I recently had the opportunity to do a Q&A session at the Goodreads group Romance Readers Reading Challenges. Here’ some of the questions and my reply:
Jane (PS) wrote: “Hi Janna – welcome to our group 🙂
From your outlined background I’m guessing that English is not your first language – did this present a significant challenge in the construction of your novel? …”
Hi Jane!
Thanks for your warm welcome! That’s right! English is not my native language. It’s my third language. 🙂 My native language is Russian. The book was first written and published in Russian, and the thought of translating it was very natural and simple. When the translation started I was horrified. I could not find right idioms, that would carry the same weight of the words. I felt if I deviate from translating the details that one can feel, will betray my book. I wanted to preserve and convey the juice of the language that expresses environment, relationships, jokes, and everything else that we live in.
I worked with several editors. My Russian book was on my lap and we were going sentence by sentence through it. At that time I had a feeling that they all hated me simultaneously. 🙂 Two of them were native English speakers with PhDs in English.
After the editorial work was over, the manuscript was read by many people from different professions, different ages, educational level, and when I realized that they love the book, I decided that it was time to publish it.
I am admitting that to translate and edit the book was much harder then to write it in Russian.
You can check out the entire event at:
Love Is Never Past Tense is available, in both English and Russian at
http://www.loveisneverpasttense.com
and the new cover edition is available as an ebook at
It is also available as an ebook at SmashWords. In celebration of the SmashWords release, Love Is Never Past Tense is featured on Christoph Fischer’s blog :see http://ow.ly/ridPP I will stop by to answer your questions today, Friday November 29. I hope to chat with you there.
Janna Yeshanova 