Translation Tuesday – excerpt of Filip Springer’s The History of a Disappearance

Springer’s collection of reportage about a Polish town that disappeared has recently been translated into English and won Asymptote’s annual translation contest

By Filip Springer and Sean Gasper Bye for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

For this and the next two Translation Tuesdays, we are thrilled to bring you the winners of our annual Close Approximations translation contest, judged by Margaret Jull Costa, Ottilie Mulzet, and Michael Hofmann. First up, Sean Gasper Bye’s translation from the Polish of Filip Springer’s nonfiction. Margaret chose Bye’s entry as the winner “because I found the subject matter totally gripping – it’s set in 1944, when the Soviet counteroffensive has reached the Vistula River – and the prose itself is satisfyingly dense, and it has what I look for in any good translation, a very convincing voice.”

–The editors at Asymptote

You don’t negotiate with a horde; with a horde you fight to your last breath

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