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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

Beginning to Speak

Diana is from Pontus, now in Georgia, once in Greece. So it’s no surprise she starts with Helen – she isn’t the first poet to do so and she surely won’t be the last: These poems are gloriously sensory and

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Posted in books, poetry, translation, Women in Translation Month

The House in Norway

The artist has her own house, and feels invaded when other people move in – how is she going to work, now? Nordic people need their space, and women need room of their own to create. The forest grows right

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Posted in books, translation, Women in Translation Month

The Ten Thousand Things

The bookseller grinned broadly and actually looked me in the eye. Apparently it’s not often that people looking for books in English go straight for the Dutch literature. But how Dutch is this book anyway? It’s caught between two worlds:

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Posted in books, history, international, translation

The Emperor of Portugallia

Once upon a time, a hundred years and more ago, there was an ordinary man in an ordinary village, who led a really rather ordinary life. He worked hard, but nothing really excited him; he wasn’t very happy, but he

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Posted in books, literature, translation

They know not what they do

When Jussi Valtonen’s book won the Finlandia Prize for the best novel of 2014, my friend recommended it to me. Her husband had loved it, I would find it really interesting. But it looked so weighty, and back then, my

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Posted in books, translation

Thomas Bernhard’s poems

Once he’d written them, he didn’t look back. He moved on to plays and novels, for which he’s much better known. He didn’t write any more poems for decades. Once he’d written them, he kept looking back. He returned and

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Posted in books, poetry, translation

Ghachar Ghochar

One of the best things about reading books in translation is that they take you to places you might never go, through languages that you might never learn, and make you feel right at home, as if you’ve grown up

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Posted in Best Translated Book Award, books, translation

Secret passages under my hometown

When someone writes about the streets where you live, you feel immediately predisposed towards them. You want to like everything they say, and even if you don’t like it, you will certainly have an opinion. The woman who translates many

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Posted in books, translation

Brother in Ice

On the ice, time and space are almost impossible to measure. Yes, there might be the sun, but in winter it might not rise for long, if at all, and in summer it might not set for long, if at

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Posted in books, translation
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