From Scandinavian crime to Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausagaard, it’s boom time for foreign fiction in the UK. But the right translation is crucial, says Rachel Cooke, while, below, some of the best translators tell us their secrets

Last year, I decided to treat myself to a new copy of Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, a novel I have loved ever since I first read it as a teenager, and whose dreamy opening line in its original translation from the French by Irene Ash – “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness” – I know by heart. But which one to get? In the end, I decided to go for something entirely new and ritzy, which is how I came to buy the Penguin Modern Classics edition, translated by Heather Lloyd.

Some days later, in bed, I began reading it. The shock was tremendous, disorienting. “This strange new feeling of mine, obsessing me by its sweet languor, is such that I am reluctant to dignify it with the fine, solemn name of ‘sadness’,” went the first sentence, which sounded to my ears a little as though a robot had written it. For a while I pressed on, telling myself it was stupid to cling to only one version, as if it were a sacred thing, and that perhaps I would soon fall in love with this no doubt very clever and more accurate new translation. Pretty soon, though, I gave up. However syntactically correct it might be, the prose had for me lost all of its magic. It was as if I’d gone out to buy a silk party dress and come home with a set of nylon overalls.

This time last year, Ferrante was everywhere. Every book-loving friend of mine had either read her, or was just about to

Last week, I mentioned this experience to Ann Goldstein, the acclaimed translator of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. She laughed. “I know what you mean,” she said, down the line from New York. “My feeling about Proust is that he’s Scott-Moncrieff [C K Scott-Moncrieff, who published his English translation of A La recherche du temps perdu as Remembrance of Things Past in the 1920s]. I haven’t read the newer translations – but I don’t want to. I’m very attached to his, even though people always say ‘he did this’ or ‘he did that’.” If Goldstein is aware that for many people she will always, now, be the one and only translator of My Brilliant Friend and the other novels that make up Ferrante’s best-selling Neapolitan quartet, she gave no sign.

Translation matters. It always has, of course – and should you be interested in the many ways it can affect the reader’s response to a book, I recommend both Tim Parks’s essay collection Where I’m Reading From, in which he asks interesting questions about the global market for fiction, and Julian Barnes’s brilliant and questing 2010 essay, Translating Madame Bovary. But perhaps right now translation is more important than ever – for suddenly, foreign literature seems finally to be finding its place in Britain, an island where it has previously struggled to attract substantial numbers of readers. How did this happen? It’s hard to say, but perhaps it began, thinking back, with the Scandinavian crime sagas — by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø et al – that we all began gobbling up in increasingly vast quantities around the turn of the century. Then there was Karl Ove Knausgaard’s confessional series of novels, My Struggle, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett, and a strange new addiction for many (the first volume came out in 2009). Finally, and most gloriously, there was Elena Ferrante. This time last year, Ferrante was everywhere. Every single book-loving friend of mine had either read her, or was just about to.

Naturally, publishers and booksellers alike are keen to capitalise on our exotic new appetites (to use the phrase “cash in” seems a bit unfair in these slightly rarefied circumstances). Nearly every week, publicists send me new or previously ignored (by us) foreign novels. Among those I’ve received this year, and thoroughly recommend, are Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (trans: Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe), a Turkish novel from 1943; The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca (trans: Jill Foulston), an Italian novel – it, too, is set in Naples – from 2009; and, most gripping of all, the Israeli page-turner Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (trans: Sondra Silverston). Meanwhile, Daunt’s publishing wing has just brought out what I believe will be my next foreign read: Marie, by the French writer Madeleine Bourdouxhe (trans: Faith Evans). The chic book with which to be seen this summer, it was written in 1940 and is set in 1930s Paris. It tells the story of a happily married woman who has a passionate affair with a younger man. Comparisons have been made both to Proust and Virginia Woolf.

“There are some books whose success is very local,” says Adam Freudenheim, the publisher of Pushkin Press, and the man who introduced me to the Russian writer Teffi (and to Gundar-Goshen). “But the best fiction almost always travels well, in my view.” For him, as for other presses that specialise in translated work (Harvill Secker, Portobello, And Other Stories, MacLehose Press and others), the focus is simply on publishing a great book; the fact that it is translated is “not the decisive thing”. And this, in turn, is how he accounts for the increasing popularity of foreign fiction – a shift that he, like Ann Goldstein, believes is real enough to turn out to be permanent. There are, quite simply, a lot of great translated books out there now, their covers appetising, their introductions informative, their translations (mostly) works of art in their own right.

Which brings me back to where I started. Last year, in another sign of how things are changing, Waterstones launched its monthly Rediscovered Classics promotion with Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. I was happy about this, but disappointed, to put it mildly, to find that it was the Penguin Modern Classics edition that it had piled up in-store, awaiting new readers. So what I want to say now is this: if you tried it then and hated it, please, have another go, only this time entrust yourself to Irene Ash’s gorgeous 1955 translation. The story of a teenager called Cecile who discovers, during a golden Riviera holiday, that her beloved papa is to remarry, I am willing to bet it will cast a spell on you, whether you are poolside, or stuck at home in Britain, watching the rain.

Deborah Smith, Korean to English: ‘Han Kang is very generous… she calls them “our” books’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Deborah Smith (left) with Booker-winning author Han Kang: ‘I wanted to be a translator because I love English.’ Photograph: Ben Pruchnie/WireImage

Deborah Smith is translator of The Vegetarian by the Korean writer Han Kang; she and Kang are the co-winners of the Man Booker International prize 2016. She is also the translator of Kang’s more recent novel, Human Acts, and of another Korean writer, Bae Suah. She lives in London, where she has recently set up a non-profit publisher, Tilted Axis Press; its first book, Panty by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, is out now.

I started teaching myself Korean in 2010, just before I started an MA in Korean Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies [in London]. The choice of Korean was strangely random; looking back, it doesn’t make any sense. I had this idea that I wanted to be a translator. I loved reading and writing, and I’d always wanted to learn a language; I was 22, and could only speak English, which was a bit embarrassing. Korean was a language I knew few people study here, and I felt that made it interesting, and that it would give me a niche. I don’t know that it was difficult to learn; I haven’t anything to compare it with. But I only really learned to read Korean. I still find having a conversation in Korean difficult.

Korean literature is incredibly strong. It has dynamism and diversity

I didn’t fall in love with Korean. I wanted to be a translator because I love English. I find some aspects of Korean very beautiful, but it doesn’t have the resonances that English has for me. It was more that I fell in love with certain writers. It has peculiarities as a language. It’s a subject-object-verb language, so a lot of information is delayed until the end of a sentence: Korean writers will often use that to build tension. It’s also a language that marks formality, and uses honorifics; Korea is a traditional Confucian society, which means it’s an age-based hierarchy. But those things demand the least attention, in the sense that they’re always the same. What’s more difficult is its reliance on ambiguity and repetition. Repeating words in English doesn’t give you the same poetic effect as in Korean, and Korean similes are loose, in that you don’t specify the ways in which one thing is like another. That just doesn’t work for an English reader: they would think “that doesn’t sound right”. So I make them less loose, but hopefully in a way that isn’t boring.

I’ve only worked with two writers so far. Han Kang has good English, so she reads my translations, then talks to me about them. She’s not one of those nightmare authors some translators talk about. She has always been very generous in the way she collaborates. She thinks translation is artistic and creative in its own right, and that they’re “our” books. Bae Suah doesn’t read or speak English but is a translator herself, from German to Korean, and so also has a strong idea of translation as creative writing. She thinks I’m the best judge of how to make a book live in my language.

I don’t want to set myself up as some colonial pioneer. There are other translators who’ve been working for many years on Korean literature, and just because they haven’t won a big prize, that doesn’t mean that wasn’t also important work. But there is enough to go round! Korean literature is incredibly strong. It has dynamism and diversity. We’re in the middle of a big change: books like The Vegetarian, popular and critically acclaimed, have made readers, publishers and booksellers much more interested in translation generally – and because only a small percentage of books are published in translation, it’s as if they all come with a special stamp. Only the best of the best gets through. Interview by Rachel Cooke

Ann Goldstein, Italian to English: ‘I’m not creating something new. I don’t feel it’s my job to do that’



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante: ‘It does feel strange to be a well known translator now, it’s totally unexpected.’ Photograph: Peter Ross / Wall Street Journal

Ann Goldstein is best known as the translator of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet of novels, which have sold more than a million copies. She edited the complete works of Primo Levi, for which she received a Guggenheim translation fellowship, and has worked on books by Alessandro Baricco and Giacomo Leopardi. Her translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Street Kids (Ragazzi di vita) is published next month. She has been head of the New Yorker’s copy department since 1980.

I didn’t learn Italian until I was in my 30s, when I began taking weekly lessons with some of my colleagues in the office. The inspiration for it was that I wanted to read The Divine Comedy in Italian, and I dragged everybody else with me. Then about five years later, in 1992, the then editor of the New Yorker, Bob Gottlieb, received a manuscript in Italian. It was by Aldo Buzzi, sent to him by the cartoonist Saul Steinberg, a friend of Buzzi’s. Bob wanted to write a note to Saul, so he ask me to read it so he knew what to say. I read it, and I liked it, so I decided to try translating it – and Bob published it. A year after that, someone asked me to translate my first book. It does feel strange to be a well known translator now, it’s totally unexpected. The idea that any translator would be at all well known strikes me as amazing.

Will I ever meet her? I don’t know. I feel I have a close relationship with her, even though we have no relationship

My spoken Italian is not as good as my reading Italian, but I love the language; that’s why I learned it. It’s a beautiful language: musical, very expressive. It does lots of little things English doesn’t do, like you can add suffixes to words to give them all kinds of subtle nuances. The obvious one is “issimo”, but there are many others. I prefer to stay close to the text when I’m translating. Of course it should read well in English. But I’m not a novelist. I don’t feel like I’m rewriting, or creating something new. I don’t feel it’s my job to do that. For the third or fourth draft, I might work without the text. But in the end, I go back to it, to make sure I haven’t gotten too far away from it. I haven’t worked that closely with many writers because a lot of those I’ve translated are dead – and then there’s Ferrante, who’s an absent writer. I have communicated with her through her publishers. She doesn’t interfere at all; she said she trusted me, which seemed like a compliment.

The success of her novels has been astonishing, a phenomenon. There’s something universally compelling about them, apart from the fact that they’re very readable. I’m not a critic, and I haven’t read lots of contemporary novels, but people who have seem to think there’s nothing else really like them. There’s something about the way she looks at emotional relationships. They examine things you might not necessarily examine yourself. I translated The Days of Abandonment [about a woman who descends into an “absence of sense” when her husband leaves her] first. We all had to do a version of the first chapter, and then they picked me. I remember that I was completely gripped by it. It’s so powerful. It’s a story we all know, but she made it more intense, more interesting, somehow.

Will I ever meet her? I don’t know. I’ve sort of lost interest in that! I guess I have such a strong impression of her from having read her books so many times. I have a close relationship with her, even though I actually have no relationship with her. I’ve just translated Frantumaglia, a collection of her letters, interviews, and more personal essays. It gives a strong sense of her as someone very intelligent, who thinks about things in her own way, who has read a lot, and who is able to use that in a way that isn’t obtrusive. She is very analytical, and critical, knows her own mind, doesn’t want to waste time. If I got an email from her asking to meet up? Yes, it would send me into a bit of a spin. I’d have to practise my Italian for one thing. RC

Edith Grossman, Spanish to English: ‘I thought to stay home and translate was more fun than playing with monkeys’



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Edith Grossman: ‘I put in as many hours as my body can tolerate.’

Edith Grossman is best known for her translations of works by Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, Miguel de Cervantes and Gabriel García Márquez (who once commented that he preferred his work in translation). Harold Bloom commended her 2003 translation of Don Quixote for the “extraordinarily high quality of her prose”. She received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation in 2006 and the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize for her 2008 translation of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s A Manuscript of Ashes. She lives in New York City.

The first translation I did was in the early 70s. I’m 80 now, so I was 30. Thereabouts. I had learned Spanish and I wasn’t sure what I’d do. I thought maybe I’d be an interpreter or whatever. But then I was in graduate school and I thought, well, I’ll be a literary critic. I liked writing about books. I specialised in Spanish and Latin American literature.

Then a friend who was editing a magazine asked me to translate a piece by an Argentine writer named Macedonio Fernández, and I said “Ronald I’m not a translator, I’m a critic”, and he said: “Edie, call yourself whatever you want, just do the damn piece.” And so I did the piece. Macedonio was the most eccentric man and writer one can possibly imagine. I translated this piece called “The surgery of psychic extirpation”. And I mean it was wonderful. This was a procedure whereby you could have certain portions of your memory excised. It’s right out of a TV science fiction. And I thought to sit at home and translate it was more fun than playing with monkeys. I didn’t have to get dressed to go to work. I could smoke all I wanted. And I thought, this is perfect, this is a perfect way for me to work. And so I began to do more and more.

One day an agent I know called me and said “Would you be interested in translating Gabriel Garcia Marquez?”, and I said: “Are you kidding me?” It was to do his great book Love in the Time of Cholera. It took six or seven months to translate. I mean there’s no union representing us, so I tend to work seven days a week, and I put in as many hours as my body can tolerate. Nowadays it kind of becomes more a physical problem of how long I can sit at my desk.

When I spoke to García Márquez on the telephone, his first words were: 'So I hear you’re two-timing me with Cervantes'

I always read the book first. Though a translator friend told me she never reads the book first. And I thought, “Wow, that’s an approach.” You’re putting yourself completely in the position of the reader – every time you turn the page there’s a surprise. So I have tried that and I kind of like it, even though I have been very firm in print about the virtues of reading the book first. I don’t do much research or preparation. I’ve always been of the opinion that whatever I need to know, the writer will tell me.

There is no such thing as a literal translation – languages are entirely different systems and you can’t impose Spanish on English or vice versa. English has its own structure and its own lexicon and Spanish has its own structure and its own lexicon, and they don’t occupy the same space. If it’s a question of my not being able to translate a passage because there are words I don’t know and I can’t find them anywhere, I can’t find them online and I can’t find them in my dictionaries, then I’ll ask the author. And if the author is no longer with us, then I will wing it, as we say, and just do the best I can.

I have had to re-read translations that I’ve done because I’ve used them in classes I teach on contemporary Latin American literature. I always find pages and pages that I would do entirely differently. But you know, it was the best I could do at the time, and so I can’t regret it.

The book I am proudest of is a book of poetry called The Solitudes by a 17th-century poet, whose last name is Góngora, and it is the most difficult poetry that I have ever run across in any language. Very complex structure. And it’s absolutely beautiful, gorgeous poetry. And I thought, oh my God, if I can do this, I can leap tall buildings in a single bound – there’s nothing I can’t do.

I think I enjoy Don Quixote more than any other book. I just fell in love with that novel over and over again. At the beginning of the 00s, I was terrified and excited at the prospect of translating it. I mentioned I was doing it in a note to García Márquez; later, when I spoke to him on the telephone, his first words to me were: “So I hear you’re two-timing me with Cervantes.”

I often think of translation as an aural/oral practice. You have to be able to hear the language of the original. You have to be able to hear the tonalities, what the language indicates about the intelligence or class of the speaker. You have to be able to hear that, in my case in Spanish. And then you have to be able to speak it in English. You know, some idiot asked Gregory Rabassa, García Márquez’s first translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude, if he knew enough Spanish to do it. And Gregory said: “You asked me the wrong question. The real question is, do I know enough English?” Ursula Kenny

George Szirtes, Hungarian to English: ‘No one will ever read you as closely as your translator does’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest George Szirtes: ‘I listen intently for the timbre of the voice.’ Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian

George Szirtes is a poet and translator. Born in Budapest in 1948, he came to England as a refugee aged eight and learned Hungarian again as an adult. He has translated many Hungarian writers including Imre Madách, Sándor Márai and László Krasznahorkai (winner of the 2015 Man Booker International). He won the Dery prize for his translation of Madách’s The Tragedy of Man and the European Poetry Translation prize for Rakovsky’s New Life.

Of the four of us who walked across the border into Austria in 1956 only my father spoke English. What he spoke, he remembered from his school days. I had a bilingual edition of AA Milne’s Now We Are Six from which I had learned the useful words and, but, so…

On arrival in England my parents insisted we speak English from the start. We went to language classes for refugees and while my parents spoke Hungarian to each other they spoke English to us, though my mother was only just learning the language herself. This was hard for my younger brother but, at eight years old, I must have managed all right; within a few months, I was near the top of the class at an English school in London. And so it went on for several years of school, without Hungarian books, without Hungarian friends, my Hungarian forgotten.

When I started writing poetry at the age of 18 it was natural to write in English. I went to art school for five years, writing all the time, lucky in my mentors, and had published three books by the time of my first adult return to Hungary in 1984 at the age of 35. It was then that I was asked to translate poetry from Hungarian to English. I needed help at first but within a couple of years I was working on my own. The poetry I translated taught me a lot and fed into my own poetry. I learned other voices and ways with verse. Then came fiction.

Translators are an intense, highly focused bunch. I admire them enormously

My way with fiction generally is to read the first chapter or so then to get down to it. It is far from scholarly. A kinder way of putting it might be that it isn’t pedantic. I listen intently for the timbre of the voice and seek a comparable voice in English that might bring to English the experience a native reader might have in Hungarian. Narrative proceeds from there.

We tend to think of translation in terms of dictionaries but that’s just the beginning. Literary precision includes the idea of effect, pace, register, intensity and much else. There isn’t always an exact equivalent for a word or phrase: it’s the effect of it that matters. Effect is partly a subjective judgment but so is writing. Nothing in English will capture the tone of Budapest slang. The word “melancholy” does not carry the association of the Hungarian bús (pronounced booosh), that conjures a whole literary period, so some equivalent sensation has to be found.

Most of my translatees have been dead a long time. The dead don’t quarrel. The best of the living, such as László Krasznahorkai, “hear” the translation as well as the opinion of the editor and trust the translator, who by definition never can be perfect. He and I rarely speak while the translation is in process.

Translators are an intense, highly focused bunch. I admire them enormously. No one will ever read you as closely as your translator does. In a language as comfy in its huge soft armchair as English the shock of a strange sensibility entering English can be a delight. The Man Booker International prize is a way of stirring us from our comfort. And after many years I am genuinely beginning to think that literature in translation is becoming less of a curiosity.

Don Bartlett, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German and Spanish to English: ‘I walked all around Oslo to find the murder site’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Don Bartlett: ‘You just have to accept that nothing’s perfect.’

Since completing an MA in literary translation at the University of East Anglia in 2000, Don Bartlett has translated Danish and Norwegian authors including Jo Nesbø, Lars Saabye Christensen and Roy Jacobsen. He has translated Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiography My Struggle, which has been hailed as a literary phenomenon; the fifth instalment, Some Rain Must Fall, was published this year. Bartlett lives in Norfolk with his family.

When I started out as a freelancer, I remember publishers saying to us, translations just don’t sell. I think readers were slightly suspicious, and frightened of more academic translations. But it’s completely turned around. It started in the 1990s – I always look at it from a Nordic point of view – with Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla[’s Feeling for Snow], and then of course Stieg Larsson. Publishers started being a bit more adventurous.

I studied German at university, worked in Austria and Germany, moved to Denmark, then came back to England and married a Spaniard, which meant learning Spanish. And I started reading more in Norwegian. But you’ve only got one head and you can’t concentrate on everything, so while one language flourishes another atrophies. You just have to accept that nothing’s perfect. When I’m translating, it’s better to be in the UK, because you’ve got English all around you, and people may say things, and you think, yeah, that’s the one.

I get on very well with Karl Ove. I sent him 50 pages to see if I’d got the tone right. He wrote back, 'Yes, that’s me'

There are times when you have to go to Norway to do research – when I started the Jo Nesbø novels, I spent ages walking the streets of Oslo, finding out where things were, where this cemetery was, where that murder was. I went to Oslo once because I’d been particularly stumped about the descriptions of a ski mast, which you don’t have in England, and I went up a hill in snow and fog, and I eventually got a picture of this mast so that I could be sure of the translation.Usually words can be translated, but it may be long-winded and not as snappy as the original. And it’s the culture – Norwegians don’t always behave the way we do. They’re forever “throwing their hands in the air” in these novels, and that’s not very English. There’s always a tension between being true to the original and being readable. Knausgaard has very long sentences only separated by commas, so what you want is to re-create that intensity rather than breaking it up with colons and semi-colons, although that would probably be more acceptable English style.

Finding the right voice in Jo Nesbø’s case was about visualising Harry [Hole], the central character, thinking about the kind of person he was. For Knausgaard, in the first person, it was more difficult. It was trying to get inside Karl Ove, meeting him, finding who the person was I was describing. All the characters are, in a sense – I know this can be argued about – real. Karl Ove exists, his wife, friends, so you don’t want to get it too wrong.

I get on very well with Karl Ove. I originally sent him 50 or 60 pages of the first novel and asked if I’d got the tone and voice right. He wrote back and said, “Yes, that’s me.” After that, he said he didn’t want to be on my back. I’ve asked him questions about bits and pieces but he doesn’t really get involved. But he has looked at the books, and wherever he goes, of course, he has to read sections out, so it’s important that he can feel the same kind of rhythms as when he wrote them. Kathryn Bromwich

Melanie Mauthner, French to English: ‘In south London you hear so many Englishes’



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Melanie Mauthner: ‘What is required? A lot of reading, and a lot of listening to the rich variety of Englishes spoken today.’

Best known for translating the works of Rwandan novelist Scholastique Mukasonga, Mauthner worked as a sociology lecturer before becoming a translator. She gained a Hawthornden fellowship in 2013 to translate Mukasonga’s collection L’Iguifou. In 2014 she won the French Voices Award for her translation of the author’s first novel, Our Lady of the Nile. She also performs as part of the London writers’ collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen.

When I was translating Our Lady of the Nile there were many unfamiliar terms I needed to find out about, for example, “un wax africain”. Walking through the alleys of Brixton market, I stepped into a fabric shop, where I discovered what the term means: the process of tie-dyeing cloth with wax, cloth that is then used to fashion women’s dresses and men’s robes. As I was reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction at the time, I realised that the best translation would be “wrapper”.

I want the new reader to hear the text the way I hear it in French, like stepping into a painting, a land, a soundscape

Here is how I translate: I read the whole book first, as well as other books by the author so that I have the sound and feel of their prose in my head. The challenge is to find a similar voice in English. Would Scholastique Mukasonga sound like Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison or Bernardine Evaristo? Walking around Brixton was helpful. It was in Brixton library that I first stumbled on this Rwandan author’s short stories. In south London you can hear so many “Englishes”: African, African Caribbean and Latin American. Mukasonga writes in a classical, lyrical French. Think Chinua Achebe or Nadine Gordimer. I needed to find a warm, tender, lively and smooth neutral English. I knew I would keep all the Kinyarwanda words that describe plants, fabric, food and spiritual rituals.

What is required? A lot of reading, and a lot of listening to the rich variety of Englishes spoken today. As a translator, my task is to hear a text with its flow, rhythm, syntax, register and diction, to hear it anew in my head. The work is to re-invent the text. I want the new reader to hear the text the way I hear it when I read it in French, with its texture and colour, like stepping into a painting, a land and soundscape.

As with any piece of writing, the most difficult part of the job is editing the drafts. This is slow work in order to ensure that the reader will not stumble or bump into a jarring word or clause. I work straight through to produce a first draft, and then I rewrite until it feels as if it had been written in English.

I didn’t meet the author but we corresponded by email after I sent her queries. I am fortunate because so many experienced and established translators share their advice with incredible generosity. It is a vibrant, supportive community with many workshops, summer schools and conferences where newcomers can learn from professionals. As a reader, I’m immensely grateful to translators who re-create the worlds of Jacek Hugo-Bader, Erri de Luca and Joseph Roth, such as Antonia Lloyd-Jones from Polish, Danièle Valin from Italian and Stéphane Pesnel from German.