Jackie Smith
Jackie Smith was selected for the New Books in German Emerging Translators Program and in 2017 won the Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize.
The stylistic flair, and variety of voice, in Jackie Smith’s mesmerizing translation turn Schalansky’s reminder that ‘Being alive means experiencing loss’ into a journey full of colour, contrast and bittersweet pleasures. An Inventory of Losses is a thoroughly memorable winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation – and one that will surely endure.
An Inventory of Losses
by Judith Schalansky
Translated by Jackie Smith
Named a best book of 2021 by The Wall Street Journal: “Disappearance may be a forlorn theme, but it has rarely been granted such reverent contemplation, or been made to feel so powerfully tangible.”
Each disparate object described in this book—a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific—shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, and Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and that, taken as a whole, open mesmerizing new vistas of how to think about extinction and loss.
With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.
The stylistic flair, and variety of voice, in Jackie Smith’s mesmerizing translation turn Schalansky’s reminder that ‘Being alive means experiencing loss’ into a journey full of colour, contrast and bittersweet pleasures. An Inventory of Losses is a thoroughly memorable winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation – and one that will surely endure.
