ACHUKA Children's Books UK

children's & YA recommendations on the go

  • News
    • Reviews
  • Illustrated
    • Meet An Illustrator
  • Fiction
    • Humour
    • Classics/Reissues
    • YA
  • Non-Fiction
  • Poetry & Tales
  • Gift
  • Links
  • About
    • ACHUKAstudio
    • Contact me
You are here: Home / Archives for translation

Why We Took The Car by Wolfgang Herrndorf – ACHUKAreview

March 3, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

WHY WE TOOK THE CAR by Wolfgang Herrndorf

I am sitting here exhaling air in the way you do after reading a book that has blown you away, leaving a bereft ache in your heart. In the case of Why We Took The Car, a German YA novel originally published in 2010 under the title of Tschick (the name of the co-leading character), and now available from Andersen Press in a superb English translation by Tim Mohr, the sense of heartache is all the more awful for having discovered just now, via a quick search on the interent, that the book’s author, Wolfgang Herrndorf, shot himself last summer, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour a few years previously.
This is the only Young Adult book he wrote (his other work is for adults), but it should find a lasting place as one of the very best books in its genre.
Mike Klinkenberg, the narrator of the book, would like to be less boring. He’d like to have more friends. He’d like to be invited to parties. And he’d like Tatiana to take notice of him. His mother’s an alcoholic and after writing an all-too-honest essay about her, which his class find hilariously weird, he’s dubbed ‘Psycho’.
Things change when new boy Tschick joins the class. He’s Russian and an oddball – often turns up blind drunk, but doesn’t let anyone, including the teacher, push him around.
For Tatiana’s birthday (another party to which he is not invited) Mike creates an oversized drawing of Beyonce but seems unlikely ever to have the confidence to present it to her.
But when Tschick picks him up in a ‘borrowed’ Lada car, one of the first things they do is drive over to Tatiana’s house, where the party is in full swing, to present the drawing.
No sooner have they handed it over than they’re doing a 180 degree turn in the middle of the street and speeding away on a week long road adventure that will be the happiest time of their lives.
Everything that happens on the road has that raw authentic feel that you get from the best of European films (indeed, it is easy to visualise this book as a movie).
I’m not going to attempt to describe the experiences the two of them have, or the characters they meet along the way. Read the book for yourselves. Before going into English translation it already had more than one million sales in foreign editions. If any book is deserving of multi-million readership it is this.

http://www.achuka.co.uk/reviews/?p=446&preview=true

Filed Under: Blog, Books, In Translation, YA Tagged With: car, coming-of-age, review, road, translation

Anthea Bell: Profile Of A Translator

November 18, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Really splendid profile (by Claire Armitstead) of the translator Anthea Bell appeared in Guardian Review…
Highhly Recommended for alll, but will be specially interesting to anyone who attended the Found In Translation event last week:

She was an early adopter of the internet, which she discovered when she was hunting down an obscure reference to a 19th-century German poem singing the praises of the joys of hiking in Westphalia. “All I had was the poet’s name and a few lines of the poem. I typed it in and the whole poem came up.” It was a eureka moment. While many of her peers were sceptical, she became an early convert, embracing a technology that she realised would transform the translator’s work.

Along with the technological change has come a new politics, with heated debate among translators as to how prominent the fact of translation should be. Though Bell is the doyenne of them all – with a raft of international awards alongside her homegrown OBE – she describes herself as “an unrepentant, unreconstructed adherent of the school of invisible translation”.

Flugge points out a paradox: her limpid translation style has meant that her work travels, and her visibility in terms of international awards has been part of her service to literature. She has won the US’s prestigious Mildred L Batchelder award for children’s books in translation four times, and has been cited more often than anyone else, which has helped to establish a trans-Atlantic market for European children’s books. She was, for instance, the translator of Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart series, a German young adult fantasy trilogy which reached number two in the New York Times bestseller list.

“Anthea has a talent that not every translator has for catching the mood of a book. Some are a bit more wooden and some try to take too many liberties. She has a knack of hitting the right style and atmosphere,” says Flugge.

Bell herself laid out her position at a translation conference in 2004: “All my professional life, I have felt that translators are in the business of spinning an illusion: the illusion is that the reader is reading not a translation but the real thing.” Nine years on, she still insists that “a translation is successful if it’s invisible” – though that is not to detract from the creativity of a relationship that emerges clearly from her Asterix notes.

via Anthea Bell: ‘It’s all about finding the tone of voice in the original. You have to be quite free’ | Books | The Guardian.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: Anthea Bell, Asterix, translation

Found In Translation

November 16, 2013 By achuka 1 Comment


[If slideshow does not start automatically, click to activate]

Found In Translation, part of the rolling programme of events known as the Children’s Book Show, a national tour bringing some of the best children’s authors from the UK and abroad to local theatre venues and giving teachers and school children the opportunity to hear world-class artists talk about their work, took place at Europe House in London on Friday 15th November 2013.

The event was made up of three separate discussions, running alongside one another. I had elected to attend Publishing Translation, a panel discussion between Sian Williams,
Nicolette Jones (children’s books editor at The Sunday Times), Fabio Geda (author of In The Sea There Are Crocodiles) – and his English translator Howard Curtis, whose translation won the 2013 Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation. The panel was also intended to include David Fickling the publisher of the book.

Poetry in Translation consisted of a discussion with some of the young winners of the Stephen Spender Trust Times Translation Prize (under 14 and 18 categories) and included readings by the young translators of their winning entries.

In the third discussion, Translation Workshop, Kevin Crossley-Holland talked about the challenges of ‘translating’ the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf into a children’s version.

Gillian Lathey of Roehampton University and co-founder of the Marsh Award gave a ten-minute introductory talk and then Sian Williams chaired the discussion, which was interspersed with extracts from the novel, read by a young actor Samuel John.

Nicolette Jones reminded the audience that only 3% of published children’s books come from another language, although she felt that increasingly reviewers are blind to whether a book is translated or not.

Fabio, who comes from Turin, told us that he had worked for several years as an educator working principally with troubled children. In 2007 he published his first novel about a young Romanian boy searching for his street-theatre father.

Before writing In The Sea There Are Crocodiles he had spend six months collaborating with an Afghan youth who had a particular way of talking about painful situations in his past. It was this young man’s voice that Geda sought to capture in his prize-winning book.

It was an interesting discussion and, in the publisher’s absence, the translator felt emboldened to question the way the book had been marketed to two different audiences with different jacket designs. He felt that the adult hardback jacket had made the book look more like a children’s novel than the actual children’s design. The new adult paperback jacket was much much better he thought.

There were some lively interventions from the floor. Why, it was wondered, are publishers not employing the scores of multi-lingual young people in their twenties desperate to find work if, as it seems, one of the impediments to considering foreign fiction is the inability to read it in the original language.

translation_bw-121

David Fickling, when he eventually arrived, disarmingly embarrassed about a confusion over the timing of the panel discussion, held an impromptu ‘event’ in the lobby where people from all three discussions had assembled for a tea & coffee break, during which he gave a commitment to publishing at least one book in translation each year. He fetched from his rucksack a picture book called Pig In A Muddle and confessed to being its translator. ‘And how did I translate it? I used a dictionary and the pictures!’ Like me he is ashamed that he has reached his sixties unable to converse in any tongue other than English. He spoke amusingly about how tentatively and shyly English he would be when approaching foreign stands at international book fairs. He hoped that a younger generation of editors would have greater confidence.

Direct link to individual photo gallery: http://photo.achuka.co.uk/translation

Filed Under: Blog, Books, In Translation Tagged With: Crossley-Holland, David Fickling, Fabio Geda, Gillian Lathey, Italian, Italy, Marsh Award, Nicolette Jones, translation, translator

Dead ducks and Moomins: nine authors pick their favourite children’s fiction in translation

July 1, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Favourite feature from the weekend press:

In translation: nine authors pick their favourite children’s fiction
It’s easy for children in the UK to miss out on the wonderful books published overseas. Here, nine children’s authors introduce the books they love

via In translation: nine authors pick their favourite children’s fiction | Books | The Guardian.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: foreign, translation, world literature

ACHUKAbooks In Translation

June 2, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Have you read any good books in translation recently?
We’re always looking out for titles to recommend on our In Translation picks page…

 

thedetourThe Detour by Gerbrand Bakker

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. “A wonderful novel. Wise and generous to a fault of all our human failings and frailties” (Lloyd Jones, author of Mister Pip).

via ACHUKAbooks – In Translation.

Filed Under: Books, In Translation Tagged With: books, foreign, picks, translation

May 28, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Hand Art front cover lo res

In recognition of a commitment to bringing exciting and original books from around the world to the UK b small publishing have been awarded a publishing grant from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

The grant has been awarded in support of a new title – Creative Hand Art – due for publication in August this year.

As part of their autumn programme for 2013, b small will be publishing activity books from  France, Chile and Korea. This is a new direction for the independent children’s publisher intended to complement their existing and continuing commitment to foreign language publishing, with a focus on culturally diverse activity books.

“This grant is a reassuring vote of confidence in our work and we’re extremely proud to be collaborating with LTI Korea. Our forward programme is made up of a healthy mix of foreign and home-grown titles, all of which embraces the idea that activity books can be artistic and inspiring whilst remaining fun and affordable.” – Sam Hutchinson, Director

https://www.achuka.co.uk/blog/677/

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: activity, foreign, grant, Korea, translation, world

Bakker’s The Detour wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

May 22, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

booksller

Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker has won this year’s £10,000 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with his novel The Detour, published by Harvill Secker.
It is the author’s second major literary prize win; his previous novel, The Twin, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2010.
Bakker will share the prize money with the title’s translator, David Colmer

via Bakker’s The Detour wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize | The Bookseller.

Also on the shortlist:
The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (Canongate)
Croatian author Dasa Drndic’s Trieste, translated by Ellen Elisa-Bursac (Maclehose Press)
Chris Barnard’s Bundu, translated from Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (Alma Books)
Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean (Harvill Secker)

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: awards, fiction, foreign, prize, prizes, translation

David Almond says children are missing out on world-class books

May 6, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

David Almond welcomes a new publishing imprint by Pushkin books which will concentrate solely on international children’s fiction

David Almond

Millions of children are missing out on the best books in the world because so few are translated into English, according to award-winning children’s author David Almond.

The  Felling-born novelist, whose book Skellig won the Carnegie Medal in 1998 and was made into a film starring Tim Roth, said more needed to be done to bring international best-sellers to this country after figures showed translated fiction accounts for less than 3% of all books sold in the UK.

Almond, who lives in Northumberland, said: “Children need to read the best books by the best writers from all parts of the world. Of course they do.

“But the plain fact is that there is very little translated children’s fiction published in the UK, and our children are missing out.”

He said the launch of a new publishing imprint by Pushkin books which will concentrate solely on international children’s fiction was “a bold new venture”.

via Northumberland author says children are missing out on world of books – Chronicle Live.

Filed Under: Blog, Books, In Translation Tagged With: David Almond, foreign, imprint, publishing, translation, world

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6

Copyright ACHUKA © 2022 · designed on Genesis Framework

 

Loading Comments...