Planeta deAgostini), which has allowed me to select books and authors to translate. And for 15 years (148 issues), with Sebastián Martínez y Luis Vigil, I was the publisher/editor of the magazine Nueva Dimensión,” which won a special Hugo Award in 1972. Santos notes that, though he’s been intimately involved in the Spanish sf field for the last four decades, his editing work has significantly curtailed his writing, though he has no regrets.
This discussion came about because Santos doesn’t have a web site or blog to which we could direct readers.
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