Sometimes, even your native language can be a foreign language. I recently read the novel Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, which is set in New Zealand. It’s a rare beast—a work of literary fiction that becomes increasingly suspenseful and intricately plotted as it develops. As you might expect, since the title is a reference to…
My translation of Color Charts: A History by Anne Varichon is out today from Princeton University Press. In The Art Newspaper, reviewer Jad Adams praised my translation, writing that “translator Kate Deimling deserves a special accolade for translating not only the sometimes technically challenging terms but conveying Varichon’s effervescent enthusiasm for her subject.” In this…
March 8 is International Women’s Day, and a perfect occasion to discover some great women writers in translation. While Elena Ferrante‘s name has been on everyone’s lips for a while now, and Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, there are loads of other talented women writers from abroad who haven’t achieved…
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Academic translation for historical research presents special challenges for the professional translator. In some cases, key concepts may have standard translations in the target language, so the translator must carefully research such terms. For instance, the French Marxist historian Lucien Febvre coined the phrase histoire vue d’en bas to describe a historical approach focused on…
My translation of Yves Saint Laurent, the masterful biography by French fashion journalist Laurence Benaïm, is out today from Rizzoli. Translating this book was wonderful, intense, and a long haul. I learned a tremendous lot about Yves’ creative and personal life (and I can’t help but think of him on a first-name basis now that…
Kurt Andersen recently interviewed Natasha Wimmer, the translator of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, on Studio 360. Her eighth Bolaño novel in translation, The Spirit of Science Fiction (which is not a work of science fiction!), is out on February 5th. It was a great conversation, and I thought I’d share a few things from it…
There tend to be a lot of summer reading lists, but what about winter reading? When the weather gets frigid, there’s nothing better than curling up on the couch with a good book. Here are seven great books in translation published in 2017 that I’m excited to recommend to you as the days get shorter.…
It was wonderful to celebrate the launch of the Albertine Prize last night, a new readers’ prize for French fiction published in English translation in 2016, and to discover the shortlist of 10 books. The event was rescheduled from March 14 due to the blizzard, and although there were still mountains of snow in the streets,…
I recently discovered on Nicholas O’Donnell’s Art Law Report blog that a new collection of essays has just been published by L’Harmattan in Paris on “Perspectives on Ethics and Cultural Heritage” (Ethique et Patrimoine Culturel: Regards Croisés). These are the proceedings of a conference held on October 20 and 21, 2015, at L’Ecole du Louvre…
According to the Moscow Times, the comic strip Garfield has now been translated into Russian for the first time by Mikhail Khachaturov and is being published by Elf Comics. “Russia practically doesn’t have any of its own comics,” publisher Elena Depeille told the paper. “Apart from just translating Garfield, we want to create a culture of comics in…