Tune in to the final eight episodes of the BookBlast Podcast series, Bridging the Divide: Translation and the Art of Empathy for some literary finds.
Podcast interview Lars Mytting and his translator Deborah Dawkin discuss The Bell in the Lake
Mytting’s superb, sweeping investigation of legend, superstition, and the effects of industrial and ideological change on a small, secluded village in rural Norway is the first in a hugely popular trilogy.
BookBlast Review The Bell in the Lake
Podcast interview Christopher MacLehose, publisher of Lars Mytting & founder of MacLehose Press, Mountain Leopard Press, Open Borders Press
Christopher MacLehose brought WG Sebald, José Saramago, Haruki Murakami, Claudio Magris, Javier Marías, Jin Yong and many others to English-language readers. He is credited as having launched the bestselling genre of crime fiction in translation now known as “Nordic Noir by publishing Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson. Hear a rare interview with a consistently passionate advocate of fine literature in translation over many decades.
Podcast interview (in English) Georgia de Chamberet with Tahar Ben Jelloun. Voice-over by Issa Naseri
The Moroccan poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist, Tahar Ben Jelloun, is one of France’s most celebrated writers. He has written extensively about Moroccan culture, the immigrant experience, human rights, and sexual identity. An author who intervenes in politics, On Terrorism: Conversations with My Daughter (translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) is the third book in a series in which the previous titles are Racism and Islam explained. It takes the form of a semi-imagined dialogue between him and his daughter.
Podcast (in French) Georgia de Chamberet interviews Tahar Ben Jelloun
Podcast, Lucy Popescu interviews Tommy Wieringa & his translator Sam Garrett
Wieringa’s novel The Death of Murat Idrissi was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019. In 2018 he won the Bookspot Literatuurprijs for his novel De heilige Rita, The Blessed Rita, published this year by Scribe UK. Hear Wieringa and his translator make a compelling and moving case for empathy with those living on the margins of society.
Podcast, Georgia de Chamberet interviews veteran publisher Philip Gwyn Jones
Philip Gwyn Jones has extensive experience at the heart of literary publishing having started his career at the late, lamented Flamingo imprint at HarperCollins, then founding Portobello Books and merging it with Granta Books, moving on to Scribe, then heading up the Picador imprint at Macmillan until recently.
Podcast, Lucy Popescu interviews Natasha Lehrer translator of The White Dress
In The White Dress, Nathalie Léger tells the story of Pippa Bacca, a thirty-three-year-old Italian feminist performance artist who hitchhiked from Milan to Jerusalem wearing a white wedding dress to symbolise “marriage between different peoples and nations.”Through her intense examination of Bacca’s final work and of the often polarised public reaction to the role of women in art, Léger also addresses her own conflicted relationship with her elderly mother.”
BookBlast Review The White Dress
Podcast, Lucy Popescu interviews Goran Vojnović & his translator Olivia Hellewell
In The Fig Tree, deftly translated by Olivia Hellewell, Goran Vojnović portrays three generations of a family whose lives are marked by the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its brutal aftermath. It is a remarkable portrait of a country’s fragmentation and a family’s fracture.”
Podcast, Georgia de Chamberet interviews Beka Adamashvili & his translator Tamara Japaridze
As a reminder of what entertaining, inoffensive satire constitutes, pick up a copy of Bestseller by Georgian trailblazer, Beka Adamashvili, deftly translated by Tamar Japaridze, (Dedalus Books). Multiple allusions from literary classics are woven into his postmodern narrative as he sends up digimodernism and the shallowness of the desire for fame. Dante, Conan Doyle, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell and other literary heavyweights rebel against the author.
Season 1 info: Bridging the Divide: Translation and the Art of Empathy
The Hosts
Bridging the Divide is hosted by editor, Georgia de Chamberet, and journalist, Lucy Popescu. The series introduces to readers a selection of new writing in translation by diverse authors, and flies in the face of the view that literary translation is just for the highbrow.
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