Blog Archives

Go, went, gone

Posted on 1 November 2021 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

A white, male, comfortably-off, widowed professor at a Berlin university has just retired. He meets Black African men seeking asylum in Europe. He tries to find out about them, and to help them. Not new, perhaps. Isn’t the whole perspective…

Tagged with: Asylum, Berlin, books, German, Jenny Erpenbeck, Susan Bernofsky, Translation
Posted in books, translation

Waiting for Translation: Why We Matter

Posted on 6 September 2021 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

It shouldn’t frustrate me so much that a German book has an English title, but it does. This frustration encapsulates some of the struggle for intersectional justice that Emilie Roig exposes. So often concepts and terms are honed in English,…

Tagged with: books, Emilia Roig, German, intersectional, justice, Waiting for translation, Why We Matter
Posted in books, gender

The Passenger

Posted on 1 July 2021 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

This book was written on the run. It captures that moment after 9 November 1938 where things got a lot worse for a lot of people, very rapidly. Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, then aged 23, had made it out of Germany…

Daughters

Posted on 1 June 2021 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

Is this a road trip or a journey back in time? The German and English covers of Töchter/Daughters tell the same story in different ways. Just getting into the car and driving south to get away from it all –…

Tagged with: books, Daughters, German, Lucy Fricke, Rohwolt, Sinéad Crowe, Töchter, Translation, V&Q Books
Posted in books, gender, translation

Grand Hotel

Posted on 1 January 2021 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — 2 Comments

“People in a hotel” would be a literal translation of Vicki Baum’s groundbreaking novel. It’s nearly a century old now, but when she wrote it, she invented a whole new genre. What sort of people are staying in the hotel?…

Tagged with: Basil Creighton, Berlin, book, Dussmann, German, Grand Hotel, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Margot Bettauer Dembo, Menschen im Hotel, Translation, Vicki Baum
Posted in books, film, history

Fifty islands I have not visited and never will

Posted on 1 November 2020 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — 1 Comment

This is the subtitle to Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands. I discovered it eleven years late, because this year Marko Niemi translated it into Finnish. I ordered the German original straight away and despite the pandemic it arrived promptly…

Tagged with: Atlas of Remote Islands, books, Christine Lo, Finnish, German, Mare, Marko Niemi, Poesia, Translation
Posted in books, history, Illustration, translation

Empty Hearts

Posted on 1 March 2020 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

The year is not that far into the future, near enough that it could almost be now, but far away enough that it really couldn’t, at least one hopes not. A bit like Black Mirror, perhaps. But the location of…

Tagged with: books, Empty Hearts, German, John Cullen, Juli Zeh, Leere Herzen, Penguin, Translation
Posted in books, translation

Thomas Bernhard’s poems

Posted on 5 June 2018 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

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…

Tagged with: books, Collected Poems, German, James Reidel, Poetry, Seagull Books, Thomas Bernhard, Translation
Posted in books, poetry, translation

Baba Dunja

Posted on 28 March 2018 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

Baba Dunja is an indomitable woman. She won’t let anything as trifling as a major nuclear disaster move her from her home. So back she moved, in to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and carried on growing her vegetables as if…

Mascha Kaléko: a new bilingual edition

Posted on 17 May 2017 by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson — Leave a comment

This new and fully bilingual edition of the Poems of Mascha Kaléko, out in time for the 110th anniversary of her birth, is a good introduction in English to one of my favourite German poets, who deserves to be more…