“Balkan Rhapsody” follows the internal and external exile of the author’s fictionalised grandmother Miriam and her young family during the 1920s and 1930s, a time of turmoil after the Balkan Wars and the First World War—when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, new states emerged, borders were redrawn and hundreds of thousands of refugees were forced to migrate. The novel plays an elegiac rhapsody to these forced displacements across today’s Albania, Greece, Romania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Turkey.
José Saramago spent much of his working life as a metalworker, a civil servant, and a jobbing translator before becoming, in his fifties, one of the most distinguished European novelists of the twentieth century. An atheist and a lifelong communist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998 for fiction the Swedish Academy characterized as “sustained by imagination, compassion and irony.” It could easily have been described as a long-standing argument with the institutions of church and state, both of which depend on specific forms of assent. Saramago’s increasingly open conflict with these institutions intensified, and eventually cost him dearly, with the controversy surrounding “O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo” (1991), translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero as “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” a novel that retells the life of Jesus from conception to crucifixion.
“Adelaida” is a marvelous book that left me breathless; I intentionally slowed down while reading its last pages, since I didn’t want it to end. A slim book of 142 pages, it mixes together many disparate genres: it is at once a diaspora story that portrays the lives of Argentinian political activists living in and out of exile during the late twentieth century, a historical account of the crimes perpetrated by Argentinian dictatorships, a cultural essay about the Buenos Aires literary scene in the fifties and sixties, a personal history of the friendship between the author and his protagonist, Adelaida, and, finally, a testimony to the role played by women in history and art.
In two stories, written approximately three-quarters of a century apart – “Dino Buzzati’s “Qualcosa era successo” (“Something Had Happened,” 1949) and Sandro Veronesi’s “Qualcosa era successo” (2026) – an ordinary train ride becomes an allegory about fear of the unknown and powerlessness in the face of inexplicable events.
Not only alert to the German, the main medium of the collection, Kesici-Ayoubi carefully treats the other three languages that largely contribute to its multilingual texture: Turkish, Arabic, and English. She provides a brief foreword called “Translator’s Notes” that draws attention to the poet’s “linguistic world” and explains no more than seven terms or references.
Translating “The Craft of Living” into English presents the singular task of transposing Pavese’s eloquent thoughts about life and literature into the language that inspired many of his points of view in the first place. By the time Pavese began publishing works in prose, in the early 1940s, he had already penned the Italian translations of works by Melville, Anderson, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Joyce, Defoe, Dickens, Lewis, and Stein and was in the process of translating Faulkner.
“Translation is the most intimate act of reading.” The definition comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a preface to her translation of eighteenth-century Bengali poetry. I didn’t learn much in grad school, but I do remember at least one thing: it’s a very bad idea to argue with Gayatri Spivak. So I won’t. However, her insight, which has been seconded by scholars of translation everywhere, should really be understood as both a blessing and a curse. If translation is an intimate act, what then happens when a translator translates testimony from a witness to genocide?
It is difficult to imagine a serious literary discussion among Slavists that would not eventually invoke the name of Yuri Tynianov (1894-1943). And yet, in notable contrast to his flashier Russian Formalist colleague Viktor Shklovsky, Tynianov’s writings have still been only spottily translated into English. Many of Tynianov’s ideas—especially but not only concerning parody, literary evolution, and the dynamism of center and periphery—have lost none of their currency today. The belated arrival of such a careful and well annotated translation is worth celebrating.
While a variety of Mexican women writers continue to take their rightful place at the literary table next to male counterparts, there are still many who remain in the shadows. One is Gabriela Rábago Palafox (1950-1995) who, although a minor writer, showed great promise of developing into a major author before her untimely death.
In this essay I consider “posing” and “passing” as narrative, cultural, and linguistic mechanisms that help us understand how exophonic and migrant identities are negotiated in contemporary Italian literature. More specifically, I examine practices of translation in relation to practices of posing and passing as Italian.
One way to understand this project, then, is a childlike, though not childish, attack on an ossified adult language with its boredom and sterility (“call it infantile vendetta [Kinder-Rache] on life’s deeply serious aim,” to quote the titular poem [44]). By following puns to their ends or dead ends, letting rhymes and rhythms take language wherever it may go, Morgenstern injects an originary vitality into linguistic structures that have forgotten those other paths they could have taken.
Language is at the center of the book. It could almost be said that the action of the novel follows linguistic acts, rather than happenings in the real world. Patrik’s internal monologue is steeped in Celan-words, particularly those from his 1968 book “Fadensonnen” (Threadsuns).
“Mona’s Eyes” by Thomas Schlesser is a bona fide international hit. It has landed on many best-seller lists and has been translated into at least twenty languages since its French debut in 2024. It’s easy to see why: this novel has been almost engineered to succeed, from its structure to its style. The framing narrative tugs on the reader’s heartstrings while the meat of the book delivers a survey of art history.
Translator and publisher Idara Crespi introduces Espresso Publishing House, a new Canadian press specializing in translated literature. Crespi also introduces the inaugural publication of Espresso Publishing, Francesco Mastriani’s Gothic thriller “The Blind Woman of Sorrento” which she translated herself.
Winner of the PEN Translates Award and included in the longlist for the Dublin Literary Award, the English version of Andrea Tompa’s “Haza” (2020), translated from Hungarian by Jozefina Komporaly as “Home” (Istros Books, 2024), raises intriguing questions about the new life of the book.