Saraband Books spoke ‘For Women in Translation Month 2021’, the award-winning translator Antoinette Fawcett about her experience of translating SHOCKED EARTH by Saskia Goldschmidt.
In this wonderful article she gives us an inside view about the questions a translator is confronted with. From replicating the feeling of the novel to individual word choices, you can read about it in this blog.
“It’s nearly three months since Shocked Earth, my translation of Saskia Goldschmidt’s novel Schokland, was published, and I still feel excited and overwhelmed by the reactions I’ve had from a variety of readers, and especially from people I don’t know at all, like Helen Vassallo, on her Translating Women blog. Helen was one of the first people to review the novel and what she said was so affirming that it made me jump with joy. Although it may seem strange to say that I was pleased to read that the novel had moved her to tears, I really was overjoyed that her emotional response mirrored my own. I also wept – and laughed, and spluttered with anger, annoyance and frustration – as I was translating the novel, and not only in the early stages. That is down to Saskia Goldschmidt’s masterly creation of plot and character and her dramatic sense of dialogue, action, and scene-setting.”
Continue reading at the website of Saraband >>
“Shocked Earth exquisitely captures the way our lives and identities are interwoven with the land we live on, and how its destruction will ultimately be our own. A powerful portrait of a family, an exploration of love and grief, it is perhaps most of all an essential call to action – I was both heartbroken and inspired.”