Blog Archives

Merkel’s Freedom

Posted on 19 February 2025 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

An hour and a half of my life listening for every year she was in office. Yes, Angela Merkel’s Freiheit/Freedom clocks up an impressive 24 hours as an audio book, or 720 pages. I stuck with it, because I wanted…

Tagged with: Angela Merkel, books, freedom, Freiheit, German, politics, Translation
Posted in books, history

Lem and le Guin’s letters

Posted on 22 January 2025 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — 1 Comment

This one jumped out at me from the blue sky (dzięki Paweł!). I’ve read less Lem than le Guin, but the idea of them writing to each other was startling, pleasing. I ordered their 1972–1984 letters from Wydawnictwo Literackie straight…

Identitti

Posted on 18 December 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — 2 Comments

I’m writing this in an Indian restaurant. The only Indian in my Finnish town is at the railway station – there are more Nepalese around here. This one is at the railway station, and, like today, I often come here…

Tagged with: Alta L Price, books, German, Identitti, Mithu Sanyal, Translation
Posted in books, gender, Queer, translation

Effingers

Posted on 20 November 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

Once I’d got my teeth into Tergit, I wasn’t going to let go. Käsebier was splendid. Berlin in the twenties is a somewhere, somewhen I wish I had been to, and here was a woman broadcasting live from the thick…

Tagged with: books, Effingers, Gabriele Tergit, German, Sofie Duvernoy, Translation, Waiting for translation
Posted in books, history, translation

Pocket Punishment

Posted on 18 September 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

A colleague raved about Ferdinand von Schirach, and a good friend said he can sure write a story. So when I found this lovely btb pocket edition that’s smaller than most phones these days, I thought, let’s try him. Strafe…

Tagged with: books, Ferdinand von Schirach, German, Katharina Hall, Punishment, Strafe, Translation
Posted in books, translation

Käsebier takes Berlin

Posted on 17 July 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — 1 Comment

Then we take Berlin… But for how long? Gabriele Tergit wrote Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm right after the story unfolded. Berlin in the late 1920s was at its most shimmering, glorious, and frenetic. But pride comes before a fall and…

Still raging: Die Wut, die bleibt

Posted on 15 May 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

A man asks a woman to pass the salt, and she gets up, walks past him out onto the balcony and… jumps. Leaving behind her teenage daughter, two young sons and their father, and her best friend. Was it one…

The Wall

Posted on 25 April 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

Going to your friends’ cabin in the mountains is a treat. But if even if you know them and the place well, you might be unsure about how it will work out. If they pop into town and leave you…

Tagged with: books, Die Wand, German, Literature, Marlen Haushofer, Shaun Whiteside, The Wall, Translation
Posted in Uncategorized

Störfall

Posted on 24 January 2024 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

Accident, incident, malfunction, (power) failure? You could translate Störfall in all of these ways. Accident seems a small word to contain the enormity of it. Christa Wolf brings together two major incidents, personal and political, local and global, in her…

The Visionaries

Posted on 15 November 2023 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

These women wrote through the darkest times. As times get darker again, 80 to 90 years later, we need to read them. The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy (Allen Lane 2023) in Shaun Whiteside’s English…