Oh dear

You know what it’s like. You create an online space for yourself, you love it intensely for a while and everything about it is very important, and then real life hits you in the face and then it’s a year later. It’s all good though – I’ve just been busy with finding my place in London, finding ways in which I can become useful, learning and doing new things. I’ve had an excerpt of my translation into English published by For Books’ Sake, of Sylwia Chutnik’s punchy Hustlerettes. If you prefer your translation the other way round and more subtle, three of her poems in my translation saw the light of day in Artpapier. New Statesman ran my feature on Polish politician and activist Anna Grodzka.

But the biggest adventure has been becoming Free Word Centre‘s Translator in Residence. It’s such an amazing opportunity – it pushes me to my limits, what with the fact I also have a job in a publishing house, but hey! I’ve written a reading list for them, held an event on contracts for literary translators, will hold another one, on women’s voices in international literature, on March 10th, and then there’s the big one – my own seminar at the London Book Fair. I also experimented with co-translation for the first time, with the brilliant Anna Hyde: we worked on Irit Amiel’s very short story for Holocaust Memorial Day. After interpreting for the Polish cult activist “Major” Fydrych, I wrote on the relevance of orange dwarf hats to Polish politics and translated reportage on Chechen refugees in a Polish school. Also, bizarrely, I was interviewed by the incredible writer and poet Wioletta Grzegorzewska, who was nominated for the prestigious literary award Nike this year for her oneiric yet gritty childhood novel “Guguly” (forthcoming in English from Portobello, in Eliza Marciniak’s translation), for her series of talks with Polish writers, translators and poets who now live in the UK.

So here’s the linkdump that is now my professional life. Curious to see where that takes me.