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The Red Book of Farewells

We’ve waited twenty years for this. To be scrupulously honest, I haven’t, as when it won the Finlandia Prize in 2003, I couldn’t speak a word of Finnish. But Pirkko Saisio’s Punainen erokirja in Mia Spangenberg’s translation as the Red

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Posted in books, literature, Queer, translation

Annie Ernaux: finding the translations

When Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize in Literature last autumn, I am ashamed to say I had never heard of her. Some French-speaking friends had loved her work for years. Two had learned French outside France, whereas friends who

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Posted in books, Nobel Prize in Literature, translation

Love in…

Five women in love. And then out of it. There aren’t going to be happy endings. Until, the author said, she talked to her daughter, and felt that she had to offer a bit of hope. Because what a lot

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Posted in books, translation

Walesland/Gwaliadir

I bought this because of the translator. Caryl Lewis’s writing is tense and spare and true. I loved Y Gemydd which I read as The Jeweller in Gwen Davies’s translation, and Drift, her first novel in English. Then I found

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Posted in books, history, poetry, translation

The train that didn’t go to Katyń

In April 1940, over twenty thousand Polish officers were killed by the Soviets in the forest of Katyń. A bare few hundred of those soldiers survived. The way I remember my grandfather telling the story of his capture on Poland’s

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Posted in books, history, translation

Tasting Sunlight

Autumn fruit. Pears, apples, grapes… the orchards and vineyards are bursting with golden light. Yet the light is fading. The first frost bites. That’s the English title for you, Tasting Sunlight. But in German, Ewald Arenz called it Alte Sorten,

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Posted in books, translation

Russia: knife, fork, and ladle

The Romanovs, Lenin, Gagarin – they all had their cooks. Holodomor, Leningrad, Chernobyl, Afghanistan – sometimes there is nothing (safe) to cook at all. For some people, like the Tatars, cooking is all you have left of home. Others, like

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Posted in books, translation

Foucault in Warsaw

In Warsaw in 1958, Foucault was writing his History of Madness. Then, it was his PhD, and he was the first director of the university’s French Cultural Centre. Within a year, he’d left Poland. Was Jurek, his mystery lover, to

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Posted in books, translation

The German House

Surely, in the sixties, all Germans knew what had happened? Any German you meet in an international context will still, often enough, soon enough, apologise for their existence. Living in Germany in the 2000s, the flags were out for the

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Posted in books

Waiting for translation: Wolf River

It is two years and more since this pandemic began. In March 2020, it hadn’t knocked Europe out yet, but it was going to very soon. The signs were there. In March 2020, this book began. It hadn’t knocked me

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Posted in books, translation
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