If, as the adage goes, readers experience a thousand lives before they die, then readers of translated literature experience a thousand cultures without ever leaving their armchair. Set in Canada, India, Finland, Italy, and Jordan, here is a selection of international reads recommended by our staff for the newsletter. Get ready to be transported!
The year is 1506. The great artist Michelangelo is furious at his stingy patron the Pope, “the bellicose pontiff who had thrown him out like a beggar.” But as one door closes, another opens in the form of an invitation from the Sultan of Constantinople to come to his city and design a bridge to cross the Golden Horn. Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants, written by Mathias Énard and translated by Charlotte Mandell, is a feat of richly-imagined historical fiction that tells the tale of this sculptor’s journey. Michelangelo is abstemious and driven, consumed by his art and ego. But he soon succumbs to the charms of cosmopolitan Constantinople, its sounds and smells, its poets and performers. Yet dark forces conspire to thwart the artist from completing his designs. Intrigue. Assassins. Daggers in the night. Will Michelangelo complete his bridge and join cultures and continents? What will be the legacy of his journey? You’ll have to read it to find out.
—Kent Kosack, Director of Educational Arm
Kjell Westö’s novel The Wednesday Club, translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith, takes us to Helsinki in 1938–ten years after the Finnish Civil War. The Second World War has not yet started, but Hitler and his policies are already a recurring discussion topic far beyond Nazi Germany. Lawyer and recent divorcee Claes Thune wants to keep the gentleman’s club with his three friends amicable but not only the world around them but also the past keeps intruding. As some of the friends start drifting apart, Thune finds a friend in his new secretary Matilda Wiik. But why is she so secretive about her background? Westö is one of the most highly praised Swedish-language writers in Finland. Although he writes poetry and short stories as well, it’s with his novels set in twentieth century Helsinki that he has truly established himself as a writer. Readers of the engaging and intriguing The Wednesday Club understand why.
—Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large for Sweden
Smita sends her daughter to the village school in Badlapur for the first time, an action that sets a daring journey in motion. Guila works in her family’s wig workshop, the House of Lanfredi in Palermo, but soon receives news that changes the course of their business forever. In Montreal, a successful lawyer, mother of two, and woman who has it all, Sarah’s priorities are about to shift dramatically. Laetitia Colombani’s The Braid, published by Picador in 2019, interlaces the stories of Smita, Guila, and Sarah—each on the precipice of change. Cinematic in scope and expertly translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, it is ideal for binge reading. Set in the present day, the alternating perspectives flow seamlessly and are further linked through a poem. Colombani creates a deeply personal tale of women building new paths upon generations of faith, culture, and tradition, while revealing unexpected ways in which our modern lives intersect.
—Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant
Out there, in an ultraconservative community in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, the softness of mukhmal (Arabic for velvet) stands in stark contrast to the coarseness of the everyday life of Hawwa—the tailoress protagonist. Velvet (2019) by Huzama Habayeb, is an intense and vivid story, told with sensitivity to the sensuous but tragic world of its heroine. But unlike most other Arabic novels with content closely or remotely related to Palestine, Velvet is almost bereft of any political or patriotic themes pertaining to the Palestinian issue; it rather employs the narrative to portray the utterly humane dimensions of common Palestinians–particularly women–with little or no attention to politics. The judges of the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation considered Kay Heikkinen’s translation “to be of outstanding quality and which deserves to enjoy the same success in English as it has already done in Arabic, through the award of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2017.” Indeed, a velvety masterpiece!
—Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine
Get reading recommendations delivered straight into your inbox—sign up for our newsletter today!