This is one of those books you start reading because you feel you ought to, because everyone tells you you really should, which is actually rather annoying, and you’re pretty sure it’s not your thing, it’s the sort of thing…
Blog Archives
Finland 100: Unknown Soldiers
Tagged with: Finland 100, Finnish, Liesl Yamaguchi, Second World War, Suomi100, Translation, Tuntematon sotilas, Unknown Soldiers, Väinö Linna
Posted in books, Finland 100, history, Suomi 100, translation
Posted in books, Finland 100, history, Suomi 100, translation
1917
It’s a hundred years since the October Revolution. What was it really like at the time, when nobody knew how it would end? Was all the violence worth it? Was a new dawn really breaking? This hugely varied collection of…
Tagged with: 1917, books, Boris Dralyuk, Josh Briggs, Martha Kelly, Poetry, Pushkin Press, Robert Chandler, Russian, Russian Revolution, Translation
Posted in books, history, translation
Posted in books, history, translation
Finland 100: The oak grove
The civil war that followed hot on the heels of independence is both very present and very absent from Finnish consciousness. It tore families and communities apart and is still difficult to talk about. Earlier this year, someone had the…
Tagged with: Asko Sahlberg, civil war, Emily Jeremiah, Finland 100, Finnish, Fleur Jeremiah, Suomi100, Tammilehto, The Brothers
Posted in books, Finland 100, history, translation
Posted in books, Finland 100, history, translation
Finland 100: The Red women
“So then they founded a women’s guard here, and anyhow I’m such an enthusiastic person so of course I went there first […] You can’t believe how enthusiastic I was about going to the front. Now I am going back…
Tagged with: books, Finland 100, Finnish civil war, gender, history, Punaisten naisten tiet, Red guard, Suomi100, Tiina Lintunen, Translation, Women in Translation Month
Posted in books, gender, history, translation
Posted in books, gender, history, translation
The Conference of the Birds
This is extraordinarily beautiful and surprisingly gripping. Translated by a bilingual poet who made the wise decision to sacrifice the rhyme to keep the essences of the story, it sings. As Sholeh Wolpé says, translating medieval Persian into modern English…
Tagged with: Attar, books, Persian, Poetry, Sholeh Wolpé, Sufism, The Conference of the Birds, Translation
Posted in books, faith, history, poetry, translation
Posted in books, faith, history, poetry, translation
Iza’s Ballad
This one is desperately sad, and it stays with you. The Door should have prepared me for more the direct emotion, the weight of history, the unflinching look at how the characters – people more like you and me than we’d care…
Tagged with: books, Budapest, George Szirtes, Hungarian, Iza's Ballad, Magda Szabo, mothers and daughters, Translation
Posted in books, gender, history, translation
Posted in books, gender, history, translation
Wayward heroes
They came from over the North Sea, and took whatever they could get, and taxed us mercilessly for a long time after. But the noble English fought back, swords gleaming, until the dastardly invaders fled back to Europe from whence they…
Tagged with: Archipilago Books, Halldór Laxness, Icelandic, Nobel Prize for Literature, Philip Roughton, Translation, Vikings, Wayward Heroes
Posted in books, history, translation
Posted in books, history, translation
Finland 100: The midwife
At the gate, I remembered the cover. My bookmark slid over it, obscuring the emblem behind the title text. I was about to board the plane to Berlin – and I had to finish this and put it in my bag before…
Tagged with: David Hackston, Finland 100, history, Katilö, Katja Kettu, Second World War, Suomi 100, The Midwife, Translation
Posted in books, film, history, Suomi 100, translation
Posted in books, film, history, Suomi 100, translation
Just ahead of the revolution
“Moscow. Autumn. Cold. My Petersburg life has been liquidated.” If Twitter had been invented 100 years ago, perhaps Teffi would have had quite a following. She is certainly concise, doesn’t appear to take herself and her craft too seriously, but shares highly entertaining vignettes,…
Tagged with: 1917, Anne Marie Jackson, Elizabeth Chandler, Irina Steinberg, Memories - From Moscow to the Black Sea, Pushkin Press, Robert Chandler, Russian, Russian Revolution, Teffi, Translation
Posted in books, history, translation
Posted in books, history, translation
Written in the dark
After the Siege of Leningrad, it has taken seven decades for these poems to be published. The blockade was horrific: at least 600,000 civilians had died by the time it was over on 27 January 1944. It’s no surprise the reality of…
Tagged with: Anand Dibble, Ben Felker-Quinn, Charles Swank, Elena Marttila, Eugene Ostashevsky, Gennady Gor, Matvei Yankelevich, Pavel Zaltsman, Polina Barskova, Russian, Sergei Rudakov, Siege of Leningrad, Translation, Ugly Duckling Presse, Written in the Dark
Posted in books, history, poetry, translation
Posted in books, history, poetry, translation
found in translation 