Three Percent #29: Get to the Whale!

This week’s podcast is a special feature on Kaija Straumanis, who recently received her MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. Although our conversation is a bit rangy (and if you think this is random, you should visit Plüb sometime), we focus mainly on Kaija’s translation of Latvian author Inga Ābele’s Paisums (High Tide).

High Tide is a somewhat fractured novel that tells the story of three main characters: Ieva, a deeply depressed screenwriter; Aksels, her former lover; and Andrejs, her husband, who was imprisoned for murdering Aksels. Structurally, this novel is pretty interesting as well. It opens with a dream, then inhabits the minds of the main characters in a series of “present day” chapters. After we see where these characters are post-jail, post-murder, etc., the book starts counting backwards, with sections about the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, to fill in certain aspects of the plot and characterization.

To help make this podcast make more sense, I’d highly recommend reading this fairly long sample that covers a lot of the bits that we talk about.

For more information about the University of Rochester’s Translation Programs, just click here.

And in terms of Kaija, in addition to translating from Latvian and German (on occasion), she’s a very good photographer. Oh, and she’s obsessed with Moby-Dick (in a way), which maybe explains the title of this podcast, and the reason why we’re using Yellow Ostrich’s Whale as this week’s intro/outro music.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking here. To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s Listen, copy the following link.