RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
‘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
LOVE IN SWASTIKA’S SHADOW: Summer 1932 in Mecklenburg; Propaganda image showing the Nazi SA canvassing votes in ‘even the smallest farm’
[Pic: Bundesarchiv Bild/CC]
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
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.
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