A book I loved to translate: "The Buddha in the Attic", by Julie Otsuka

Dorothea Lange, Japanese Internment Camp

I will write about it often in the next months, when my translation of this wonderful books comes out in Italy.

Now it's coming out in the US, and I want to share this great "New York Times" review which, I think, captures well the beauty of this little gem of a book.

"(...) The voice that speaks to us here is the 'we' of the Japanese women who arrived in California in the aftermath of World War I, most of them young and inexperienced, most bearing photographs of men they had agreed to marry, sight unseen: 'On the boat we could not have known that when we first saw our husbands we would have no idea who they were. That the crowd of men in knit caps and shabby black coats waiting for us down below on the dock would bear no resemblance to the handsome young men in the photographs. That the photographs we had been sent were 20 years old. . . . That when we first heard our names being called out across the water one of us would cover her eyes and turn away — I want to go home — but the rest of us would lower our heads and smooth down the skirts of our kimonos and walk down the gangplank and step out into the still warm day. This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry. And we would be wrong.'

You can read the whole article HERE.