What’s New in Translation: August 2025

August 11, 2025 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Eric Bies, Justin Goodman, Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

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Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

Bungaku Days 2025: A Celebration and Symposium on Translation from the Japanese Literature Publishing Project

March 17, 2025 | in Dispatches | by Mary Hillis

The symposium demonstrated that literature, like music, is not confined by borders—it moves, it transforms, it finds new voices.

Bungaku Days, an annual event presented by the Japanese Literature Publishing Project, is comprised of a symposium of topical discussions surrounding Japanese writing, as well as an award ceremony for the organization’s International Translation Competition. This year, translators, writers, and literati gathered in Kyoto to discuss the craft of translation and recognize new achievements in the field, with various experts dispensing knowledge of both the creative and the logistical matters of international literature. Here, Mary Hillis reports on the goings-on of this year’s edition.

In At the End of the Matinee by Keiichiro Hirano (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter), the character Makino recalls when he first understood how to breathe life into his classical guitar performances: “Music is born in opposition to the beauty of silence; the creation of music lies in the attempt to use sound to bring about new beauty that contrasts with the beauty of silence.” Just as music relies on silence to give it shape, literature rests on pauses, echoes of history, interstices where interpretation takes root. In bringing Japanese literature to a wider audience, it is necessary to bridge these gaps, not merely by transferring language but by truly transforming it. Whether in rendering nuance across cultures, adapting novels into visual media, or retranslating classical works, translators often dwell in the space between the lines.

What’s New in Translation: February 2025

February 10, 2025 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Eamon McGrath, Marcel Krueger, Rosalia Ignatova, and Xiao Yue Shan

February's latest in translation.

In this month’s round-up of recent translations, we present eleven titles from Japan, Iraq, Colombia, Indonesia, Austria, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Slovenia. From neorealist postwar fiction to the graphic novel, stories capturing the tides of time and the turbulent eras of violence, narratives of migration and mystery, innovations of the short fiction form and unconventional looks into classic tales . . . these titles are invitations into hidden places and profound sights, stark realities and dreamy visions.

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A Perfect Day to be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, Other Press, 2025

Review by Rosalia Ignatova

Nanae Aoyama’s short novel, A Perfect Day to Be Alone, is the English-language debut of its lauded young author, offering a delicate exploration of existential drift through the eyes of Chizu, a restless twenty-year-old, and Ginko, her elderly relative who takes her in for a year. While the narrative is sparse on action, it is rich in atmospheric detail, focusing on the quiet moments that shape their unlikely cohabitation.