Sunday, July 6, 2014

The Tilting House or, in German, Das Haus, in dem es schräge Böden, sprechende Tiere und Wachstumspulver gibt

My first book, The Tilting House, has now been published in Germany. Actually, it appears it came out a while ago. This spring some time. But I just received my hard copies yesterday. The German version has a new title:

Das Haus, in dem es schräge Böden, sprechende Tiere und Wachstumspulver gibt

 I believe this means, "The house where the slanting floors, talking animals and growth powders are."

Weird. But whatever. The cover, by Maximilian Meinzold, is lovely. The translation is by Petra Sparrer. Sorry, Petra, but I have no idea if the translation is any good, as I can't read much German.

Because I have a pathetically fragile ego, I've been Googling the German title and finding a variety of reviews, blog posts, and random mentions, which I have to run through Google Translate to make sense of. Most of the reviews are quite good. A few aren't.

Fair enough.

The one mention that really struck me was about a kid at a school talent show reading a story from the book and making the crowd laugh.

That freaked me out. Some kid in Germany is reading my translated words.

Here's a word you can translate: Dankbarkeit.

German for gratitude.