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Alarmingly elegant translations: The White Review

If Paris calls London “alarmingly elegant”, it’s worth taking another look. Especially if it’s in translation from all around the globe. This month’s online issue of The White Review is a box of delights. I like to claim my favourites first,

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Posted in literature, poetry, translation

Maresi, Chronicles of the Red Monastery

Maresi, Chronicles of the Red Monastery, was the book I read by the Christmas tree this year; next year you could be doing the same. The splendid Pushkin Press has just bought the English rights. The author, the Swedish Finn

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Posted in books

Rilke’s Advent

No-one does Advent better than the Germans. The Leo German dictionary usually has an excellent online advent calendar (in German, with poems and pictures for every day). So who better, I thought, to start Advent, than the German poet Rainer

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Posted in translation

The Newest New Words

(Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, 1872, with John Tenniel’s illustration) To be master or mistress of meanings, you need to be up to date with good sources. You might remember that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) will deliver a new

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Posted in language

The space between: After the Berlin Wall fell

25 years ago, the Berlin Wall came down. 9 November might seem like a good date to celebrate German reunification, but because the same day in 1938 saw the burning of synagogues and destruction of Jewish property across Germany, they

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Posted in books, history, international, literature

Finland: Cool or Weird?

Finland is this year’s guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This opens up Finnish literature to a German-speaking and global audience, with lots of great authors and over 60 translators in attendance. Finnland: Cool. I have to say, I DON’T like the

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Posted in books, literature, translation

Scotland: “If only hitting on the right judgment/were instinctive to humankind!”

Today Scotland votes on independence. As a Welsh neighbour who lived in Scotland for half a decade, I’d love to be voting, but it’s not for me to decide. It’s still a good day to read some Scottish Gaelic poetry, though.

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Posted in books, international, literature, poetry, Scotland Referendum, translation

25 years – that’s a quarter of a century…

In just a few weeks time, it will be 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That’s a quarter of a century… makes a girl think. If you, too, wear glasses from reading too much small print, you will

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Posted in history, international, literature, poetry, translation

translate it yourself

Tired of bad translations? Put the poetry back into translation yourself! At the Modern Poetry in Translation website, you can read submit your own English translation of a poem, based on a literal translation and sound recording in the original

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Posted in books, international, translation, words

nonsense in translation: Nina Cassian and the Jabberwocky

Romanian poet Nina Cassian died one month ago today. (Here she is reading her work, and here’s a great poem she wrote in New York exile). She also translated Brecht, Molière and Shakespeare, but was especially proud of her translation of

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Posted in literature, poetry, translation
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