There are many lofty reasons to read translated literature: understanding other cultures, seeking out diversity, bragging to your bookish friends. But at the end of the day, there’s only one reason you really need: These books are good!
Read on to discover suggestions from a former bookseller at Third Place Books and a librarian at The Seattle Public Library.
“On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)” by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. Booksellers have called Balle’s runaway phenomenon a “Danish Groundhog Day,” but without the slapstick comedy of Bill Murray’s stuck-in-time narrative. It might be more apt to call Balle the “Danish Matt Dinniman” — because everywhere you turn, someone appears to be reading this quiet, masterful septology. With four installments currently published in English, and three more on the way, Balle’s series has bewildered professional and casual readers alike.
Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller, finds herself awakening again and again on the 18th of November. Claustrophobia and panic eventually calm into a quotidian sense of freedom and agency, as if living on an alien planet. Balle’s 18th of November has unique rules, plot twists and an evolving logic all its own, as if time itself is an organism.
The publisher, New Directions, releases two volumes a year, typically in April and November (on or near the 18th, of course). The installations as a whole feel like the event of a generation, and to live through them is astonishing.
“Septology” by Jon Fosse, translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls. Before Norwegian author Fosse won the Nobel Prize, critics struggled to articulate the divine qualities that made “Septology” come alive in Searls’ translation — from the novel’s gently winding sentence structure to his unique, meditative, so-called “soul-cleansing” approach to fiction.
When Asle, an aging painter living alone on the coast of Norway, encounters his doppelgänger, two versions of the same life intersect dramatically as both characters grapple with questions of solitude, life, death, alcoholism, God and artmaking.
First written as a single novel, but published in seven collected parts in Norwegian and English, Searls’ translation is hypnotic and intellectually reverent, written in a single sentence that repeats and circles back on itself with mathematical beauty.
“Midnight Timetable” by Bora Chung, translated from Korean by Anton Hur. In this “Novel in Ghost Stories,” an unnamed narrator begins a new job as a night watchman at an institute that sequesters cursed objects. Over the course of their first shifts, a longtime employee shares with them some of the stories attached to the items they guard, from an unexpectedly sinister embroidered handkerchief, to a (justifiably) angry sheep, to a shadowy presence in the very corridors of the Institute.
This is horror for those who love creepy stories that avoid full-on gore and feature insinuations of something just beyond your perception that moves when you turn your head, or a hint at the terrors that underpin our everyday interactions and society.
“Season of the Swamp” by Yuri Herrera, translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman. Benito Juárez was the first Indigenous president of Mexico. But for 18 months in the early 1850s, he was an exile in New Orleans. Herrera imagines Juárez and a small cohort of compatriots as they navigate the city, take odd jobs, survive yellow fever, experience Mardi Gras and negotiate the schemes of both con men and police in the chaotic city. Especially striking is Juárez’s ongoing, sly commentary on American slavery, as he bears witness to and interacts with those he calls the “captured.”
Shot through with keen observation and wit, this is a snapshot of both the formation of a politician and a precise flaying of the stories underpinning the American republic.
“Of Cattle and Men” by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Zoë Perry. “Of Cattle and Men” is a vivid, brutal tale of the slaughterhouse trade by Brazilian author Maia, starring the hardened slaughterhouse worker Edgar Wilson, a man of few words and a complex moral code. In Perry’s translation, Maia reads like Cormac McCarthy with the labor consciousness of George Orwell.
Meat eaters, proceed with caution. Perry’s translation is steadfast in its interpretation of agricultural life in rural Brazil, and remarkable in its ability to render the subtle surrealism and overwhelming bloodshed of Maia’s new breed of western.
“Of Cattle and Men” is the first in a loose trilogy featuring Edgar Wilson that can be read in any order, followed by “On Earth As It Is Beneath” and “Bury Your Dead,” both translated by Padma Viswanathan.
“Only a Little While Here” by María Ospina, translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary. These five linked short stories follow animal protagonists in Colombia: two stray dogs in Bógota; a scarlet tanager on its southern migration from Connecticut to Colombia; a beetle; and a porcupine.
Along the way, we get glimpses of the people these animals pass by, or who observe them. Ospina’s gift to the reader is to imagine how a bird, a beetle, a porcupine or a dog experiences their world, their transit, without the imposition of anthropomorphization. Yet while unaware and unconcerned with borders or other human-made constructions, they are no less subject to the results of human imposition on their landscapes and natural home.
– By Andrea Gough, Adult Services librarian, and Spencer Ruchti, former author events manager at Third Place Books and cofounder of the Cercador Prize for literature in translation.
This column was originally published in the Seattle Times as part of our monthly column, and is reprinted here with permission.
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