Martha Cooley, who translated Antonio Tabucchi’s Time Ages in a Hurry, recently did a wonderful interview with Village of Crickets. She says of Tabucchi:

When I look at my own engagement with Tabucchi, I always go back to that novel and the incredible rush I got out of reading it, because it did such a good job of taking the personal and the political and entwining and complicating their relationship. Tabucchi is very good at finding the moment of pure human loss, desire, need, that forms the connection between the realms of private life and political reality.

In the interview, she delves in-depth into language and craft, as well as the state of translation:

Yet we believe language itself is free. The truth, though, is that we live in a time when English has become the hegemonic language, and it’s anything but free. It’s the price of entry for many professions, and if you don’t have the money or the education to learn it, you’re locked out. This is one of the main reasons why so little literature from other languages and cultures is translated into English.

 

Read more here, and come by the Community Bookstore on April 30 to hear Martha Cooley and co-translator Antonio Romani discuss Time Ages in a Hurry with Lynne Sharon Schwartz.