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…
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Tagged with: Asylum, Berlin, books, German, Jenny Erpenbeck, Susan Bernofsky, Translation
Posted in books, translation
Posted in books, translation
Memoirs of a polar bear
A decade ago, on a visit to Berlin, I bought a small Steiff bear to remind me of the city I used to live in, and of Knut. Knut, if you don’t know already, was a baby polar bear in Berlin Zoo.…
Tagged with: Berlin, books, German, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Susan Bernofsky, Translation, Yoko Tawada
Posted in books, gender, translation
Posted in books, gender, translation
German Book Prize Shortlisters in Translation
The German Book Prize short list is out today! Three women, three Swiss writers and four with other books published in English in the last three years have made the cut. In my very subjective order of preference, they are:…
Tagged with: Eluned Gramich, Eugene Hayworth, Frank Witzel, German, German Book Prize, Inger-Maria Mahlke, Jenny Erpenbeck, Martin Chalmers, Monique Schwitter, Rolf Lappert, Susan Bernofsky, Swiss, Translation, Ulrich Peltzer
Posted in books, literature
Posted in books, literature
The End of Days: The Translator
Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky, has variously been described as brutal, haunting, and dreamlike, unvarnished and the work of a miniaturist. It’s all that and more. And it’s a very fitting first German winner of…
Tagged with: books, German, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Jenny Erpenbeck, Literature, Susan Bernofsky, The End of Days, Translation
Posted in books, literature
Posted in books, literature
found in translation 