#iain galbraith

[womenintranslation]

The private relationship with language also alters the way in which a translator reads a text for translation, paying close attention to both the contrasts but also the possibilities that open up between different languages.

Rebecca DeWald, reviewing Esther Kinsky’s “River,” translated from German by Iain Galbraith (Transit Books, 2018) on Reading in Translation.

[guernicamag]

Mithraic

Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine years Zarvan murmured to get a son

And now his descendants are flogging off the houses of heaven and the five coasts of the earth

With his sea-goat ready for departure the mythologist beholds once again the shattered world egg Poor Summer in Franconia

The poster in the village shop recalls the yellowed terror of the Colorado beetle

In the backroom behind her the shopkeeper’s children sit glued to the nation’s wooden eye

Windfalls lie leaden in the garden and blue in the crayfish-stream flow the suds from the washing machine

The Moor on the hill peeps from an American tank among the dying spruces

In the afternoon my crazy grandfather torches the fields

My last aspirin dissolves gently in a glass

As the pain subsides I hear once more the call of the distant posthorn

By W. G. Sebald, translated from the German by Iain Galbraith. From Across the Land and the Water, to be published by Random House on April 3, 2012. New from Guernica.