New in Translation

What’s New in Translation: April 2022

April 11, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth and Georgina Fooks

Discover new titles from Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad and Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin, out this month!

In this month’s roundup of translations, we review the works of two iconic feminist writers, Forough Farrokhzad and Kyung-sook Shin, who trace, narrativize, and engage with gender and politics in its most vivid and various forms. In dialogue with the greater schemes of sexuality, passions, and poetics, these women writers work within and trespass the boundaries of their language to paint bold new portraits of the world, as a place lived in the mind.

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Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forough Farrokhzad, translated from the Persian by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., New Directions, 2022

Review by Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

A poet of (com)passion: such is just one of the myriad ways to encapsulate the unique encounter with Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry. One of 20th-century Iran’s most celebrated and outspoken poets, she was controversial for the ways in which she lived and loved—openly, in transgression of patriarchal societal norms—and as a result, her work was banned for more than a decade after the Islamic Revolution. Yet, her legacy has lived on in illicit fragments and poems shared between readers, and now she is one of Iran’s best-loved women poets, widely read and translated. Through the work of Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., this latest translation seeks to offer lovers of poetry a comprehensive critical edition of Farrokhzad’s work.

Born in 1934, the poet’s turbulent life was tragically cut short by a car accident in February 1967, leaving us with a nonetheless prolific oeuvre spanning a wide range of creative endeavours. A poet, filmmaker, actress, painter, and more, her work across various formats bears witness to the vibrancy of human life in the face of suffering, and to the wonders and pleasures of living despite overwhelming pressures and pushbacks.

Farrokhzad is undoubtedly a poet of romance. Drawing on a long tradition of Persian love poetry (Rumi was one of her great inspirations, according to Sholeh Wolpé), Farrokhzad’s work remains unique in its fervent declarations of physical and emotional intimacy, opening up possibilities for women poets in the Persian language. The opening poem of the collection, ‘Captive’, points to the vastness of desire:

I want you, and I know that never
will I hold you as my heart desires
You are that clear bright sky
I am a captive bird in the corner of this cage

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2022

March 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Eva Wissting, Ka Man Chung, and Laurel Taylor

New works this week from China, Sweden, Italy, and Argentina!

March feels like a month of renewal, and our selections of translated literatures this week presents a wondrous and wide-ranging array of original thinking, ideations, philosophies, and poetics. From a revelatory collection of Chinese science fiction, to art critic María Gainza’s novel of forgery and authenticity, to Elena Ferrante’s new collection of essays on writing, and a debut collection of poetry from Iranian-Swedish poet Iman Mohammed—there is no shortage of discovery amidst these texts. Read on to find out more!

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The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, Tordotcom Publishing, 2022

 Review by Ah-reum Han

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories is a trailblazing new anthology of Chinese science fiction and fantasy, created by and featuring the works of an all-female and nonbinary team of writers, editors, and translators. As a lifelong fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre but new to contemporary Chinese literary scene, I found this collection a true gift—warm and generous to the novice like myself, for whom Chinese literature has only ever been accessible through translation. Under the meticulous curatorial vision of Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, the stories and essays within celebrate decorated and emerging voices alike, indicating at an exciting future of sci-fi and fantasy for digital natives in our culturally porous world.

As you enter the collection, leave everything at the door and hold on tight. This book will whisk you away from one uncanny valley to the next—from a world where children raise baby stars as pets, to a near future where parenting is turned into a computer game, to a fisherman’s village where they practice the art of dragonslaying, to a woman on the road mysteriously burdened with a corpse, and much more. The title story, “The Way Spring Arrives” by Wang Nuonuo (trans. Rebecca F. Kuang), situates itself amidst the babbling creeks where giant fish carry the rhythm of the seasons on its back, delivering spring from year to year. In “A Brief History of Beinakan Disaster as Told in a Sinitic Language” by Nian Yu (trans. Ru-Ping Chen), we are caught in a post-apocalyptic world, where people live under the threat of devastating heat currents and history pervades as literal memory capsules passed down by a select few. Despite the imaginative heights these stories reach, each creates enough space in its strangeness for us to reexamine our assumptions about the world and our place in it. Often, folklore and fantasy crosses into sci-fi and allegory, and readers are left feeling unsettled in even the most familiar landscapes.

Between these stories, you’ll find essays on genre, gender, and translation that enrich the surrounding fictions; these intelligent texts help orient readers in socio-political, historical, and global contexts, while looking to the future of this young genre. In “Net Novels and the She Era,” Xueting Christine Ni discusses the role the internet has played in disrupting gender norms within publishing—particularly in the case of the popular online sci-fi serials. In Jing Tsu’s essay on the collection at hand, she points out: “This volume shows that there is also a difference between science fiction about women and other marginalized genders and the ones written by them.” We also hear from translators, such as Rebecca F. Kuang, who writes about the symbiotic relationship between writer, translator, and reader—the choices implicit in the things left unsaid. “What Does the Fox Say” by Xia Jia is a playful de-reconstruction of the famous English pangram—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”—as both story and essay, illuminating the act of translation in a modern world of search engines, artificial intelligence, translation software, and media. As the author notes: “intersexuality is the dominant mode to create as well as to read most of the works in our time: quotation, collage, tribute, deconstruction, parody.” This collection pioneers its own conversation around its stories. We are paused at intervals to consider: who are we really, and where do we go from here? READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2022

February 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Andrea Blatz

New work this week from Tunisia and Russia!

In this week’s selection of translated literature, we present Hassouna Mosbahi’s expansive, dreaming portrait of Tunisia through the recollections of one man’s life, as well as Nataliya Meshchaninova’s precise, cinematic cult classic of a young girl carving her own way through abuse and neglect in post-Soviet Russia. Read on for our editors’ takes on these extraordinary titles.

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Solitaire by Hassouna Mosbahi, translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins, Syracuse University Press, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

The essential core. The innermost heart. The pupil of the eye. The central pearl of the necklace.

These are epithets lifted from a tenth-century anthology of poetry and artistic prose by the literary connoisseur Abu Mansur al-Tha’alibi—a privileged arbiter of what counted as the era’s innermost heart. Determined to immortalise the remarkable cultural efflorescence of his contemporary Arab-Islamic world, al-Tha’alibi took upon himself the task of gleaning the anecdotes, biographies, epigrams, and panegyrics he deemed exemplary of his epoch: “sift[ing] our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls”, as Virginia Woolf once wrote.

Not for nothing did al-Tha’alibi name his compilation Yatimat al-Dahr fi Mahasin Ahl al’-Asr: “The Unique Pearl Concerning the Elegant Achievements of Contemporary People.” From the inheritance of this opulent work, the Tunisian writer Hassouna Mosbahi drew inspiration for his own dazzling, shape-shifting novel Yatim al-Dahr—cleverly rendered in English by William Maynard Hutchins as Solitaire. Hutchins contextualises the title in his helpful preface, explaining that “yatimat” refers to both a “unique, precious pearl” and “fate’s orphan.” “Solitaire” reflects these prismatic valences.

Solitaire, also, is a game one plays with oneself; Mosbahi’s book, in many ways, is a puzzle with no straightforward answers. It is encyclopaedic and uneven and oblique. Stories proliferate, nestled within other stories, structurally echoing the classic Thousand and One Nights.

On a first reading, it is easy to sink into the sediment of the novel’s non-linear chronology, before being pulled abruptly out of the seductive illusion and back onto the newly destabilised present. Mosbahi’s work dissolves temporal barriers, saturating the present with echoes of the past. It feels vertiginous to remember that all the action spans a single day, kaleidoscoped through the mind of the eponymous orphan-protagonist Yunus and taking place mostly along the coast, at the threshold of sea and sand. Language arrives on the page like slips of paper curled up in glass bottles: Sufi prayers, journal entries, newspaper articles, quotations of verse, orally transmitted tales, autobiographical monologues—shored up in their rawness. Digressions expand, often without warning, to constitute entire chapters. Hutchins’ translation captures these tonal shifts impeccably. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2022

January 17, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Barbara Halla, and Charlie Ng

Featuring newly released titles from France, Spain, and Japan!

Though this new year comes with its own shares of doubts and questions, what remains certain is  that new titles and texts from around the world hold their own promises of enthrallment, knowledge, and beauty. This month, we present three works of fiction that traverse the realms of history, politics, and family. From a new collection of stories from Japanese master Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, to a novel interrogating the psychologies surrounding sexual predation by the award-winning Lola Lafon, to an imaginative journey into turn-of-the-century Barcelona with Eduardo Mendoza—these writings are sure to keep you thinking and dreaming.

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Reeling by Lola Lafon, translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle, Europa Editions, 2022

Review by Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor

What we may reflexively call the “#MeToo era” has served as a cataclysm for the publication of several books of fiction and memoirs centered around women’s experiences with sexual violence. Far from being an Anglo-centric phenomenon, French works such as Vanessa Springora’s Consent (translated by Natasha Lehrer) and Camille Kouchner’s La Familia Grande (translated by Adriana Hunter) have garnered great acclaim for their unflinching and complicated portrayal of childhood sexual abuse. Lola Lafon’s Reeling, as well, lends itself easily to this movement, seeming particularly prescient considering the recent conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell for her role in the trafficking of underaged girls. The novel’s direct protagonists, Cléo and Betty, are two women whose lives are derailed by the Maxwell-like figure of Cathy—a stylish older woman who approaches young girls between thirteen and fourteen, offering them prestigious scholarships through the fictive Galatea foundation.

As Cathy prepares the girls for their “interviews,” she plies them with cares and attention, clothing and expensive perfumes; she makes them feel special, or rather that they are destined for something special. Yet, it is clear that something far more sinister hides behind the promises of scholarship. By the time the girls are to “interview” with the older male jurors, Cathy has earned their trust and affection; they would do anything to please her, to deserve her trust, to fulfill her expectations as she emphasizes the need for maturity and openness, the main criteria these “jurors” are looking for in the candidates.

Two important elements come to the fore in the figure of Cathy and her relationship to the young girls she grooms, and also in the encounters of girls like Cléo, Betty, and dozens of others with these older men. On the one hand, it is important to unpack the way Cathy manufactures consent through manipulation: although these girls do not want to do anything of a sexual nature during their “interviews,” many decide to go forward with it—not solely because of their own ambitions, but also to please a figure they have come to trust and revere. Secondly, the “jurors” themselves prey on the girls’ desire to appear mature, to show they are not “frigid” and thus somehow inadequate. This particular mind-game speaks also to the way sexual liberation—the result of the social and political movements that swept France during the 1960s and 1970s—often framed physical freedoms in ways that prioritized women’s and girls’ availability to men. As a thirteen-year-old Cléo thinks after her assault, “Cléo, thirteen years, five months, and however many days, had consented. To say no was to be frigid.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2021

December 13, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Jacqueline Leung, and Maddy Robinson

Czech women's writing, German autofiction, and Japanese mystery!

This month, our selections of the best in global literature present a bevy of questions to be answered—rectifying the neglect of Czech women’s writing at the end of the twentieth century, solving murders, and chasing that ever-wandering place of home. Read on for these pivotal texts that are taking place amidst the most sustaining inquiries of our time: of secrets, of memory, and of desire.

a world apart

A World Apart and Other Stories by Various Authors, translated from the Czech by Kathleen Hayes, University of Chicago Press, 2021 

Review by Maddy Robinson, Social Media Manager

Kathleen Hayes’s collection of fin-de-siècle Czech women’s writing, A World Apart and Other Stories, is to be granted a second edition—twenty years after its initial publication, and around a century after the heyday of its writers. As Hayes informs us in her introduction, despite the proliferation of women’s writing in Czech literary magazines and anthologies at the time, or the academic attention the period has received, there continues to be a distinct lack of English translations for feminine texts from the turn of the century. In an effort to combat this dearth of material, Hayes carefully selected and translated eight short stories written before the First World War, to offer English language readers entry into a literary movement that might otherwise have remained solely within the domain of Central European Studies academics. We are presented with invaluable insight into the societal and individual concerns which accompanied this turbulent period in history, especially viewed in the context of a people struggling with “the woman question.”

The book opens with Božena Benešová’s “Friends,” an evocative tale of childhood sensitivity to perceived social hierarchies, and a frank condemnation of anti-Semitism. Hayes remarks that this is rather unusual, given that “at the time it was written, negative references to the Jews were still the norm in Czech literature.” The story also constitutes an anomaly in this anthology, as from this point on, there is but one central theme around which each story revolves: passion, forbidden or otherwise.

She was a strange woman, but perhaps, after all, strange only from my point of view. I was totally incapable of getting close to her soul.

The titular story, “A World Apart,” was published in an anthology of the same name in 1909 by Růžena Jesenská and is perhaps the most striking and complex of the collection. Travelling by train, the protagonist Marta recounts the story of a friendship she once had with a Miss Teresa Elinson, an intense woman whom she also met on a train, and who convinces her to visit her manor house “A World Apart.” Miss Elinson’s attempts to seduce Marta are not initally met with outright rejection—however, there is a foreboding, Du Maurier-like sense that if she were to remain at A World Apart, she might suffer the same fate as her deceased predecessor, Berta. Though Hayes puts the unlikely subject matter of lesbian desire more down to “literary convention than psychological realism,” Jesenská’s depiction of the risks of breaking worldly norms, as well as her portrait of the passionate, Dandy-esque figure of Teresa Elinson, make for a fascinating contribution to any study of turn-of-the-century queer desire and its manifestations. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2021

November 8, 2021  |  in In This Together, New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun, Georgina Fooks, Shawn Hoo, and Suhasini Patni

New titles this month from the Philippines, Indonesia, Syria, and Slovakia!

This month, our selection of translated titles traverse the battlefield and the surfaces of paintings, lonely post-Communist apartment blocs and conservative spaces housing queer, radical instances of love. In language described by our editors and reviewers as potent, provocative, capacious, and full of longing, these four titles present an excellent pathway into the writers who are bringing the immediacies of experience into powerful socio-cultural commentary on our reality: Martin Hacla, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Ramy Al-Asheq, and Monika Kompaníková. 

angels

There Are Angels Walking the Fields by Marlon Hacla, translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim, Broken Sleep Books, 2021

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

Words happened. Cow became
Cow. The word milk gushed in every throat.

From this seemingly deflationary announcement that opens one of Marlon Hacla’s poems—“Words happened.”—an entire landscape is animated and given breath at the very juncture of utterance. Not only do ears of corn and a crown of birds begin to stir, so too does the speaker, finding himself transported by the magical properties of language: “I uttered the word joy / And I was once again playing a game / As a child with my friends.” Read as the collection’s ars poetica, we might say that in Hacla’s debut poetry collection, words do not simply refer to things. They move things, and each marks an occasion in the world; they sing the world into movement.

There Are Angels Walking the Fields—first published in 2010 under the Ubod New Authors Series by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in the Philippines—opens with a lilting “Invocation,” its unbroken anaphora incanting the world of inanimate things (“In the name of the rock. In the name of the lily blossom”), of unarticulated desires (“In the name of burned / Letters from a concubine”) and of those who have been cast into the margins (“In the name of wives / Abandoned by their husbands. In the name of gay fathers”). Who could believe more in language’s ability to intervene in the world than the one who uses them in supplication? In opening the collection with this list, Hacla immediately throws his lot with the downtrodden and the forgotten—those who may not have the ability to speak—and soothes them with the divine balm of words. In her translator’s note, past contributor Kristine Ong Muslim justifies her sharpening of the poem’s decisiveness in order to heighten the quality of invocation. Thus, a line more literally translated as “In the name of hands / Not touched” becomes “In the name of hands / Never held.” Might we also consider the translator as one who practices the art of invocation—except rather than calling out in prayer, the translator calls inward, to be possessed by both languages? Where, in order for words to perform the magic of the original—for cow to become cow—something first has to happen to them? In Muslim’s translation, Hacla’s lines are screwed tight; each enjambment turns brutally, and every line sweats with a potent lyricism, as how this opening poem rollicks to an epiphany by the end:

[. . .] In the name of faces hidden.
By a black veil. In the names of ears
That had not known the sound of a violin. In the name of a flower
That bloomed in the morning and wilted by nightfall.
In your name, you who would someday die and fade away.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2021

October 11, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel, Kent Kosack, and Thuy Dinh

New works in translation from Poland, Croatia, and the Netherlands!

This month, our selections of the best in world literature are unified by their writers’ undeniable strength of voice and masterful control of the narrative form. From the Netherlands, a collection of A.L. Snijder’s very short stories—a genre invented by their author—revels in the unreal natures of our reality. From Croatia, the dark humorist stylings of Robert Perišić masterfully delineate the unrealiable boundaries of nations and psychologies. And from Poland, reporter and writer Margo Rejmer brings us a rare and intimate glimpse at Communist Albania under the fractious rule of Enver Hoxha, from the people who lived through it. 

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Night Train by A.L. Snijders, translated from the Dutch by Lydia Davis, New Directions, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

            “For more than fifty years I have cherished one wish: to travel. This wish is part of another wish: for reality without reality—stories that are indistinguishable from the truth.”

—A.L. Snijders, “Baalbek” from Night Train

The key to understanding A.L. Snijders’s very short stories (dubbed zkv—zeer korte verhalen) lies inside “Baalbek,” where the Dutch author connects his desire to visit Lebanon’s ancient Roman outpost with creating stories that depict “reality without reality.” The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a megalith found in Baalbek and enshrouded with otherworldly presence, represents the perfectly magnified symbol for Snijders’s miniature approach. His Night Train—a collection of ninety-one zkv translated by Lydia Davis—is a shapeshifting amalgam of fable, zen koan, commentary, lyrical essay, and autobiography. As an immersive foray into the unknown, the instability of Snijders’s narrative form produces a trompe-l’oeil effect “indistinguishable from the truth,” giving the reader a sensation of being at once disoriented and illuminated.

Born Peter Cornelis Müller in 1937 in Amsterdam, Snijders came from a large, bourgeois Catholic family. The dual forces of freedom and order constitute the main themes of his life and work. Artistic and cosmopolitan, Snijders nevertheless chose a stable career teaching at a police academy and led a placid life as a gentleman farmer in rural Achterhoek, Holland’s eastern region. Even after being awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 2010—one of the three most prestigious literary honors in Holland—Snijders did not, for years, deviate from the low-key routine of reading his work on an early morning radio show and circulating his steady flow of zkv among an email list of loyal readers. Ever industrious, he passed away this past June while working on new material.

The commonplace in Snijders’s oeuvre is imbued with mystery. In “Minor Characters,” Snijders’s alter-ego wonders if his compressed fiction may actually be “unpsychological novel[s] for people who understand nothing about psychology.” If reality resembles an unseen but anarchic mole emerging each night to turn Snijders’s garden into a surrealist landscape (“Mole”), then the author’s aesthetic philosophy suggests holistic means to affirm “what can never be understood.” This notion of reality as unknowable, or “unpsychological,” represents the trademark of Snijders’s fiction, allowing his narrative—as both burrowing animal and spy—to elude conventional expectations and assume an enigmatic depth, despite its compact form. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2021

September 27, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel and Sarah Moore

New work this week from Mexico and Algeria!

This month, our editors dive into two powerful works that look into the dominating subjects of human life: sex and war. An erotically subversive collection of stories by award-winning author Mónica Lavín moves to the darkest and most questioning arenas of desire, and a memoir by Algerian Freedom fighter Mokhtar Mokhtefi stands as a cogent and compelling text of witness of his nation’s struggle against French colonialism.

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Meaty Pleasures by Mónica Lavín, translated from the Spanish by Dorothy Potter Snyder, Katakana Editores, 2021

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

There is catharsis in transgression, and pleasure—especially the centering of one’s own pleasure—is all too often transgressive. The twelve short stories in Mónica Lavín’s collection, Meaty Pleasures, thoughtfully curated and translated by Dorothy Potter Snyder, capitalizes on this subversive desire, exploding the tranquil veneer of domestic life by compelling our complicity in the deeply uncomfortable and socially taboo.

It all begins and ends with the flesh. “Postprandial,” the decadent opening story, foregoes grounding details about setting and character in order to focalize an aphrodisiac tasting menu, offered from a hotel restaurant manager to a passerby, and the explicit sex that follows. It readies the reader for Lavín’s challenging approach to realism, intimacy, and power imbalance which pervades the rest of the collection. The final story, “Meaty Pleasures,” also emphasizes the sensual relationship between food and sex—but in a completely different way. Told from the perspective of an adult daughter who has watched her parents’ Saturday afternoon artisanal butchering hobby grow into an obsession that echoes over the course of their lives, the sex is left entirely to the implicit, straining in constant tension with the parental web of familial obligations. The daughter and her sister reflect: “Sometimes we’d ask each other, have you tried calling Papá and Mamá on Saturday afternoons? Because on that day of week, they never answered the phone to either one of us.”

In between, we meet many a troubled family. As is common in stories of nonconformity, various characters rebel against the numbing effect of matrimony, but their resistance does not lead them to any predictable conclusion—or perhaps any predictability is heightened to a manic extreme. In “What’s there to come back to,” a husband leaves his repentant wife on their doorstep for a whole winter’s night before he, begrudgingly, allows her back into their home. Snyder’s translation captures a certain languor and resentment in his stream of consciousness that induces anxiety when set against the excruciating awareness of her waiting, building a rawness that painfully and coldly leads to his reflection upon waking up in the morning: “Fried eggs again for breakfast, the TV news. I think she’s gone. Maybe she froze to death. Maybe we both froze to death.” In “You Never Know,” a son tires of the demons left to him by his mother’s abandonment. “Then, you kiss and hug them in the shadows of a movie theater, and you masturbate thinking about them, and when you start to want something more than their bodies, like their companionship and tenderness, you leave without saying goodbye.” Innocent—righteous, even—though his anger seems, his journey darkens with an incestual turn. “Roberto’s Mouth” finds a disgruntled housewife disappointed yet again when her own plans to leave her family are thwarted by her naughty-mouthed chat-room lover’s lazy approach to cuckholding. In such narratives that continually unpack and distort the concepts of familial intimacy, images of transgressively penetrated flesh dominate the collection, inviting the reader to reflect on the discomfort they inspire. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2021

August 16, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Fairuza Hanun

New work this month from Lebanon and India!

The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.

beirut

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.

But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”

Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.

That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.

Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2021

July 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Barbara Halla, Ruwa Alhayek, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

New texts from Italy, Brazil, Korea, Morocco, and Spain!

In this month’s selection of excellent literature in translation, there’s something for everyone. From a dreamy and architecturally expressive graphic novel that speaks to fates and futures, to a collection of strange and visceral short stories delineating the network between bodies and their definitions. And if science fiction or unsettling tales aren’t your thing, there’s also the powerful narrative on a prodigal son who returns to navigate the pathos-filled landscape of past tragedies, loneliness, and isolation; the masterfully told history of Catalonia as it plays out through the life of a woman embroiled in the tumult of her time; or a cunning satire of contemporary Morocco that traverses territory of both physical and virtual landscapes. Read on for reviews on each of these remarkable works; hope you enjoy the trip!

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Celestia by Manuele Fior, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards, Fantagraphics, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

“. . . from above, this island is in the shape of two hands intertwined.”

                                                           —Dr. Vivaldi, from Manuele Fior’s Celestia

Such is how Dr. Vivaldi alludes to Venice—curved strips of land yearning to touch and engulf each other in blue space. Ambitiously realized by Manuele Fior and eloquently translated by Jamie Richards, Celestia—Venice’s oneiric double—is a visual poem and modernist dance in graphic novel form, encompassing diaphanous terrains and gothic undertow, exuberantly tumescent with allusions to literature, art, and architecture.

Born in 1975 in Cesena, Italy, Fior currently lives in Paris, France. Drawing from his studies at Venice’s University of Architecture (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, or IUAV), he has, over time, developed a dynamic visual language with narrative elements drawn from both Western and Eastern aesthetic traditions. Several of his acclaimed graphic novels have been translated into English and published by U.S.-based Fantagraphics, and Celestia marks his fifth collaboration with Richards—a scholar and translator of Italian literature.

Deeply influenced by John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “Profezia” (“Prophecy”)—Fior depicts Celestia as a fusion of dualities that exist both in the history of Venice as well as in the fictional universe of his work: Gothic and Renaissance, spiritual and secular, traditional and modern, rational and organic, freedom and oppression, community and exile. While in Fior’s earlier work—such as The Interview—telepathy is depicted as an extraterrestial gift, in Celestia this ability has existed from time immemorial among certain people, possibly as an evolutionary process. When the story opens, the island of Celestia is home to a group of telepathic refugees, who long ago fled from a horrific invasion that had devastated the mainland. One of them, Pierrot—cloaked in his commedia dell’arte persona—now wishes to renounce his telepathic power, which he perceives as a tragic link to his childhood. After delivering vigilante justice to a member of the demonic syndicate that controls the island’s murky depths, Pierrot escapes Celestia with Dora—a seer also burdened by her gift, as well as the oppressive intimacy enforced by her mind-melding circle of elites, led by Dr. Vivaldi.

Beset by this innate ability that has become a form of enslavement, Pierrot and Dora set off—hoping their journey would both resolve the past and guide them toward a new future. The couple’s subsequent arrival on the mainland brings them into contact with an omniscient child, or Child—who embodies both the future of mankind and its messiah. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2021

June 14, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by David Boyd, Eva Wissting, and Julia Sherwood

The best and latest from Mexico, Sweden, and Poland!

This month, our selections of excellent works from around the world are manifold with mystery: some historical, some psychological, and some linguistic. From Poland, philosopher Remigiusz Ryziński attempts to figure out the sexual politics behind Michel Foucault’s hasty departure from Warsaw. The newest autobiographical novel from Linda Boström Knausgård contends with the author’s own experiences with electroshock therapy, and its impact on her memories. Lastly, in an essay collection by Mariana Oliver explores the act of moving between the various territories of cities and languages, between familiarity and curiosity. Read on to find out more!

foucault

Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

“Michel Foucault came to Poland in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded Center for French Culture at the University of Warsaw. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as History of Madness. Yet in mid-1959, he was forced to leave Poland. The reason was a certain boy, Jurek. No one ever figured out who this boy really was.” With the mystery laid out, Remigiusz Ryziński opens his exploration of this little-known episode in the life of the philosopher as a young man, and his attempt to find out what led to Foucault’s expulsion from Warsaw.

Foucault in Warsaw is the first non-academic book by Remigiusz Ryziński—a Polish philosopher and cultural critic who studied at the Sorbonne—and another addition to Sean Gasper Bye’s impressive portfolio of translations. Combining the techniques of literary reportage with the analytical tools of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Ryziński has unearthed secret police dossiers and trawled through hundreds of pages of reports filed by undercover cops and snitches: “Stories typed or handwritten, full of dates and places, names and connections, meetings, relationships, breakups, love, and suffering. Reading them felt like flipping through someone’s family photo album.” He immersed himself in the press and newsreels from the period, incorporating details, such as the price of everyday goods and statistical information, to conjure up the flavours, textures, and colours of Warsaw—the city that is as much a hero of this book as the philosopher himself, along with “the boys whose company Foucault enjoyed most.”

For those familiar with recent works of Polish literature, Ryziński’s reconstruction of the life of the gay community in Warsaw in the late 1950s will bring to mind Lubiewo, Michał Witkowski’s groundbreaking 2004 novel depicting gay life on Poland’s Baltic coast, before and after the end of communism. While Witkowski’s book presents fictionalised versions of real stories and characters, Ryziński has tracked down the actual people who knew Foucault during his time in Warsaw (including some who were romantically linked to him) or were active on the gay scene at the time. He retraced the places Foucault did—or was likely to—frequent, recreating a detailed topography of Warsaw’s cruising spots: an assortment of cafés and bars from the seedy to the sophisticated, steam baths both ornate and functional, public squares and monuments ideally suited for pulling soldiers, and public toilets such as the French-style urinals known as “mushrooms,” to the bathrooms at the Palace of Culture, considered “the height of luxury.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2021

May 10, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Jacqueline Leung, Lindsay Semel, and Sarah Moore

New work from Iceland, Chile, France, and Argentina!

We take our jobs of bringing you the best new releases from the realm of world literature very seriously, and this week, we have four astounding texts from authors notorious for their intelligence, their variousness, and their ability to captivate. From Iceland, Sjón explores the banality of evil in a charged, probing character study. In Argentina, the legendary Norah Lange comes to new light as she evolves beyond her reputation as a literary muse, and tells her story in her own, singular language. The latest from French writer and playwright Yasmina Reza is a poignant meditation, guided by oratory, on selfhood, aging, and human frailties. And lastly, Chile’s award-winning Lina Meruane comes out with an exploration of illness and intergenerational trauma that is at once dreamy and deeply grounded in physicality. Read on to find out more!

red milk

Red Milk by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, Sceptre, 2021

 Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Sjón, one of Iceland’s most internationally recognizable literary figures, is a lifelong cultural miscegenationist. Since his earliest days as a neo-surrealist poet and musician, he has drawn proudly and liberally from global artistic lineages. In Red Milk, his latest collaboration with long-time translator Victoria Cribb, he employs an intentional, methodical restraint to examine the survival of Nazism post-World War II through the life and early death of Gunnar Kampen, a fictionalized version of a real, small-time Icelandic neo-Nazi. Sjón’s policy of omission—of drama, psychology, violence, grandeur of any kind—results in a delicious tension. He tempts us to expect so much of the novel, and though he never provides the relief of clean culminations, he manages to keep the reader wanting.

More than anything, we want Gunnar to either damn or to redeem himself, but he refuses to be anything more than a tempest in a teacup—a chess piece carved in ivory rather than ebony. He passes his brief life engaged in the mundane building of a movement that never comes to fruition. He stumbles into nationalist socialism the same way any young person stumbles into their solidified adult identity. This is not a psychoanalytic assessment of what draws him to Nazism so as much as a collection of images, inputs, choices, and feedback that nudge him there. One such curious image comes from a party he attended with his parents as a child. Bored with the adults, he wanders through the house until he encounters “a human figure, sitting in the shadow thrown by the curved back of the armchair,” in the library. He marvels at her brown skin and colorful clothing.

Without releasing her grip on his left hand, she raises his right hand and pulls it under the lampshade, holding it up to the strong bulb until the light shines red through the child’s flesh, revealing the silhouettes of the bones inside.

            ‘Only possible with such a hand.’

The woman nods at him. The filigree brooch on her shoulder gleams, exposing the pattern from which it is made: a myriad tiny swastikas that differ from the hated one only in that they stand upright rather than tilted on their side.

            ‘Only white people let the light into themselves.’

The imagery is not attributed any meaning besides its own aesthetic potency. The woman’s exoticism is a neutral source of intrigue for Gunnar, unrelated to his blossoming racial beliefs. The woman—as an ideologically educated Gunnar discovers later—might well have been Savitri Devi, the all too real mother figure of contemporary neo-Nazism, but Gunnar’s brush with history is told with the same tone as if she had simply been Reykjavik’s witchy spinster. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2021

April 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng, Marina Dora Martino, and Rachel Stanyon

New work from Japan, Denmark, and Germany!

Our chosen texts from around the world this month denote a certain defamiliarization with one’s environment, whether due to an intrinsic sense of alienation, or an enforced strangeness by a world unexpectedly altered. In literature, disparity is a powerful, effective motif for both the urgency of social commentary, and the exploration of the personal psyche, and the works presented here are exemplifications par excellence in both respects. From a collection of short science fiction tales from a Japanese counterculture icon, to a dual text of two poetry volumes by acclaimed Danish poet Pia Tafdrup, and a harrowing tale of exile and forced peripatetics in the immediate fallout of Kristallnacht. Read on to find out more!

terminal boredom

Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2021

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Copyeditor

Terminal complicity. Terminal addiction. Terminal jealousy. Terminal resignation. Terminal self-deception. Terminal love. Any of these could have been the title of Terminal Boredom, this engrossing first collection of short stories by Izumi Suzuki to appear in English translation. Given how prescient and succinct these tales are, it is surprising that they have taken this long to become available in English. With their worlds full of disillusionment and disaffection, youth unemployment and apathy, they will certainly strike a chord for modern readers interested in the emotional and societal effects of late capitalism, along with fans of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

In Japan, Suzuki is better known; there is even a novel (Endless Waltz by Mayumi Inaba, 1992) and a film (Koji Wakamatsu’s 1995 adaptation Endless Waltz) about the relationship between her and her jazz-musician husband, Kaoru Abe (Suzuki’s daughter sued over invasion of privacy at the book’s release, so read and watch as your conscience dictates). Suzuki, born in 1949, had a varied career, working as a key-punch operator, bar hostess, model, and actress, finding success as a writer before committing suicide in 1986, eight years after her then newly ex-husband had died of a drug overdose. These biographical details suggest that she understood intimately the sometimes hapless jobs, dependencies, and loneliness of the characters she depicts.

The scenarios constructed in the collections’ seven stories are varied enough to maintain interest, while the themes of apathy and detachment bind them together. “Women and Women” (tr. Daniel Joseph) describes a world plagued by resource scarcity in which men have been carved out of society and sent to a cunningly translated “Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone” (GETO for short). This society is controlled through a sort of Orwellian erasure of history, and maintained by the complicity of the vast majority of its female inhabitants. Although the same-sex relationships are cast sympathetically, and, indeed, androgyny seems to be idolized throughout the collection, the story seems ultimately to condemn this ghettoized, vapid world. There does, however, remain a degree of ambivalence. The narrator soon comes across an escaped boy and “learn[s] the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life” before discovering that her mother was disappeared because she had fallen in love with a man and conceived naturally; in the end, though, our protagonist opts back into ‘normal’ life:

When I returned to my room, I noticed that my anguish was almost entirely gone. Women and women. Just as it should be. (. . .)

And yet . . . I put the pen down again before I was done. Now that I know about that thing, how can I ever be happy? To doubt this world is a crime. Everyone but everyone believes implicitly in this world, in this reality. I and I alone (well, probably not) know the great secret of this existence, and I’ll have to live out the rest of my life keeping it at all costs.

Right now, I have no intention of sacrificing my life for some underground resistance movement. But who knows, it might come to that someday.

The reader cannot, however, help but feel that it never will. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2021

March 15, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alice Banks, Carol Khoury, Maddy Robinson, and Rachel Farmer

The best in world literature from Iceland, Palestine, Algeria, and Japan!

This month, our selection of excellent new publications are representative of literature’s capacity for translating worldly phenomenon into language, converting the lived into the understood. From Iceland, a passionate and intimate call to response on the tragedies of environmental destruction; from Palestine, a monumental work of love and resistance from “the Virginia Woolf of Palestine,” Sahar Kalifeh; from Algeria, a sensual novel that treads the tenuous territory of colonialism’s aftereffects; and from Japan, the English-language debut of Akutagawa-winner Kikuko Tsumura, who with graceful humour and intrigue tackles the toxic concept of labour in the thrive of capitalism.  

on time and water

On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Rachel Farmer, Chief Executive Assistant

When Greta Thunberg addressed the UN Climate Summit in September 2019, she choked back tears as she uttered the now infamous words: “How dare you?” Reactions to this display of emotion were mixed to say the least. Some showed discomfort, others concern for her wellbeing; some dismissed her outburst as manipulative, others ridiculed her. Her face and words were even immortalised in meme format. In displaying her anguish and rage so plainly, Thunberg violated the unspoken rule that seems to underpin much of the communication and discussion around climate change, wherein impassivity, stoicism, and detachment reign supreme.

In On Time and Water—part memoir, part interview, part impassioned treatise on the future of our planet—Andri Snær Magnason follows the young Swedish activist’s example, casting aside convention and delving into the emotional side of the climate crisis. In doing so, he embarks on a deeply humane and vulnerable exploration of what manmade climate change truly means for the planet—and for us. In this compelling hybrid of a book, translated sensitively by Lytton Smith, he explains how, a few years ago, he was called upon to defend a region in his country’s highlands from being destroyed in the name of energy production. Despite his deep admiration for the spiritual fervour with which Helgi Valtýsson, another Icelandic writer, wrote about the region in 1945, Magnason found himself unable to infuse the same passion into his defence. Bringing emotions into the discussion would have risked his arguments being dismissed as hysterical, doommongering, or hopelessly idealistic.

I’d found myself overwhelmed by melancholy at the unruly devastation that washed out this peerless region, yet I chose words that seemed moderate and inviting to readers. I used the prevailing language of liberalism, innovation, utilitarianism, and marketing. I discussed the area’s importance for Iceland’s image, its potential tourist income, the area’s research value, how the highlands were a magnet for foreign currency as a filming location for movies or commercials. [. . .] We live in times when money is the measure of reality. I couldn’t argue nature’s right to exist, its essential value, by saying that we might find God’s all-encompassing expanse there. READ MORE…