Half of this week's ten book selections are works of translation. We have especially skilled Finnish translators to thank for them.
How Our understanding of literature – and the entire world and humanity – would be empty without Finnish translators!
This came to my mind when I read translated books presented and evaluated in Helsingin Sanomat in recent weeks. Most of them would remain inaccessible to Finnish readers without skillful translations.
Andrea Abreu novel Cloud cover (Panza de burro, Siltala) depicts girls awakening to their sexuality and shows a side of Tenerife that tourists never see. In his book review Anni Valtonen especially praises the translator Sari Selanderin work.
“Abreu's style lives on in the text with startling credibility, and as a Spanish speaker myself, I can almost hear in my ears the text written by Abreu in the original language, whose translation rights – no wonder – have been sold to more than twenty countries,” Valtonen writes.
Likewise has made a great impression Tero Valkonen when translating the New Zealander of Eleanor Catton of the work Birnam Forest (Birnam Wood). It is Valkonen's third Catton translation.
And thank you Markus Juslinin we can read prose translated directly from Japan. By Toshikazu Kawaguchi Before the coffee gets cold (Coffee ga samenai uchini, Bazar) takes you to a small street in Tokyo and to a cafe where, when sitting on a certain chair, the customer can travel back in time.
Antti Majanderin according to Kawaguchi succeeds in the impossible in his novel: To write about great sorrows as a feather.
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