Friday, December 17, 2010

Edging through the alphabets

The first translations of Janet Frame's work were into the German language, beginning in 1961.


The first Frame titles to be translated were Owls Do Cry, The Lagoon and The Edge of the Alphabet:

Wenn Eulen Schreien, Nannen, Hamburg 1961

Die Lagune, Nannen, Hamburg 1962

Am Rande des Alphabets Nannen, Hamburg, 1963

Faces in the Water was also translated. Schimmen in Het Water was published in 1963 by Dutch publisher Van Ditmar, Amsterdam.

There were also early Italian and Spanish translations.



When Janet Frame published her bestselling autobiographical trilogy in the mid 1980s, translations of her work again spiked, and her fame grew even more after she won the Commonwealth Literary Prize in the late 1980s.

Then in the 1990s Jane Campion's film adaptation of Janet Frame's autobiography brought her life and work to the attention of a wider audience, outside the usual boundaries of literary fiction.

The number of foreign languages Janet Frame has been translated into continues to grow.

Recently, deals have been agreed for Romania and Russia.

Here is the list so far:

Brazilian Portuguese

Czech

Chinese

Danish

Dutch

Finnish

French

German

Hebrew

Hungarian

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Norwegian

Mexican Spanish

Polish

Portuguese

Romanian

Russian

Slovenian

Spanish

Swedish

Turkish


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