Posts featuring Javier Marías

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Brazil and Spain!

This week, our reporters bring you news of new publications, prizes, and book fairs in Brazil and the release of new novels in Spain examining the Franco regime. Read on to find out more!

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

Things are heating up in Brazil, as summer carries on in full force and the Sambadrome gears up for its first parade of the decade. Brazil is more than just Carnaval, though, as Eliane Brum reminds us in The Collector of Leftover Souls (Graywolf Press), translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty and longlisted for the National Book Award. A prolific journalist and documentary filmmaker, Brum calls out the reader in the first few pages of the book: “Whenever I visit an English-speaking country, I notice Brazil doesn’t exist for most of you. Or exists only in the stereotype of Carnival and soccer. Favelas, butts, and violence.” Brum invites the reader on a journey into indigenous villages, through environmental destruction (and reconstruction), and into the heart and soul of politics in Brazil. The translation resonates in the midst of growing tensions over fires in the Amazon, met by what Brum characterizes as an unfit and “destructive” response by the Bolsonaro administration.

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On Translators in Translation: Spanish Novels About Translators Available in English Translation

The increasing need to understand the importance of translation in our globalized world manifests in works of fiction that feature a translator.

In our globalized world, translation seems to be everywhere. In subtitles, instructions, signs, menus, in meetings, and walking down the street. And recently, in fiction too. The representation of the act of translation and the task of the translator has become a recurrent topic in literature. In English, novels such as Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear and Rachel Cantor’s Good on Paper, both from 2016 and with translator protagonists, were very well received by readers as well as critics; and the latest anthology Crossing Borders, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, brings together stories on translation and translators by acclaimed writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Lydia Davis, among others. Translation was even at the center of the Academy Award nominee film Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”) in which Golden Globe nominee Amy Adams plays a translator tasked with communicating with heptapod aliens. The increasing need to understand the importance of translation in our globalized world has manifested in a recurrence with which works of fiction feature a translator or interpreter as the main character. In Spanish, too, there have been dozens of novels with translator protagonists written in the last few decades by both mainstream and cult authors, and by both translators who write and writers who translate. With this newly found interest in translation, more and more of these novels are being translated into English. Here are five novels on translators originally written in Spanish that are available to read in English translation.

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