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  • How Korean it is

    If it’s a truism that translation is also and inevitably an act of interpretation, it can also be a misleading one. The translation doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, produce an interpretation; rather, it needs to ensure that the multiple possibilities of the original are there for its new readers to find, while still leaving these readers space for their own interpretations, which will be shaped by cultural and political frameworks, but equally by individual experiences of both life and literature. The translator (like the editor, the cover designer, the publicist) has to tread a fine line, contextualising certain cultural particularities without being overly prescriptive as to how the book is read and understood.

    This is especially the case for a novel like The Vegetarian, Han Kang’s brutally poetic triptych of taboo and transgression. It’s not so much the main character Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat (though in South Korea this is still rare enough to be subversive in itself) as her refusal to explain herself which provokes such varied, and often violent, responses in those around her – a salaryman husband, a video artist brother-in-law, a dutiful older sister. By filtering her central character through these multiple lenses, Han allows Yeong-hye a radical passivity which challenges Eurocentric notions of what a ‘protagonist’ ought to be – precisely the notions which have long seen Korean literature criticised as ‘lacking agency’. Just as Yeong-hye acts as a vessel for her family’s own fears, preconceptions, and repressed desires, so too the book itself invites widely divergent interpretations as to its overall attitude and ‘meaning’ – between individuals, but also between cultures. But if this is part of the reason that The Vegetarian has already proved such a successful crosser of borders – having already been translated as far afield as Poland and Vietnam, Argentina and Portugal – it also poses certain challenges for the translator.

    How, then, at the same time as leaving room for this diversity of interpretation, to ensure that the translation gives English readers an experience as close as possible to that of the book’s original audience? Luckily, The Vegetarian gives the translator plenty of non-culture-specific features to be ‘faithful’ to. First was the considerable poetry of the writing – one of the distinctive features of Han’s prose, unsurprisingly so given that she’s also a published poet (and previously wrote on ‘My Literary Forms’ for PEN Atlas). It’s probably due to this double life that the mood of a given piece by her is always distilled for me into a specific image, which is a particularly useful thing for a translator to latch onto. In the case of The Vegetarian, originally published in South Korea as three separate novellas, each section of the triptych has its own distinct mood: clipped and matter-of-fact, a starched white shirt buttoned all the way to the top; fevered desire undercut with pathos, and experienced at one crucial remove; finally, bleached exhaustion, the blurred outlines of stark trees glimpsed through a grey wash of rain.

    But if this combination of style and tone forms a core that can hopefully ensure a unity of experience for readers otherwise separated by language, what about the diversity of interpretation? During the editing process, in which Han was a meticulous and humble participant, I learned about some of the ways the book had already been interpreted by translators into other languages. Some of these were fairly obvious – that Vietnamese publishers had felt the patriarchal family dynamic would form an easy point of identification for their market; or that the sexual content, unusually explicit for a South Korean novel, had been received as fairly sensational by that original audience (something which the director of the Korean film adaptation later played up in his promotional materials, much to Han’s chagrin – she felt that this focus on the sexual element was misleadingly reductive). Other readings were surprising and hadn’t occurred to me, though I could instantly see the logic behind them. When I was stuck on how to translate the epithet ‘May Priest’, in which ‘May’ refers to the May 1980 massacre in Han’s home city of Gwangju, Han wondered if the Polish translator’s choice of ‘Santa Maria’ might work for a UK audience. This led into a discussion of how a historically Catholic country like Poland would likely see Yeong-hye’s renunciation as a self-sacrificial mortification of the flesh, starving herself into some kind of near-religious and saintly ecstasy. Buddhism, on the other hand, which has deep roots in Korea and still flourishes there today, would see it as a quieter attempt at sloughing off the violence inherent in the human animal (without privileging her own interpretive framework over any other, Han mentioned to me during our discussion that she herself is a Buddhist).

    Our thoughts turned to how the book’s reception might differ in the UK, where, for example, readers would be unlikely to have an automatic appreciation of the rigid, Confucian hierarchy of social relations. As much as possible, I chose to retain the Korean practice of using relational titles (e.g. ‘my sister-in-law’s husband’, ‘Ji-woo’s mum’) rather than referring to people by their names. Given the surge of interest in feminism here in the UK, it seemed both inevitable and problematic that The Vegetarian would be seen as ‘representative’ of Korean women’s writing in particular – something Han experienced first-hand at last year’s London Book Fair, where she was lumped on an all-women panel discussing ‘Families and Relationships’ (the men got to talk about Politics and Art). A feminist reading will see Yeong-hye as a young woman asserting absolute control over her own body, a radical renunciation of the role South Korea’s conformist, patriarchal society has carved out for her. Which, of course, is no less right or wrong than any of the other possible interpretations, but which does run the risk of simplification, of reading the book as more of a socio-anthropological report than as literature. In the second section, where she allows her video-artist brother-in-law to paint flowers onto her body, Yeong-hye nevertheless seems to exert an uncanny power over this disturbed, fevered man. The question this invites – how far Yeong-hye is using those around her to effect her own transformation – is as troubling in its context of mental illness as it is in that of sexual politics; were more of Han’s work available in English, Anglophone readers would be more likely to read her explorations of desire and passivity as an exploration of the elision between artist and artwork. This elision could stem equally from her long-standing preoccupation with the figure of the artist and the nature of the artistic process as from her ‘Koreanness’ or gender.

    Of course, my translation choices have to respect the author’s intentions, and the gulf between how English and Korean work, which meant a lot of time spent finding syntactical/semantic options that would have the same effect, using a completely different feature of the original language. In the first section, for example, I chose to insert a number of adverbs (‘completely’, ‘naturally’, etc) that would hopefully make Yeong-hye’s husband sound both pedantic and self-exonerating, while the main challenge for the middle act was getting the sexual language right – not too purple, but not too clinical either. But my longest exchange with Han was prompted by the final page, where Yeong-hye’s older sister says to her ‘surely the dream isn’t all there is?’ Han was anxious that the speaker’s uncertainty comes through here, and I had to explain why, unlike in Korean, in English ‘surely’ gives the impression more of the speaker trying to convince herself than of any actual assurance.

    Above all, Han Kang wanted her book to provoke, to disturb, to ask questions that each reader will have to answer for themselves. I can only hope my translation does the same.

    The subject of the piece,  Han Kang, was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She has published collections of short stories including Love in Yeosu, A Yellow Patterned Eternity, and The Fruits of My Woman as well as novels including Your Cold Hand, Black Deer, Greek Lessons, and The Vegetarian.

  • From Afrikaans to English: on writing and translating 'The Alphabet of Birds'

    One tends to dive into translating one’s own debut work in the same way as one dived into writing it in the first place: headlong. My background is in law, and specifically the cold, adversarial kind of legal practice that entails negotiating large business transactions. I’m not trained as a translator, literary or otherwise. And, other than in tangential ways, my background as a lawyer did not do much to further the kind of skills, or at least allow for the quiet reflection, required for writing fiction.

    So, when asked about the process of writing or translating my collection of stories, published in English as The Alphabet of Birds (Alfabet van die voëls in Afrikaans), it forced me go back and disentangle something that I did intuitively rather than through careful reflection. This is actually not unusual, I’m sure (even when one’s background is in literature or language), particularly for a debut work that was written when one’s innocence as a writer was still more or less intact. You find out much about the work you wrote, and the decisions you made in translating it, after the event.

    While living outside South Africa for most of my adult life, I hardly ever spoke Afrikaans. English was the language in which I worked and socialised. Afrikaans was regained quite suddenly once I started writing. It simply emerged ‘intact’ after having been, as it were, ‘preserved’ for many years. The notion of ‘intactness’ is, of course, a fallacy. Languages are not static. Afrikaans, more than most languages, underwent significant changes in the period of my absence from South Africa (1994-2010). Its social position has changed and it has lost a huge amount of ground as a language of higher functions. Concomitantly, spoken Afrikaans has developed (degenerated?) in many ways. As a result, the Afrikaans that I felt re-emerging against my palate and in the glottis was a little formal and archaic, somewhat removed from the new Afrikaans (or mix of Afrikaans and English) spoken particularly by a younger generation of urban South Africans. Broken English has become the lingua franca of the new South Africa, and (bad) English is exerting a huge influence on (particularly spoken) Afrikaans. As I was no longer really in touch with spoken Afrikaans, I therefore often wrote dialogue in English and then translated it back into Afrikaans after doing some careful listening around. All of it then ultimately goes back into English. Even when I’m writing now, some of the prose starts out in English before being translated into Afrikaans. There is movement towards synchronicity – i.e. the Afrikaans and English texts being written almost simultaneously.

    South African author Ivan Vladislavić recently asked me about the preparation of different English versions of my collection for South Africa, on the one hand, and for the UK/US on the other. This did not entail too many difficult choices. The approach was to keep as much as possible local colour by sticking to South African usage, except where it would be confusing to a British or American reader. For instance, for both the SA and UK/US English editions, German phrases (that are more easily comprehensible for Afrikaans readers due to the recent Germanic roots of Afrikaans) were translated into English. A word like ‘bakkie’ in the South African English was changed to ‘pickup truck’ for UK and US readers. Sometimes choices had to be made between UK and US usage, resulting, for instance, in the use of ‘lift’ instead of ‘elevator’.

    An interesting dimension of translating these stories was the interaction between the themes of the stories and the act of translation. The stories may perhaps be considered to fall under the rubric of ‘diasporic literature’. And if emigration entails continuous processes of psychological translation of the self to unfamiliar cultural contexts, and of those contexts to oneself, then the experiences central to diasporic work must surely be re-enacted in language when the author translates his own work from or into his mother tongue.

    Translating your own work gives you a marvellous freedom. You may rewrite, add or subtract to your heart’s desire. When translating someone else’s work, the need for engagement with, and obtaining the approval of, the author (provided he knows the target language) changes the nature of the process in an important way. I doubt whether, to me, translation would provide as much pleasure, such a sense of intuitive abandon, if I were to be subjected to the constraint of having to deal with an author’s wishes. On the other hand, I have heard accounts from translators of exhilarating interaction with writers, particularly in cases where a work of exceptional quality is being translated, the translator is innovative and the author is open to creative collaboration.

    I’ve not had the experience of my work being translated by someone else into a language I know. If any of my future work were to be translated into English, I’d probably prefer to do it myself again, given the opportunity it affords me to ensure that different voices, registers and nuances are dealt with in exactly the way I believe they should be. My stories will shortly be translated into Dutch, of which I have a good passive knowledge, but with which I’m not sufficiently familiar in order to help calibrate or tweak the translation. I doubt whether I will insist on providing much input. (It certainly helps that I have an excellent veteran translator for the Dutch, someone whose sensibilities and judgement I trust implicitly.)

    In short, it might be best to translate your own work if you are able to. If it is into a language that one doesn’t speak well enough to confidently double-guess the translator, it would seem logical to be hands-off. And, mercifully, in the case of translation into a language that one doesn’t speak at all, there is, of course, no opportunity for proper involvement by the author. There is surely freedom too in just letting go.

    You can read more about SJ Naude at his author profile at the And Other Stories website.

    Ivan Vladislavic has written about SJ Naudé for Ampersand.

    You can buy The Alphabet of Birds via our bookseller partner Foyles.

  • From Afrikaans to English: on writing and translating ‘The Alphabet of Birds’

    One tends to dive into translating one’s own debut work in the same way as one dived into writing it in the first place: headlong. My background is in law, and specifically the cold, adversarial kind of legal practice that entails negotiating large business transactions. I’m not trained as a translator, literary or otherwise. And, other than in tangential ways, my background as a lawyer did not do much to further the kind of skills, or at least allow for the quiet reflection, required for writing fiction.

    So, when asked about the process of writing or translating my collection of stories, published in English as The Alphabet of Birds (Alfabet van die voëls in Afrikaans), it forced me go back and disentangle something that I did intuitively rather than through careful reflection. This is actually not unusual, I’m sure (even when one’s background is in literature or language), particularly for a debut work that was written when one’s innocence as a writer was still more or less intact. You find out much about the work you wrote, and the decisions you made in translating it, after the event.

    While living outside South Africa for most of my adult life, I hardly ever spoke Afrikaans. English was the language in which I worked and socialised. Afrikaans was regained quite suddenly once I started writing. It simply emerged ‘intact’ after having been, as it were, ‘preserved’ for many years. The notion of ‘intactness’ is, of course, a fallacy. Languages are not static. Afrikaans, more than most languages, underwent significant changes in the period of my absence from South Africa (1994-2010). Its social position has changed and it has lost a huge amount of ground as a language of higher functions. Concomitantly, spoken Afrikaans has developed (degenerated?) in many ways. As a result, the Afrikaans that I felt re-emerging against my palate and in the glottis was a little formal and archaic, somewhat removed from the new Afrikaans (or mix of Afrikaans and English) spoken particularly by a younger generation of urban South Africans. Broken English has become the lingua franca of the new South Africa, and (bad) English is exerting a huge influence on (particularly spoken) Afrikaans. As I was no longer really in touch with spoken Afrikaans, I therefore often wrote dialogue in English and then translated it back into Afrikaans after doing some careful listening around. All of it then ultimately goes back into English. Even when I’m writing now, some of the prose starts out in English before being translated into Afrikaans. There is movement towards synchronicity – i.e. the Afrikaans and English texts being written almost simultaneously.

    South African author Ivan Vladislavić recently asked me about the preparation of different English versions of my collection for South Africa, on the one hand, and for the UK/US on the other. This did not entail too many difficult choices. The approach was to keep as much as possible local colour by sticking to South African usage, except where it would be confusing to a British or American reader. For instance, for both the SA and UK/US English editions, German phrases (that are more easily comprehensible for Afrikaans readers due to the recent Germanic roots of Afrikaans) were translated into English. A word like ‘bakkie’ in the South African English was changed to ‘pickup truck’ for UK and US readers. Sometimes choices had to be made between UK and US usage, resulting, for instance, in the use of ‘lift’ instead of ‘elevator’.

    An interesting dimension of translating these stories was the interaction between the themes of the stories and the act of translation. The stories may perhaps be considered to fall under the rubric of ‘diasporic literature’. And if emigration entails continuous processes of psychological translation of the self to unfamiliar cultural contexts, and of those contexts to oneself, then the experiences central to diasporic work must surely be re-enacted in language when the author translates his own work from or into his mother tongue.

    Translating your own work gives you a marvellous freedom. You may rewrite, add or subtract to your heart’s desire. When translating someone else’s work, the need for engagement with, and obtaining the approval of, the author (provided he knows the target language) changes the nature of the process in an important way. I doubt whether, to me, translation would provide as much pleasure, such a sense of intuitive abandon, if I were to be subjected to the constraint of having to deal with an author’s wishes. On the other hand, I have heard accounts from translators of exhilarating interaction with writers, particularly in cases where a work of exceptional quality is being translated, the translator is innovative and the author is open to creative collaboration.

    I’ve not had the experience of my work being translated by someone else into a language I know. If any of my future work were to be translated into English, I’d probably prefer to do it myself again, given the opportunity it affords me to ensure that different voices, registers and nuances are dealt with in exactly the way I believe they should be. My stories will shortly be translated into Dutch, of which I have a good passive knowledge, but with which I’m not sufficiently familiar in order to help calibrate or tweak the translation. I doubt whether I will insist on providing much input. (It certainly helps that I have an excellent veteran translator for the Dutch, someone whose sensibilities and judgement I trust implicitly.)

    In short, it might be best to translate your own work if you are able to. If it is into a language that one doesn’t speak well enough to confidently double-guess the translator, it would seem logical to be hands-off. And, mercifully, in the case of translation into a language that one doesn’t speak at all, there is, of course, no opportunity for proper involvement by the author. There is surely freedom too in just letting go.

    You can read more about SJ Naude at his author profile at the And Other Stories website.

    Ivan Vladislavic has written about SJ Naudé for Ampersand.

    You can buy The Alphabet of Birds via our bookseller partner Foyles.

  • ‘They were taken alive, alive we want them returned!’

    Writers and PEN members all over the world have been supporting the struggle of the parents of the disappeared Mexican students to discover the truth about their children. On 30 
    November, on my way to the Feria Internacional del Libro [FIL], I attended a press conference in Mexico City.  Speakers included relatives of the 6 students shot and 43 abducted at gunpoint on 26 September by the local police and handed over to Guerreros Unidos ‘Warriors United’ – a major narco-trafficking gang.  The outcry over the students’ subsequent disappearance was exacerbated by reports of a smouldering fire laced with tyres, presumably to disguise the smell of burning flesh and obstruct future analysis.

    The students came from Guerrero, one of the poorest states in Mexico. Enrolled in a teachers’ training college, some were so impecunious that they arrived barefoot and with only a sheet of cardboard to sleep on. One, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, was described by his father as ‘slim, willowy, with slanted eyes that gave him the nickname “Coreano”, he has to walk 4km to the highway to catch the bus, then 4 km back to train as a teacher in his village of Omeapa.’ They were almost all from indigenous farming families; several wanted to teach in their own languages.

    One week later came the news no-one wanted to hear. General mistrust of the notoriously foot-dragging national forensics division had led to assistance from the respected Argentine Forensic Anthropological  Team and the University of Innsbruck, which analysed ash from the smouldering pyre. On 6 December they provided DNA identification of several students and released the name of the first: Alexander Mora Venancia, 19, from the village of El Pericón [‘The Big Parrakeet’].  At the press conference Mora’s father stated: ‘Nobody could dissuade him from wanting to be a teacher. He just loves teaching. At first he helped in the fields, but he always had the desire to study and to pass on what he learnt. I demand that the authorities do their job properly, and don’t simply cover up for those responsible for the massacre committed by the mayor of Iguala. Those young men were taken alive, alive I want them returned to us’.

    A vain hope against hope, but also a challenge to an indifferent government to account for itself. In this the families are supported, not only by regular mass demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of citizens, but by the international community.

    The former mayor of Guerrero Angel Aguirre’s brother-in-law is leader of the Guerreros Unidos narco-trafficking gang, to whom the abducted students were delivered. Aguirre and his wife fled to Mexico City, where they were found – but not arrested or questioned. Small wonder: the citizens of Guerrero have little faith either in Aguirre’s replacement or in the federal police force. ‘They threw out the local thugs and imposed others from Mexico. They have substituted the bad with the worse,’ says journalist Magali Tercero.

    Meanwhile President Peña Nieto has scandals of his own to preoccupy him: his wife Angelica is implicated in the purchase of a $11m second home, claiming it was bought with severance money from a TV soap. Allegations of corruption extend to her co-purchaser, awarded not only numerous governmental property development contracts but also the sole  concession to supply a new cross-country bullet train, with major Chinese investment.

    Mexico also has other currency earners to consider. Reports of mass graves, reeking with the smell of burning flesh, and of police and military answering to criminal gangs are not good for a tourism industry. The sense that in Mexico today – including in the beach resort of Acapulco, which is in Guerrero – one might be stepping on an undisclosed graveyard is hardly a tourist attraction. The flights I took to and from Mexico City were two-thirds empty. And agricultural production in the land that boasts 56 varieties of corn and chillies has here given way to poppies, making Mexico the world’s largest heroin producer after Afghanistan.

    No surprise that at the December Feria Internacional del Libro – the largest Hispanic book fair in the world and the biggest in its 18-year history – the 43 were everywhere with us.

    One of the few living authors from the 1960s boom, Elena Poniatowska, famous for writing Tlatelolco on the student massacre of 1968, repeated her commemoration of that event by explicitly linking it to the present, bringing each disappeared student to life with the name, age and a description of the character of each. She also deplored the fact that President Peňa Nieto had dared to appropriate the chant of Yo soy Ayotzinapa (I am Ayotzinapa) after doing nothing to bring the guilty to justice. Everyone in the crammed hall sang it then at full volume.

    Authors of the standing of Juan Villoro, Jorge Volpi and Ana Garc’ia Berguera opened their sessions with a countdown of the 43 students. ‘As writers we are all deeply wounded by what took place at Ayotzinapa,’ said Ana García Berguera and read from David Huerta’s epic poem, Ayotzinapa – circulated throughout the FIL, according to PEN, in many languages – including the line ‘our hearts are ousted from their place at our centre’ and the lines:

    Whoever reads this must also know

    That despite everything

    The dead have not departed

    Nor have they disappeared.

    Panels with speakers such as Darío Ramírez, of Article 19, and journalists Lydia Cacho and Carmen Aristegui were overflowed into video-linked public spaces. International authors including Claudio Magris (Italy); Bernardo Atxaga (Basque Country); Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua) and Andrés Neuman (Argentina) spoke out there and are, we assume, speaking out in their home countries too.

    At every event, students emblazoned with the number 43 spoke out in solidarity, and badges of support were distributed. Flash mobs appeared of young people fleeing through the crowded halls before suddenly ‘dropping down dead’ on the floor while the chant went up counting down from 43. The organisers boldly encouraged ongoing discussion, and the local media – which includes local Mexican PEN members and activists – provided wide coverage.

    In Mexico, PEN made clear the common cause between students, teachers, writers and readers – every one of us. Mexican PEN director – and author – Aline Davidoff highlighted the fact that of all the writers who speak out, journalists are bound to be first in the firing line. That is, unless they bow to intimidation and self-censorship. She commented that: ‘Here in Mexico we have a state of impunity where government and organised crime meet.’

    Of course, writers and journalists overlap, and here is what Juan Villoro, both writer and journalist, published in the Spanish daily El País on 30th October 2014, five weeks after the students’ abduction: ’43 future teachers have disappeared. The size of this tragedy comes down to a single phrase, one that opposes impunity, disgrace and injustice. The Mexico of guns and arms is afraid of those who teach others how to read.’

    The students’ families want nothing more than the return of their loved ones. Alive and – at worst, or – with a full account of what has happened to them. They also believe that only international pressure, particularly with the support of organisations such as PEN, can force the government to properly investigate their disappearance. In the words of Raúl Isidro Burgos: ‘We beg for international support so that this crisis does not remain ours alone. What we now suffer on a daily basis has to become the responsibility of the government, which to date has taken no responsibility at all.’

    (Image Brett Gundlock / Getty Images)

  • 'They were taken alive, alive we want them returned!'

    Writers and PEN members all over the world have been supporting the struggle of the parents of the disappeared Mexican students to discover the truth about their children. On 30 
    November, on my way to the Feria Internacional del Libro [FIL], I attended a press conference in Mexico City.  Speakers included relatives of the 6 students shot and 43 abducted at gunpoint on 26 September by the local police and handed over to Guerreros Unidos ‘Warriors United’ – a major narco-trafficking gang.  The outcry over the students’ subsequent disappearance was exacerbated by reports of a smouldering fire laced with tyres, presumably to disguise the smell of burning flesh and obstruct future analysis.

    The students came from Guerrero, one of the poorest states in Mexico. Enrolled in a teachers’ training college, some were so impecunious that they arrived barefoot and with only a sheet of cardboard to sleep on. One, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, was described by his father as ‘slim, willowy, with slanted eyes that gave him the nickname “Coreano”, he has to walk 4km to the highway to catch the bus, then 4 km back to train as a teacher in his village of Omeapa.’ They were almost all from indigenous farming families; several wanted to teach in their own languages.

    One week later came the news no-one wanted to hear. General mistrust of the notoriously foot-dragging national forensics division had led to assistance from the respected Argentine Forensic Anthropological  Team and the University of Innsbruck, which analysed ash from the smouldering pyre. On 6 December they provided DNA identification of several students and released the name of the first: Alexander Mora Venancia, 19, from the village of El Pericón [‘The Big Parrakeet’].  At the press conference Mora’s father stated: ‘Nobody could dissuade him from wanting to be a teacher. He just loves teaching. At first he helped in the fields, but he always had the desire to study and to pass on what he learnt. I demand that the authorities do their job properly, and don’t simply cover up for those responsible for the massacre committed by the mayor of Iguala. Those young men were taken alive, alive I want them returned to us’.

    A vain hope against hope, but also a challenge to an indifferent government to account for itself. In this the families are supported, not only by regular mass demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of citizens, but by the international community.

    The former mayor of Guerrero Angel Aguirre’s brother-in-law is leader of the Guerreros Unidos narco-trafficking gang, to whom the abducted students were delivered. Aguirre and his wife fled to Mexico City, where they were found – but not arrested or questioned. Small wonder: the citizens of Guerrero have little faith either in Aguirre’s replacement or in the federal police force. ‘They threw out the local thugs and imposed others from Mexico. They have substituted the bad with the worse,’ says journalist Magali Tercero.

    Meanwhile President Peña Nieto has scandals of his own to preoccupy him: his wife Angelica is implicated in the purchase of a $11m second home, claiming it was bought with severance money from a TV soap. Allegations of corruption extend to her co-purchaser, awarded not only numerous governmental property development contracts but also the sole  concession to supply a new cross-country bullet train, with major Chinese investment.

    Mexico also has other currency earners to consider. Reports of mass graves, reeking with the smell of burning flesh, and of police and military answering to criminal gangs are not good for a tourism industry. The sense that in Mexico today – including in the beach resort of Acapulco, which is in Guerrero – one might be stepping on an undisclosed graveyard is hardly a tourist attraction. The flights I took to and from Mexico City were two-thirds empty. And agricultural production in the land that boasts 56 varieties of corn and chillies has here given way to poppies, making Mexico the world’s largest heroin producer after Afghanistan.

    No surprise that at the December Feria Internacional del Libro – the largest Hispanic book fair in the world and the biggest in its 18-year history – the 43 were everywhere with us.

    One of the few living authors from the 1960s boom, Elena Poniatowska, famous for writing Tlatelolco on the student massacre of 1968, repeated her commemoration of that event by explicitly linking it to the present, bringing each disappeared student to life with the name, age and a description of the character of each. She also deplored the fact that President Peňa Nieto had dared to appropriate the chant of Yo soy Ayotzinapa (I am Ayotzinapa) after doing nothing to bring the guilty to justice. Everyone in the crammed hall sang it then at full volume.

    Authors of the standing of Juan Villoro, Jorge Volpi and Ana Garc’ia Berguera opened their sessions with a countdown of the 43 students. ‘As writers we are all deeply wounded by what took place at Ayotzinapa,’ said Ana García Berguera and read from David Huerta’s epic poem, Ayotzinapa – circulated throughout the FIL, according to PEN, in many languages – including the line ‘our hearts are ousted from their place at our centre’ and the lines:

    Whoever reads this must also know

    That despite everything

    The dead have not departed

    Nor have they disappeared.

    Panels with speakers such as Darío Ramírez, of Article 19, and journalists Lydia Cacho and Carmen Aristegui were overflowed into video-linked public spaces. International authors including Claudio Magris (Italy); Bernardo Atxaga (Basque Country); Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua) and Andrés Neuman (Argentina) spoke out there and are, we assume, speaking out in their home countries too.

    At every event, students emblazoned with the number 43 spoke out in solidarity, and badges of support were distributed. Flash mobs appeared of young people fleeing through the crowded halls before suddenly ‘dropping down dead’ on the floor while the chant went up counting down from 43. The organisers boldly encouraged ongoing discussion, and the local media – which includes local Mexican PEN members and activists – provided wide coverage.

    In Mexico, PEN made clear the common cause between students, teachers, writers and readers – every one of us. Mexican PEN director – and author – Aline Davidoff highlighted the fact that of all the writers who speak out, journalists are bound to be first in the firing line. That is, unless they bow to intimidation and self-censorship. She commented that: ‘Here in Mexico we have a state of impunity where government and organised crime meet.’

    Of course, writers and journalists overlap, and here is what Juan Villoro, both writer and journalist, published in the Spanish daily El País on 30th October 2014, five weeks after the students’ abduction: ’43 future teachers have disappeared. The size of this tragedy comes down to a single phrase, one that opposes impunity, disgrace and injustice. The Mexico of guns and arms is afraid of those who teach others how to read.’

    The students’ families want nothing more than the return of their loved ones. Alive and – at worst, or – with a full account of what has happened to them. They also believe that only international pressure, particularly with the support of organisations such as PEN, can force the government to properly investigate their disappearance. In the words of Raúl Isidro Burgos: ‘We beg for international support so that this crisis does not remain ours alone. What we now suffer on a daily basis has to become the responsibility of the government, which to date has taken no responsibility at all.’

    (Image Brett Gundlock / Getty Images)

  • Publishers’ translation highlights 2015

    Stefan Tobler, And Other Stories

    It’s an exciting year for our translated fiction — as well as the year of our first British debut fiction (from Niyati Keni and Angela Readman). We have two new titles in translation from authors we have published already: Carlos Gamerro (in March The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón, a hilariously satirical novel that takes in business inspirational books and Argentine guerrilleros) and Oleg Pavlov (in July Requiem for a Soldier, a very dark absurd humour in the last days of the Soviet empire), as well as the following five authors previously untranslated in English:

    SJ Naudé has translated his own Afrikaans stories in The Alphabet of Birds. Published this month, the stories have been highly praised by many writers and are on their way to entering the canon of South African literature.

    In March we will publish our first of three upcoming novels from the much-talked-about young Mexican writer Yuri Herrera. Signs Preceding the End of the World (translated by Lisa Dillman) is a novel about a translator in some ways: the main character, Makina, has national and language borders to cross and must come to terms with how this changes her.

    In April comes the Swiss writer Anne Cuneo’s Tregian’s Ground (translated by Roland Glasser and Louise Rogers Lalaurie). This historical novel is also a remarkable, cross-border story, this time of the copyist and compiler of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Francis Tregian. In danger as a Catholic in the Elizabethan Age, he journeys across Europe, befriending Shakespeare, swapping scores with Byrd and Monteverdi, and playing in the French court.

    Haroldo Conti’s Southeaster (translated by Jon Lindsay Miles) is long overdue in English. Conti’s writing won major prizes and was praised by Gabriel García Márquez and Eduardo Galeano among others in the 70s, before he was ‘disappeared’ at the age of fifty-one by the Argentine dictatorship. Southeaster, the first of his books to be translated into English, is about a man drifting with odd jobs and a boat in the Paraná Delta.

    Susana Moreira Marques’ Now and at the Hour of our Death (translated by Julia Sanches) was the single book that most excited our readers in our Portuguese reading groups since 2011. We all fell in love with its beautiful, genre-defying approach. Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travelled to a forgotten old corner of northern Portugal. She listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own reflections. It brilliantly combines the spirit of oral history with the sensibility of philosophical reportage.

    Bill Swainson, Bloomsbury

    Reckless by Hasan Ali Toptaş (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and John Angliss) – March.  Hasan Ali Toptaş is one of Turkey’s leading writers. His books have won many prizes, including the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize and Yunus Nadai Novel Prize and have been widely translated though not published in English. Reckless (published in Turkish in 2013) is the story of a man fleeing the spiralling chaos of the big city in search of serenity in an Anatolian village of which he has heard dreamlike tales from an old army friend. But the village is no simple idyll and the mystery of just what he did on the Turkish/Syrian border 30 years earlier that places his friend in his debt eludes him.

    The All Saints’ Day Lovers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean) – May.  Achingly sad and exquisitely crafted, the seven stories in The All Saints’ Day Lovers together form an artistic whole, united by theme, mood, intense emotion and the starkly beautiful landscape of the Ardennes. ‘One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature’ Mario Vargas Llosa

    The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Étoile; The Night Watch; Ring Roads by Patrick Modiano – August. The first three novels that the 2014 Nobel Laureate published in France, when he burst onto the Parisian literary scene at the end of the ’60s challenging the Gaullist myths, form a trilogy of the Occupation and evoke the city of that time, with its mystery, complicity and moral ambivalence. The Trilogy sees the first publication in English of La Place de l’Étoile (translated by Frank Wynne) alongside The Night Watch (translated by Patricia Wolf) and Ring Roads (translated by Caroline Hillier).

    Geoff Mulligan, Clerkenwell

    Gone to Ground by Marie Jalowicz Simonis the remarkable story of a young Jewish woman’s survival in Berlin through the Second World War. It is coming out in February and is translated by Anthea Bell.

    Eric Lane, Dedalus

    The Interpreter by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry follows on from New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs and forms a trilogy of novels on the theme of language and identity. The Interpreter is both a quest and a thriller, and at times a comic picaresque caper around Europe but also deals with the profound issues of existence.

    What Became of the White Savage by Francois Garde, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins is also a novel about language and identity and the need to belong. Based on a true story of a sailor who is abandoned in 19-th c Australia and spends 17 years living as an aborigine and when he is found and taken back to France cannot readjust to so-called civilised life. In France it won 9 literary prizes including the Goncourt in the first novel category.

    Lightheaded by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Andrew Bromfield is a zany, anarchic black comedy which satirises life in contemporary Russia. At its heart is the question what is important in life and what sacrifices an individual should be expected to make for the good of others. Winner of the Debut Prize.

    Ink in the Blood by Stephane Hochet, translated by Mike Mitchell. An artist gets his first tattoo and finds his whole being changes, what he feels and especially how he relates to women in this atmospheric and spine-chilling Euro short.

    Daniela Petracco, Europa Editions

    The book I’m most looking forward to publishing this year is The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante in Ann Goldstein’s accomplished translation.  The fourth and final instalment of the celebrated Neapolitan novels will be published in September.

    We are also adding some new authors to our list: Greek author Fotini Tsalikoglou with her melancholic novella The Secret Sister, out this month in Mary Kitroeff’s translation; French author Anna Gavalda with Billie, the urgently-told, inspiring story of two survivors, a novel that spent months in the number 1 spot on the French best seller lists last year and has been translated into 30 languages and counting. The English translation is by Jennifer Rappaport.

    In the Summer we’ll be publishing the first novel by none other than Nobel Laureate, actor and dramatist Dario Fo: The Pope’s Daughter, translated by Antony Shugaar, re-tells the story of Lucrezia and the Borgias as a shocking mirror image for the uses and abuses of power in our own time.

    Also in the Summer, a rediscovered classic by Jewish Austrian author Ernst Lothar, who, like his friend and associate Stefan Zweig, was forced to leave Vienna and seek exile abroad in the last years before WW2.  The Vienna Melody tells the story of a family of piano makers from the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Austria’s Nazi takeover of 1938.  We are reissuing the original 1948 translation by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood.

    Another title I much look forward to is the new novel by the young and gifted Viola Di Grado. The Hollow Heart, translated by Antony Shugaar, tells the story of a suicide – before, during and after – told in forensic, heart-breaking detail.

    In our World Noir series, we have new crime novels by Carlotto, Mallock, de Giovanni, and an exciting debut: The Night of the Panthers by Piergiorgio Pulixi is the first in a series that will explore organised crime and police corruption.

    Jacques Testard, Fitzcarraldo Editions

    The first translated book we publish this year is My Documents (April) by the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell), his fourth to appear in English. The previous three were short novels, written with the author’s trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy. My Documents, which is, on the surface, a collection of stories, is his longest work yet. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of the mercurial godson, this novel in fragments evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. In the words of Adam Thirlwell, ‘these stories are graceful, grave, comical, disabused. I guess what I mean is: My Documents represents a new form. When I think about Alejandro Zambra, I feel happy for the future of fiction.’

    In June, we publishe Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good, a collection of free verse and essays by ‘Russia’s first authentic post-Soviet author’ (Keith Gessen). Widely published and critically acclaimed as a poet, Medvedev is also a prominent political activist and a member of the Russian Socialist movement ‘Vpered’ [Forward]. His small press, the Free Marxist Publishing House, has recently released his translations of Pasolini, Eagleton, and Goddard, as well as numerous books on the intersection of literature, art and politics. Medvedev has also taken the unusual step of renouncing copyright — only pirated editions, no contracts. It’s No Good includes selected poems from his first four books of poetry as well as his most significant essays.  A collective of translators — Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill and Bela Shayevich — worked on the various texts.

    Following on from our launch title, Zone, published in August 2014, we publish Mathias Enard’s novel Street of Thieves in August 2015, once again brilliantly translated by Charlotte Mandell. It tells the story of Lakhdar, a young Tangerine who finds himself exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Meryem. A bildungsroman set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Street of Thieves is also a story about immigration, and draws on a wealth of literary influences – Bowles, Choukri, Genet and Burroughs, to name a few.

    Jane Aitken, Gallic Books

    In February we are tremendously excited to publish best-selling Algerian author Yasmina Khadra’s novel The African Equation, translated by Howard Curtis. The story centres around Kurt, a Frankfurt doctor held hostage in East Africa whose view of the continent is challenged by a fellow captive. Khadra’s vivid imagining of the demise of Colonel Gaddafi, The Dictator’s Last Night, translated by Julian Evans, will follow in October.

    April sees the publication of The Red Notebook, the much-anticipated new novel by The President’s Hat author Antoine Laurain. Translated in-house by Emily Boyce, we have a special attachment to this quirky, romantic tale with a bookseller hero who attempts to track down a woman based on the contents of her bag – which mysteriously include a signed copy of a novel by famously reclusive Nobel winner Patrick Modiano.

    Anne Berest’s fictionalised biography Sagan, Paris 1954, out in June, draws a portrait of 18-year-old Françoise Sagan as her debut novel Bonjour Tristesse is poised to propel her to fame. The translator, Heather Lloyd, recently translated the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Bonjour Tristesse, so was the ideal choice for this intimate account of the novel’s continued relevance.

    Then in September comes our first foray into graphic novels, and what a way to start: Stéphane Heuet’s beautifully illustrated adaptation of Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’, translated by Harvard academic Arthur Goldhammer. This ambitious project will give Proust-lovers a different way to approach the text, and, we hope, encourage new readers to discover it for themselves.

    Max Porter, Granta & Portobello

    We start the year with The Vegetarian by Han Kang (January, translated by Deborah Smith), a remarkable and unsettling novel about taboo and metamorphosis. It’s an essential read for anybody interested in illness, performance and trauma. It is also notable for Deborah Smith’s beautiful and intuitive translation.

    In March we have the mesmeric new novel by Man Booker International nominated Peter Stamm, All Days are Night (translated by Michael Hofmann). It tells the story of a perfect life that is violently shattered by tragedy. Like all Stamm’s work it is unadorned, insightful and quietly devastating.

    Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? by Swedish economist and journalist Katrine Marçal (March, translated by Saskia Vogel) is an engaging and thought-provoking look at economics, equality and the mess we are in. As the general election approaches and the gender pay gap widens, it’s time we brought feminism and economics together.

    Valeria Luiselli, author of Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd returns in April with a sparklingly intelligent and raucous comic novel The Story of My Teeth (translated by Christina McSweeney). Just in time for the Mexico market focus at LBF 2015 one of Latin America’s rising literary stars leaps into wonderfully flamboyant storytelling mode.

    Other highlights from Granta and Portobello in 2015 include The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret (July, translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen, Anthony Berris), a life-affirming collection of tragicomic essays by the author the New York Times called ‘a genius’.

    We have a previously unpublished collection of essays by the great Joseph Roth, called The Hotel Years, writings from inter-war Italy, Germany, Russia, Albania and Ukraine, by turns poignant, witty and unsettling  (September, translated by Michael Hofmann).

    Also in September Portobello Books will publish The Strange Case of Thomas Quick by Dan Josefsson (translated by Anna Paterson), the riveting story of a prisoner who posed as the worst serial killer in Swedish history, and the psychoanalyst who shaped the investigation.

    In November we publish Walter Kempowski’s last, great, novel All for Nothing (translated by Anthea Bell) a towering masterpiece of post-war German fiction comparable to Roth, Fallada and Grass, which also calls to mind Rachel Seiffert’s Dark Room and Richard Bausch’s Peace.

    Michal Shavit, Harvill Secker

    This year at Harvill Secker we have an incredibly strong selection of fiction in translation : An electrifying debut, Jesús Carrasco, Out in the Open, to be published in April. Beautifully translated by Margaret Jull Costa it tells the story of a boy in a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A closed world where names and dates don’t matter, where morals have drained away with the water. It has been a huge best-seller in Spain and Holland and it marks the arrival of a major new Spanish writer.

    We are also excited to welcome to the list Mia Couto in August. It is an understatement to describe Mia Couto as Mozambique’s greatest novelist – he is in fact one of the most outstanding authors to have emerged in Africa’s post-colonial history. Based on a true story, Confession of the Lioness, translated by David Brookshaw, is set in the rural village of Kulumani as it is being besieged by killer lions. As the inevitable encounter with the lions approaches, the hidden tensions in the village are gradually exposed and the real theme of the novel becomes apparent: the war is not between man and nature but between the village’s patriarchal traditions and its long suffering women.

    And last but certainly not least, this March we are publishing the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s phenomenal My Struggle series, translated by Don Bartlett: Dancing in the Dark. 18 years old and fresh out of high school, Karl Ove moves to a remote Norwegian fishing village to work as a teacher. All goes well to begin with. But as the nights grow longer, Karl Ove’s life takes a darker turn. Drinking causes him blackouts and romantic adventures end in humiliation. As the New York Times Book Review put it: ‘Why would you read a six-volume 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to’.

    Susan Curtis, Istros Books

    We have seven lucky titles lined up for you in 2015: we start the year with Croatian poet Olja Savicevic’s beautiful debut novel, Farewell Cowboy, followed by a collection of hard-hitting short prose pieces exploring the female condition in Turkey in Ciler Ilhan’s Exile – winner of the European Prize for Literature. We also have another EU prize winner in the Slovenian writer, Gabriela Babnik and an unusual love story set in Africa, Dry Season. Dream and nightmare are the themes of Evald Flisar‘s psychologically challenging novel, My Father’s Dreams, whereas fairy tales are the playground for Macedonian writer, Aleksandar Prokopiev in his collection for adults – Homunculus. We will also be treated to the final instalment of Andrej Nikolaidis‘ informal ‘Olchinium Trilogy’ – Till Kingdom Come and get to taste one of the biggest Balkan hits in recent years: Yugoslavia, My Country by Goran Vojnovic.

    Katharina Bielenberg, MacLehose Press

    O. Enquist’s The Wandering Pine (January, translated by Deborah Bragan Turner)

    In this venerated Swedish novelist gives us his life in the third person, as a national highjumper, as a journalist during the 1972 Munich Olympic hostage crisis, as a playwright who had the most tremendous Broadway flop, and as an alcoholic whose disease almost destroyed him. A startlingly bold autobiography.

    In Evelio Rosero’s Feast of the Innocents (January, translated by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom), a doctor chooses Carnival as the perfect arena in which to explode the myth of Simon Bolívar once and for all. A magical, exuberant riot of a book set in Colombia’s southern city of Pasto.

    Elias Khoury’s The Broken Mirrors/Sinalcol (translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies) tells the story of two brothers divided by difference and civil war, between Beirut and France. Thought provoking, rich in language and character, beautiful constructed, another powerful novel from the Lebanese writer.

    With The Heart of Man (February, translated by Philip Roughton) Icelander Jón Kalman Stefánsson concludes his sublime trilogy, a profound exploration of life in the extreme north and its most crucial elements: love, food, warmth, literature – but most of all, love.

    Karim Miské’s Arab Jazz (February, translated by Sam Gordon) is a fast-paced crime novel from Paris’ 19th arrondissement that goes to the heart of religious extremism and the violence it can inspire. Recent horrific events in Paris are to some extent reflected in this novel by the Franco-Mauritanian documentary film-maker. Miské visits the UK in February for a series of events supported by PEN Promotes.

    Borders by Roy Jacobsen (March, translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw) is a gripping story of impossible choices in a theatre of total war, where family love, national identity, even military genius, count for nothing as the doomed German 6th
    Army fights for Stalingrad in WWII.

    Leica Format (translated by Celia Hawkesworth) by Croatian writer Daša Drndiƈ – author of Trieste – is a tale of cities, of how the past merges with the present, and of what constitutes a homeland. A narrative of poignant, vivid fragments and images that combine to form a haunting study of history and the processes by which we describe, remember, or falsify it.

    Fall of Man in Wilmslow by David Lagercrantz (May, translated from Swedish by George Goulding) explores the repressive atmosphere of Cold War Britain through the death and life of revolutionary mathematician Alan Turing. Lagercrantz’s writing is so clever and engaging that complex mathematical theorems become crystal clear. He is also the author of the continuation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (coming in August)

    Later in the year we look forward to two novels by incumbent Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano (A Pedigree and So That You Don’t Lose Yourself in the Quartier), and novels by Andreï Makine, Peter Terrin and Norbert Gstrein, as well as Pierre Lemaitre’s 2013 Goncourt Prize-winner, the first in a magnum opus.

    Juliet Mabey, Oneworld

    We will be adding four novels to our growing list of fiction in translation, the first of which is A Perfect Crime by A Yi, translated from the Chinese by Anna Holmwood. A bored high school student murders his best friend to relieve the daily tedium of existence, and so begins a stylish psychological suspense novel, the literary love child of Camus’ The Stranger, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Kafka’s The Trial. Offering both a vision of China’s heart of darkness – the despair that traps the rural poor and the incoherent rage lurking behind their phlegmatic front – and a technically brilliant excursion into the claustrophobic realm of classic horror and suspense, this novel is generously supported by a PEN Award for translation and promotion.

    In July we are publishing a Norwegian YA novel in our new imprint, Rock the Boat. Minus Me, written by Ingelin Rossland and translated by Deborah Dawkin, follows a young terminally ill teenager as she completes her bucket list and ultimately comes to terms with leaving.

    In October we are very excited to be publishing the critically acclaimed, multiple award-winning Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated from the Russian by Lisa Hayden. Winner of both the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana Awards in 2013 and shortlisted for several others, this huge novel has been dubbed Russia’s The Name of the Rose. An enthralling chronicle of the Russian Middle Ages, a doomed love affair, and an epic journey all in one life-affirming, sprawling fable.

    And in November we are publishing the multiple award-winning French novel Meursault, Contre-enquete by Algerian journalist and writer Kamel Daoud, translated by Sandra Smith. This highly acclaimed debut is a powerful, lyrical, and politically charged re-imagining of The Outsider, narrated by the brother of the nameless Arab killed in Camus’ iconic novel, and is already a huge bestseller in France. It has won numerous accolades including the Prix François-Mauriac of the Académie Française and the Prix des Cinq Continents, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award in French literature.

    Meike Ziervogel, Peirene Press

    Peirene only publishes three books a year and I curate them in series. 2015 is Peirene’s year of Chance Encounter: Meeting The Other. A stunning Finnish tale about the human will to survive (White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen, translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah), a French love story about the art of reading (Reader for Hire by Jean Raymond, translated by Adriana Hunter), and a Norwegian drama about two middle-aged sisters whose existence is turned upside down when a stranger enters their lives (The Looking-Glass Sisters by Gøhril Gabrielsen, translated by John Irons).

    Amelia Fairney, Penguin

    Drone Theory, by Gregoire Chamayou, translated by Janet Lloyd. Beautifully argued, passionate and coherent, this is an urgent and important polemic that blends philosophy with reportage as it grapples with one of the most pressing issues in the world today: robot warfare

    Blood-drenched Beard, by Daniel Galera, translated by Alison Entrekin (paperback). This sultry, alluring and atmospheric novel by Brazilian rising star Daniel Galera is made all the more mysterious and compelling by the protagonist’s unusual disorder: he is unable to recognize the faces of any of the people he meets.

    Frog, by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt (paperback). The latest novel by the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, Frogoffers a moving and eye-opening insight into Chinese society and the far-reaching reverberations of the one-child policy

    Paul Baggaley, Picador

    Monica Sabolo’s All This Has Nothing To Do With Me , translated by Georgina Collins, is an original, extremely funny and darkly moving glimpse into the depths of one woman’s psyche, and a delicious piece of Parisian comedy. When journalist ‘MS’ interviews the mysterious ‘XX’ for a job at her magazine, she hires him straight away – because he is gorgeous. As one date leads to another, her obsession spirals whilst the object of her affection remains aloof. There is voyeurism here, and the addiction of any glossy magazine, but the prose is also sublime – sharp, graceful and charming. And MS herself is a wonderfully sympathetic character. She has a wry awareness of how ridiculous her behaviour is even as it spins out of control, and she never takes herself too seriously; there is a touch of a 21st century Bridget Jones to her in this respect.

    One Hundred Days of Happiness, translated by Tony Shugaar is Italian film director Fausto Brizzi’s gorgeously funny and sweetly sad story about the last one hundred days in the life of Lucio Battistini. Lucio’s simple life takes a tumble when an indiscretion at work gets him thrown out of the apartment he shares with his wife and children.  That’s when he receives the news that he is seriously ill, an three months left to live. Lucio decides he must live his last days to the full, and there’s a lot to do. He wants to win his wife back and travel with his children, he needs to let everybody know how happy he was, in spite of everything. This novel has a fun-loving, roguish Italian charm to it and despite the inevitably sad ending it’s really about celebrating love and friendship, and it’s endlessly uplifting for that.

    Wilful Disregard, translated by Sarah Death, is Lena Andersson’s August Prize-winning novel about one Ester Nilsson, a sensible person in a sensible relationship. That is until the day she is asked to give a lecture on famous artist Hugo Rask. The man himself sits in the audience, spellbound, and, when the two meet afterwards, he has the same effect on her. This short, sharp novel is just brilliant, a sort of dark love story about desperate devotion and total self-betrayal and self-delusion. It’s cuttingly, sometimes cruelly funny and written with whip-smart panache and precision.

    A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler and translated by Charlotte Collins. The new novel from Austrian writer Robert Seethaler sold 100,000 copies in German last year. It is the story of one man’s life – his loves, battles, consolations and regrets – set in the Alps, as the modern world begins to erode the old ways. Told with dignity, humility and great beauty, it has been compared with John Williams’ STONER.

    The Sense of an Elephant  by Marco Missiroli, translated by Stephen Twilley is a powerful story of paternal love and hidden lives, set in a palazzo in Milan. Pietro arrives with a battered suitcase to take up the job as concierge, and from the outset shows a special interest in Dr Luca Martini and his family. Soon he’s letting himself into their apartment while everyone is out. What is the secret that binds the two men? This is a charming, atmospheric novel and it won Italy’s Campiello Prize in 2012.

    Adam Freudenheim, Pushkin Press

    At the end of January we publish the debut novel by Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch (translation by Sondra Silverston).  This sensuous, whimsical and moving love story fuses personal lives and epic history.  It’s a true delight!

    At the end of February we are thrilled to publish, in a unique, reverse back-to-back edition, Karate Chop & Minna Needs Rehearsal Space by Dorthe Nors (translations by Marin Aitken and Misha Hoekstra).  This collection of stories and novella by Danish writer Dorthe Nors marks the appearance in English of one of the most original writers I know of.  These two books will knock your socks off, quite simply.

    At the end of March we publish the powerful allegorical novel The Boy Who Stole Atilla’s Horse by Ivan Repila, a young Spanish writer (translation by Sophie Hughes).  Atilla has echoes of Beckett and Cormac McCarthy but is a very much its own thing – a fable for the early 21st century of a Europe in decline.

    Pushkin Children’s Books releases early this year include The Whale That Fell in Love with a Submarine by Akiyuki Nosaka (translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori) – wartime Japan like you’ve never read about it before – and the Brazilian bestseller Fuzz McFlops by Eva Furnari, a charming tale of a depressed one-eared rabbit who happens to be a writer, too.  And in September we’re thrilled to be publishing the sequel to The Letter for the King – The Secrets of the Wild Wood by Tonke Dragt (translation by Laura Watkison, who has been shortlisted for this year’s Marsh Award).

    Hannah Westland, Serpent’s Tail

    Serpent’s Tail is starting the year with a debut novel by a really exciting Finland Swedish writer called Philip Teir who has been compared to Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen – The Winter War (translated by Tiina Nunally) is a brilliantly funny, sharp, moving account of the demise of a family over the course of one winter, taking place in Helsinki and London. We’ve then got Leonora (translated by Amanda Hopkinson), a fictionalised account of the life of the great surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, by Elena Poniatowska, who was a friend of Carrington’s over many decades and is Mexico’s greatest living writer. In May we’re publishing Alain Mabanckou’s The Lights of Pointe Noire (translated by Helen Stevenson), a beautiful meditation on homecoming and how the Congo has changed since his childhood. And in November we’re planning to shock everyone with Danish debut Am I Cold by Copenhagen’s enfant terrible Martin Kongstad (translated by Martin Aitken) – this furious satire on art, marriage and late capitalism set in a Denmark teetering on the edge of financial crisis is hilarious, fearless, and cuts like a knife.

    Hannah Westland, Tuskar Rock

    In 2015 we begin publishing Tuskar Rock Press’s wonderful books. Starting with Antonio Munoz Molina’s masterpiece of the Spanish civil war, IN THE NIGHT OF TIME (translated by Edith Grossman) in March, and followed by the inimitable László Krasznahorkai’s new novel SEIOBO THERE BELOW (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) in August.

  • Publishers' translation highlights 2015

    Stefan Tobler, And Other Stories

    It’s an exciting year for our translated fiction — as well as the year of our first British debut fiction (from Niyati Keni and Angela Readman). We have two new titles in translation from authors we have published already: Carlos Gamerro (in March The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón, a hilariously satirical novel that takes in business inspirational books and Argentine guerrilleros) and Oleg Pavlov (in July Requiem for a Soldier, a very dark absurd humour in the last days of the Soviet empire), as well as the following five authors previously untranslated in English:

    SJ Naudé has translated his own Afrikaans stories in The Alphabet of Birds. Published this month, the stories have been highly praised by many writers and are on their way to entering the canon of South African literature.

    In March we will publish our first of three upcoming novels from the much-talked-about young Mexican writer Yuri Herrera. Signs Preceding the End of the World (translated by Lisa Dillman) is a novel about a translator in some ways: the main character, Makina, has national and language borders to cross and must come to terms with how this changes her.

    In April comes the Swiss writer Anne Cuneo’s Tregian’s Ground (translated by Roland Glasser and Louise Rogers Lalaurie). This historical novel is also a remarkable, cross-border story, this time of the copyist and compiler of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Francis Tregian. In danger as a Catholic in the Elizabethan Age, he journeys across Europe, befriending Shakespeare, swapping scores with Byrd and Monteverdi, and playing in the French court.

    Haroldo Conti’s Southeaster (translated by Jon Lindsay Miles) is long overdue in English. Conti’s writing won major prizes and was praised by Gabriel García Márquez and Eduardo Galeano among others in the 70s, before he was ‘disappeared’ at the age of fifty-one by the Argentine dictatorship. Southeaster, the first of his books to be translated into English, is about a man drifting with odd jobs and a boat in the Paraná Delta.

    Susana Moreira Marques’ Now and at the Hour of our Death (translated by Julia Sanches) was the single book that most excited our readers in our Portuguese reading groups since 2011. We all fell in love with its beautiful, genre-defying approach. Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travelled to a forgotten old corner of northern Portugal. She listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own reflections. It brilliantly combines the spirit of oral history with the sensibility of philosophical reportage.

    Bill Swainson, Bloomsbury

    Reckless by Hasan Ali Toptaş (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and John Angliss) – March.  Hasan Ali Toptaş is one of Turkey’s leading writers. His books have won many prizes, including the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize and Yunus Nadai Novel Prize and have been widely translated though not published in English. Reckless (published in Turkish in 2013) is the story of a man fleeing the spiralling chaos of the big city in search of serenity in an Anatolian village of which he has heard dreamlike tales from an old army friend. But the village is no simple idyll and the mystery of just what he did on the Turkish/Syrian border 30 years earlier that places his friend in his debt eludes him.

    The All Saints’ Day Lovers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean) – May.  Achingly sad and exquisitely crafted, the seven stories in The All Saints’ Day Lovers together form an artistic whole, united by theme, mood, intense emotion and the starkly beautiful landscape of the Ardennes. ‘One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature’ Mario Vargas Llosa

    The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Étoile; The Night Watch; Ring Roads by Patrick Modiano – August. The first three novels that the 2014 Nobel Laureate published in France, when he burst onto the Parisian literary scene at the end of the ’60s challenging the Gaullist myths, form a trilogy of the Occupation and evoke the city of that time, with its mystery, complicity and moral ambivalence. The Trilogy sees the first publication in English of La Place de l’Étoile (translated by Frank Wynne) alongside The Night Watch (translated by Patricia Wolf) and Ring Roads (translated by Caroline Hillier).

    Geoff Mulligan, Clerkenwell

    Gone to Ground by Marie Jalowicz Simonis the remarkable story of a young Jewish woman’s survival in Berlin through the Second World War. It is coming out in February and is translated by Anthea Bell.

    Eric Lane, Dedalus

    The Interpreter by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry follows on from New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs and forms a trilogy of novels on the theme of language and identity. The Interpreter is both a quest and a thriller, and at times a comic picaresque caper around Europe but also deals with the profound issues of existence.

    What Became of the White Savage by Francois Garde, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins is also a novel about language and identity and the need to belong. Based on a true story of a sailor who is abandoned in 19-th c Australia and spends 17 years living as an aborigine and when he is found and taken back to France cannot readjust to so-called civilised life. In France it won 9 literary prizes including the Goncourt in the first novel category.

    Lightheaded by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Andrew Bromfield is a zany, anarchic black comedy which satirises life in contemporary Russia. At its heart is the question what is important in life and what sacrifices an individual should be expected to make for the good of others. Winner of the Debut Prize.

    Ink in the Blood by Stephane Hochet, translated by Mike Mitchell. An artist gets his first tattoo and finds his whole being changes, what he feels and especially how he relates to women in this atmospheric and spine-chilling Euro short.

    Daniela Petracco, Europa Editions

    The book I’m most looking forward to publishing this year is The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante in Ann Goldstein’s accomplished translation.  The fourth and final instalment of the celebrated Neapolitan novels will be published in September.

    We are also adding some new authors to our list: Greek author Fotini Tsalikoglou with her melancholic novella The Secret Sister, out this month in Mary Kitroeff’s translation; French author Anna Gavalda with Billie, the urgently-told, inspiring story of two survivors, a novel that spent months in the number 1 spot on the French best seller lists last year and has been translated into 30 languages and counting. The English translation is by Jennifer Rappaport.

    In the Summer we’ll be publishing the first novel by none other than Nobel Laureate, actor and dramatist Dario Fo: The Pope’s Daughter, translated by Antony Shugaar, re-tells the story of Lucrezia and the Borgias as a shocking mirror image for the uses and abuses of power in our own time.

    Also in the Summer, a rediscovered classic by Jewish Austrian author Ernst Lothar, who, like his friend and associate Stefan Zweig, was forced to leave Vienna and seek exile abroad in the last years before WW2.  The Vienna Melody tells the story of a family of piano makers from the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Austria’s Nazi takeover of 1938.  We are reissuing the original 1948 translation by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood.

    Another title I much look forward to is the new novel by the young and gifted Viola Di Grado. The Hollow Heart, translated by Antony Shugaar, tells the story of a suicide – before, during and after – told in forensic, heart-breaking detail.

    In our World Noir series, we have new crime novels by Carlotto, Mallock, de Giovanni, and an exciting debut: The Night of the Panthers by Piergiorgio Pulixi is the first in a series that will explore organised crime and police corruption.

    Jacques Testard, Fitzcarraldo Editions

    The first translated book we publish this year is My Documents (April) by the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell), his fourth to appear in English. The previous three were short novels, written with the author’s trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy. My Documents, which is, on the surface, a collection of stories, is his longest work yet. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of the mercurial godson, this novel in fragments evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. In the words of Adam Thirlwell, ‘these stories are graceful, grave, comical, disabused. I guess what I mean is: My Documents represents a new form. When I think about Alejandro Zambra, I feel happy for the future of fiction.’

    In June, we publishe Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good, a collection of free verse and essays by ‘Russia’s first authentic post-Soviet author’ (Keith Gessen). Widely published and critically acclaimed as a poet, Medvedev is also a prominent political activist and a member of the Russian Socialist movement ‘Vpered’ [Forward]. His small press, the Free Marxist Publishing House, has recently released his translations of Pasolini, Eagleton, and Goddard, as well as numerous books on the intersection of literature, art and politics. Medvedev has also taken the unusual step of renouncing copyright — only pirated editions, no contracts. It’s No Good includes selected poems from his first four books of poetry as well as his most significant essays.  A collective of translators — Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill and Bela Shayevich — worked on the various texts.

    Following on from our launch title, Zone, published in August 2014, we publish Mathias Enard’s novel Street of Thieves in August 2015, once again brilliantly translated by Charlotte Mandell. It tells the story of Lakhdar, a young Tangerine who finds himself exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Meryem. A bildungsroman set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Street of Thieves is also a story about immigration, and draws on a wealth of literary influences – Bowles, Choukri, Genet and Burroughs, to name a few.

    Jane Aitken, Gallic Books

    In February we are tremendously excited to publish best-selling Algerian author Yasmina Khadra’s novel The African Equation, translated by Howard Curtis. The story centres around Kurt, a Frankfurt doctor held hostage in East Africa whose view of the continent is challenged by a fellow captive. Khadra’s vivid imagining of the demise of Colonel Gaddafi, The Dictator’s Last Night, translated by Julian Evans, will follow in October.

    April sees the publication of The Red Notebook, the much-anticipated new novel by The President’s Hat author Antoine Laurain. Translated in-house by Emily Boyce, we have a special attachment to this quirky, romantic tale with a bookseller hero who attempts to track down a woman based on the contents of her bag – which mysteriously include a signed copy of a novel by famously reclusive Nobel winner Patrick Modiano.

    Anne Berest’s fictionalised biography Sagan, Paris 1954, out in June, draws a portrait of 18-year-old Françoise Sagan as her debut novel Bonjour Tristesse is poised to propel her to fame. The translator, Heather Lloyd, recently translated the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Bonjour Tristesse, so was the ideal choice for this intimate account of the novel’s continued relevance.

    Then in September comes our first foray into graphic novels, and what a way to start: Stéphane Heuet’s beautifully illustrated adaptation of Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’, translated by Harvard academic Arthur Goldhammer. This ambitious project will give Proust-lovers a different way to approach the text, and, we hope, encourage new readers to discover it for themselves.

    Max Porter, Granta & Portobello

    We start the year with The Vegetarian by Han Kang (January, translated by Deborah Smith), a remarkable and unsettling novel about taboo and metamorphosis. It’s an essential read for anybody interested in illness, performance and trauma. It is also notable for Deborah Smith’s beautiful and intuitive translation.

    In March we have the mesmeric new novel by Man Booker International nominated Peter Stamm, All Days are Night (translated by Michael Hofmann). It tells the story of a perfect life that is violently shattered by tragedy. Like all Stamm’s work it is unadorned, insightful and quietly devastating.

    Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? by Swedish economist and journalist Katrine Marçal (March, translated by Saskia Vogel) is an engaging and thought-provoking look at economics, equality and the mess we are in. As the general election approaches and the gender pay gap widens, it’s time we brought feminism and economics together.

    Valeria Luiselli, author of Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd returns in April with a sparklingly intelligent and raucous comic novel The Story of My Teeth (translated by Christina McSweeney). Just in time for the Mexico market focus at LBF 2015 one of Latin America’s rising literary stars leaps into wonderfully flamboyant storytelling mode.

    Other highlights from Granta and Portobello in 2015 include The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret (July, translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen, Anthony Berris), a life-affirming collection of tragicomic essays by the author the New York Times called ‘a genius’.

    We have a previously unpublished collection of essays by the great Joseph Roth, called The Hotel Years, writings from inter-war Italy, Germany, Russia, Albania and Ukraine, by turns poignant, witty and unsettling  (September, translated by Michael Hofmann).

    Also in September Portobello Books will publish The Strange Case of Thomas Quick by Dan Josefsson (translated by Anna Paterson), the riveting story of a prisoner who posed as the worst serial killer in Swedish history, and the psychoanalyst who shaped the investigation.

    In November we publish Walter Kempowski’s last, great, novel All for Nothing (translated by Anthea Bell) a towering masterpiece of post-war German fiction comparable to Roth, Fallada and Grass, which also calls to mind Rachel Seiffert’s Dark Room and Richard Bausch’s Peace.

    Michal Shavit, Harvill Secker

    This year at Harvill Secker we have an incredibly strong selection of fiction in translation : An electrifying debut, Jesús Carrasco, Out in the Open, to be published in April. Beautifully translated by Margaret Jull Costa it tells the story of a boy in a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A closed world where names and dates don’t matter, where morals have drained away with the water. It has been a huge best-seller in Spain and Holland and it marks the arrival of a major new Spanish writer.

    We are also excited to welcome to the list Mia Couto in August. It is an understatement to describe Mia Couto as Mozambique’s greatest novelist – he is in fact one of the most outstanding authors to have emerged in Africa’s post-colonial history. Based on a true story, Confession of the Lioness, translated by David Brookshaw, is set in the rural village of Kulumani as it is being besieged by killer lions. As the inevitable encounter with the lions approaches, the hidden tensions in the village are gradually exposed and the real theme of the novel becomes apparent: the war is not between man and nature but between the village’s patriarchal traditions and its long suffering women.

    And last but certainly not least, this March we are publishing the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s phenomenal My Struggle series, translated by Don Bartlett: Dancing in the Dark. 18 years old and fresh out of high school, Karl Ove moves to a remote Norwegian fishing village to work as a teacher. All goes well to begin with. But as the nights grow longer, Karl Ove’s life takes a darker turn. Drinking causes him blackouts and romantic adventures end in humiliation. As the New York Times Book Review put it: ‘Why would you read a six-volume 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to’.

    Susan Curtis, Istros Books

    We have seven lucky titles lined up for you in 2015: we start the year with Croatian poet Olja Savicevic’s beautiful debut novel, Farewell Cowboy, followed by a collection of hard-hitting short prose pieces exploring the female condition in Turkey in Ciler Ilhan’s Exile – winner of the European Prize for Literature. We also have another EU prize winner in the Slovenian writer, Gabriela Babnik and an unusual love story set in Africa, Dry Season. Dream and nightmare are the themes of Evald Flisar‘s psychologically challenging novel, My Father’s Dreams, whereas fairy tales are the playground for Macedonian writer, Aleksandar Prokopiev in his collection for adults – Homunculus. We will also be treated to the final instalment of Andrej Nikolaidis‘ informal ‘Olchinium Trilogy’ – Till Kingdom Come and get to taste one of the biggest Balkan hits in recent years: Yugoslavia, My Country by Goran Vojnovic.

    Katharina Bielenberg, MacLehose Press

    O. Enquist’s The Wandering Pine (January, translated by Deborah Bragan Turner)

    In this venerated Swedish novelist gives us his life in the third person, as a national highjumper, as a journalist during the 1972 Munich Olympic hostage crisis, as a playwright who had the most tremendous Broadway flop, and as an alcoholic whose disease almost destroyed him. A startlingly bold autobiography.

    In Evelio Rosero’s Feast of the Innocents (January, translated by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom), a doctor chooses Carnival as the perfect arena in which to explode the myth of Simon Bolívar once and for all. A magical, exuberant riot of a book set in Colombia’s southern city of Pasto.

    Elias Khoury’s The Broken Mirrors/Sinalcol (translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies) tells the story of two brothers divided by difference and civil war, between Beirut and France. Thought provoking, rich in language and character, beautiful constructed, another powerful novel from the Lebanese writer.

    With The Heart of Man (February, translated by Philip Roughton) Icelander Jón Kalman Stefánsson concludes his sublime trilogy, a profound exploration of life in the extreme north and its most crucial elements: love, food, warmth, literature – but most of all, love.

    Karim Miské’s Arab Jazz (February, translated by Sam Gordon) is a fast-paced crime novel from Paris’ 19th arrondissement that goes to the heart of religious extremism and the violence it can inspire. Recent horrific events in Paris are to some extent reflected in this novel by the Franco-Mauritanian documentary film-maker. Miské visits the UK in February for a series of events supported by PEN Promotes.

    Borders by Roy Jacobsen (March, translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw) is a gripping story of impossible choices in a theatre of total war, where family love, national identity, even military genius, count for nothing as the doomed German 6th
    Army fights for Stalingrad in WWII.

    Leica Format (translated by Celia Hawkesworth) by Croatian writer Daša Drndiƈ – author of Trieste – is a tale of cities, of how the past merges with the present, and of what constitutes a homeland. A narrative of poignant, vivid fragments and images that combine to form a haunting study of history and the processes by which we describe, remember, or falsify it.

    Fall of Man in Wilmslow by David Lagercrantz (May, translated from Swedish by George Goulding) explores the repressive atmosphere of Cold War Britain through the death and life of revolutionary mathematician Alan Turing. Lagercrantz’s writing is so clever and engaging that complex mathematical theorems become crystal clear. He is also the author of the continuation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (coming in August)

    Later in the year we look forward to two novels by incumbent Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano (A Pedigree and So That You Don’t Lose Yourself in the Quartier), and novels by Andreï Makine, Peter Terrin and Norbert Gstrein, as well as Pierre Lemaitre’s 2013 Goncourt Prize-winner, the first in a magnum opus.

    Juliet Mabey, Oneworld

    We will be adding four novels to our growing list of fiction in translation, the first of which is A Perfect Crime by A Yi, translated from the Chinese by Anna Holmwood. A bored high school student murders his best friend to relieve the daily tedium of existence, and so begins a stylish psychological suspense novel, the literary love child of Camus’ The Stranger, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Kafka’s The Trial. Offering both a vision of China’s heart of darkness – the despair that traps the rural poor and the incoherent rage lurking behind their phlegmatic front – and a technically brilliant excursion into the claustrophobic realm of classic horror and suspense, this novel is generously supported by a PEN Award for translation and promotion.

    In July we are publishing a Norwegian YA novel in our new imprint, Rock the Boat. Minus Me, written by Ingelin Rossland and translated by Deborah Dawkin, follows a young terminally ill teenager as she completes her bucket list and ultimately comes to terms with leaving.

    In October we are very excited to be publishing the critically acclaimed, multiple award-winning Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated from the Russian by Lisa Hayden. Winner of both the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana Awards in 2013 and shortlisted for several others, this huge novel has been dubbed Russia’s The Name of the Rose. An enthralling chronicle of the Russian Middle Ages, a doomed love affair, and an epic journey all in one life-affirming, sprawling fable.

    And in November we are publishing the multiple award-winning French novel Meursault, Contre-enquete by Algerian journalist and writer Kamel Daoud, translated by Sandra Smith. This highly acclaimed debut is a powerful, lyrical, and politically charged re-imagining of The Outsider, narrated by the brother of the nameless Arab killed in Camus’ iconic novel, and is already a huge bestseller in France. It has won numerous accolades including the Prix François-Mauriac of the Académie Française and the Prix des Cinq Continents, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award in French literature.

    Meike Ziervogel, Peirene Press

    Peirene only publishes three books a year and I curate them in series. 2015 is Peirene’s year of Chance Encounter: Meeting The Other. A stunning Finnish tale about the human will to survive (White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen, translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah), a French love story about the art of reading (Reader for Hire by Jean Raymond, translated by Adriana Hunter), and a Norwegian drama about two middle-aged sisters whose existence is turned upside down when a stranger enters their lives (The Looking-Glass Sisters by Gøhril Gabrielsen, translated by John Irons).

    Amelia Fairney, Penguin

    Drone Theory, by Gregoire Chamayou, translated by Janet Lloyd. Beautifully argued, passionate and coherent, this is an urgent and important polemic that blends philosophy with reportage as it grapples with one of the most pressing issues in the world today: robot warfare

    Blood-drenched Beard, by Daniel Galera, translated by Alison Entrekin (paperback). This sultry, alluring and atmospheric novel by Brazilian rising star Daniel Galera is made all the more mysterious and compelling by the protagonist’s unusual disorder: he is unable to recognize the faces of any of the people he meets.

    Frog, by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt (paperback). The latest novel by the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, Frogoffers a moving and eye-opening insight into Chinese society and the far-reaching reverberations of the one-child policy

    Paul Baggaley, Picador

    Monica Sabolo’s All This Has Nothing To Do With Me , translated by Georgina Collins, is an original, extremely funny and darkly moving glimpse into the depths of one woman’s psyche, and a delicious piece of Parisian comedy. When journalist ‘MS’ interviews the mysterious ‘XX’ for a job at her magazine, she hires him straight away – because he is gorgeous. As one date leads to another, her obsession spirals whilst the object of her affection remains aloof. There is voyeurism here, and the addiction of any glossy magazine, but the prose is also sublime – sharp, graceful and charming. And MS herself is a wonderfully sympathetic character. She has a wry awareness of how ridiculous her behaviour is even as it spins out of control, and she never takes herself too seriously; there is a touch of a 21st century Bridget Jones to her in this respect.

    One Hundred Days of Happiness, translated by Tony Shugaar is Italian film director Fausto Brizzi’s gorgeously funny and sweetly sad story about the last one hundred days in the life of Lucio Battistini. Lucio’s simple life takes a tumble when an indiscretion at work gets him thrown out of the apartment he shares with his wife and children.  That’s when he receives the news that he is seriously ill, an three months left to live. Lucio decides he must live his last days to the full, and there’s a lot to do. He wants to win his wife back and travel with his children, he needs to let everybody know how happy he was, in spite of everything. This novel has a fun-loving, roguish Italian charm to it and despite the inevitably sad ending it’s really about celebrating love and friendship, and it’s endlessly uplifting for that.

    Wilful Disregard, translated by Sarah Death, is Lena Andersson’s August Prize-winning novel about one Ester Nilsson, a sensible person in a sensible relationship. That is until the day she is asked to give a lecture on famous artist Hugo Rask. The man himself sits in the audience, spellbound, and, when the two meet afterwards, he has the same effect on her. This short, sharp novel is just brilliant, a sort of dark love story about desperate devotion and total self-betrayal and self-delusion. It’s cuttingly, sometimes cruelly funny and written with whip-smart panache and precision.

    A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler and translated by Charlotte Collins. The new novel from Austrian writer Robert Seethaler sold 100,000 copies in German last year. It is the story of one man’s life – his loves, battles, consolations and regrets – set in the Alps, as the modern world begins to erode the old ways. Told with dignity, humility and great beauty, it has been compared with John Williams’ STONER.

    The Sense of an Elephant  by Marco Missiroli, translated by Stephen Twilley is a powerful story of paternal love and hidden lives, set in a palazzo in Milan. Pietro arrives with a battered suitcase to take up the job as concierge, and from the outset shows a special interest in Dr Luca Martini and his family. Soon he’s letting himself into their apartment while everyone is out. What is the secret that binds the two men? This is a charming, atmospheric novel and it won Italy’s Campiello Prize in 2012.

    Adam Freudenheim, Pushkin Press

    At the end of January we publish the debut novel by Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch (translation by Sondra Silverston).  This sensuous, whimsical and moving love story fuses personal lives and epic history.  It’s a true delight!

    At the end of February we are thrilled to publish, in a unique, reverse back-to-back edition, Karate Chop & Minna Needs Rehearsal Space by Dorthe Nors (translations by Marin Aitken and Misha Hoekstra).  This collection of stories and novella by Danish writer Dorthe Nors marks the appearance in English of one of the most original writers I know of.  These two books will knock your socks off, quite simply.

    At the end of March we publish the powerful allegorical novel The Boy Who Stole Atilla’s Horse by Ivan Repila, a young Spanish writer (translation by Sophie Hughes).  Atilla has echoes of Beckett and Cormac McCarthy but is a very much its own thing – a fable for the early 21st century of a Europe in decline.

    Pushkin Children’s Books releases early this year include The Whale That Fell in Love with a Submarine by Akiyuki Nosaka (translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori) – wartime Japan like you’ve never read about it before – and the Brazilian bestseller Fuzz McFlops by Eva Furnari, a charming tale of a depressed one-eared rabbit who happens to be a writer, too.  And in September we’re thrilled to be publishing the sequel to The Letter for the King – The Secrets of the Wild Wood by Tonke Dragt (translation by Laura Watkison, who has been shortlisted for this year’s Marsh Award).

    Hannah Westland, Serpent’s Tail

    Serpent’s Tail is starting the year with a debut novel by a really exciting Finland Swedish writer called Philip Teir who has been compared to Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen – The Winter War (translated by Tiina Nunally) is a brilliantly funny, sharp, moving account of the demise of a family over the course of one winter, taking place in Helsinki and London. We’ve then got Leonora (translated by Amanda Hopkinson), a fictionalised account of the life of the great surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, by Elena Poniatowska, who was a friend of Carrington’s over many decades and is Mexico’s greatest living writer. In May we’re publishing Alain Mabanckou’s The Lights of Pointe Noire (translated by Helen Stevenson), a beautiful meditation on homecoming and how the Congo has changed since his childhood. And in November we’re planning to shock everyone with Danish debut Am I Cold by Copenhagen’s enfant terrible Martin Kongstad (translated by Martin Aitken) – this furious satire on art, marriage and late capitalism set in a Denmark teetering on the edge of financial crisis is hilarious, fearless, and cuts like a knife.

    Hannah Westland, Tuskar Rock

    In 2015 we begin publishing Tuskar Rock Press’s wonderful books. Starting with Antonio Munoz Molina’s masterpiece of the Spanish civil war, IN THE NIGHT OF TIME (translated by Edith Grossman) in March, and followed by the inimitable László Krasznahorkai’s new novel SEIOBO THERE BELOW (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) in August.

  • Why I write what I write?

    In May 1979, excited by the news of the revolution, I skipped the graduation ceremony at the University of Iowa and fled to Iran. I wanted to be part of this massive uprising against the 2500 years of monarchy. I arrived a few months after the first revolutionary riots. The Shah had already fled the country and Iran had an interim government. The political atmosphere was extremely open and Iranians enjoyed immense freedom – something they had never experienced before.

    But between 1979 and 1983, when the political power fell completely into the hands of the Islamic clergy and the last political party was shut down and its members imprisoned, the young revolution went through a massive transformation. This change buried the hopes of the nationalists, liberals and Marxists. The religious fundamentalists under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini created a blood bath, which resulted in the execution of thousands of Iranians who were labelled enemies of God.

    According to the new imposed ideology, I was considered an enemy of God. I was a professor of playwriting and dramatic literature and a dramaturge for the Theatre Division of the Ministry of Culture and Art (soon to change its name to the Ministry of Islamic Guidance). I ran the literary pages of a progressive newspaper and participated in political and feminist activities. When the ‘turn to the right’ happened, the Islamic agents began to interrogate the secular intellectuals in all the organisations. A process of purge began.

    I remember the day that I was teaching playwriting to a small group of women. An hour after class, armed guards broke through the classroom door and pointed their Kalashnikovs toward us. They ordered us to move back and face the wall. I was teaching the American playwright Arthur Miller. The guards collected the books and papers and told us these were ‘communist documents.’ Spontaneous executions happened every day and once I’d seen a crazy mullah machine-gunning prostitutes against a brick wall. Now standing next to my trembling students, I thought this was serious and these young boys would shoot us any second. But one of the students who always wore a large black scarf was allowed to talk. She told the boy-guards that her husband was one of the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards and if they killed us, he’d execute them with no mercy. With a phone call this was confirmed and we were saved.

    A short while after this incident I was fired from my jobs. The newspaper for which I worked was closed as well. This was the winter of 1983, when my first full-length play was being rehearsed. The director was hoping to produce it for a major stage. But the guards locked and sealed the theatre and arrested him and the actors.

    Now the clock ticked, as if in a count down. Each day more and more of us, ‘the others’ – those who didn’t want to join the Army of Allah – were arrested. The nightly TV shows of repentance began and the leaders of different political parties under severe psychological and physical torture broke down and appeared in fuzzy videos confessing to their sins (the sin of having different ideologies or religions).

    Soon, the execution of the political prisoners began and escalated. A dark dictatorship, a religious fascism opened its black wings over my country. One of the ugly peculiarities of this theocracy was a deep-rooted animosity toward women. Some women at the time of their executions were denied the right to stand on their feet. They were executed in tightly tied burlap sacks. This image haunted me for years and appeared in recurring nightmares, until finally I portrayed it in a scene at the end of my first novel, At the Wall of the Almighty.

    Many women left the country, those who couldn’t and remained, fought for their freedom. Some showed their anger and agony in self-destructive ways. I remember the physician who burned herself in a public plaza as protest against the humiliation of the mandatory veil.

    After my close friends, colleagues, and relatives were arrested in the massive round-up of 1983 I went underground. Now I realised that it was necessary to leave the country. I had already lost my jobs and my name was black-listed. Soon the guards would invade my apartment and take me to Evin prison with my two-year old son. So in a dark night, holding my sedated baby on my back, I walked on minefields and followed the turbaned smugglers who led me out of my country.

    At that time I was not aware that in future I will turn all these terrifying incidents into works of fiction. But seven years after exile, I wrote my first novel, At the Wall of the Almighty. I portrayed an imaginary prison that is mazelike and the only door to outside faces the wall of God, where prisoners are executed. Shortly after, I wrote, The Bathhouse, narrated by an innocent seventeen-year old girl who is arrested by mistake and taken to a facility by the name of the Bathhouse. After thirty days of torture she ends up at the wall of the execution. Most of the stories of my collection, The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree are about the revolution or the consequences of it. In Against Gravity, my third novel, the female protagonist who has escaped the inferno of Iran finds herself entangled in a typical American scenario: she is stalked and shot at by an insane man who is obsessed with her.

    But in The Drum Tower, recently published in the U.S. and U.K, simultaneously, I’ve travelled back to the early days of the revolution and dealt with the predicament of an emotionally disturbed girl who has to escape from the prison of her house and prison of her country.

    Thirty-two years have passed since that gloomy night when I stepped out of my country and the bridges burned behind me. But the memories are alive and vivid – the eruption of a massive revolution, the death of my friends in the massacre of 1988, the suffering of my family and the families of thousands whose sons or daughters were executed. All these still urge me to write; there are many stories untold and voices unheard. My people are still hostages of a medieval regime. So I begin another project, because someone has to write what happened in Iran and what is still happening.

    Farnoosh Moshiri published plays, short stories, and translations in Iranian literary magazines before she fled her country after a massive arrest and execution of secular intellectuals, feminists, and political activists. She lived in refugee camps of Afghanistan and India for four years before emigrating to the U.S. Her novels and collections include At the Wall of Almighty, The Bathhouse; The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree, Against Gravity, and The Drum Tower. Among other awards and fellowships, she is the recipient of Barthelme Memorial Award, C. Glenn Cambor/Inprint Fellowship, two Barbara Deming Awards for writing of peace and social justice; two consecutive Black Heron Awards for Social Fiction, and Valiente (courage) Award from Voices Breaking Boundaries for artists who have taken risks to speak out and act as advocates. She has taught literature, playwriting, and creative writing in Universities of Tehran, Kabul, Houston, and Syracuse. In 2012, with collaboration of the composer, Gregory Spears, she created a chamber opera by the name of ‘The Bricklayer’ commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera. The world premiere was on March 16, 2012.

    Currently she is teaching at the University of Houston-Downtown and working on a new novel.

    You can find out more about Farnoosh Moshiri at her website and her publisher profile.

    The Drum Tower is available to buy in the UK.

  • Rain and Bamboo

    In the wetter parts of Africa, bamboo provides for many household needs. African bamboo, it must be said, is a giant bamboo, just as Africa is a giant continent. African bamboo can grow to eighty feet tall, a huge swaying stalk and a gluttonous lover of soil. Gallant too, for it likes to bow, to kiss the ground and sleep at the feet of its surroundings, though it usually rises up majestically, pointing triumphantly to the zephyr, the sky of the thousand night stars that shine madly in certain parts of Africa. Anyone who has had the good fortune to set foot on African soil, in its wettest and windiest parts, will have noticed that bamboo is a prime building material, and they will have doubtless seen two or three boys amusing themselves with bamboo toys. Bamboo can be used to make a thousand household utensils, and weapons too, useful when confronting the natives, whether from flora or fauna, for both can be overly exuberant in certain parts.

    Anyone who’s been to Africa but not woken up with a stiff neck after sleeping on a hard bamboo bed, hasn’t really been to Africa, or at least hasn’t experienced the true beauty of Africa, never mind talk of thousand-year-old landscapes and supposedly flowering economies. Dried bamboo leaves provide the fluffy insides of mattresses, serving our daily appointment with the God of Rest, while bamboo forests provide myriad possibilities to men and women in love, for when the sun sets across Africa, the continent becomes a great scene of secret courting. To speak of bamboo is, therefore, to speak of life in Africa, a life that is flourishing, fluid and sometimes secret, a life that is hidden behind a thousand cloths of a thousand different colours, conveyed by a thousand songs and a thousand different ways of giving names to reality.

    For there are languages in Africa, indigenous forms of talking, and some languages have been around for thousands of years, though when we say thousands of years we may not mean real years, for there’s always room for imagination in Africa. These languages, these means of describing reality, are sometimes so peculiar that they defy the miracles of science, and some even took it upon themselves to cross borders, artificial borders erected long after everything else, to later appear in books left behind as testimony. But despite their being peculiar and nomadic, the few thousand people left in my grandmother’s village, now that the grandchildren have set out on hundreds of different paths towards particular norths, haven’t stopped speaking these languages, just as they haven’t stopped using bamboo, and the rain hasn’t stopped falling, pitter-patter, in the nearby forest.

    To speak of books left behind as testimony is to speak of knowledge, understanding, imagination. Ultimately it is to speak of how hundreds of butterflies come down from the bamboo plants and settle on village floors wet with rain, in those parts of Africa where rain comes more than a few days a year. Ultimately it is to speak of how those butterflies imprint their sensations onto leaves, so that future generations of butterflies might learn to travel without risking anything other than their own fear. Art, literature, creation on paper. The sublime art of evoking experiences, of bequeathing knowledge to future generations, of passing on survival instructions to women and men, girls and boys, in villages of forests and rain.

    That’s to say, in order for there to be a language, somebody must speak it, use it, make sense of the world with it. For every book there are a thousand other tales of rain and bamboo that are never written down due to more pressing needs. Artistic books, that’s to say literature, tell of unknown, faraway places, lands and languages fighting for survival, impervious to the fact that stories are sold in books these days, and mostly in English, or two or three other powerful languages. Lands where bamboo is still used, despite the fact that it has been replaced elsewhere by elastic or some conglomeration of metals ripped from African soil.

    Books bring glimpses of lives that people don’t see, lives lived in languages of little weight and reach. So when the learned sit down to discuss the real, or supposed, quality of books produced by people from bamboo places, they should bear two things in mind: that these works offer traces of lives lived under different circumstances, lives where the book as product means nothing; that stories will go on being told, just as they’ve always been told, but in fewer voices, destiny having allowed mortal silence to ravish entire bamboo communities. So if we want to speak of the art of writing, it is a terrible injustice to have certain works undermined just because their author didn’t know, despite himself, the language of those who decide things in the modern world. To do so is to do more than kill the artist of the unknown language, it is to kill art itself.

    Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. His parents were from the remote Annobón Island, off the African coast. His books include the novel Avión de Ricos, Ladrón De Cerdos (The Pig Thief And The Rich Man’s Aeroplane) and the short story collection Cuentos Crudos (Raw Tales).

    Ávila Laurel has been a constant thorn in the side of his country’s long-standing dictatorial government. A nurse by profession, for many years he was one of the best known Equatorial Guinean writers not to have opted to live in exile. But, in 2011, after a week-long hunger strike in protest against Obiang’s regime, timed to coincide with the President of Spain’s visit to Equatorial Guinea, Ávila Laurel moved to Barcelona. He writes across all media, in particular as a blogger, essayist and novelist. By Night the Mountain Burns was published in November by And Other Stories.

    By Night the Mountain Burns was published in November by And Other Stories, and is available to buy from our bookseller partner Foyles.

    You can read more about Jethro Soutar’s experience of translating Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel.

    More information about Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel can be found at his author profile at the Foyles website.

  • Yule love these books in translation 2014

    Roasting chestnuts on an open fire, taking the first whiff of mulled wine, and cracking open a great work of literature in translation: find your stocking-filler or winter-cheerer with these recommendations from top writers

     

    Jo Baker, writer

    Suspended Sentences, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti (Yale University Press)

    Together, these three novellas form a beautiful evocation of life in and around Paris towards the latter part of the 20th Century. They each centre on a noirish mystery – the search for a shadowy figure, or for something just out of reach – but these are stories that resist resolution. Ultimately, they’re more concerned with absences, with gaps, with what can’t quite be remembered or grasped, than with what has ‘actually happened’… and so they feel like lace, full of elegantly captured spaces. As the narrator of ‘Afterimage’ says: ‘Of all the punctuation marks… ellipses were his favourite’. He’s talking about the photographer Jensen, but that could equally be suggested of Modiano himself.

     

    Alexandra Büchler, director of Literature Across Frontiers

    Nowhere People by Paulo Scott (And Other Stories) stands way out among the books I read in 2014. It’s the kind of novel you read and already look forward to reading it again although it makes such a painful read. Translated from the Brazilian Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, it is an innovative and emphatic j’accuse by a former lawyer and activist, a great example of the possibility of political engagement through literature, a reminder of one of the worst crimes in the history of mankind, the crime of displacing and annihilating indigenous people around the globe. Read this if you don’t mind crying.  Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao – New York – Bilbao (Seren Books) translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin is a mix of travel writing, family history and reflections on Basque culture and its place in today’s world. It is a book about journeys, the many journeys made by Uribe’s father and grandfather on Basque fishing boats and his own travels as a writer who has inherited their language. Read this if you want to be moved by the simple prose of an author who is primarily a poet.   Lasha Bugadze was one of the Georgian writers on board of Literature Express, a train carrying some 100 authors across Europe to celebrate the new millenium. His novel of the same title  translated from the Georgian by Maya Kiasashvili (Dalkey Archive Press), is a fictionalized account of that journey. Brilliant, funny, tragicomic, it pokes fun at the construct of Europe with its inherent hierarchies and inequalities played out in the environment of a literary festival on wheels. Read this if you want to laugh.

     

    Robert Chandler, translator from Russian

    Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Oliver Ready (Penguin Classics).  At last we have a translation that brings out the wild humour and vitality of the original.  A.N. Wilson, who also chose this as a ‘Book of the Year’, is right to call it a ‘truly great translation’.  Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity (Liveright, 2014).  A book about Dante rather than a translation – but Prue Shaw succeeds brilliantly in making a foreign writer accessible to a wider readership, which is, of course, just what a translator does.  I have been reading and re-reading Dante all my adult life and have never read anything better, clearer or more inspiring about him.

     

    Jonathan Coe, writer

    The book I most enjoyed in English translation this year was Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère translated by John Lambert (Allen Lane). It’s rare to find a book so original in form (is it a novel? is it a biography?) and at the same time so compelling in content. A fascinating portrait, not just of a memorably grotesque, larger-than-life character, but of Russia itself.

     

    Geraldine D’Amico, Folkestone Book Festival and King’s Place Spoken Word Programmer and translator

    My favourite book this year was certainly Frederic Gros’ A Philosophy of Walking translated by John Howe (Verso Books). This is a book about the simplest, most basic thing human beings have been doing for ever, whether to go from point A to point B, to experience nature or as a form of exercise. Frederic Gros is both a keen walker and a philosopher. In his book he alternates chapters about his experience as someone who simply enjoys walking, preferably slowly, and chapters about famous thinkers and why walking was important for them: from Kant who had such a routine that you could set your watch by the time he appeared at a certain place, to Rimbaud, the wandering poet, Thoreau and his cabin in the woods and many more. It is a delightful book to be read from beginning to end or dipped in now and then, perfect to pack in a rucksack and pull out with one’s picnic, food for the mind and the soul.

     

    Boris Dralyuk, translator from Russian

    I’ve been lucky enough to review a number of books in translation in 2014 and I would eagerly recommend Bill Johnston’s inspired recreation of the contemporary Polish poet Tomasz Różycki’s mock-epic Twelve Stations (Zephyr, 2014), Bryan Karetnyk’s sensitive re-translation of the Russian émigré novelists Gaito Gazdanov’s ‘metaphysical thriller’ The Buddha’s Return (Pushkin Press, 2014), and John Lambert’s seamless rendition of Emmanuelle Carrere’s rollicking biographical novel Limonov (Allen Lane, 2014). But I’d be a fool to squander an opportunity to praise two more publications that are not to be missed. Anne Marie Jackson, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Clare Kitson, Irina Sternberg and Natalie Wase have done an extraordinary service to the Russian author Teffi (1872-1952) — and to the Anglophone reader — by selecting and translating Subtly Worded (Pushkin, 2014), a volume of stories that could not be more aptly titled. Teffi was not only a great wit and an impeccable stylist, but one of the twentieth century’s most perceptive and clear-headed observers. Subtly Worded is flawless — a true revelation. This year Antonia Lloyd-Jones, one of the premiere translators of Polish prose, has brought us Mariusz Szczygieł’s remarkably engaging Gottland (Melville House, 2014), an idiosyncratic chronicle of the Czechs’ Kafkaesque journey through the twentieth century. Szczygieł’s book exposes the dangers of compromise, the importance of memory, and the differences between the national experiences of two Slavic peoples – a particularly relevant subject, in a year when the Slavic world is again in crisis.

     

    Maya Jaggi, a cultural journalist and literary critic, a judge of this year’s International Impac Dublin Literary Award

    Tomás González is among the brilliant Colombian writers emerging from the shadow of Gabriel García Márquez. In the Beginning Was the Sea (Pushkin Press), translated by Frank Wynne, is about a 30-something couple from Medellín who buy a run-down estate on the Caribbean coast to live the good life, but whose rustic dream sours as they fatally antagonise the locals. It’s a forensic portrait of a doomed relationship and environmental hubris, with the irony of a plantation novel – and a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of escaping to the country. Joan Sales’s Uncertain Glory (MacLehose Press), a Catalan-language classic from the 1950s revived in Peter Bush’s translation minus the cuts of Franco’s censors, follows three men in love with the same woman in civil-war Spain. Sales fought for the Republicans in the Aragon trenches, and lays bare the absurdities of war with astringent satire through the disillusioned eyes of the defeated. I would also recommend Kirmen Uribe’s novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao (Seren Books), translated by Elizabeth Macklin. A reflective insight into three generations of Basque family history, it is crafted with the structure of a trawler’s net by one of Spain’s most exciting young novelists – who writes in Basque – and is the perfect read for anyone on a plane.

     

    Roland Gulliver, Associate Director, Edinburgh International Book Festival

    He has been hitting all the literary headlines this year but Karl Ove Knausgaard is definitely worth the hype. Reading the first three books in his series, Death in the Family, Man in Love and Boyhood Island translated by Don Bartlett (Harvill Secker), has been an incredible experience. Intense, insightful, funny, addictive; like all great books they make you see yourself and your world afresh, challenging your perspectives on art, literature and society. My great discovery this year was George Simenon (translated by David Bellos, Anthea Bell, Linda Coverdale and many more). Penguin have taken on the admirably impressive task of retranslating all of his novels over a 7 year period. I have to confess I had stereotyped Maigret as pedestrian Sunday night TV but the novels are fascinating. These short novels capture society in post-war France, highlighting the class divide and the rise of the petit-bourgeoisie, the growth of cities and the fear of immigration, and desperate measures people go to out of fear, greed or just trying to survive. Finally, my funniest book of the year is Weapons of Mass Diplomacy written by Abel Lanzac, drawn by Christophe Blain and translated by Edward Gauvin (SelfMadeHero). Set in the French Foreign Office at the time of the Iraq crisis, it is that rare beast of laugh out loud funny. A graphic novel version of The Thick of It with a unique Gallic twist!

     

    Daniel Hahn, translator from Spanish and Portugese

    My choice would be The Adventures of Shola, by Bernardo Atxaga, and translated by Margaret Jull Costa –  a charming, witty, spirited collection of stories about the exploits of an irresistibly characterful little dog. It’s a children’s book – Atxaga’s first in English – and a great Christmas present for children, but I think I may have to buy a few copies for adults, too…

     

    Amanda Hopkinson, translator from Spanish, Portugese and French

    One is – or rather are – two children’s books by Erich Kästner, translated from the German by the impeccable Anthea Bell. Just like Emil and the Detectives, Kästner’s best-known tale, The Flying Classroom and The Parent Trap are pitched at 9+-year-olds, and I enjoyed every word of both, before reluctantly passing them onto my grandson. They explore childhood with wit and invention while spinning magical yarns interwoven with the erratic and bizarre actions of adults and the independent-mindedness of children. Small wonder the Nazis saw fit to burn them!  My other choice does not have a translator but is, in a sense, still a translation. Only recently has Turkish novelist Elif Shafak started composing her books in English, and The Architect’s Apprentice is clearly an original, unfiltered through any word-for-word mental process. It spans an elephantine journey from Hindustan through the Ottoman Empire, relaying the adventures of a baby – then growing – elephant and his mahout. Stuffed with histories of new worlds and human ways, this is magical realism as it encounters Orientalism in a literary explosion akin to a New Year’s firework display.

     

    Michele Hutchinson, translator from Dutch and editor

    There are some fantastic Dutch children’s classics and Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt is one of them. Laura Watkinson’s skilful translation was published this year by Pushkin Press and garnered excellent reviews. The strapline reads, ‘A young messenger. A secret mission. A kingdom in peril’. A perfect gift for a young nephew or niece.  That same nephew or niece might also enjoy The Cat Who Came in off the Roof by Annie M.G. Schmidt, one of the best-loved Dutch children’s writers of all time. Beautifully packaged by (again) Pushkin Press in a retro-looking edition and charmingly translated by David Colmer.

     

    Antonia Lloyd-Jones, translator from Polish

    One of my favourite books to be published this year is Harlequin’s Millions by Bohumil Hrabal (Archipelago). Any Hrabal fans will recognise the nameless narrator as the beautiful heroine of his earlier work, The Little Town Where Time Stood Still. Now she and her husband Francin, manager of the brewery, and his charismatic brother Uncle Pepin, are finishing their days in a most unusual retirement home – a decaying castle that once belonged to a legendary count, where classical figures continue to pose and battle in crumbling paintings and sculptures. As the narrator reminisces and her fellow pensioners tell their stories of the past, we sense that rather than standing still, time is running in parallel, and the people in their colourful tales are still very much alive, while also being long since dead and gone. Meanwhile, the lovely ballet music of ‘Harlequin’s Millions’ drifts throughout the castle as a constant accompaniment to Hrabal’s lilting prose, which has lost none of its lyricism in Stacey Knecht’s magnificent translation.

     

    Catherine Taylor, literary critic, Deputy Director of the English PEN

    Elena Ferrante has been the year’s  most-talked about sensation in literature – quite possibly for the wrong reasons. The extreme reclusiveness of the author has led to debates which go far beyond any assessment of her actual work. And what subversive, sensuous work it is. In Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay, (Europa Editions) translated with aplomb by Ann Goldstein, the third volume in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series of novels about childhood friends Lila and Elena, she explores the intense rivalries of female friendship and nascent feminism against the backdrop of Italy in the 1960s.

    His first book, Traveller of the Century, was a bulky, quintessential novel of ideas. Talking to Ourselves, Andrés Neuman’s new book (Pushkin Press), is short, intense and unforgettable as a small family comes to terms with the terminal illness of one of its beloved members. Excoriating , painfully soul-searching and impeccably translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García. Lastly, Isaac Babel, the great Russian writer who died in 1940 at the height of Stalin’s purges, is well-served by a new translation of his best-known collection, Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press). Boris Dralyuk brings to vivid life Babel’s wry, unflinching account of his time as a correspondent in the Red Army during Russia’s civil war.

     

    Adam Thirlwell – writer

    The translated book I loved most this year was Michel Laub’s Diary of the Fall (Harvill Secker) translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Its themes seem pure grandeur – memory, the Holocaust, writing, nostalgia – but its construction is so original and elegant that the grandeur seeps into you, unawares. What I mean is: it might not seem the perfect Christmas present, but on the principle that you should give the best books to the people you love, then everyone you love should get Michel Laub’s new novel.

     

    Ros Schwartz, translator from French

    My choice is The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Andrew Bromfield (Peirene Press). Exquisitely written and translated, searing, magical, inventive and poignant – one of those books that stays with you for a long time.  

     

    Naomi Wood, writer

    I’m afraid I’m only just crawling out from my Hemingway-sized reading hole, but the book I really enjoyed reading in translation was Elena Ferrente’s My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale, trans. Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions). She describes the intense, passionate and decidedly overwhelming friendship of two young girls in postwar Naples in such vivid prose; I adored this book, and can’t wait to read the next ones in the series.

     

    A.M. Bakalar, author

    Voices from Tibet: Selected Essays and Reportage by Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong, edited and translated by Violet S. Law (Hong Kong University Press). A short but powerful book on China’s rule over Tibet. These essays explore a wide range of topics, from the ongoing destruction of Tibetan culture, environment and freedom to self-immolation as a form of protest against the Chinese heavy-handed control.

    Wioletta Greg (or Wioletta Grzegorzewska in Polish) is a mesmerising voice of young Polish émigré authors. Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance by Wioletta Greg translated by Marek Kazmierski (Arc Publications) is a delightful collection of selected poems and prose, here published in Polish with English translation.

    Books that make you laugh are notoriously difficult to write. Two novels, published this year, in particular brought me to tears. Mission London by a Bulgarian author Alek Popov translated by Charles de M Gill (Istros Book) and Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes translated from German by Jamie Bullock (MacLehose Press). The former describes the experiences of a newly appointed Bulgarian ambassador to London, the latter brings Adolf Hitler from the dead into contemporary Germany. I can’t remember when I laughed so much during reading in years.