A translation of Małgorzata Rejmer’s reportage Błoto słodsze niż miód. Głosy komunistycznej Albanii (“Mud Sweeter than Honey. Voices from Communist Albania”) has recently been published in Spain. The authors of the translation are Agata Orzeszek and Ernesto Rubio. The publication was supported by the Book Institute as part of the ©POLAND Translation Programme.
Barro más dulce que la miel – as reads the title of the Spanish translation of Mud Sweeter than Honey – was published at the end of last year by La Caja Books publishing house in Valencia.
Mud Sweeter than Honey is the story of a country tormented by the terror of Enver Hoxha, a communist dictator for whom even Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were too liberal. It’s about people sentenced to exile at the drop of a hat, solely because they were born to the wrong family or whispering in their own homes, they tried to think for themselves. It’s about bloody revolts in the labour camps, the tragic escapes from a country turned into a bunker, about the lives sacrificed on the altar of an ideological paradise and about those who crushed them, regardless of the consequences.
By arranging the stories of her characters in a choir of poignant voices, the author reveals a fragment of the darkest period in Albanian history and writes another page in the book of the fall of humanistic values of the 20th century.
Małgorzata Rejmer’s reportage was promoted by the Book Institute in the catalogue “New Books from Poland”. The book has been awarded, among others, the “Polityka” Passport Award and the Gryfia Award.
In recent years, the Book Institute has also supported the translation of Małgorzata Rejmer’s reportage Bukareszt. Kurz i krew (“Bucharest. Dust and Blood”) into Czech, Estonian, Romanian, and Serbian as well as the novel Toksymia (“Toximia”) into Italian.
As part of the ©POLAND Translation Programme, Agata Orzeszek and Ernesto Rubio also translated Jacek Hugo-Bader’s Dzienniki kołymskie (“Kolyma Diaries”, La Caja Books, Valencia 2019).
