One of the best things about being a translator is having the world at your fingertips – but a commute to work of less than twenty steps (I did get up and test the distance from breakfast table to desk…
25 years – that’s a quarter of a century…
In just a few weeks time, it will be 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That’s a quarter of a century… makes a girl think. If you, too, wear glasses from reading too much small print, you will…
Tagged with: 1989, Art Spiegelman, Arundhati Roy, Atonement, Central Europe, Christina Viragh, Czesław Miłosz, German, God of Small Things, Hungarian, IanMcEwan, Kertész Imre, Literature, Maus, Nobel Prize, Poetry, Polish, quarter of a century, Tim Wilkinson, Wisława Szymborska, World Literature Today
Posted in history, international, literature, poetry, translation
Posted in history, international, literature, poetry, translation
Williams translating Williams
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has a new book of poems out this month, first presented at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where I got my hands on a copy. The Other Mountain, published by Carcanet, includes a couple of…
Tagged with: books, Edinburgh Book Festival, Literature, Poetry, Rowan Williams, The Other Mountain, Translation, Waldo Williams, Wales, Welsh
Posted in books, Edinburgh Festival, faith, literature, poetry, translation, Uncategorized
Posted in books, Edinburgh Festival, faith, literature, poetry, translation, Uncategorized
keeping the language alive: polari, manx, cornish
When I was a teenager in Cardiff, the family next door spoke Welsh, but most people around spoke English. When I went to babysit, the boys were in shock: how could this other person speak their home language too? They…
Tagged with: Cornish, Endangered Languages Project, English, Gaelic, Manx, Mick Paynter, Morrissey, Ned Maddrell, Polari, Welsh
Posted in international, translation, words
Posted in international, translation, words
as red as blood
In preparation for my next Finnish exam, I’ve been devouring teen literature; the action is usually breathless enough to compensate for my slower reading pace. But when I went to take Ilkka Auer’s Ice-Witch ones back and get As Red…
Tagged with: As Red As Blood, books, Fantasy, Finnish, Ilkka Auer, Literature, Owen Witesman, Salla Simukka, Snow White, Translation
Posted in books, translation
Posted in books, translation
freedom is the best thing: Tove is 100!
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…
Tagged with: Ateneum, Finnish, ICA, Moomins, Tove Jansson, Tuula Karjalainen, Work and Love
Posted in books, Illustration, international, literature, Tove Jansson Centenary, translation
Posted in books, Illustration, international, literature, Tove Jansson Centenary, translation
stories from home: books for unaccompanied migrant children
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…
translate it yourself
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…
Tagged with: Alberto Caeiro, Carmen Bugan, Christine Marendon, Czesław Miłosz, Daniel Weissbort, First World War, German, Ken Cockburn, Miroslav Holub, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry, Portuguese, Romanian, Ted Hughes, Translation, Zbigniew Herbert
Posted in books, international, translation, words
Posted in books, international, translation, words
My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre
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…
Tagged with: Abdellatif Laâbi, Afghanistan, Andre Naffis-Sahely, Dari, French, Mimi Khalvati, Morocco, My Voice, Poetry, Poetry Translation Centre, Shakila Azizzada, Translation, Zuzanna Olszewska
Posted in books, international, language, literature, translation
Posted in books, international, language, literature, translation
Victoria Lomasko: Slaves of Moscow
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…
Tagged with: graphic art, international, Pussy Riot, reportage, Russian, Slaves of Moscow, Thomas Campbell, Translation, Victoria Lomasko, Words without Borders
Posted in Illustration, international, literature, translation
Posted in Illustration, international, literature, translation
found in translation 