I'm entering a strange new world (and I kind of love it)

Dear fellow readers, writers, publishers, hi everybody,

As this is my first blog post, I'd like to share a moment of personal pride and professional nervousness. The publishing house I work for - Periplaneta, a tiny, but fierce indie publisher located in Berlin - is releasing an English language edition in October. As of today, the first book from the first batch of five is already inofficially available as an ebook on amazon. (Alive to Love and Strive by Clint Lucas, if anyone asks.) It's a small moment of pride, I'm in the credits.

The idea for this book was born two years ago, long before I started working here, and it was a project started just for the fun of it, with a German student who wanted to have a try at translation, and a few people fluent in English as a second language.

It sounded like a folly. Clint's original and well-sold book is one of many anthologies of stories read out in Berlin's very, very lively and unique literary stage scene. (Literary stages are live events were authors perform their own text in front of an audience, similar to poetry slams, but without competition. There's a few dozen of them in Berlin, more than in the entire rest of Germany. The Goethe institute prefers to call them 'reading stages', but I always felt that this kind of belittles the authors performing there.)

Translating it into English was a nightmare for those involved. A book like that uses highly idiomatic German, with many, many colloquial terms and expressions. I was the third editor to have a try at sorting out the good translations from the bad, to find what got lost and what was unintentionally added. (The joys of translation will require another blog post someday.) I'm a translator by trade, but I prefer, as most of us do, translating into my native language.

I did the job, more or less. The translation isn't perfect, it's far from it. (Here the nervousness sets in, although I was only the editor.) But it's readable, and the imperfections give it a certain amount of germanophone charme.

From now on, the translations will be my job. (The next one is in the works and will probably be released in late November or early December.) Here the nervousness makes itself at home, asks for a cup of tea, and settles down. We might have kids someday.