Pomegranate Star Publishing

07/09/2025

A time when there were many fewer tourists about! These pics were taken from an exhibition at Watts Gallery last year.

04/08/2025

Enjoyed reading this article about Potentialities ... and how a text communicates.

“Translation is something of the runt of the literary litter, more often perceived as grunt work than art work,” Max Norman writes. “Its practitioners have rarely received attention for anything other than screwing up.” In the United States, it’s estimated that about 3% of books published annually are translations. But translators are increasingly visible in the public sphere.

Damion Searls, who has translated the Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, gives neither an apology nor a theory nor a history but, rather, a “philosophy” of translation in his new essay, “The Philosophy of Translation.” More precisely, he offers a “phenomenology” of translation, the study not of how the world might be perceived in the abstract but of our actual experience of the world. For Searls, translation is phenomenological because it is fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then recreated for a new reader.

Reading, according to Searls, is a form of perception, and a text is rather like a world, Norman writes. Words and phrases present affordances that readers take up as they go. A translator, then, isn’t just a lexical go-between, interpreting one word at a time. A translator, rather, is a reader who re-creates their own path through the textual world of a book. Read about one translator’s philosophy of the craft, which centers on trust and freedom: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/sHdXdc

31/07/2025

'I like anything that seems difficult of attainment'. I loved this quote written on the wall. The words are from an explorer at the beginning of the 20th century, and they seems to reflect something tenacious about the spirit of the age. If you are interested to know whose quote it is, ask me in the comments!

15/07/2025

One of the extraordinary things I have found recently after finding the new copies of Ottoman texts by Olga de Lebedeff in Leiden (at the university Special Collections library), is that ChatGPT offered an almost instantaneous speedy modernized translation and simplified transcription from Ottoman Turkish!

I could barely believe it. Some elements of the source text were less legible for ChatGPT to read, however, but it preserves as much meaning as possible.

This page is the introduction to Lermontov's 'Demon' (Iblis) described as a prose-poetic adaptation. ChatGPT explains: The style is romantic, emotional and slightly mystical, consistent with late 19th-century Ottoman literary adaptations of Russian Romanticism.

24/06/2025

Photos from my perusing the various biography sections at Foyles in Charing Cross Road yesterday...(yes, and the wonderful cafe!)... thanks to both Chris upstairs and downstairs for their advice and chatting about my book.

14/06/2025

I found this in my grandmother's dictionary today! Where was the old Hotel Continental in Constantinople? Does anyone know?

16/05/2025

Grateful to see this picture from Watkins Books in London featuring Olga de Lebedeff - A Life Across Empires 😀😀😀

08/05/2025

Lovely to have had a book launch with the Diplomatic Families and Spouses group in Surrey today! Thank you for hearing my talk on how this book about Olga de Lebedeff got written and how the story unfolded.