Tag Archives: Literary translation
Tasting Life in the State of Exception: Rosella Postorino’s “At the Wolf’s Table,” translated from Italian by Leah Janeczko
by Maurizio Vito Bertolt Brecht’s epigraph from The Threepenny Opera at the beginning of Rosella Postorino’s novel At the Wolf’s Table ushers in the undertone characterizing the story the reader is about to peruse: “A man can only live by absolutely forgetting he’s a man like other folk.” Forgetting is one way to survive troubled […]
Recurring Currents: Esther Kinsky’s “River,” translated from German by Iain Galbraith
By Rebecca DeWald When I first read Stan Nadolny’s The Discovery of Slowness (translated from German by Ralph Freedman), which follows Sir John Franklin on his arctic exploration, I was struck by the way in which the quality of “slowness” both becomes a plot device and its conceit: the reader sees the world through […]
The Art of “Tonbe-Leve”: Frankétienne’s “Dézafi,” Translated from Haitian Creole by Asselin Charles
By Nathan Dize In a 1975 interview, journalist Jean Léopold Dominique praised Frankétienne’s publication of Dézafi, meaning “cockfight,” because it provided a polysemic analogy for Haitian life, at once a metaphor as well as a depiction of reality. The cockfight in the novel takes place both in the actual cockfighting ring, but also in the […]
Translation without an Original: Raja Alem’s “Sarab,” Translated from Arabic by Leri Price
By Amanda Al-Raba’a On November 20, 1979 an insurgent group called al-Ikhwan led by Juhayman al-‘Utaybi besieged the Grand Mosque in Mecca in opposition to the Saud family and increased Western influence in Saudi Arabia. Two of the pillars of Islam are intimately linked to the Grand Mosque: it houses the Ka‘aba, towards which Muslims […]
Stories Left Untold: The Magic of Hwang Sok-Yong’s “Princess Bari,” Translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell
By Kalau Almony The value of literature is often credited to the way literary texts allow us to vicariously experience places and events we otherwise would have no immediate access to. The argument goes that literature thus enables us to expand our own limited worldviews and become better people, capable of making more ethical decisions. […]
“Scattered words (and scattered worlds)”: Dubravka Ugrešić’s “American Fictionary,” translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth and Ellen Elias-Bursać
By Ena Selimović “This is an indecent book,” Dubravka Ugrešić’s American Fictionary proclaims in a new co-translation by Celia Hawkesworth and Ellen Elias-Bursać, and then continues: I have always believed (and still do) that a writer with any self-respect should avoid three things: a) autobiography; b) writing about other countries; c) diaries. (7) This proclamation […]
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 […]
Decline and Fall: “Eventide” by Therese Bohman, translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy
Reviewed by Gabi Reigh Eventide is Therese Bohman’s third novel and just as the heroines of Drowned (2012) and The Other Woman (2016), Karolina, the novel’s protagonist, is a disenchanted observer of the workings of Swedish society, rejecting its norms through her self-destructive emotional entanglements and exposing its hypocrisy about sexual politics. In an interview […]
Declining the Metatranslational Revenge Plot: Brice Matthieussent’s “Revenge of the Translator,” translated from French by Emma Ramadan
Reviewed by Jed Deppman * ____________________________________________________________________________________________ *In interviews in 2009 and 2010, French translator Brice Matthieussent explained the idea for his first novel. In the 1990s he told publisher Christian Bourgois that he dreamed of a book where the text would be absent, available to the reader only by imaginative inference […]
A Scrapbook of “Memorial Clippings”: “My Lai” by Carmen Berenguer, translated from Spanish by Liz Henry
Reviewed by Kelsi Vanada It feels as though the pages of Chilean poet Carmen Berenguer’s My Lai, translated into English by Liz Henry, originated in a scrapbook or journal kept over many years—picked up, loose pages shaken out, and gathered up again quickly and out of order. This sensation is augmented by the inclusion of […]
