Whenever I am in Warsaw, there are a couple of bookshops near the university that I have to visit. I always come out with something unexpected that keeps me going till I can come back to Poland. This time, the…
Whenever I am in Warsaw, there are a couple of bookshops near the university that I have to visit. I always come out with something unexpected that keeps me going till I can come back to Poland. This time, the…
This is extraordinarily beautiful and surprisingly gripping. Translated by a bilingual poet who made the wise decision to sacrifice the rhyme to keep the essences of the story, it sings. As Sholeh Wolpé says, translating medieval Persian into modern English…
Simon Armitage’s award-winning translation is set side-by-side with the original, which creates plenty of opportunities for deciphering and comparing the older and younger versions of English. The original really rolls round your tongue. The translation cuts to the quick with…
It takes a gay writer to bring a Catholic country back to its sense of love and sin, good and evil, and moral justice. The road is very long, but the actual miles travelled are very few, as almost all…
Summer has been so hot down south, but the Nordic midsummer is so uncharacteristically cold, even for here, that you might be missing real winter already. Time for some Icelandic poetry. Cold Moons by Magnús Sigurðsson, translated by Meg Matich,…
If you’re still looking for somewhere to go on holiday this summer, why not try Estonia’s second largest island, Hiiumaa, which looks like a lovely peaceful place where you can get really close to nature? Read this book before you…
Is a pomegranate a grenade-apple, a cluster of garnets, or a something else? Moshen Emadi has some ideas: Emadi’s Standing on Earth, translated from the Persian by Lyn Coffin, is a Phoneme Media production. I love this publisher for its windows on worlds…
“Have you heard about the iron road?” “Iron road?” “yes, iron tracks, and on it, an iron horse that eats whole logs instead of hay, it’s a bit like the Suomela steam boat, only of course it doesn’t have paddles, it…
The key to The House in Smyrna is in Rio. Her grandfather brought it with him on the boat when he emigrated from Turkey. His granddaughter was born in Portugal, and is travelling all the way back, to see if it still…