News and views from Vagabond Voices and the people we work with. Blog posts include explorations of translated literature; cover art design; storytelling; the acts of reading, writing and translating books; and more.
Can a translation be beautiful? Is it even noticed? In this instalment of our Think in Translation blog series, Vagabond’s founder Allan Cameron, who has translated dozens of books, discusses his process for translating The Anonymous Novel from Italian into English. The Anonymous Novel has received much critical praise, including being called “a literary miracle” by Vitali Vitaliev. The Herald said Allan’s translation brilliantly conveys the sense “that some Russian Master had been leaning over [the author’s] shoulder, guiding his hand.”
Why should you read a translated novel, when there are so many good ones written in English? Surely a translation is never as good as the original? Who benefits most from translated literature? In this blog post Vagabond founder Allan Cameron explores these questions and also discusses the precarious position of small publishers of translated literary fiction.
Vagabond founder Allan Cameron discusses the importance of supporting physical bookshops and smaller online chains like Wordery as opposed to buying books on Amazon.
With his cover for Helen Lamb’s vividly atmospheric novel Three Kinds of Kissing, designer Mark Mechan aimed to capture the mood of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s – the period in which the story takes place. This is one of the most detailed, unique covers he’s created for us. In this blog post he breaks down his design process.
Read MoreThe subtle spellbinding strength of Helen’s writing comes from an intuitive, keenly felt sense of what makes human lives so special, and sometimes so messy and difficult. Helen knew that what doesn’t get talked about, what lies behind a look or a glance, is what really matters. This unswerving commitment to the “truth” of her characters runs through Three Kinds of Kissing. The story of Grace and Olive, and of the secret that binds them together and tears them apart, may be a work of fiction but it is unwaveringly honest. Chris Powici, writer and former partner of the late Helen Lamb, discusses Lamb’s writing process and interests.
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What would you like to know about the process of translating novels? We’re now wrapping up Series 1 of our Think in Translation podcast and blog. Thank you to all who’ve listened and participated in our debate on literary translation! At the start of this project we sent out a two-question survey in the hopes of getting a better sense of what it is about translation and translated books that most interests our readers and listeners. The following blog post is the first of two parts (we’ll do one post per question) in which Allan Cameron, Vagabond’s founder as well as a writer and translator himself, responds to the questions we received.