Blog Archives

Merkel’s Freedom

Posted on 19 February 2025 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

An hour and a half of my life listening for every year she was in office. Yes, Angela Merkel’s Freiheit/Freedom clocks up an impressive 24 hours as an audio book, or 720 pages. I stuck with it, because I wanted…

Tagged with: Angela Merkel, books, freedom, Freiheit, German, politics, Translation
Posted in books, history

Effingers

Posted on 20 November 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

Once I’d got my teeth into Tergit, I wasn’t going to let go. Käsebier was splendid. Berlin in the twenties is a somewhere, somewhen I wish I had been to, and here was a woman broadcasting live from the thick…

Tagged with: books, Effingers, Gabriele Tergit, German, Sofie Duvernoy, Translation, Waiting for translation
Posted in books, history, translation

Käsebier takes Berlin

Posted on 17 July 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — 1 Comment

Then we take Berlin… But for how long? Gabriele Tergit wrote Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm right after the story unfolded. Berlin in the late 1920s was at its most shimmering, glorious, and frenetic. But pride comes before a fall and…

Störfall

Posted on 24 January 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

Accident, incident, malfunction, (power) failure? You could translate Störfall in all of these ways. Accident seems a small word to contain the enormity of it. Christa Wolf brings together two major incidents, personal and political, local and global, in her…

The Visionaries

Posted on 15 November 2023 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

These women wrote through the darkest times. As times get darker again, 80 to 90 years later, we need to read them. The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy (Allen Lane 2023) in Shaun Whiteside’s English…

In memory of memory

Posted on 13 September 2023 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

The way you remember your story is important. Your family’s stories and their ways of telling them tell you about who you are. But there is so much missing. Maria Stepanova comes from a long line of Russian Jews, and…

Tagged with: Fitzcarraldo Editions, In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova, Russian, Sasha Dugdale, Translation
Posted in books, history, translation

Walesland/Gwaliadir

Posted on 16 November 2022 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

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…

Tagged with: Caryl Lewis, Gwaliadir, Nigel Wells, Poetry, Translation, Walesland, Welsh, Y Lolfa
Posted in books, history, poetry, translation

The train that didn’t go to Katyń

Posted on 12 October 2022 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — 1 Comment

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…

Lament for the Fallen

Posted on 4 October 2021 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — 2 Comments

I am writing this as Afghanistan descends once more into horror. A tiny Welsh part of me still thinks “the bloody English colonials, look what they started and didn’t finish – again.” And you could read the Gododdin this way,…

Tagged with: Aneirin, books, Cynghanedd, Faber, Gillian Clarke, Gododdin, Hay Festival, Poetry, Translation, Welsh
Posted in books, history, literature, poetry

The Passenger

Posted on 1 July 2021 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — 1 Comment

This book was written on the run. It captures that moment after 9 November 1938 where things got a lot worse for a lot of people, very rapidly. Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, then aged 23, had made it out of Germany…