Rarely have I felt so “seen” by a book. Like Jen Calleja, I’m a German>English literary translator (in the broadest sense), and a musician, and someone whose brain perhaps makes her uniquely suited to the strange, solitary life of a translator and who would struggle in a more conventional working environment, and someone who has faced (and continues to face) many of the professional and personal challenges mentioned in this book. I wanted to highlight something on almost every page, and I found myself (ruefully) chuckling and nodding throughout.

This is a really interesting experimental work. It’s not a novel, not a memoir as such, and not a book of essays. It takes the form of an imagined visit to a fair (like an art fair, or a book fair, or a fun fair), with each short “chapter” situated in a different part of this virtual fair and covering a different aspect of translation and life as a translator. It’s funny and heartbreaking and infuriating, and reading it made me feel much less alone in my weird little corner of the literary/publishing world. I would be interested to know what someone who wasn’t immersed in this world would think of the book. For my part, I’m much to close to the subject matter to think it was anything but excellent.

Further reading…