“My husband is heading from Kyiv to Kharkiv. He’s delivering baby food to maternity hospitals, medications and humanitarian aid to the city’s territorial defence. Along the way, he tells me he sees road signs that have been knocked down or painted over. This is done by the locals to impede the movement of Russian troops. Passing Ukrainians can figure out where to go based on a Cyrillic soft sign here, the letters “o” or “e” there, in between the other ruined symbols. But the Russian occupiers, most of whom have been sent here without smartphones so that they won’t post selfies with geolocations as they did when fighting in Donbas in 2014, don’t have maps. Instead, these Russians, who were not invited to come here, blunder and get lost.” … click here for full article in The New Statesman.

Translator Jennifer Croft walks readers through her translation of the opening passage in Book Two of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, just out from Riverhead Books.

“Whenever I translate, I first immerse myself in the original as though taking a dip in a lovely cove, far from the eyes of anyone, where the water’s always warm. (I hope it does not undermine all that I have said so far to confess that in life I am not a good swimmer, and that I have never gone swimming in a cove.) By immersing myself, I can feel weightless as the body of the work suspends me—my preoccupations, much of my subjectivity, which merely acts as a filter—and I can allow the images generated by the words of the original to wash over me, feel them all around me, form them afresh in my cleared head….”

Click here to read Croft’s complete meditation on her dazzling translation!

The Nobel Prize–winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe.

In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The story of Frank—a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day—is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is—The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.

In “Essays One,” Davis’s meditations on writing include imperatives such as: “When you write, write freely, as you want to, following your own interests,” which is both wisdom to act on and advice whose practicality depends on hazy factors (are your interests, for instance, interesting?). Now comes “Essays Two,” a collection about translation, with some whimsically blunt headings, like “The Comma Splice,” that recall a how-to guide. It’s a guide, however, to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self. “Just as you can enter another person and speak in his voice,” she writes, “you are also no longer confined to writing in your own style and with your own sensibility.”

Davis’s adventures in translation are full of such realizations, and the lessons they sustain are encouraging. Reading for fun, it turns out, can make things happen. In an account of Davis’s Spanish studies by almost exclusive means of a Spanish translation of “Tom Sawyer,” we follow her impressive progress and come to understand that the rest of us could do the same, bolstering language-acquisition through a combination of “an interesting story”; “aroused curiosity”; “freedom to work independently”; and — this next part is probably less fun — “constant reinforcement of vocabulary.”

A hopeful mood prevails in this book. In an essay on reading prose in Norwegian, a language about which she originally knows relatively little, Davis advances happily just by noticing, by looking around. “Words are repeated in certain contexts,” she writes — an easy-to-forget key to learning a language — with “some contexts the same and some different, and eventually, over time, with much repetition, we learn what the words mean.” Recognition accumulates through a patient habit of reading out of curiosity, by which Davis begins to understand Norwegian. It’s incredible, and yet, in Davis’s telling, totally credible. She makes it seem so obvious that reading a foreign language for enjoyment leads to astonishing new vistas, because she reminds us that fun is naturally propulsive.

Keep reading

Georgina Fooks reviews Shapeshifter by Alice Paalen Rahon, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, New York Review Books, 2021.

“The collection that opens the text, On Bare Earth, is a formidable emblem of Surrealist poetry; published by Éditions Surréalistes in 1936, it was prefaced by Yves Tanguy, and praised by Breton as a “talisman.” It’s difficult not to read the collection in a rush, swept along by the elemental force of the title. From the very beginning, we start to uncover a sort of visual alphabet, images and themes that mould Paalen Rahon’s poetry—beasts, skies, paths, light, stone.Her unique approach is evident from the very first lines:

A woman once lovely
one day
took off her face
now her head was smooth
blind and deaf
sheltered from mirror traps
and looks of love

….”

The Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation was established in 2020 in the memory of Sarah Maguire (1957-2017), the founder of the Poetry Translation Centre and champion of international poetry. The prize is awarded every two years for the best book of poetry from a living poet from beyond Europe in English translation, published anywhere in the world. Winning poets and translators will divide a prize of £3,000. The aim of the prize is to showcase the very best contemporary poetry from around the world, and to champion the art of poetry translation.
The prize is open for submissions until 30 November 2021.
Click here for more information.