In the middle of the twelve days of Christmas, the year is turning. It’s a time to remember the good and bad in the year that’s fading, and perhaps to hope for something better in the year to come. One…
“Listening to the foreign language I was deeply speaking our own, and came to understand how difficult it is to name things truly…” says the Greek poet, Eleni Vakalo (1921-2001). Her translator, Karen Emmerich, describes discovering manuscripts of her poems…
The first ever Warwick Prize for Women in Translation short list presents tough competition (not least with Memoirs of A Polar Bear and Second Hand Time) but The Coast Road (The Gallery Press, 2016) is extraordinary. A host of translators offer…
The age of the Russian Revolution produced some extraordinary poetry, and the women poets deserve better recognition. For spot-on quick-fire dispatches from a period of unprecedented change, try Teffi, but for poetry, try Tsvetaeva, who died 76 years ago today. Glagoslav…
Whenever I am in Warsaw, there are a couple of bookshops near the university that I have to visit. I always come out with something unexpected that keeps me going till I can come back to Poland. This time, the…
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…
Simon Armitage’s award-winning translation is set side-by-side with the original, which creates plenty of opportunities for deciphering and comparing the older and younger versions of English. The original really rolls round your tongue. The translation cuts to the quick with…
Summer has been so hot down south, but the Nordic midsummer is so uncharacteristically cold, even for here, that you might be missing real winter already. Time for some Icelandic poetry. Cold Moons by Magnús Sigurðsson, translated by Meg Matich,…
Is a pomegranate a grenade-apple, a cluster of garnets, or a something else? Moshen Emadi has some ideas: Emadi’s Standing on Earth, translated from the Persian by Lyn Coffin, is a Phoneme Media production. I love this publisher for its windows on worlds…