Hanna Krall, “The Woman From Hamburg”

The story starts when a Polish couple agrees to hide a Jewish woman in their wardrobe in 1943. The woman becomes pregnant, and everything accelerates from there.

(from The New Yorker, Dec. 20 and 27, translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine)

Fast-paced and plainly told, this story is all about getting down to it. I’m not sure whether the author believes that the secret of the circumstances surrounding the woman’s pregnancy is supposed to be a secret revealed in the story’s final turns, or if you’re supposed to figured it out early on and just let things progress not for intrigue but because a good story is a good story. That make sense?

Lately I’ve been reading stories translated into English. Which basically means the names and places seem foreign but it reads really smoothly. Sometimes I wonder what I’m missing by not reading things in their original language. What untranslatable turns of phrase or cultural references are being omitted?

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