Tag Archives: Pushkin Press
Unbudgeable Feelings: Toon Tellegen’s “The Cricket’s Healing,” Translated from Dutch by David Colmer
Toon Tellegen’s “The Cricket’s Healing,” translated by David Colmer, explores themes of loneliness and depression through animal fables. Behind his surreal metaphors and silly yet strange encounters between animals, we can find very real social commentary and a deep analysis of the landscape of the human mind.
Off in the Distance: Lalla Romano’s “In Farthest Seas,” Translated from Italian by Brian Robert Moore
Poignant, and at times breathtakingly honest, “In Farthest Seas” joins a select group of narratives that help us cope with the death of a loved one through the eyes of the writer, who cannot help but transform that pain into a story so that the writer, as well as the reader, may begin to comprehend it.
Writing as Identity: Banine’s “Parisian Days,” Translated from French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova
At the start of her second memoir, “Parisian Days,” Banine, a French author of Azerbaijani descent, arrives in the promised land. The year is 1921. Paris has newly entered the Roaring Twenties, a time of short respite between the two Great Wars. Banine is only nineteen, and she has just miraculously escaped her detested husband, the distant city of Istanbul where she left him behind, her homeland Azerbaijan and, perhaps most significantly, the grips of the Soviet Union.
EAST AND WEST MEET IN BANINE’S “DAYS IN THE CAUCASUS,” translated from French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova
Banine came into the world in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1905. She grew up taking lessons in French, German, English, and Russian, participating in feasts marking the end of Ramadan, playing the piano, traveling between the city and the countryside with relatives, talking to poplars, talking to rivers. Daydreaming.
Modernist Nostalgia: Joseph Roth’s “The Coral Merchant,” translated from German by Ruth Martin
Martin has selected six of Roth’s most beautiful and penetrating stories, written between 1920 (the year Roth moved from Vienna to Berlin) and 1939 (the year Roth died in his Parisian exile), for this volume.
“The Country of Old Men”: Maxim Leo’s Red Love, Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Reviewed by Rachel Harland “I had the feeling that the GDR only really came to an end at that moment,” writes Berlin-based journalist Maxim Leo in the prologue to his autobiographical narrative Red Love: The Story of an East German Family. “Eighteen years after the fall of the Wall the stern hero had disappeared. Before […]