The Edinburgh festivals are full of wonderful translation events, but this one may have sold out faster than most. Trafika Europe is celebrating their first anniversary with two poets: a Saami man and an Occitan woman. Trafika is a gorgeous online…
The Edinburgh festivals are full of wonderful translation events, but this one may have sold out faster than most. Trafika Europe is celebrating their first anniversary with two poets: a Saami man and an Occitan woman. Trafika is a gorgeous online…
“Why write? It is so much easier to say when I started to write. I fell in love with words, and wordsmiths such as Dylan Thomas… in the ‘fifties, when I was growing up, the Welsh language was still seen…
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,…
A thing of beauty was released into the world today. It was already there, but now more people can read it. The first five volumes of the Murty Classical Library of Indian literature are now published: 2 millennia of culture…
Happy New Year! Happy birthday Asymptote! If you feel you didn’t get enough presents (and there’s still four days of Christmas left) or you didn’t make ambitious enough new year’s resolutions about reading more in as many languages as possible…
Sometimes someone makes you see something you know well in a new way. Oliver O’Brien’s Tube Tongues does just that. The UCL scholar mapped all the languages spoken at each London tube stop. It’s fascinating, and great for language learners…
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…
How do you translate a dead poet? The November issue of Poetry magazine is dedicated to translation, with translator’s notes on each poem. I made a beeline for languages I know – and found they shared a problem. The poet…
It is extremely hard to find Sámi literature in English. This could be a deliberate strategy: Sámi author Ellen Marie Vars refused to allow translations of her work into majority languages, because she wanted people to read in Sámi. The…
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.…