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:…
Blog Archives
Words to bridge the gap
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
“It is time to speak out”: Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate 2015
Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature for her “Polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Born in Ukraine to a Ukrainian mother and a Belarusian father, she worked as…
Tagged with: Belarusian, Jerzy Czech, Julia R Robin Whitby, Literature, Nobel Prize, Polish, Russian, Ryszard Kapuściński, Svetlana Alexievich, Translation, Ukrainian
Posted in books, literature, translation
Posted in books, literature, translation
German Book Prize Shortlisters in Translation
The German Book Prize short list is out today! Three women, three Swiss writers and four with other books published in English in the last three years have made the cut. In my very subjective order of preference, they are:…
Tagged with: Eluned Gramich, Eugene Hayworth, Frank Witzel, German, German Book Prize, Inger-Maria Mahlke, Jenny Erpenbeck, Martin Chalmers, Monique Schwitter, Rolf Lappert, Susan Bernofsky, Swiss, Translation, Ulrich Peltzer
Posted in books, literature
Posted in books, literature
Now and at the Hour of our Death
This beautiful book is published by And Other Stories this week. It isn’t easy to write about the dying and their loved ones without falling into clichés and platitudes, especially in such a beautiful setting as rural northern Portugal: “Grass…
Tagged with: And Other Stories, books, Edinburgh Festival, Julia Sanches, Now and at the Hour of our Death, Portuguese, Susana Moreira Marques, Translation
Posted in books, Edinburgh Festival
Posted in books, Edinburgh Festival
“born of love, not hatred”: Anne Carson’s Antigone
Yes, I did go to see Antigone at the Edinburgh Festival because Juliette Binoche was in the title role (I loved her work with Kieslowski, though unfortunately this time, images from Chocolat kept surfacing in my mind). And I made a discovery: Anne Carson’s new…
Tagged with: Anne Carson, Antigone, Antigonick, Bianca Stone, Bloodaxe, Edinburgh Festival, Greek, Oberon Classics, Sophokles, Translation
Posted in books, Edinburgh Festival, Illustration, theatre
Posted in books, Edinburgh Festival, Illustration, theatre
