A blog mainly about literature and life in the Nordic countries.
Monday, 6 April 2009
100th Post
Just a note to record the fact that Nordic Voices in Translation recently published its 100th post - not bad for a blog that's still less than a month old.
This is a respectable tally. News articles, excerpts, poems, publications, and the occasional stray into the past, have meant that there is now a reasonable spread, giving a picture of things available to read from 'Norden'.
Translation features, but not only translation. Because so much remains untranslated into English, after decades of dwindling interest in Britain. There is a lot of catching up to do, exploring all avenues of literature in the several countries covered.
But what is posted up here includes works in progress and hints at up-and-coming writers, so that in future it might not always take decades before Britain, with much trumpeting, 'discovers' a Nordic author who already has five books in German, three in French, four in Dutch, but not a single one, yet, in English. A paradoxical situation arises where Britain has by far the smallest percentage of translations, but because of the status of English as 'the world language', a book does not truly 'exist' in translation until it has appeared in English.
1 comment:
This is a respectable tally. News articles, excerpts, poems, publications, and the occasional stray into the past, have meant that there is now a reasonable spread, giving a picture of things available to read from 'Norden'.
Translation features, but not only translation. Because so much remains untranslated into English, after decades of dwindling interest in Britain. There is a lot of catching up to do, exploring all avenues of literature in the several countries covered.
But what is posted up here includes works in progress and hints at up-and-coming writers, so that in future it might not always take decades before Britain, with much trumpeting, 'discovers' a Nordic author who already has five books in German, three in French, four in Dutch, but not a single one, yet, in English. A paradoxical situation arises where Britain has by far the smallest percentage of translations, but because of the status of English as 'the world language', a book does not truly 'exist' in translation until it has appeared in English.
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