Once upon a time, there was a woman made for a man. She was created entirely from flowers, just for him. But then she fell in love with someone else, and decided to kill the man, to be with her…
Blog Archives
Blodeuwedd – the flower woman
Tagged with: Alan Garner, Blodeuwedd, Charlotte Guest, Gwyneth Lewis, Mabinogion, Sioned Davies, The Meat Tree, Translation, Welsh, Whistles in the Wind
Posted in books, Folklore, literature, translation
Posted in books, Folklore, literature, translation
One book is never enough
Last week, it seemed that a new subspecies of lumbersexuals was emerging in the most unlikely of places: among Budapest intellectuals and activists. It turned out that all these checked shirts were popping up in my feed for a reason.…
Tagged with: Checked Shirts, Clouded Sky, Corvina Books, Dick Slackman, education, Foamy Sky, Frederick Turner, Hungarian, Hungary, Kazinczy Ferenc, Orvath Zsuzsanna, Princeton University Press, Radnoti Miklos, S. J. Marks, Sheep Meadow Press, Stephen Berg, Steven Polgar, Translation
Posted in books, education, history, language, poetry, translation
Posted in books, education, history, language, poetry, translation
Black flower
A book that can be turned upside down and read from back to front in another language can be a wonderful thing. Formats like that came through our door in my childhood home, but they were mostly bilingual Welsh-English leaflets…
Tagged with: Black Flower, Clare Sullivan, Irma Pineda, Natalia Toledo, native languages of the Americas, Ploughshares, Poetry, Spanish, Translation, Welsh, Zapotec
Posted in books, language, poetry, translation
Posted in books, language, poetry, translation
it’s friendship day: don’t miss the train…
In Finland, today is Friends’ Day (ystävänpäivä), and a much more inclusive feast than Valentine’s as it is often celebrated elsewhere. Today can simply be a chance to do something nice with or for a friend, and we need that: There’s…
Tagged with: Adam Zagajewski, Clare Cavanagh, Finnish, friends, Monet, Polish, Translation, Valentine's Day
Posted in books, gender, poetry, translation, Valentine's Day
Posted in books, gender, poetry, translation, Valentine's Day
Words to bridge the gap
From a capella to zeitgeist, English has always filched other people’s words and run with them. There are so many more waiting to be used. And Ella Frances Sanders has brought them to life. As she says in Lost in Translation:…
Tagged with: Ella Frances Sanders, Inuit, Japanese, The Bridge Called Langauge, Translation, Untranslatable Words, Welsh
Posted in books, Illustration, language, translation, words
Posted in books, Illustration, language, translation, words
A voice from Nowhereland
Mascha Kaléko died 40 years ago this week. Her poems are full of longing, memory and regret, even for things that haven’t happened yet, by someone who always had to move on. She has a gloriously Central European knot of…
A Translation for every Teenager
Every teenager in Sweden should get a translation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We should all be Feminists in time for Christmas. What would I give every teenager in translation into English? Something from a teenage perspective: Their peers are more likely…
Tagged with: Blake Ferris, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Farsi, Kannada, Malala Yousafzai, Marjane Satrapi, Mattias Ripa, Persepolis, Polish, Rutka Laskier, Swedish, Translation, Young Adult
Posted in books, film, gender, international, translation
Posted in books, film, gender, international, translation
Thank you for the stories
When I moved to Finland 3 years and 3 months ago, I barely knew the language. All I could read was the free supermarket adverts that came through the door, matching the products to multi-vowelled words underneath ( ääs and…
Tagged with: Aleksis Kivi, British Library, Children's Books, Finnish, Johanna Sinisalo, Maria Turtschaninoff, Mikkeli, Moomins, Nordic Library Week, Roald Dahl, Rosa Liksom, Salla Simukka, Seven Brothers, Tove Jansson, Translation
Posted in books, literature
Posted in books, literature
Take the City Home
It’s autumn holiday week here – the sun is retreating, schools are on mid-term break, and summer is starting to seem like a distant memory. It’s time to escape the daily grind if at all possible. But what will you…
Tagged with: Austin Hyde, Camoes, Czesław Miłosz, David Brooks, history, Lisbon Poets, Louis Iribane, Martin D'Evelin, Polish, Portuguese, Translation, Warsaw
Posted in books, literature, poetry
Posted in books, literature, poetry
Europe on Air: Warsaw, Berlin, Istanbul
Being read to isn’t only for children. If you, like me, work closely with complicated texts all day, however much you love reading, it can feel like an effort on workday evenings. But great world literature is just within earshot.…
Tagged with: Antonia Lloyd-Jones, BBC Radio 4, Berlin, Elif Shafak, Entanglement, Finnish, German, Istanbul, Jamie Bulloch, Look Who's Back, Marja-Leena Jaakkola, Polish, Reading Europe, Svetlana Alexeievich, three percent, Timur Vermes, Warsaw, Zygmunt Miłoszewski
Posted in books, literature, radio, translation
Posted in books, literature, radio, translation
found in translation 