Esther Kinsky

Translating is like love. You can talk about it endlessly because discourse makes a different facet of it sparkle each time while all the more surely obscuring its essence. Esther Kinsky, who translates into German from Russian, Polish and English and who herself writes fiction, knows that and acts accordingly. That is what makes Fremdsprechen (Foreign Speaking) such a charming and thought-provoking book. (…)
Just as love has Plato’s myth of spherical creatures, translation, too, has an origin fable in which the initial unity gives way to division and consequent longing. Kinsky tells the story of the Tower of Babel as a story of punishment and loss of innocence, but in the confusion of languages she also sees a chance that childish “stasis” will give way to the transforming activity of the truly adult human being.

Burkhard Müller: “Wie viele Schattierungen hat die blaue Blume?”
© Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 March 2013