Tag Archives: literary reviews
Lines of Flight: Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s “Manhattan Tropics,” translated from Spanish by J. Bret Maney
By Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón Caribbean literary archives are very much like those metaphoric sea shores where the leftovers of shipwrecks of the past constantly wash up. A few years ago, in an important anthology of Puerto Rican narrative published in Venezuela, novelist Marta Aponte Alsina put it best when she wrote that the literary critic […]
Envoicing the Unheard: “Faces on the Tip of My Tongue” by Emmanuelle Pagano, Translated from French by Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins
By Nataliya Deleva Faces on the Tip of My Tongue is a book difficult to describe in one sentence. It caught my attention at its launch event in London when my thoughts dissolved into a conversation with the co-translators Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins. It was presented as a book about people on the fringe […]
Not Playing Games: Chloé Delaume’s “Not A Clue,” Translated from French by Dawn M. Cornelio
Content Warning: Ableism By Julia Peterson When I decided to read Not A Clue, I was hopeful – perhaps naïvely – that it would offer a new take on a frustrating and overdone premise. The story is set in a psychiatric hospital in Paris, where a doctor has been murdered and six patients are suspected […]
Across a Threshold: Olga Livshin’s “A Life Replaced, Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman”
By Lev Fridman There is this edge, where some of us recall childhood’s voices. –– There is an edge, Mama i Papa –– where we wake up in the car with a travel mug to recall a Country. ––No, not That Country of the Present slowly invading this one.–– […]
Forced Exile: Shenaz Patel’s “Silence of the Chagos,” translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
By Preea Leelah Every day, Charlesia walks to the ocean and fixedly gazes in the direction of her homeland, the island of Diego Garcia, the place she may never see again. Shenaz Patel’s novel Silence of the Chagos is the haunting, still unfolding story of the people of Diego Garcia, one of the 56 islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, situated in the Indian […]
Slipknots: Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s “Room in Rome,” translated from Spanish by David Shook
By Olivia Lott Room in Rome introduces English-language readers to the work of essential Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, 1924––Milan, 2006) through David Shook’s translation. A member of Peru’s “Generation of 1950,” Eielson is best known for his borderless aesthetic practice, which includes poetry, narrative, theater, visual arts, performances or “actions,” and syntheses that […]
A World Classic: Mihail Sebastian’s “The Town with Acacia Trees,” Translated from Romanian by Gabi Reigh
By Alta Ifland The stories we enjoy as children and teenagers mark us in a much stronger way than those we read as adults, maybe because what we read when we are not yet fully formed informs us permanently. These stories are like braids that weave our emotional core, and because they are intertwined with […]
A Tale of Two Women: Dorota Maslowska’s “Honey, I Killed the Cats,” Translated from Polish by Benjamin Paloff
By Magdalena Kay Dorota Maslowska’s novel Honey, I Killed the Cats takes us on a fast-paced journey through psychological and physical space. Set in an off-putting contemporary city, we are never sure where we are, again neither physically nor psychologically. Although its neighborhoods and streets have British names, this metropolis is anywhere and nowhere—there is […]
A Gem of a Translation: “The Jeweller” by Caryl Lewis, Translated from Welsh by Gwen Davies
By Ben Ffrancon Davies Caryl Lewis’s stormy novel, The Jeweller, focuses on the humdrum yet turbulent life of Mari, a market-stall jeweller by day who moonlights in a most peculiar way. She, along with her friend Mo, clears the houses of the recently deceased, sorting through their things to find jewels which she can sell […]
Voices of the Post-Soviet Intellectual: Maxim Osipov’s “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” Translated from Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson
By Jonathan Stone The Grannies took the most practice. There were three of them, and as I prepared to read out loud Alex Fleming’s translation of Osipov’s essay “The Cry of The Domestic Fowl,” I kept vacillating between voices. The one who’s in the worst health hears and sees things: “Yuri, is that you?” she’ll […]
Sentimental Education: Berta García Faet’s “The Eligible Age,” Translated from Spanish by Kelsi Vanada
By Lucina Schell Fidelity is often considered a virtue in translation, especially when the translator is female. So what happens when a young female poet writing in English decides to translate a feminist work of great rhetorical sophistication by a young female poet writing in Spanish that specifically plays with the idea of an aesthetic […]
Shifting Sands: Mercè Rodoreda’s “Garden by the Sea,” Translated from Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent
By Eva Dunsky In Garden by the Sea, translated by the mother-daughter team Martha Tennant and Maruxa Relaño, Rodoreda writes a slow burn towards catastrophe. Rodoreda, who is considered one of the most important Catalan writers of the 20th century, wrote often about Catalan society in the years before and after the Spanish Civil War, […]
Translators on Books that Should be Translated: Slavenka Drakulić’s “Marble Skin”
By Serena Todesco As a translator, I often find myself trying to find suitable images to describe what translation exactly entails. When it comes to authors from relatively unknown countries, such as Croatia, translation is indeed a form of irregular and unpredictable treasure hunting. Thanks to the strange combination of my academic interest in European […]
The Haunted Modernism of Jindřich Štyrský’s “Dreamverse,” Translated from Czech by Jed Slast
By Sean Lambert Reading Jindřich Štyrský’s dream journal highlights what an understudied genre of literature the dream journal is. Perhaps if there were a larger body of famous examples (Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams and William Burroughs’ My Education are desperate for company), it would be clearer how uniquely compelling, evocative and revealing is Štyrský’s […]
“Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-Yuan,” Translated from Chinese by Red Pine
By Heather Lang-Cassera Liu Tsung-Yuan has long been acknowledged as one of the most accomplished prose writers of the T’ang Dynasty. However, his excellent poetry was set aside for a time in China—largely because, relative to his prose, he wrote little of it—and it has been wildly under-translated into English. Fortunately, renowned translator Red Pine, […]