The OF Blog: Non-English SF Blogs and Websites

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Non-English SF Blogs and Websites

This post is long overdue from me. A day or so ago, when commenting about a comment made by Romanian SF translator Horia-Nicola Ursu on Jeff VanderMeer's blog, I remarked that I was pleasantly surprised by how much I understood of the Romanian excerpt listed in the Pingback section. I visited his blog and sure enough, I could grasp at least the basics of the writing.

Now spec fic is not an English-only matter. Those who know me well know that I read quite a bit in Spanish, my second language, and that via Spanish (and four semesters of college Latin) I can read, more or less, Portuguese and Italian and have a good understanding of French (and now Romanian, apparently). Some of my favorite SFish authors wrote in other languages. Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez are just the two most famous of a whole slew of Spanish-language writers whose ideas, themes, and plot elements have a bit of the speculative about them. José Saramago's corpus is impressive, especially when one considers that this Portuguese author didn't become well-known (or translated into English or other non-Romance language idioms) until he was near retirement age. I am currently trying (and somewhat succeeding) to teach myself Serbian so I can read favorite authors such as Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Zoran Živković, and David Albahari in their native tongue (there's another reason, but that's more personal in nature).

So when I thought about it this morning, I couldn't help but think it was an oversight that I didn't have a blogroll section for non-English SF blogs, websites, forums, etc. So I added a few that were in my Bookmarks or which I had encountered recently. But here is where you, the anonymous readers who come from a few dozen countries, enter the picture. If you know of (or run) a SF site in a non-English language that you think would be of interest to me and perhaps other multilinguals, if you would please, respond with a link so I can investigate and add them. I guess I ought to add that I can muddle my way through the Germanic languages as well, although I'm not limiting this to the ones that I can read for content without needing assistance. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

3 comments:

Gabriele Campbell said...

Here's a German forum.

Larry Nolen said...

Thanks. I'll add it shortly :D

Anonymous said...

I run a Swedish webzine called Vetsaga, which publishes essays and articles about science fiction and fantasy.

There's also the blog Ampersand, a complement to Vetsaga that mixes shorter reflections and longer reviews with quotes and (hopefully) interesting links.

Fanspan is the best soruce of news about Swedish fandom, and fantasy and science fiction in Sweden.

Catahya is the biggest Swedish fantasy society, which is active not exclusively but mainly on the net.

//JJ

 
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