Angry in Piraeus - Maureen Freely

Angry in Piraeus is the story of the creation of a translator, as Maureen Freely explores what it was in her childhood that led her to become a traveler across the spaces that exist between countries, languages, and forms. She offers rich descriptions of her itinerant upbringing in America, Turkey, and Greece, vividly evoking what it means to be constantly commuting between worlds--geographical, conceptual, linguistic, and literary--in search of a home, or a self, that is proving elusive. She tells of her transition from novelist to translator--and, specifically, translator of Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk--and of how eventually she found it necessary to give up translating Pamuk in order to return to her own fictional worlds.

As in the entire Cahiers series, the author's words are complemented by beautiful artworks, in this case delicate collages created by Japanese artist Rie Iwatake that journey through their own in-between spaces in a captivating play of analogies and metaphors. The resulting book is an unforgettable meditation on translation, writing, and life itself.