Hilary Plum
I’ve lived in the Pioneer Valley for some years, a graduate of Amherst College who never really left and now an MFA candidate in fiction at UMass Amherst.
Why Clockroot Books? There are so many works of translation to which I feel unimaginably indebted. For instance, when I think of never having discovered Stephen Mitchell’s Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
And maybe also because “They say the time you spend in a foreign country isn’t part of your own life” (Lance Olsen, Anxious Pleasures).
As an editor: even if it’s a little sentimental, I think of editing as something like the opening of Neruda’s “Love for this Book” (trans. Clark Zlotchew and Dennis Maloney):
“In these lonely regions I have been powerful
in the same way as a cheerful tool
or like untrammeled grass which lets loose its seed
or like a dog rolling around in the dew.”
in the same way as a cheerful tool
or like untrammeled grass which lets loose its seed
or like a dog rolling around in the dew.”
Especially the last bit: the task of editing is as exhilarating and even playful as this, to collaborate with and delight in the work of such writers & translators, editors & designers.