Tag Archives: reviews
Translators on Books that Should be Translated: “Keder” by Yordanka Beleva
By Izidora Angel Keder, like other words in the Bulgarian language, is of Turkish origin. It means sorrow, but also grief and sadness. The story goes that the ancient Turks believed when a person dies, he bestows to his closest forty sorrows, for each of the forty days after death. With each passing day, fewer […]
Gradations of Love: Mihail Sebastian’s “Women,” Translated from Romanian by Philip Ó Ceallaigh
By Mihaela Moscaliuc Née Iosef Hechter, Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was a Jewish Romanian prose writer, playwright, journalist, and lawyer who left us chilling testimonies of the milieu leading up to and spanning World War II, which Sebastian survived at great emotional cost, only to be killed by a truck in 1945. Women appeared in […]
Authorial Women: The Gender of Character Construction in Hiromi Kawakami’s “The Ten Loves of Nishino,” Translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell
This month, in memory of our contributor Professor Jed Deppman who founded the Oberlin College Translation Symposium, instituted a literary translation minor, and taught courses in literary translation and comparative literature, we are featuring three reviews by Oberlin College Comparative Literature graduates and students, taught and trained by Professor Deppman and other Oberlin College faculty. Professor […]
A Woman Besieged: Clarice Lispector’s “The Besieged City,” translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz
This month, in memory of our contributor Professor Jed Deppman who founded the Oberlin College Translation Symposium, instituted a literary translation minor, and taught courses in literary translation and comparative literature, we are featuring three reviews by Oberlin College Comparative Literature graduates and students, taught and trained by Professor Deppman and other Oberlin College faculty. Professor […]
Clinical Erotics in Luis Panini’s “Destruction of the Lover,” Translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel
This month, in memory of our contributor Professor Jed Deppman who founded the Oberlin College Translation Symposium, instituted a literary translation minor, and taught courses in literary translation and comparative literature, we are featuring three reviews by Oberlin College Comparative Literature graduates and students, taught and trained by Professor Deppman and other Oberlin College faculty. Professor […]
Translators on Books that Should be Translated: “Indigo” by Roberto Carretta and Renato Viola
by Stiliana Milkova The reclusive clockmaker Anton Ivanovic has disappeared from his apartment in Turin. His only friend, the erudite professor of mythology Joshua Momigliano, receives a letter which sends him on a quest to find out what happened to Anton. As Joshua asks in the opening pages, “Anton Ivanovic was a reserved, impenetrable man […]
Laughter in the Gulag: “Sacred Darkness,” Translated from Russian by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner
By Dimiter Kenarov Looking back at the Soviet Union, nearly three decades after its demise, I can’t shake off the feeling of vertigo. That terrifying whale of an empire, whose blubber once stretched over a sixth of the landmass and most of the twentieth century, seems like a distant memory now, a mythical creature that […]
Polyphonic Transpositions: Pavel Arseniev’s “Reported Speech,” translated from Russian by Thomas Campbell, Cement Collective, Jason Cieply, Ian Dreiblatt, Ronald Meyer, Ainsley Morse, Ingrid Nordgaard, Anastasiya Osipova, Lia Na’ama Ten Brink
By Molly Thomasy Blasing From its very first pages, Pavel Arseniev’s Reported Speech shows itself to be true to its title; the opening poem’s epigraph comes to us, we are told, from an “Instruction in the platzkart train car” (15). This is only the beginning of a journey through a trail of words found, mixed […]
Tasting Life in the State of Exception: Rosella Postorino’s “At the Wolf’s Table,” translated from Italian by Leah Janeczko
by Maurizio Vito Bertolt Brecht’s epigraph from The Threepenny Opera at the beginning of Rosella Postorino’s novel At the Wolf’s Table ushers in the undertone characterizing the story the reader is about to peruse: “A man can only live by absolutely forgetting he’s a man like other folk.” Forgetting is one way to survive troubled […]
Recurring Currents: Esther Kinsky’s “River,” translated from German by Iain Galbraith
By Rebecca DeWald When I first read Stan Nadolny’s The Discovery of Slowness (translated from German by Ralph Freedman), which follows Sir John Franklin on his arctic exploration, I was struck by the way in which the quality of “slowness” both becomes a plot device and its conceit: the reader sees the world through […]
