Blog Archives

Russia: knife, fork, and ladle

The Romanovs, Lenin, Gagarin – they all had their cooks. Holodomor, Leningrad, Chernobyl, Afghanistan – sometimes there is nothing (safe) to cook at all. For some people, like the Tatars, cooking is all you have left of home. Others, like

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Posted in books, translation

The lost soul – zgubiona dusza

The man was moving so fast he had completely forgotten why he was moving at all. So he went to see a wise woman. And the wise woman said, “Slow down. You have to wait for your soul to catch

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Posted in books, Illustration, Nobel Prize in Literature, translation

Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

It can be both easier and harder to translate an author who is so aware of the translation process herself. The heroine of this novel and her friend are translating Blake into Polish; they come up with multiple versions of

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Posted in books, film, translation

stories from Abulafia Street

The Short Story Project brings you a new story every week from around the globe, online, for free. The stories are in Hebrew, English and the language of origin, and best of all, you can listen or read, so the app

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Posted in international, literature, short stories, translation

listen! – auf, wrzzz, shhhh…

It isn’t easy to explain a translator’s work to your nephews when they are just learning to read, but when I heard Saara Pääkkönen, who translates the Donald Duck comics into Finnish, explaining that she drops objects to hear what sound they

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Posted in 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.

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Posted in books, literature, radio, translation

The world through your letterbox: PEN World Bookshelf

English PEN has just announced more support for independent publishers to publish works in translation, which is great news since the independents are the ones producing the really interesting stuff. Their world bookshelf of contemporary writers in supported by the PEN

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Posted in literature, translation

stories on the go

One of the best things about being a translator is having the world at your fingertips – but a commute to work of less than twenty steps (I did get up and test the distance from breakfast table to desk

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Posted in books, international, literature, short stories, translation

waiting for translation: Tokarczuk’s Bieguni

You know that feeling when you’re waiting at an airport, trying to guess where other are from and where they are going? You start writing in your notebook, observing the man across from you, who is writing in his notebook,

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Posted in books, international, language, literature, translation

new year, new translation: the assassin from apricot city

What does the rest of the world look like in the eyes of the rest of the world? That’s something we can never know. But good journalism in good translation can help. It’s not a good idea to have a

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Posted in international, language, translation
advent Alice in Wonderland American And Other Stories Antonia Lloyd-Jones Arabic Argentina Beowulf Berlin Best Translated Book Award Bible books Brazil Brazilian Portuguese British British Library Buddhism Catalan Children's Books China Chinese Christmas Christmas Carols Contemporary Czesław Miłosz Danish Dari David Hackston Dublin Literary Award English Estonian Fantasy Farsi Fiction Finland Finland 100 Finlandia Prize Finnish Flemish Free Word Centre French George Szirtes German Greek Hebrew Herbert Lomas Herta Müller history Hungarian Iceland Idioms Illustration India international International Translation Day Irish Gaelic Italian J. R. R. Tolkien Japanese Jenny Erpenbeck Johanna Sinisalo Korean Language language learning Languages Latin Literature Lola Rogers Lord of the Rings Mabinogion Man Booker International Prize Maori Maria Turtschaninoff Moomins New Year Nobel Prize Nobel Prize for Literature Norwegian Old English Olga Tokarczuk Owen Witesman Oxford English Dictionary Penguin PEN Translation Prize Persian Philip Boehm Phoneme Media Poetry Poetry Translation Centre Polish Portuguese Pushkin Press Queer Romanian Rosa Liksom Russian Salla Simukka Second World War Short Stories Sofi Oksanen Spanish Stanisław Barańczak Suomi100 Susan Bernofsky Svetlana Alexievich Swedish Switzerland Thomas Teal Tibetan Tove Jansson transation Translation translator Translators Without Borders Valentine's Day Wales Warsaw Welsh Wisława Szymborska Witold Szabłowski Women in Translation Month words Words without Borders writing YA

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