Tag: Women in Translation

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Women in Translation: Five books published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

This month, August, is a chance to celebrate women in translation, specifically women authors who’s works have been translated. There’s so much good translated literature out there. For this month, I’ll be sharing some inspiration from women authors all around the world who have had their work translated into English.

I know a lot of people read works translated from English (or other languages) into their own language. There’s so much important translation work that needs to be done to make works more accessible to the world. But since I only read in English, I’m going to be highlighting works that have been translated into English.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be focusing on independent book publishers that focus on publishing works in translation.

For this week, we’ll be highlighting Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent publisher specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays.

Source: https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/about/

Fitzcarraldo Editions is another independent British book publisher (similar to Charco Press and Tilted Axis Press). They don’t have a specific regional focus, they are just interested on little-known or neglected authors.

Currently, Fitzcarraldo Editions publishes about 22 titles each year, and you can sign up to a subscription to receive the books published that year. If you go here, you can sign up for a subscription and choose how many books you want to receive.

Photo by Christopher Lowe on Unsplash

Fitzcarraldo Editions was founded in 2014, and has grown significantly in the past 10 years. Over the past decade, four of Fitzcarraldo’s authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, including:

  • Svetlana Alexievich (2015)
  • Olga Tokarczuk (2018)
  • Annie Ernaux (2022)
  • Jon Fosse (2023)

They’ve also done a really good job at branding their books. All books are published in their signature colour of deep blue for fiction, and white for any nonfiction/essays, making them easy to spot when browsing for books. Also, they use a custom serif typeface called Fitzcarraldo.

Personally, Fitzcarraldo Editions feels a lot more established than the other publishing houses I’ve highlighted. This makes them feel a little less personalized or focused on specific themes, but they’re still doing amazing work and helping to get works out into the world that might not otherwise exist.

If you want to learn more about Fitzcaraldo Editions, you can visit their website here or read about them here on Wikipedia.

Five translated books written by women from Fitzcarraldo Editions

Here’s a list of five translated books written by women from Fitzcarraldo Editions.

  1. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead / Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych by Olga Tokarczuk (2009)
    Poland
  2. Minor Detail / تفصيل ثانوي – by Adania Shibli / عدنية شبلي from (2017)
    Palestine
  3. Strangers I Know / La straniera by Claudia Durastanti (2019)
    Italy
  4. Owlish / 鷹頭貓與音樂箱女孩 by Dorothy Tse / 謝曉虹 (2020)
    Hong Kong
  5. Paradais / Páradais by Fernanda Melchor (2021)
    Mexico

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead / Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (2009) – Poland

by Olga Tokarczuk,
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

  • Year Published: 2009
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, contemporary, literary, thriller, dark, mysterious, reflective, medium-paced
  • Language: Polish
  • Shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize
  • Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature

One of Poland’s most imaginative and lyrical writers, Olga Tokarczuk presents us with a detective story with a twist in DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD. After her two dogs go missing and members of the local hunting club are found murdered, teacher and animal rights activist Janina Duszejko becomes involved in the ensuing investigation. Part magic realism, part detective story, DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD is suspenseful and entertaining reimagining of the genre interwoven with poignant and insightful commentaries on our perceptions of madness, marginalised people and animal rights.

Links:

Minor Detail / تفصيل ثانوي – Palestine (2017)

by Adania Shibli / عدنية شبلي,
Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

  • Year Published: 2017
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, contemporary, historical, literary, dark, sad, tense, medium-paced
  • Portrays the aftermath of the Nakba (aka the catastrophe) in Palestine

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

Links:

Strangers I Know / La straniera (2019) – Italy

by Claudia Durastanti,
Translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris

  • Year Published: 2019
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, emotional, reflective, medium-paced

Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia’s mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn’t be more different; they can’t even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving.

Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born. She comes of age with her brother in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City. Without even sign language in common – their parents have not bothered to teach them – family communications are chaotic and rife with misinterpretations. An outsider in every way, she longs for a freedom she’s not even sure exists. Only books and punk rock – and a tumultuous relationship – begin to show her the way to create her own mythology, to construct her own version of the story of her life.

Kinetic, formally daring, and strikingly original, Strangers I Know is a funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.

Links:

Owlish / 鷹頭貓與音樂箱女孩 (2020) – Hong Kong

by Dorothy Tse / 謝曉虹,
Translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce

  • Year Published: 2020
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, magical realism, challenging, dark, mysterious, slow-paced

In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a life-sized ballerina named Aliss who has tantalizingly sprung to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty. A deliciously dark subversion of the fairy-tale form set in an alternate Hong Kong, Dorothy Tse’s extraordinary debut novel is a boldly inventive exploration of life under oppressive regimes and an urgent warning against the insidious perils of apathy and indifference.

Links:

Paradais / Páradais (2021) – Mexico

by Fernanda Melchor,
Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes

  • Year Published: 2021
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, contemporary, crime, literary, challenging, dark, tense, fast-paced
  • Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor – an attractive married woman and mother – while Polo dreams about quitting his gruelling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society – with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies – and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

Links:

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Are you familiar with Fitzcarraldo Editions? If so, I’d love to hear which books you enjoyed from their collection or which books you are excited to read.

Do you know of any other independent publishers like Fitzcarraldo Editions? I’d love to hear all about them in a comment below!

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Women in Translation: Five books published by Charco Press

This month, August, is a chance to celebrate women in translation, specifically women authors who’s works have been translated. There’s so much good translated literature out there. For this month, I’ll be sharing some inspiration from women authors all around the world who have had their work translated into English.

I know a lot of people read works translated from English (or other languages) into their own language. There’s so much important translation work that needs to be done to make works more accessible to the world. But since I only read in English, I’m going to be highlighting works that have been translated into English.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be focusing on independent book publishers that focus on publishing works in translation.

For this week, we’ll be highlighting Charco Press.

Charco Press focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world.

Source: https://charcopress.com/about

Charco Press is an independent publishing house that is based in Edinburgh, UK, but that focuses on translating Latin American fiction into English. It was founded in 2016 to bring more diversity to the Latin American literature that is studied and available to the English speaking world.

Photo by Guille Álvarez on Unsplash

Charco means ‘puddle’ in Spanish. It is also a colloquialism used in some Latin American countries to refer to the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore, cruzar el charco means ‘crossing the puddle’ and is a way of referring to when someone is going overseas, or travelling between continents.

Source: https://charcopress.com/about

Charco Press aims to make the best of contemporary Latin American literature more accessible to the English world. They actively seek out the best authors and works from Latin America, along with finding contemporary translators to bring talent from the margins into the spotlight.

I think all of this is fantastic. It’s so important to highlight the work being done around the world to make literature more accessible to others.

Personally, I haven’t read much Latin American literature. I want to read more, and I want to delve deeper into the nuances of the region.

At the moment, I’m based in Asia, so I’m more focused on reading and learning about work from this region. Plus it’s easier to access books from this region while I’m living here.

For now, I’m just starting to dabble in Latin American literature, and later I’m hoping to truly dive into the depths.

If you’re also starting to dabble or looking for more options within Latin American literature, I would greatly recommend checking out Charco Press, you can read more on their website or on wikipedia.

Five translated books written by women from Charco Press

Here’s a list of five translated books written by women from Charco Press

  1. Theatre of War / Escenario de guerra by Andrea Jeftanovic (2000)
    Chile
  2. Byobu / El abc de byobu by Ida Vitale (2004)
    Uruguay
  3. Elena Knows / Elena sabe by Claudia Piñeiro (2007)
    Argentina
  4. Of Cattle and Men / De Gados e Homens by Ana Paula Maia (2013)
    Brazil
  5. Salt Crystals / Los Cristales de la Sal by Cristina Bendek (2018)
    Columbia

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.

Theatre of War / Escenario de guerra (2000) – Chile

by Andrea Jeftanovic,
Translated from the Spanish (Chile) by Frances Riddle

  • Year Published: 2000
    English version in 2020
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, emotional, reflective, slow-paced

A powerful novel depicting the devastating psychological effects of war, political violence and domestic abuse. This is a story narrated from the point of view of a nine-year old girl, Tamara, who takes in the intricacies of the survival strategies of the world she inherits, marked by poverty, unspeakable trauma, trapped scenarios. Theatre of War takes us on a desolate journey into the reconstruction of memory – a universal question that here turns into a reflection on how giant historical events can affect the seemingly insignificant lives of nameless individuals. Tamara, protagonist and narrator, faces the ghosts of a very tangible past that includes her father’s war (an immigrant from former Yugoslavia), a very conflictive family life, suicides, lost landscapes, inherited trauma, absent siblings and a mother who, due to an undefined illness, has suffered from partial memory loss and cannot recognise her own daughter.

Andrea Jeftanovic’s debut novel, is an exploration of the empty theatre of operations her memory provides for the domestic war she was part of as a child. The Chilean novelist approaches the ruins of memory to source from them the love needed to build her identity as an adult. An impressive, sensitive, harrowing, widely praised first novel from one of the most important female novelists of Latin America.

Links:

Byobu / El abc de byobu (2004) – Uruguay

by Ida Vitale,
Translated from the Spanish (Uruguay) by Sean Manning

  • Year Published: 2004
    English version in 2021
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, contemporary, literary, challenging, reflective, medium-paced
  • Well-known poet in Uruguay
  • She just turned 100 years old in November 2023!

Byobu’s every interaction trembles with possibility and faint menace. A crack in the walls of his house, marring it forever, means he must burn it down. A stoplight asks what the value of obedience is, what hopefulness it contains, and what insensible anarchy it defies. In brief episodes, aphorisms, and moments of spiritual turbulence and gentle scrutiny, reside a wealth of habits, worries, curiosities, pleasures, peculiarities, and efforts to understand.

Representative of the modesty and complexity of Ida Vitale’s poetic universe, Byobu flushes the world with meaning and playfully offers another way of inhabiting the every day.

Links:

Elena Knows / Elena sabe (2007) – Argentina

by Claudia Piñeiro,
Translated from the Spanish (Argentina) by Frances Riddle

  • Year Published: 2007
    English version in 2021
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, contemporary, crime, literary, mystery, emotional, reflective, sad, medium-paced
  • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022

A unique tale that interweaves crime fiction with intimate tales of morality and search for individual freedom.

After Rita is found dead in the bell tower of the church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation,

Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.

Links:

Of Cattle and Men / De Gados e Homens (2013) – Brazil

by Ana Paula Maia,
Translated from the Portuguese (Brazil) by Zoë Perry

  • Year Published: 2013
    English version in 2023
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, dark, mysterious, reflective, medium-paced

Animals go mad and men die (accidentally and not) at a slaughterhouse in an impoverished, isolated corner of Brazil.

In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic and sludgy with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over and over again, the stun operator at Mr. Milo’s slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It’s important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled. One runs headlong into the side of a barn, 22 more hurl themselves off the side of a cliff. Bronco Gil, their foreman, thinks it’s a jaguar or a wild boar, Edgar Wilson does not. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness.

Links:

Salt Crystals / Los Cristales de la Sal (2018) – Columbia

by Cristina Bendek,
Translated from the Spanish (Columbia) by Robin Myers

  • Year Published: 2018
    English version in 2022
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction contemporary challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Returning to the island of San Andrés, in the Caribbean Sea, after many years living in Mexico, forces Verónica Baruq, our main character, to question her relationship with her origins. An intriguing photograph of her great-grandparents and an eerie encounter with Maa Josephine, a Raizal old woman who she meets outside the First Baptiste Church, are only a couple of the triggers that begin to reveal the truth about her background. Her past not only puts the protagonist in contact with the island’s unknown history, but it also helps her understand the social movements which, between zouk and calypso, celebrate the Raizal identity, carry out ‘thinking rundowns’ and above all, resist.

A fascinating bildungsroman that brings to the fore the untold stories of the Afro-Caribbean population that inhabit this forgotten paradise.

Links:

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books published by Charco Press.

Are you familiar with Charco Press? If so, I’d love to hear which books you enjoyed from their collection or which books you are excited to read.

Do you know of any other independent publishers like Charco Press? I’d love to hear all about them in a comment below!

Posted on

Women in Translation: Five books published by Tilted Axis Press

This month, August, is a chance to celebrate women in translation, specifically women authors who’s works have been translated. There’s so much good translated literature out there. For this month, I’ll be sharing some inspiration from women authors all around the world who have had their work translated into English.

I know a lot of people read works translated from English (or other languages) into their own language. There’s so much important translation work that needs to be done to make works more accessible to the world. But since I only read in English, I’m going to be highlighting works that have been translated into English.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be focusing on independent book publishers that focus on publishing works in translation.

For this week, we’ll be highlighting Tilted Axis Press:

Tilted Axis Press is an independent publisher of contemporary literature by the Global Majority, translated into or written in a variety of Englishes. Founded in 2015, our practice is an ongoing exploration into alternatives – to the hierarchisation of certain languages and forms of translation, and the monoculture of globalisation.

Source: https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/about
Photo by Jason W on Unsplash

Tilted Axis Press was founded in 2015 by Deborah Smith, the translator of The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Her English translation of the work (from the Korean), won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize and was very well received internationally. She used the funds and success from this work to create Tilted Axis Press.

Tomb of Sand by Geentanjali Shree (translated into English from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell) was published by Tilted Axis Press, and won the International Booker Prize in 2022. Tilted Axis Press received a lot of attention for this award and increased their international recognition.

After winning the International Booker Prize in 2022, Deborah Smith decided to step down as Publisher and Managing Director of Tilted Axis Press. Kristen Vida Alfaro is Deborah’s successor and currently leads the publishing company.

Tilted Axis Press publishes a handful of books throughout the year (~6-9), focusing on contemporary translated fiction, with some poetry and non-fiction too.

Each year you can buy a yearly subscription, to receive all the book published that year. They send you the books throughout the year as they get published. You can still buy the bundle for 2024, either to receive the print/physical books or as e-books.

I find that Tilted Axis Press currently fills a pretty unique gap in the publishing industry by helping to get modern Southeast Asian books translated into English. They publish books from all over the region, including Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, which rarely get the attention of big publishers.

If you’re interested, you can learn more at their website or on wikipedia. Or you can read one of the books listed below that have been published by Tilted Axis Press.

Five translated books written by women from Tilted Axis Press

Here’s a list of five translated books written by women from Tilted Axis Press

  1. Chinatown by Thuận (2005)
    Vietnam
  2. Strange Beasts of China/异兽志 by Yan Ge (颜歌) (2006)
    China
  3. Every Fire You Tend / Yüzünde Bir Yer by Sema Kaygusuz (2009)
    Turkey
  4. Tomb of Sand / रेत समाधि by Geetanjali Shree / गीतांजलि श्री (2018)
    India
  5. Arid Dreams / ฝันแห้งและเรื่องอื่นๆ by Duanwad Pimwana / เดือนวาด พิมวนา (2019)
    Thailand

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.

Chinatown (2005) – Vietnam

by Thuận,
Translated from the Vietnamese by An Lý Nguyễn

  • Year Published: 2005
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, emotional, reflective, sad, medium-paced
  • Winner of the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award

An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: the subway workers suspect it’s a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her constrained childhood in communist Hanoi, to a long period of study in Leningrad during the Gorbachev period, and finally to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through everything runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer who lives in Saigon’s Chinatown, and who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling darkly between them, she has not seen for eleven years.

Through her breathless, vertiginous, and deeply moving monologue from beside the subway tracks, the narrator attempts to once and for all face the past and exorcize the passion that haunts her.

Links:

Strange Beasts of China/异兽志 (2006) – China

by Yan Ge (颜歌),
Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Jeremy Tiang

  • Year Published: 2006
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, contemporary, fantasy, literary, dark, mysterious, reflective, medium-paced
  • Translated version published in 2021 through Tilted Axis press

From one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Chinese literature, an uncanny and playful novel that blurs the line between human and beast …

In the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness—save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks.

Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self.

Part detective story, part metaphysical enquiry, Strange Beasts of China engages existential questions of identity, humanity, love and morality with whimsy and stylistic verve.

Links:

Every Fire You Tend / Yüzünde Bir Yer (2009) – Turkey

by Sema Kaygusuz,
Translated from the Turkish by Nicholas Glastonbury

  • Year Published: 2009
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, historical, literary, emotional, reflective, medium-paced

In 1938, in the remote Dersim region of Eastern Anatolia, the Turkish Republic launched an operation to erase an entire community of Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds. Inspired by those brutal events, and the survival of Kaygusuz’s own grandmother, this densely lyrical and allusive novel grapples with the various inheritances of genocide, gendered violence and historical memory as they reverberate across time and place from within the unnamed protagonist’s home in contemporary Istanbul.

Kaygusuz imagines a narrative anchored by the weight of anguish and silence, fuelled by mysticism, wisdom and beauty. This is a powerful exploration of a still-taboo subject, deeply significant to the fault lines of modern-day Turkey.

Links:

Tomb of Sand / रेत समाधि (2018) – India

by Geetanjali Shree / गीतांजलि श्री,
Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell

  • Year Published: 2018
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, emotional, mysterious, reflective, medium-paced
  • Language: Hindi
  • Winner of International Book Prize in 2022

An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a hijra (trans) woman – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two.

At the older woman’s insistence they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.

Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree’s playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.

Links:

Arid Dreams / ฝันแห้งและเรื่องอื่นๆ (2019) – Thailand

by Duanwad Pimwana / เดือนวาด พิมวนา,
Translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul

  • Year Published: 2019
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, short stories, challenging, reflective, sad, slow-paced
  • Duanwad Pimwana won the 2003 S.E.A Write Award for her novel Changsamran

In thirteen stories that investigate ordinary and working-class Thailand, characters aspire for more but remain suspended in routine. They bide their time, waiting for an extraordinary event to end their stasis. A politician’s wife imagines her life had her husband’s accident been fatal, a man on death row requests that a friend clear up a misunderstanding with a prostitute, and an elevator attendant feels himself wasting away while trapped, immobile, at his station all day.

With curious wit, this collection offers revelatory insight and subtle critique, exploring class, gender, and disenchantment in a changing country.

Links:

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books published by Tilted Axis Press.

Are you familiar with Tilted Axis Press? If so, I’d love to hear which books you enjoyed from their collection or which books you are excited to read.

Do you know of any other independent publishers like Tilted Axis Press? I’d love to hear all about them in a comment below!

Posted on

Five translated modern classic books by women around the world

This month, August, is a chance to celebrate women in translation, specifically women authors who’s works have been translated. There’s so much good translated literature out there. For this month, I’ll be sharing some inspiration from women authors all around the world who have had their work translated into English.

I know a lot of people read works translated from English (or other languages) into their own language. There’s so much important translation work that needs to be done to make works more accessible to the world. But since I only read in English, I’m going to be highlighting works that have been translated into English.

For two weeks, this and last, I want to highlight classic works of literature from around the world that have been translated into English. I’m breaking it into two parts, the first (last week) was from European authors, and this week will be from all around the world.

When I was doing research for these posts, there were far more classics translated from European authors. I guess it’s not much of a surprise, especially with the English-speaking world’s connection with Europe, but it does show a discrepancy in the availability of classics from all areas of the world.

There are numerous reasons why there are far fewer translations from outside of Europe. From colonial impacts encouraged by the delusional belief of Western supremacy, to local cultures or traditions that might have leaned more towards oral storytelling instead of written.

Photo by Jan Mellström on Unsplash

Art lost to history

Whenever I think about the stories and literature lost to time, I’m so saddened by the understanding that there’s so much we’re missing out on. There are so many individuals who had stories to tell or could’ve created incredible works of art that never got the chance due to lack of funds or opportunities. Maybe they were able to create for those around them, those they loved or just for themselves, and maybe that’s enough.

I guess what breaks my heart is that we’ll never have a clear understanding of all people at that time, only those with privilege or power have remained. There are so many perspectives, thoughts, and understandings throughout history that have been lost and now we can only imagine what they might be.

That’s why I think it’s important to seek out different perspectives. There may not be as many translated works from certain areas of the world, but those that exist are valuable and important.

I’ve selected books from all over the world covering Asia, Latin America, and Africa. But this is only a list of five books, so it’s just a tiny selection of all the books out there.

Think of this as a jumping off point, or a source of inspiration to look for more modern classic books in translation from around the world.

Five translated modern classic books by women around the world

Here’s a list of five translated classic books with women authors from around the world.

  1. A Riot of Goldfish / 金魚撩乱 by Kanoko Okamoto / 岡本かの子 (1937)
    Japan
  2. Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral by Gabriela Mistral (1941)
    Chile
  3. Love in a Fallen City / 傾城之戀 by Eileen Chang / 張愛玲 (1946)
    China
  4. Pinjar: The Skeleton and Other Stories / ਪਿੰਜਰ by Amrita Pritam (1950) 
    India
  5. So Long a Letter / Une si longue lettre by Mariama Bâ (1979)
    Senegal

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.

A Riot of Goldfish / 金魚撩乱, Kingyo ryōran (1937) – Japan

by Kanoko Okamoto / 岡本かの子,
Translated from the Japanese by J. Keith Vincent

  • Year Published: 1937
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, short stories, lighthearted, reflective, slow-paced
  • Okamoto was an active member of the feminist group Bluestockings (青踏社, Seitōsha)

In early 20th-century Japan, the son of lower-class goldfish sellers falls in love with the beautiful daughter of his rich patron. After he is sent away to study the science of goldfish breeding, with strict orders to return and make his patron’s fortune, he vows to devote his life to producing one ideal, perfect goldfish specimen to reflect his loved-one’s beauty. This poignant and deft tale is presented along with the story of a pauper from Kyoto who teaches himself to be an accomplished chef.

Links:

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (1941) – Chile

by Gabriela Mistral,
Translated from the Spanish (Chile) by Doris Dana, alternative translations done by Langston Hughes and Ursula Le Guin

  • Year Published: 1941
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, poetry, challenging, emotional, reflective, fast-paced
  • Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature
  • Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga

Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and her works are among the finest in all contemporary poetry. She is loved and honored throughout the world as one of the great humanistic voices of our time.

This bilingual edition of selected poems was translated and edited by Doris Dana, a close personal friend with whom Gabriela lived and worked with prior to her death in 1957. These translations give a profound insight into the original poetry of this greatest of contemporary Latin American women. They were selected from her four major works ‘Desolación’, ‘Ternura’, ‘Tala’, and ‘Lagar’.

Links:

Love in a Fallen City / 傾城之戀 (1946) – China

by Eileen Chang / 張愛玲,
Translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury

  • Year Published: 1946
    English version in 2006
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, short stories, emotional, mysterious, reflective, slow-paced

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

Links:

Pinjar: The Skeleton and Other Stories / ਪਿੰਜਰ (1950) – India

by Amrita Pritam
Translated from the Punjabi by Khushwant Singh

  • Year Published: 1950
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, challenging, reflective, slow-paced

Brought together in this volume are two of the most moving novels by one of India’s greatest women writers The Skeleton and The Man. The Skeleton, translated from Punjabi into English by Khushwant Singh, is memorable for its lyrical style and depth in her writing. Amrita Pritam portrays the most inmost being of the novel s complex characters. The Man is a compelling account of a young man born under strange circumstances and abandoned at the altar of God.

Links:

So Long a Letter / Une si longue lettre (1979) – Senegal

by Mariama Bâ,
Translated from the French (Senegal) by Modupé Bodé-Thomas

  • Year Published: 1979
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, literary, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
  • Focuses on the condition of women in Western African society (post-colonial times)
  • Won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1980

So Long a Letter is a sequence of reminiscences, some wistful, some bitter, recounted by Senegalese school teacher Ramatoulaye, who has recently been widowed. The letter, addressed to her old friend Aissatou, is a record of her emotional struggle for survival after her husband’s abrupt decision to take a second wife. Although sanctioned by Islam, his action is a calculated betrayal of her trust and a brutal rejection of their life together. The novel is a perceptive testimony to the plight of those articulate women who live in social milieux dominated by attitudes and values that deny them their proper place.

Links:

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of classic translated books written by women from around the world.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite translated classic book written by a woman, please feel free to share it in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

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Five translated classic books from European women

This month, August, is a chance to celebrate women in translation, specifically women authors who’s works have been translated. There’s so much good translated literature out there. For this month, I’ll be sharing some inspiration from women authors all around the world who have had their work translated into English.

I know a lot of people read works translated from English (or other languages) into their own language. There’s so much important translation work that needs to be done to make works more accessible to the world. But since I only read in English, I’m going to be highlighting works that have been translated into English.

This week and next I want to highlight classic works of literature from around the world that have been translated into English. I’m breaking it into two parts, the first will be from European authors, and the next will be from all around the world.

When I was doing research for these posts, there were far more classics translated from European authors. I guess it’s not much of a surprise, especially with the English-speaking world’s connection with Europe, but it does show a discrepancy in the availability of classics from all areas of the world.

Nevertheless, Europe is still quite diverse and is home to many different languages and cultures. I’ve included books from a variety of countries, each translated from a different language.

Photo by Gourgen Karapetyan on Unsplash

Classics as an insight into culture

I think classics are an interesting glimpse into a culture. It highlights both what was relevant and liked in that era, and also what was important enough to preserve until now. It’s not enough to simply be good literature or a relatable story, it has to have gotten notice and been protected for decades so that we have access to it now.

All this effort is why so much literature has been lost to time. Either writers of the time weren’t able to get it published (or even spend their time writing) or maybe it wasn’t seen as worthwhile to preserve.

Also, in many areas of the world, colonial or authoritarian forces actively destroyed culturally significant items as a way to exert control over the people, and sometimes to convert locals to the colonial language and religion.

One of the books in this list, The Artificial Silk Girl almost disappeared from the world because the Nazis banned and burned all copies of it within Germany. Luckily, an English translation of the work was published in Great Britain before the chaos of Nazi book banning and burning during the war.

Classics can even become more significant when an oppressive force tries to ban, restrict, or destroy specific books. The opposition to the work of art makes it even more appealing to others, and often people want to understand why the government felt it was so threatening. Banning books rarely make them go away.

The concept of “classic books” encompasses so many different genres. The only thing that groups them together is that they are considered significant and that they’re old, which is completely vague. But I do think classic books are one way to learn about the culture it came from.

So keep reading if you’re interested in reading some translated classics by European women.

Five translated classic books from European women

Here’s a list of five translated classic books from European women.

  1. The Saga of Gösta Berling / Gösta Berlings saga by Selma Lagerlöf (1891)
    Sweden
  2. The Artificial Silk Girl / Das kunstseidene Mädchen by Irmgard Keun (1932)
    Germany
  3. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
    Netherlands
  4. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954)
    France
  5. The Door / Az ajtó by Magda Szabó (1987)
    Hungary

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.

The Saga of Gösta Berling / Gösta Berlings saga (1891) – Sweden

by Selma Lagerlöf,
Translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlén

  • Year Published: 1891
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, adventurous, reflective, slow-paced
  • Considered the Swedish version of Gone with the Wind

In 1909, Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Saga of Gösta Berling is her first and best-loved novel—and the basis for the 1924 silent film of the same name that launched Greta Garbo into stardom. A defrocked minister, Gösta Berling finds a home at Ekeby, an ironworks estate that also houses and assortment of eccentric veterans of the Napoleanic Wars. His defiant and poetic spirit proves magnetic to a string of women, who fall under his spell in this sweeping historical epic set against the backdrop of the magnificent wintry beauty of rural Sweden.

Links:

The Artificial Silk Girl / Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) – Germany

by Irmgard Keun,
Translated from the German by Katharina von Ankum

  • Year Published: 1932
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, funny, reflective, medium-paced
  • Banned and burned by the Nazis

In 1931, a young woman writer living in Germany was inspired by Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to describe pre-war Berlin and the age of cinematic glamour through the eyes of a woman. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera. Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin’s “golden twenties” with empathy and honesty.

Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun’s work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war. Today, more than seven decades later, the story of this quintessential “material girl” remains as relevant as ever, as an accessible new translation brings this lost classic to light once more.

Links:

The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) – Netherlands

by Anne Frank,
Translated from the Dutch by B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday

  • Year Published: 1947
  • Storygraph Categories:
    nonfiction, classics, history, memoir, emotional, reflective, sad, medium-paced

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit.

In 1942, with the Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, the Franks and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annexe” of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.

Links:

Bonjour Tristesse (1954) – France

by Françoise Sagan,
Translated from the French by Irene Ash

  • Year Published: 1954
    English version in 1956
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, literary, romance, emotional, reflective, sad, medium-paced
  • She was only 18 when this was published!

Cécile leads a hedonistic, frivolous life with her father and his young mistresses. On holiday in the South of France, she is seduced by the sun, the sand and her first lover. But when her father decides to remarry, their carefree existence becomes clouded by tragedy.

United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love’s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love.

Links:

The Door / Az ajtó (1987) – Hungary

by Magda Szabó,
Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

  • Year Published: 1987
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, literary, emotional, reflective, sad, slow-paced
  • Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Intense, brilliant and moving, The Door is a compelling story about the relationship between two women of opposing backgrounds and personalities: one, an intellectual and writer; the other, her housekeeper, a mysterious, elderly woman who sets her own rules and abjures religion, education, pretense and any kind of authority. Beneath this hardened exterior of Emerence lies a painful story that must be concealed.

One of Hungary’s best-known writers, Magda Szabó here explores themes of love, loyalty, pride and privacy, and the barriers and secrets that govern them.

Links:

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of translated books written by European women.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite book in translation written by a European woman, please feel free to share it in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

Posted on

The Professor and Root

Excerpt from The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa

Photo by Benjamin Lizardo on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.

WE CALLED HIM the Professor. And he called my son Root, because, he said, the flat top of his head reminded him of the square root sign.

“There’s a fine brain in there,” the Professor said, mussing my son’s hair. Root, who wore a cap to avoid being teased by his friends, gave a wary shrug. “With this one little sign we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can’t see.” He traced the symbol in the thick layer of dust on his desk.

Of all the countless things my son and I learned from the Professor, the meaning of the square root was among the most important. No doubt he would have been bothered by my use of the word countless—too sloppy, for he believed that the very origins of the universe could be explained in the exact language of numbers—but I don’t know how else to put it. He taught us about enormous prime numbers with more than a hundred thousand places, and the largest number of all, which was used in mathematical proofs and was in the Guinness Book of Records, and about the idea of something beyond infinity. As interesting as all this was, it could never match the experience of simply spending time with the Professor. I remember when he taught us about the spell cast by placing numbers under this square root sign. It was a rainy evening in early April. My son’s schoolbag lay abandoned on the rug. The light in the Professor’s study was dim. Outside the window, the blossoms on the apricot tree were heavy with rain.

The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the “correct miscalculation,” for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. This gave us confidence even when our best efforts came to nothing.

“Then what happens if you take the square root of negative one?” he asked.

“So you’d need to get – 1 by multiplying a number by itself?” Root asked. He had just learned fractions at school, and it had taken a half-hour lecture from the Professor to convince him that numbers less than zero even existed, so this was quite a leap. We tried picturing the square root of negative one in our heads: . The square root of 100 is 10; the square root of 16 is 4; the square root of 1 is 1. So the square root of – 1 is …

He didn’t press us. On the contrary, he fondly studied our expressions as we mulled over the problem.

“There is no such number,” I said at last, sounding rather tentative.

“Yes, there is,” he said, pointing at his chest. “It’s in here. It’s the most discreet sort of number, so it never comes out where it can be seen. But it’s here.” We fell silent for a moment, trying to picture the square root of minus one in some distant, unknown place. The only sound was the rain falling outside the window. My son ran his hand over his head, as if to confirm the shape of the square root symbol.

But the Professor didn’t always insist on being the teacher. He had enormous respect for matters about which he had no knowledge, and he was as humble in such cases as the square root of negative one itself. Whenever he needed my help, he would interrupt me in the most polite way. Even the simplest request—that I help him set the timer on the toaster, for example—always began with “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but …” Once I’d set the dial, he would sit peering in as the toast browned. He was as fascinated by the toast as he was by the mathematical proofs we did together, as if the truth of the toaster were no different from that of the Pythagorean theorem.

The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary

Here is the book summary:

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.

Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

Copyright © 2003 by Yōko Ogawa.

Translated by: Stephen Snyder

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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A thing in motion

This is a quote from the book Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.

Quote by Olga Tokarczuk, “Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Flights – Summary

Here is the book summary:

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Copyright © 2007 by Olga Tokarczuk.

Translated by: Jennifer Croft

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

Posted on

The world in your head

Excerpt from Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.

The first trip I ever took was across the fields, on foot. It took them a long time to notice I was gone, which meant I was able to make it quite some distance. I covered the whole park and even — going down dirt roads, through the corn and the damp meadows teeming with cowslip flowers, sectioned into squares by ditches — reached the river. Though of course the river was ubiquitous in that valley, soaking up under the ground cover and lapping at the fields.

Clambering up onto the embankment, I could see and undulating ribbon, a road that kept flowing outside of the frame, outside of the world, IF you were lucky, you might catch sight of a boat there, one of those great flat boats gliding over the river in either direction, oblivious to the shores, to the trees, to the people who stand on the embankment, unreliable landmarks, perhaps, not worth remarking, just an audience to the boats own motion, so full of grace. I dreamed of working on a boat like that when I grew up—or even better, of becoming one of those boats.

It wasn’t a big river, only the Oder, but I, too, was little then. It had its place in the hierarchy of rivers, which I later checked on the maps—a minor one, but present, nonetheless, a kind of country viscountess at the court of the Amazon queen. But it was more than enough for me. It seemed enormous. It flowed as it liked, essentially unimpeded, prone to flooding, unpredictable.

Occasionally along the banks it would catch on some underwater obstacle, and eddies would develop. But the river flowed on, parading, concerned only with its hidden aims beyond the horizon, somewhere far off the the north. Your eyes couldn’t keep focused on the water, which pulled your gaze along up past the horizon, so that you’d lose your balance.

To me, of course, the river paid no attention, caring only for itself, those changing, roving waters into which—as I later learned—you can never step twice.

Every year it charged a steep price to bear the weight of those boats—because every year someone drowned in the river, whether a child taking a dip on a hot summer’s day or some drunk who somehow wound up on the bridge and, in spite of the railing, still fell into the water. The search for the drowned always took place with great pomp and circumstance, with everyone in the vicinity waiting with bated breath. THey’d bring in divers and army boats. According to adults’ accounts we overheard, the recovered bodies were swollen and pale—the water had rinsed all the life out of them, blurring their facial features to such an extent that their loved ones would have a hard time identifying their corpses.

Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity. From then on, the river was like a needle inserted into my formerly safe and stable surroundings, the landscape composed of the park, the greenhouses with their vegetables that grew in sad little rows, and the sidewalk with its concrete slabs where we would go to play hopscotch. This needle went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension; so pierced, the landscape of my childhood world turned out to be nothing more than a toy made of rubber from which all the air was escaping, with a hiss.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Flights – Summary

Here is the book summary:

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Copyright © 2007 by Olga Tokarczuk.

Translated by: Jennifer Croft

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.