Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

Photo: Vipul Mathur / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Translation, as the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin argued, is an art form. Amid all the conventional doom ‘n’ gloom about literary translation, then – and even though we at Books from Finland are among its biggest supporters, we have to put up our hands and admit that we do our fair share of hand-wringing – it’s refreshing to see this over at Better than Sliced Bread, a blog edited by English students at Helsinki University: a love-letter by Seattle student Elizabeth Oakes to the ‘vast and beautiful’ vistas that the process of translation can open up.