Tove Jansson was born 100 years ago today. If you live in Finland, you won’t have missed the anniversary Moomin mugs (with donations to UNICEF), the large and splendid retrospective of her work at the Ateneum national art gallery, or the…
Tove Jansson was born 100 years ago today. If you live in Finland, you won’t have missed the anniversary Moomin mugs (with donations to UNICEF), the large and splendid retrospective of her work at the Ateneum national art gallery, or the…
Reading stories in translation opens up the world to places you could never go to. For some people however, the place they can never go to is back home. More and more children are migrating into the US from Latin…
Tired of bad translations? Put the poetry back into translation yourself! At the Modern Poetry in Translation website, you can read submit your own English translation of a poem, based on a literal translation and sound recording in the original…
Here’s another nail in the coffin of Robert Frost’s truism that poetry is what gets lost in translation. The fabulous Poetry Translation Centre (PTC) is celebrating its first decade with My Voice, an anthology of poems translated from 23 languages…
Published in English this month, Slaves of Moscow tells the story of twelve Kazakhstani women enslaved in a Moscow grocery store. The Kazakhstani couple who owned the shop forced them to work 20 hours a day. Some even gave birth…
100 years ago today, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot in Sarajevo, triggering what H.G. Wells called the “war that will end war”; it wasn’t long before the irony of that phrase was felt. The Oxford English Dictionary has…
If you speak a language well enough to get along, but not really well, it’s an effort. You need time to think and process and a lot of energy can go into making sure you get the grammar right. As…
You know that feeling when you’re waiting at an airport, trying to guess where other are from and where they are going? You start writing in your notebook, observing the man across from you, who is writing in his notebook,…
Love football or hate it, you can’t ignore the World Cup. But if you’d rather read a good book, three percent is pitching readable works published this millennium from each World Cup qualifying country against each other. On the day…
Here in Finland, today is the start of ten loooooooooooong sunny weeks of school holidays – and we already have 22 hours of daylight at this time of year. Sadly, if most of your work comes from and goes to different countries, you…