Category: My translations

The swing has always been there.

It looks out to sea and invites every­one to take a seat.

…

The swing is still there.

It looks out to sea and invites every­one to take a seat.

It is a place of begin­nings

…

This is the begin­ning and end of “The Swing”, writ­ten and illus­trat­ed by Ger­man pic­ture book artist Brit­ta Teck­en­trup. It is like the ebb and flow of the tide on the beach, ris­ing is also falling, falling is also ris­ing; it is also like a cycle of time, the begin­ning is also the end, the end is also the begin­ning…

​This pic­ture book is 160 pages long, far exceed­ing the length of a nor­mal “chil­dren’s pic­ture book”. The small square size book opens into a stretched rec­tan­gle; the pages are some­times half text and half pic­ture, some­times the whole pic­ture with­out words fills the whole page, some­times the words are dot­ted like musi­cal notes, some­times the pic­ture is reduced to leave blank space beside or above and below, and some­times it is divid­ed into reg­u­lar or irreg­u­lar small pic­tures, the rhythm is accel­er­at­ed, and the imaged text also sways along… The lay­out com­po­si­tion is like a poem and paint­ing, reveal­ing a qui­et con­tem­pla­tion, and in the con­stant change, it hides a gen­tle and warm leap. Turn­ing the pages gen­tly and read­ing qui­et­ly, it seems as if you can hear the sooth­ing sound of the waves, or a famil­iar and vague piece of music.