Dancing on Ropes
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€17.50
'Full of lively stories ... leaves the reader with an awed respect for the translator's task' Economist
Would Hiroshima have been bombed if Japanese contained a phrase meaning 'no comment'? Is it alright for missionaries to replace the Bible's 'white as snow' with 'white as fungus' in places where snow never falls? Who, or what, is Kuzma's mother, and why was Nikita Khrushchev so threateningly obsessed with her (or it)?
The course of diplomacy rarely runs smooth; without an invisible army of translators and interpreters, it could hardly run at all. Join veteran translator Anna Aslanyan to explore hidden histories of cunning and ambition, heroism and incompetence. Meet the figures behind the notable events of history, from the Great Game to Brexit, and discover just how far a simple misunderstanding can go.
Anna Aslanyan is a journalist, translator and public service interpreter. She contributes to the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and other UK-based publications, writing about books and arts. Her translations from Russian include Post-Post Soviet? Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade, a collection of essays edited by Ekaterina Degot et al. (University of Chicago Press, 2013); contemporary short stories for Best European Fiction (Dalkey Archive, 2013, 2018); and A Journey to Inner Africa, a 19th-century travelogue by Egor Kovalevsky (Amherst College Press, 2020). Her popular history of translation, Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History, was published by Profile in May 2021.