How are these surreal days influencing your normal writing process?
It was very difficult for me writing fiction in the first weeks of quarantine. I only could write non-fiction. But now I days I’m begging to write fiction again. The more complicated item is to image the new world if you write stories that happen in real-time, not dystopic ones.
My Italian husband and I are staying in our old home in the hills just south of the Po river, a rolling countryside about one hour and half from Milan. This is, as everyone knows, the region of northern Italy most severely affected by coronavirus. In total lockdown, self-isolation is very strict.
Amanda Hopkinson, translator from Spanish of “Rage” by the Argentine novelist Sergio Bizzio: "A translator may suspect s/he is in for trouble when even the title of the next book gives rise to some musing. Rabia means both ‘rage’ and ‘rabies’..."
Whenever I’m asked for an example of a spicy Polish phrase, the idiom that comes to mind is one that I first encountered in “A Grain of Truth” by Zygmunt Miłoszewski. You’ll find it on page 79, when the main character, Prosecutor Szacki, is relieved to hear that his boss will deal with the journalists asking awkward questions about his case. “Not his circus, not his monkeys”, he thinks – not his problem....
We have just been told that John Brownjohn died in January. He was a legendary figure in the world of translation. He translated more than 160 books, and won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German translation three times and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize once. For Bitter Lemon he provided extraordinary translations of The Sinner by Petra Hammesfahr (which became a Netflix sensation) and Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions by Mario Giordano.