An unexpected pregnancy rocks Kristin and Ciaran\u2019s relationship. She is a 24-year-old Swedish woman and immigrated to Scotland as an adult. He is a Brazilian who was adopted and moved to the country as a child. They live together in a tiny flat in Edinburgh and have to decide what to do next. Kristin\u2019s strategy is to focus on her job in the National Museum of Immigration and to avoid talking about the pregnancy, which she calls \u201cproject\u201d, while Ciaran decides to immerse himself in Swedish, trying to create a one-week \u201clanguage bath\u201d for himself, to learn it for her and the unborn baby. But they still don\u2019t know, if they will keep it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jessica Gait\u00e1n Johannesson, who grew up with Swedish and Spanish and now lives in English, uses this set-up in her novel How we are translated<\/em> to think about language, multilingualism and culture in a way that I enjoyed very much: a bit messy, but nuanced and memorable. We read Kristin\u2019s perspective who asks very early on: \u201cHow long can people live together, though, as in live TOGETHER, without speaking the same language?\u201d For Ciaran, Brazilian Portuguese is only a faded memory, English is his first and most intimate language. Kristin, on the other hand, still finds her feet in English and reflects that there are things that you can\u2019t say when you transition from one language to another \u2013 not only because you don\u2019t know the terms, but because you feel you can\u2019t say them. For her, it\u2019s slang or commonly used swear words, which she replaces with \u201cfick\u201d and \u201csheet\u201d. As a couple, they have developed numerous, loveable idiosyncrasies and nicknames for each other, but Kristin\u2019s active reflection on her specific language use suggests that they can carry a discomfort and are more noticeable when you speak in your second language. She often compares Swedish and English and begins to collect literal translations, which allows her to gain a deeper understanding of her first language and the cultural connotations of certain terms. When Ciaran starts to learn Swedish, she is not happy and pleased that he is trying to embark on a similar process, but mostly annoyed that he doesn\u2019t confess doing it for himself \u2013 \u201cnobody learns a language just to be nice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the one week of their lives that the novel covers, Ciaran and Kristin are preoccupied with themselves. No matter what they decide to do, the pregnancy will change their relationship and they know it. Kristin avoids Ciaran by staying at work longer. She found an odd job at the Castle, which is officially the National Museum of Immigration, to see her through university, but is now two years graduated and still works there. At the Castle, Kristin and other immigrants re-enact their \u201coriginal\u201d cultures in various exhibitions; Kristin plays a Norse woman. To switch to their native language and culture, all employees spent some time in a \u201cTranslation Room\u201d before their shifts. When they emerge from the room, they have to stay in character for the curious visitors. This museum sounds weirdly reminiscent of the human zoos during colonial times. Thus, the novel invites readers to think about the essence of culture and how cultures are looked upon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I thoroughly enjoyed Jessica Gait\u00e1n Johannesson debut novel, its thought-provoking approach to language and culture as well as the quirks of her characters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jessica Gait\u00e1n Johannesson’s debut novel is thought-provoking in its approach to language and culture and offers up a wonderful cast of characters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":23213,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2416,103],"tags":[2029,2802,2814,2801,2816,2800,2812,2556,737,2813,1189,2815,2190,2817,2809,2811],"class_list":["post-23216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine","category-review","tag-culture","tag-edinburgh","tag-essentialism","tag-how-we-are-translated","tag-human-zoo","tag-jessica-gaitan-johanesson","tag-learning-a-new-language","tag-migration-en","tag-multilingualism","tag-museum-of-migration","tag-novel-2","tag-original-culture","tag-pregnancy","tag-scotland","tag-scribe","tag-swedish"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23216"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23219,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23216\/revisions\/23219"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}