Tag Archives: literary reviews
Framing by Fragmentation: Elena Ferrante’s “Incidental Inventions,” Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
By Stiliana Milkova The timing of Elena Ferrante’s Incidental Inventions is impeccable – it offers us an aperitivo before we can delve into her new novel scheduled to come out in English translation in June 2020. While we wait, we can flip leisurely through the pages of Incidental Inventions, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, and already in bookstores. […]
Maelstrom and Mirroring in Edoardo Sanguineti’s “My Life, I Lapped It Up,” translated from Italian by Will Schutt
By Judith Vollmer All good poems wrestle with acute contradictions. They sweat and sing the facts and mysteries of living, while simultaneously revealing the scaffoldings and artistic intentions of their surface textures. Sometimes poems sound imitative of traditions they’d rather reject. Sometimes they sound overly self-conscious and merely experimental. But when they’re good—even great—they […]
Edge to Edge: Laura Marris In Conversation With John Taylor and Pierre Chappuis
By Laura Marris Some of us, if we are lucky enough, have witnessed it—the moment when a passing line of clouds tangles with the trees of a ridge, blurring the distinctions between branches and vapor, between landscape and sky. This thoughtful, sensitive volume offers the poetic equivalent of that process, a brush between two imaginative […]
Translators on Books that Should be Translated: “SLOBOŠTINA BARBIE” BY MAŠA KOLANOVIĆ
By Ena Selimović In a review in The Guardian, Ranka Primorac argued that the “best of Croatia’s post-independence writing” challenges what she described as a “dualist (sunny beaches vs. nasty politics, ‘backward’ Croatia vs. ‘modern’ EU) mode of thinking.” Alongside the works of Zoran Ferić and Slavko Goldstein, Maša Kolanović’s Sloboština Barbie exemplified for Primorac […]
Nothing to See Here: Wioletta Greg’s “Accommodations,” Translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft
By Benjamin Paloff After reading Wioletta Greg’s Accommodations, one can be forgiven for wondering whether the novel—not this short novel in particular, but the novel as such, as a literary form—might have exhausted its possibilities. That is no slight against this pleasant, if forgettable, little book, just a pertinent observation about a text in which […]
Thresholds and Mothers: Elsa Morante’s “Arturo’s Island,” Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
By Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski Elsa Morante’s Arturo’s Island: A Novel is an enchanting, complex work about a boy, Arturo, growing up on the island Procida. He swims, struggles to understand his father, adores his dog, falls in love, and eventually leaves home. His drama of adolescent feelings is both universally relatable and singular. Since he […]
Comic Despair and Magical Melancholy: Duanwad Pimwana’s “Bright,” Translated from Thai by Mui Poopoksakul
By Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit At the outset of Duanwad Pimwana’s Bright, five-year old Kampol Changsamran’s family crumbles in ways he cannot comprehend. Told to sit and wait in the courtyard of their tenement neighborhood, Kampol obeys as his father drives away with his infant brother, promising to return. Abandoned without knowing why, Kampol drifts from house to […]
Everyday Illuminations: Gemma Gorga’s “Book of Minutes,” Translated from Catalan by Sharon Dolin
By Mary Ann Newman Unlike American poetry, Catalan poetry tends to shun the confessional or the directly personal. To revive a Lacanian phrase, Catalan poetry is always already political. A language and a literature that suffered continual interruptions owing to lost wars and various repressions—the 1714 War of Succession, the 1923 dictatorship of Primo de […]
TRANSLATORS ON BOOKS THAT SHOULD BE TRANSLATED: “DRERI I TROTUARËVE” BY DIANA ÇULI
by Barbara Halla In an interview for an Albanian newspaper, Diana Çuli talked at length about the events that inspired her most famous book to date, Dreri i Trotuarëve (A Stag in the Boulevard): one morning in the late ‘60s, as Çuli walked to school with a group of female friends, a girl had jumped […]
The Mother of All Questions: Donatella di Pietrantonio’s “A Girl Returned,” translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
By Barbara Halla “Motherhood,” writes Jacqueline Rose in her book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, “is … the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our conflicts, of what it means to be fully human” (1). More than one century of Italian literature has grappled precisely with […]
Haitian Sacred Arts as Public Education: Antoine Innocent’s “Mimola, or the Story of a Casket,” translated from French and Haitian Creole by Susan Kalter
By Nathan Dize Mimola, or the Story of a Casket begins with an obituary, an homage to the family matriarch who survived the Middle Passage and who built and sustained a family, now two generations in the making. Antoine Innocent’s novel blends the urbane journalistic qualities of Port-au-Prince with the rich folk tradition of the […]
Time and the Elastic Object in Piotr Paziński’s “THE BOARDING HOUSE,” Translated from Polish by Tusia Dabrowska
By Judith Vollmer Time is the muse and director of Piotr Paziński’s novel The Boarding House, in which a grandson returning to the site of childhood visits to his grandmother enters a claustrophobic journey into a broken world. The Time-muse, though austere, also exercises a seductive presence, advancing the sinuous pace of the novel in […]
Me, She, I, Too: Adélaïde Bon’s “The Little Girl on the Ice Floe,” Translated from French by Tina Kover
Content Warning: Sexual Violence, Rape By Alec Joyner Over the last few years, more and more novels, memoirs, and books of poetry have begun to plumb the depths—the intricate, historically entrenched structures of sexual violence—that extend far beneath the #MeToo hashtag. These books are making a case, implicitly, for the ongoing value of literature, a […]
A Woman Besieged: Clarice Lispector’s “The Besieged City,” translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz
This month, in memory of our contributor Professor Jed Deppman who founded the Oberlin College Translation Symposium, instituted a literary translation minor, and taught courses in literary translation and comparative literature, we are featuring three reviews by Oberlin College Comparative Literature graduates and students, taught and trained by Professor Deppman and other Oberlin College faculty. Professor […]
On Akhmatova’s Couch: “Relative Genitive: Poems with Translations from Osip Mandelstam & Vladimir Mayakovsky,” by Val Vinokur
by Jonathan Stone In a way, Relative Genitive should get three reviews: as Val Vinokur’s translation of eighteen poems by Osip Mandelshtam, as Val Vinokur’s translation of seven (mostly longer) poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, and as a collection of thirty eight poems by Val Vinokur. However, the artfulness with which Vinokur fuses and navigates those […]