“The past is the past. No good will come of digging it up.” The story starts with a funeral. Norma Ross’s mother is run over by an underground train in the middle of Kallio, Helsinki’s Kreuzberg. Was it suicide or…
Blog Archives
Finland 100: Norma
Tagged with: books, Finland 100, Finnish, Norma, Owen Witesman, Penguin, Sofi Oksanen, Suomi100, Translation
Posted in books, Finland 100, gender, translation
Posted in books, Finland 100, gender, translation
Things that Happen
Poems from the heart of the city, written in a language that doesn’t get translated nearly often enough, Bengali. Bhaskar Chakrabarti writes about the ordinary life he sees from his window in Kolkata, and Arunava Sinha’s is the first major…
Tagged with: Arunava Sinha, Bengali, Bhaskar Chakrabarti, books, India, Kolkata, Poetry, Seagull Books, Translation
Posted in books, poetry, translation
Posted in books, poetry, translation
The Gurugu Pledge
The stories start long before they even try to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Telling them on the mountain takes time and trust. Sometimes it’s better to wait until the lights go out, but then the griots to get going: This…
Tagged with: And Other Stories, Barcelona, books, Equatorial Guinea, Jethro Soutar, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Morocco, Spanish, The Gurugu Pledge, Translation
Posted in books, translation
Posted in books, translation
The private lives of Barcelona
Barcelona is changing. The socialists are on the rise, the ruling class is in decline, and the Catholic Church with it. Modern women are doing things their mothers would never have dreamed of doing, let alone in public. More and…
Tagged with: Archipelago Books, Barcelona, books, Catalan, Josep Maria de Sagarra, La Central, Literature, Mary Ann Newman, Private Life, Spanish, Translation
Posted in books, literature, translation
Posted in books, literature, translation
The Unwomanly Face of War
Svetlana Alexievich’s first book is the latest to be (re-)translated into English, in the wake of her Nobel Prize win. It tells a story that stretches back over a century – Russian women fought against Napoleon too, as Alexievich notes…
Tagged with: Belarus, books, Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard Pevear, Russian, Soviet Union, Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War, Translation
Posted in books, translation
Posted in books, translation
Women in Translation Month: Recitation
When you’ve lived away from home for a long time, home can be anywhere. If you move around a lot, the places of transit themselves, airports and train stations, can feel the most homelike of all. People may easily mistake…
Tagged with: Bae Suah, Berlin, books, Deborah Smith, Deep Vellum, Korean, Recitation, Translation, Women in Translation Month
Posted in books, international, translation, Women in Translation Month
Posted in books, international, translation, Women in Translation Month
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
The Pearl
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…
Tagged with: books, Old English, PEN Translation Prize, Poetry, Simon Armitage, The Pearl, Translation
Posted in books, faith, poetry, translation
Posted in books, faith, poetry, translation
Cold moons
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,…
Tagged with: books, Iceland, Karol Majewski, Magnús Sigurðsson, Meg Matich, Phoneme Media, Poetry, Translation
Posted in books, poetry, translation
Posted in books, poetry, translation
