Blog Archives

White Nights

Copy of the book Białe noce by Ursula Honek

Rather than heralding midsummer, White Nights/Białe noce feels looming and Novemberish. Immersed in darkness and silence (ciemno wszędzie, głucho wszędzie), there’s no way of knowing what’s going to happen next. Very likely, another death…  If you love Tokarczuk and want

Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, translation

The train that didn’t go to Katyń

In April 1940, over twenty thousand Polish officers were killed by the Soviets in the forest of Katyń. A bare few hundred of those soldiers survived. The way I remember my grandfather telling the story of his capture on Poland’s

Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, history, translation

Russia: knife, fork, and ladle

The Romanovs, Lenin, Gagarin – they all had their cooks. Holodomor, Leningrad, Chernobyl, Afghanistan – sometimes there is nothing (safe) to cook at all. For some people, like the Tatars, cooking is all you have left of home. Others, like

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, translation

Foucault in Warsaw

In Warsaw in 1958, Foucault was writing his History of Madness. Then, it was his PhD, and he was the first director of the university’s French Cultural Centre. Within a year, he’d left Poland. Was Jurek, his mystery lover, to

Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, translation

Waiting for translation: Wolf River

It is two years and more since this pandemic began. In March 2020, it hadn’t knocked Europe out yet, but it was going to very soon. The signs were there. In March 2020, this book began. It hadn’t knocked me

Tagged with: , , , ,
Posted in books, translation

Women in Translation Month: The Map

Is this an adventure novel, war memoir, seven short stories, or one of those new approaches to history through objects? It’s all that and more. The real protagonist is not a person, but a map. Do you know Rembrandt van

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, translation, Women in Translation Month

The lost soul – zgubiona dusza

The man was moving so fast he had completely forgotten why he was moving at all. So he went to see a wise woman. And the wise woman said, “Slow down. You have to wait for your soul to catch

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, Illustration, Nobel Prize in Literature, translation

 Honey, I Killed the Cats

                  After translations into dozens of languages, this has taken seven years to appear in English, but the wait is worth it. A twentysomething woman in the States, still hopelessly single when

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, translation

Accomodations

Wiola is growing up. We are still growing up in parallel. She is a student in Poland exactly when I am a student in Poland, the academic session of 1995/1996. Except I’m in Warsaw for a year of my degree,

Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in books, translation

Swallowing Mercury

Wioletta Greg is frankly fantastic, and Eliza Marciniak has rendered her voice in English delightfully. A good friend gave this translation of Swallowing Mercury for my birthday, and her only concern was that I might have it already, but I might not

Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Posted in books, history, literature, translation
advent Alice in Wonderland American And Other Stories Antonia Lloyd-Jones Arabic Argentina Beowulf Berlin Best Translated Book Award Bible books Brazil Brazilian Portuguese British British Library Buddhism Catalan Children's Books China Chinese Christmas Christmas Carols Contemporary Czesław Miłosz Danish Dari David Hackston Dublin Literary Award English Estonian Fantasy Farsi Fiction Finland Finland 100 Finlandia Prize Finnish Fitzcarraldo Editions Flemish Free Word Centre French George Szirtes German Greek Hebrew Herbert Lomas Herta Müller history Hungarian Iceland Idioms Illustration India international International Translation Day Irish Gaelic Italian J. R. R. Tolkien Japanese Jenny Erpenbeck Johanna Sinisalo Korean Language language learning Languages Latin Literature Lola Rogers Lord of the Rings Mabinogion Man Booker International Prize Maori Maria Turtschaninoff Moomins New Year Nobel Prize Nobel Prize for Literature Norwegian Old English Olga Tokarczuk Owen Witesman Oxford English Dictionary PEN Translation Prize Persian Philip Boehm Phoneme Media Poetry Poetry Translation Centre Polish Portuguese Pushkin Press Queer Romanian Rosa Liksom Russian Salla Simukka Second World War Short Stories Sofi Oksanen Spanish Stanisław Barańczak Suomi100 Susan Bernofsky Svetlana Alexievich Swedish Switzerland Thomas Teal Tibetan Tove Jansson transation Translation translator Translators Without Borders Valentine's Day Wales Warsaw Welsh Wisława Szymborska Witold Szabłowski Women in Translation Month words Words without Borders writing YA

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Follow found in translation on WordPress.com
Archives