Saturday 11 April 2009

Kiiltomato / Lysmasken - reviews site

Visitors to this blog who are translators and are able to read both Finnish and Swedish will find quite a few useful reviews on the Kiiltomato / Lysmasken website. If you are not sure whether the latest work by some known or unknown author may be worth translating, you can search there for reviews. Both Olli Jalonen's and Heidi von Wright's latest works feature.

The website dates back to 2000, so there are a large number of reviews already available. And not only of Finnish or Nordic literature. You can see reviews of works by such authors as Le Clézio, Lispector, Reich-Ranicki, Turgenev, Pessoa, C.S. Lewis, Pirandello, Yourcenar, Kertész, etc., when these have been translated into either Finnish or Swedish.

2 comments:

David McDuff said...

The reviews are certainly useful for information about books and authors, though some of the contributions are rather on the dry side. I liked Maili Öst's review of the new book about Hellaakoski - the piece is well-written and gives the reader a real insight into both the book and the poet.

Eric Dickens said...

One of the most recent Kiiltomato / Lysmasken reviews is of a recent Finnish translation of Charlotte Brontë's novel "The Professor". One thing I didn't see in that review was the fact that this is very much a macaronic novel in the original English version, as quite a few dialogues are given untranslated in French. I wonder what the Finnish translator did with these passages.