Talking in Tongues – Essays on Language and Literature

The German language has a great proverb for "dilemma": "Sitting between chairs." Peter Wortsman’s beautifully crafted essays on translation, as well as his introductions to his translations of German literature, demonstrate his mastery in dealing with this dilemma. He straddles his two native languages, German, and English, which he once described as a "Hybrid Anglo-Saxon-Norman language." To translate German the way he does, to write English the way he does, he needs a third chair: French, the "Norman" component of English. His works demonstrate that it is only through writing and translating between these three languages that his essays and translation are so rich and deep.

– Barbara Hahn, Max Cade Foundation Chair in German Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University

Peter Wortsman has spent his life in the uncharted territory between languages where “geographic borders are infinitely porous, and stories slip between the cracks.” It is the great good luck of his readers that he is a careful cartographer of that space. He tracks what happens when German metamorphoses into English or both into French, and the creatures born of those transformations populate his wondrous tales, which recall those of the Grimms and Kafka but add something special that is Wortsman’s own.

– Andrew S. Gross, Professor of North American Studies, University of Göttingen