To see the worlds behind the names behind the trees behind the forest, all convolved together with strange and impossible contingencies…

How does a book come to be translated? How does a book come to be translated into Estonian, a language with only about a million speakers? What’s the connection between translation and the oldest living tree in the world, or translation, Soviet gulags, and Ronald Reagan? If you’re curious about any of these things, then...

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The books I wrote but cannot read (and how translations come to be)

I’ve just received my copy of the new Estonian translation of Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider. It’s now sitting in a very special section of my bookshelf: “my” translations. So far, there are Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Russian*, and now Estonian editions of Charles Darwin’s Barnacle; this spring they’ll be joined by a Chinese...

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