Posts filed under 'Bloodaxe Books'

What’s New in Translation: November 2025

November 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, Liliana Torpey, and Nichole Gleisner

New work from India, Serbia, France, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Iran, Spain, Lithuania, Palestine, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This month, we’re bringing reviews of eleven different titles from eleven different regions, from a trilingual text of experimental fiction that veers between Vietnamese and English, a visceral and psychically frenetic portrait of a marriage gone wrong, a rich collection from a master Iranian poet that gestures towards his remarkable life, and the latest metafiction from a Spanish literary giant. 

dog

Dog Star by Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Subha Prasad Sanyal, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Something’s rotten in the city of Kolkata. A corrupt managerial class—within which mad scientists and war-mongers play a major role—has conspired with local authorities to capture, confine, and starve as many canines as possible. While the city’s “dead serf-servants and healthful, cellphone-carrying ever-connected mummies and balloons” stagger through their dystopia, the dogs have disappeared from the urban bustle, and no one cares. Animal rights groups have been eliminated, and in the way of Nazi death camps, the system targets even newborn pups. What’s a dog to do in these last dog days? “Bark! Bark!” replies the snappy refrain of Dog Star, the lyrical, subversive, and highly re-readable novella by Bengali writer and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya, delivered in a kinetic English by Subha Prasad Sanyal, who has doubtlessly advanced this innovative author’s reputation in world literature.

A self-proclaimed fable, Dog Star leads the reader through dark alleys where street dogs—“nerikuttas”—hide from “pincers,” form alliances, trade information about current dangers, and strategize escape plans, looking to the constellation “Lubdhok, aka Dogstar, aka Sirius aka Alpha Canis Majoris” for liberation. These survivors, along with their unlikely feline allies, are anthropomorphized in their emotions and dialogues, and their plight, although set in West Bengal, is familiar enough to seem representative of any place under political (dis)order. The Netanyahu regime’s genocide against Gaza comes to mind, for example, as do the active “detention centers” in the US: “They’ll yank and drag you by your neck with the pincers to the caged car. Then throw you in.” Bhattacharya does not avoid visceral descriptions of animal torture, but he balances its brutality with astute irony, giving the murderers absurd lines like: “We must pay heed that there aren’t ridiculous expenses.” READ MORE…

Restoring Our Latent Desires and Capabilities: A Review of The Shadow of Words by Ana Blandiana

May 21, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Charles Altieri

[These poems] offer astonishing ways of capturing how language has broken through to our inner lives.

The Shadow of Words by Ana Blandiana, translated from the Romanian by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea, Bloodaxe Books, 2025

Before entering into Ana Blandiana’s The Shadow of Words, a compilation of the lauded poet’s early work, my first task must be to praise the lengthy introduction by the collection’s translators, Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea, in which they give a superbly lucid account of the intricate shifts in the poet’s sensibility in these beginning years, from 1964 to 1981. The overarching theme, they ascertain, is the various ways that Blandiana stages relations between the joys of intimate life and the political order that threatens them. It is fascinating how these poems elaborate variations on those attitudes.

A poet familiar with the realities of social life. Blandiana was banned from publishing in her native Romania at only seventeen years old, and prohibited from going to university because her father, an orthodox priest, was considered a political prisoner by the communist regime—leaving her labelled as “an enemy of the people.” Later in life, her rebellions against the Ceauşescu dictatorship led to further prohibitions against publication in 1985 and in 1988, with the latter lasting until the revolution of 1989. Such political and literary efforts have since led to her becoming a legendary figure in Romania, often seen as a Joan of Arc or a modern Cassandra—while in her literary oeuvre, she is comparable to writers like Vaclav Havel and Anna Akhmatova, whose work has become symbolic of a collective destiny.

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