Tag: PEN Translates award

Review | The Last Days of Ellis Island, Gaëlle Josse & Ellis Island: A People’s History, Malgorzata Szejnert

The Last Days of Ellis Island by Gaëlle Josse @WorldEdBooks and Ellis Island: A People’s History by Malgorzata Szejnert @ScribeUKbooks offer an excellent complementary read, giving a different take on getting through the gateway to the Promised Land that was the United States a century ago.

Ellis Island in New York harbour remains the ultimate symbol of American immigration. It was the continent’s busiest inspection station for sixty years until it closed in 1954. Millions of immigrants went through an extensive and elaborate legal and medical vetting process when they disembarked: Jews escaping from political and economic oppression in czarist Russia and Europe; Italians escaping rural poverty; Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Greeks . . . along with arrivants from Syria, Turkey and Armenia. Approximately forty per cent of U.S. citizens today can trace at least one of their ancestors back to Ellis Island. Continue reading Review | The Last Days of Ellis Island, Gaëlle Josse & Ellis Island: A People’s History, Malgorzata Szejnert

Interview | Nicky Harman | Translator of the Week

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m based in Weymouth and in London. I go to China every year on visits. I speak and read Spanish, French and Italian but I only translate from Chinese. I have two kids, grown-up now, and two grandchildren. I keep reasonably fit, cycle, walk, swim and do yoga –– but all in moderation! And I love food.

When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
When I was very small, my father used to read us Grimms Household Tales every day after tea, and I loved that. Rapunzel (‘let down your hair’) was a particular favourite. This only happened in winter . . . my parents were farmers, and in summer, work went on till late in the evening. In my early teens, my father tried to wean me off children’s books and introduce me to the classics, and as a result, I went on strike and didn’t read any more fiction until I was in my thirties. After that, and somewhat belatedly, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens became big favourites. I wasn’t an entirely undutiful daughter: I carried around my father’s present of a leatherette-bound box set of Austen for twenty years without ever opening them, and then had to retrieve a couple of the volumes from houses in places like Sheffield and Wandsworth, where I had somehow mislaid them years before. I never did make headway with Trollope or The Brothers Karamazov, which my father kept pressing on me. Continue reading Interview | Nicky Harman | Translator of the Week

Guest Review | Henrietta Foster | Ludwig’s Room, Alois Hotschnig

Henrietta Foster is a freelance journalist and TV producer for the BBC. Her latest film, Beyond The Grace Note, is about women orchestra conductors. She is writing a book about Hungarian Jews.

Alois Hotschnig sent me a copy of Ludwig’s Room about a year or so ago. Accompanying the book was a postcard of a fearsome blue dragon by Albrecht Dürer, and on the reverse was a greeting in pencil. I mentioned his gift to Tess Lewis, the translator of the book, and that I was very much looking forward to reading it. Quick as a flash an email came back saying that as I had just been through a bad emotional break up, I was not to read the novel under any circumstances – any circumstances whatsoever. It was not a book for the broken-hearted. A little taken aback I did, however, obey my wise and good friend.

A few weeks ago and with some trepidation, I decided that I was now sufficiently robust to bookblast durer dragonread Ludwig’s Room. I was also curious to discover why it would have been so harmful for the recently dumped. Like Dürer’s dragon, it is a spiky, frightening, bleak and at times difficult book to read. But also like Dürer’s mythical beast, it is finely drawn and deceptively engaging. At times, it is very funny in a self-deprecating rather black-humoured way.
 Continue reading Guest Review | Henrietta Foster | Ludwig’s Room, Alois Hotschnig

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