The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE recommends an impressive impersonation of Bob Dylan
‘Maybe there is no such thing as a fatherland’
LEIGH WILSON applauds the new translation of a novel from 1932 that is a hymn to values inimical to the forces that were growing in Germany in the early 1930s
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Here, Vermiglio, William Tell and Wolf Man
New releases from Thorpe and Morrison, Daria Kulesh, and Will Finn and Rosie Calvert
RINA ARYA confronts the brutal operation of Francis Bacon’s approach to portraiture
Emphasising his continuous engagement in labour movement struggles, ALISTAIR FINDLAY salutes John Foster’s contribution as activist, strategist, intellectual and defender of the Morning Star
ANDY MIAH advocates the use of AI to assist people by expanding access to global literature and culture
EWAN KOTZ relishes a veteran Glasgow band that have lost none of their verve for live performance
Background for Love
Helen Wolff, Pushkin Press, £16.99
ALL publishing can be seen as a kind of translation. Sometimes from one language to another but also from one place to another, one time to another, one reader to another.
The writer and publisher Helen Wolff knew this. It shaped her life as one of the 20th century’s most important publishers, and it has shaped too the life of her novella, Background For Love, which has just been translated into English from German for the first time by her grandson, Tristram Wolff.
It is a startling work following a young woman as she escapes the rising fascism of 1930s Berlin with her older lover for the south of France. It shimmers with summer sun, with a young woman’s desire for her lover but also with her stronger desire to create her life as her own. And among the shimmering, the novella asserts too those human values, evident in the best kinds of translation, which are our defence against the narrow and the limited.
Similar stories
LEO BOIX selects the best books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction written by Latinx and Latin American authors published this year
LEO BOIX reviews a noir novel featuring flies, a fumigation company and two female ex-convicts by Argentinian Claudia Pineiro, an anthology by contemporary Latin American writers and collections of poetry by Chilean Gabriela Mistral and Puerto Rican Irizelma Robles
Magic realism by Brazilian Itamar Vieira Junior, nonfiction by Peruvian Gabriela Wiener, and poetry by Chilean Vicente Huidobro and Zapotec poet Victor Teran
For the third Formula 1 Grand Prix in a row, controversies off the track are threatening to overshadow the almost predictable action on it