On Reading in Translation

And some of my translated favorites

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a reader of books in translation. It seems to me that there are two types of readers: first, those who don’t read books in translation, or if they do, it’s sort of by accident because they heard something is a good book and it doesn’t matter if its translated or not — the sort of reader who picks up Elena Ferrante and that’s the only translated book they read that year — and, second, those who seek out translations specifically. These are the people who can name translators and translation presses, who can discuss the countries whose literatures they like the best, who know which bookstores carry a lot of translations, who can maybe even name untranslated books they hope will be available in English one day.

I used to be the first kind of reader and turned into the second, and I am not in any way judging either group. As a young person, I read a few classics in translation because my dad happened to have them on his bookshelf, so I read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky early on, and then I read more in college and grad school: Flaubert, Kafka, Chekhov, Ibsen, etc. Mostly the usual suspects. I don’t remember what translations I read after that, but I did start keeping track of translation reading in LibraryThing in 2010, which shows that during a lot of the 2010s, I read maybe 3-5 books in translation a year, sometimes more than that but if so it was usually for teaching purposes. Most of the translations I read were of the “by accident” variety: my book group picked a translation, I was assigned to review one, I just happened to come across one.

But then in 2019 I read 31 books in translation, and in 2020 I read 33. This year so far I’ve read 11 and it’s still March. I turned into someone who makes a point of reading translations, and the only reason I don’t read more is because I want to read other things and can only read so fast. I think of myself as a big translation reader, but the truth is that this focus is relatively new and there is so much I haven’t read yet.

Anyway — and the following comes from the perspective of someone living in the U.S. and reading solely in English — I’ve been puzzling over the idea of books in translation as a category, as a focus for reading, or as a way to identify as a reader. To think of “translated books” or even “translated fiction” as a category brings together a whole lot of literary traditions that are very different from one another. Do authors from, say, Japan, Russia, Iran, Rwanda, Colombia, and Argentina really belong together in the same category? The biggest thing that connects these works is that they weren’t originally written in English. Thinking of oneself as primarily a reader of translations is defining one’s reading by what it’s not, as including everything except that originally written in English. But wait, it should be the other way around! It seems like reading widely from around the globe should be the norm, the cultural default, and to focus primarily on books in English a more niche interest. Haha, naïve, I know.

Of course, you can only read the books that are available to you, that you know about from some source, and the vast majority of the books that get marketing dollars, review attention, and word-of-mouth buzz are books written in English. Books from the major publishing companies are the ones that command the most attention, and they publish few translations. Translations, especially of contemporary writing, usually come from small presses, and to know about small presses, you usually have to know a lot about the book world. Becoming more than an “by accident” translation reader takes some research, and, yes, not everyone is as obsessed as I am.

I think some people read a lot of translations specifically because they don’t like the kind of book that gets published in the U.S., U.K., and other English-speaking countries, and are looking for something different, although I don’t particularly like generalizations about “the kind of book that gets published in the U.S.,” etc. because it’s possible to find a huge variety of forms and styles and voices if you look around a bit (hello, small presses, I love you!).

So people who read a lot of translations must define themselves as lovers of variety and seek it out even beyond the variety you can find in English if you’re willing to look for it. Because, yes, you can find books in English that are outside of mainstream publishing, but it’s a different thing entirely to read books from other cultures and literary traditions. I probably don’t need to get into why that’s valuable.

Or are there characteristics of translated books that connect them in ways beyond offering variety? If you make a point of reading books in translation, what draws you to them? Is it the variety of what’s available, or something more specific?

I’m not entirely sure why in 2019 I started reading significantly more translations. It’s probably at least partly the fault of lovely bookish people I hang out with on Twitter and other bookish sites online. To those people I say thank you! I guess I read more translations now in part because of peer pressure: people I like on Twitter read a lot in translation and I want to be like them. But I am also someone who values variety in reading, and the more I learn about literature from the around the world, the more I want to experience it for myself. I’m back to a newsletter I wrote a few weeks ago about how the internet inspires me to read more. Not only does it inspire me to read more, but it inspires me to read more widely and it helps me figure out how to do exactly that.

I thought I’d end by listing some of my favorite books in translation from the last few years, excluding ones I’ve written about here. Here are some highlights:

• That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump (Two Lines Press, 2020, originally published in 1994).

• The Bitch by Pilar Quintana, translated by Lisa Dillman (World Editions, 2020, originally published in 2017).

• Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, translated by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press, 2019, originally published in 2012).

• A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories Press, 2020, originally published in 2016).

• Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes (New Directions, 2020, originally published in 2017).

• Four by Four by Sara Mesa, translated by Katie Whittemore (Open Letter, 2020, originally published in 2012).

• The Book of Anna by Carmen Boullosa, translated by Samantha Schnee (Coffee House Press, originally published in 2016).

• Include Me Out by Maria Sonia Cristoff, translated by Katherine Silver (Transit Press, 2020, originally published in 2014).

• They Will Drown in Their Mother’s Tears by Johannes Anyuru, translated by Saskia Vogel (Two Lines Press, 2019, originally published in 2017).

• The Dishwasher by Stéphane Lerue, translated by Pablo Strauss (Biblioasis, 2019, originally published in 2016).

• Blood Sisters by Kim Yideum, translated by Ji Yoon Lee (Deep Vellum, 2019).

• When Death Takes Something From You Give it Back by Naja Marie Aidt, translated by Denise Newman (Coffee House Press, 2019, originally published in 2017).

• Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza, translated by Thomas Bunstead (Catapult, 2019, originally published in 2014).

• Among the Lost by Emiliano Monge, translated by Frank Wynne (Scribe US, 2019, originally published in 2015).

• I’ll Go On by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Emily Yae Won (Tilted Axis Press, 2018, originally published in 2014).

• The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker (Feminist Press, 2017, originally published in 2002).

• Seeing Red by Lina Meruane, translated by Megan McDowell (Deep Vellum, 2016, originally published in 2012).

Publishing This Week

New books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. This week it’s all about essays:

• Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul by Jesse McCarthy (Liveright): an essay collection on race and culture.

• Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury): an essay collection about, according to the publisher, “narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them.”

  

New on the TBR

New books acquired:

• Be Holding by Ross Gay (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020): I’m happy to get my hands on this! Here’s what I wrote about it a few weeks ago: Be Holding is a book-length poem about Julius Erving’s “impossible move” in the 1980s NBA finals — and a lot more. I was assured by David Naimon’s Between the Covers podcast interview with Ross Gay that even people who don’t care about basketball will find much to love in this book.

• Three by Ann Quin (And Other Stories, 2020, originally published in 1966): Ann Quin was a British experimental writer from the mid twentieth century who only recently got on my radar. This is a novel about a lodger who disappears, the couple she lived with who investigate, and everything that they discover.

• The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer (Simon & Schuster, 2020): a monologue by a young woman living in London to her doctor about identity, desire, and sexuality. It’s described as comic and transgressive.

Added to my wishlist (books that have caught my eye but I don’t yet own):

• Second Place by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, publishing on May 4): I own so many books by Rachel Cusk that I haven’t yet read, and, yes, I’d like to add this one to the stack.

• Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (University of Minnesota Press, 2021): that title! This novel combines narrative and poetic fragments to explore Anishinaabe life and traditions. (“Anishinaabe” refers to a group of culturally related indigenous people in Canada and the U.S.)

Currently Reading

• The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davis (Arcade Publishing, originally published in 1962): this is my first Ginzburg book, a collections of essays. It’s amazing! I’ve read four so far and loved each one.

• The Removed by Brandon Hobson (Ecco Press, 2021): my current audiobook. It tells the story of the Echota family in the years after the death of their teenage son Ray-Ray.

The Cormac Report

Last week was publication day for the new Dog Man book Mothering Heights. Cormac is, to put it mildly, a huge Dog Man fan, although I think he’s beginning to outgrow them. He doesn’t keep the books in his usual reading places anymore — the dinner table, his bed — and he had forgotten that a new one was on the way until I reminded him. Still, a new Dog Man is an occasion for excitement, and it was fun to watch him come home, get settled into the armchair in his bedroom, and read his new book.

The Dog Man books — which I should be totally familiar with by now because Cormac used to talk to me about them for hours, except I usually wasn’t actually listening — were a major source of creativity for a long time. Cormac always wants to write in the style of the books he loves, so he wrote his own Dog Man books, complete with bad literary puns as titles. I don’t remember how this got started, but my husband and I must have laughed and groaned at Dav Pilkey’s punny titles — Fetch-22, A Tale of Two Kitties, Grime and Punishment — and explained to Cormac what was going on, and then he wanted to come up with his own. So he ransacked our shelves looking for classics, and he asked us over and over for ideas. I’m not great at puns, but I did come up with Old Smeller and The Smell Jar and my husband came up with Infinite Pest and The Pound and the Furry. One of us, maybe Cormac, came up with Snore and Peace. Not bad, right?

This has meant that Cormac knows the titles of a lot of classic novels, even though he has no idea what they are about. Out of the blue the other day, he asked for my copy of Moll Flanders because he wanted to turn that into a Dog Man book. I think he was going to call that one Ball Flanders. He knows about The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre and A Farewell to Arms and has spent time thinking about what counts as a classic and what doesn’t. I guess I should say, thank you, Dav Pilkey! Also, you might want to come talk to us. We have some ideas for you….

Have a great week everyone!