It's Women in Translation Month!

For August, I'm recommending 3 novels translated from Japanese, German, and Bosnian

Regan’s newsletter publishes biweekly book recommendations on a theme. Subscribe, and you’ll find 3 new book recs in your inbox every other Friday. Past newsletters have covered the Memoir-in-Essays, the Cure for Autofiction, Summer Reading, and more.

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Just 3% of books published in the US and UK markets are works translated from other languages.¹ Works written by women make up less than one third of that 3%.²

The Women in Translation (WIT) movement is, according to their website, “a global effort centered around the idea that women who write in languages other than English deserve to be widely read and appreciated.” The project was started in late 2013 by blogger Meytal Radzinski and has, over the past decade, become widely recognized in the literary community, with features in publications such as Words Without Borders, The Guardian, the New York Times, and more. Every August, I see WIT-themed bookstore displays, small presses’ discount bundles, and publications offering reading lists for work by women in translation.³ Literary centers host book groups and author / translator panels, and 2024 marks the tenth year PEN America has hosted their virtual Women in Translation Reading Series.⁴

I’m feeling inspired by the WIT articles, lists, and recommendations I’ve been reading and of course wanted to pull together a few of my own. This week, I’m recommending a futuristic novel about language and climate; the story of an artist in East Germany, her brothers, and her lovers; and an autofictional account of a Bosnian writer’s fight against cancer.

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Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions, 2022)

National Book Award-winning Japanese author Yoko Tawada lives in Berlin and writes in both Japanese and German. Her novel about a made-up language and a ragtag cast of multilingual, multicultural characters feels like the perfect recommendation to kick off Women in Translation month. In the not-too-distant future, the entire country of Japan has been lost to climate disasters; its language and even its name have all but disappeared in the years after climate refugees were forced to relocate across the globe. Hiruko, now living in Denmark, has invented a new language: Panska can be understood by those familiar with any Scandinavian language but remains so unique that she’s its only speaker.

Soon, Hiruko joins forces with a Danish linguistics student, a transgender student from India, a German woman working in a museum, and an enigmatic chef in the search for fellow speakers of her native tongue. The result is a strange, tender, and adventurous romp across the European continent and a thought-provoking, thoroughly unique exploration of the relationship between language and identity.

Even for those who haven’t yet read Scattered All Over the Earth, I’d wholeheartedly recommend Yurina Yoshikawa’s LitHub article on the novel, which came out just as I was reading the final chapters of Tawada’s book a couple years ago:

“Since the English translation of this novel came out in early March [2022] critics have praised it as ‘mordantly funny,’ or ‘deeply inventive,’ and categorized it as ‘science fiction,’ a ‘dystopia,’ and even contrary to that, ‘the first great utopian novel of the 21st century.’

“What none of Tawada’s critics seem to consider is the realism of her stories once you get past the hypotheticals, and the significance of her work on people like me who don’t easily fit into an existing national or ethnic identity. People who are gradually losing their mother tongue—a thing that is somehow deemed so sacred that to lose it would reveal a person’s laziness, or acceptance of cultural annihilation.”

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, tr. Lucy Jones (Penguin Classics, 2023)

Siblings is a short novel that brims with cultural references, charisma, and voice. A review in The Guardian praises Lucy Jones’ achievements as a translator: “Jones’s translation excellently captures the dry wit, expressionistic boldness and seductively odd rhythms that make the original German so charismatic.”

The year is 1963, and Brigitte Reimann’s semi-autobiographical work follows the life of young painter Elisabeth and her brothers in the German Democratic Republic. I felt more submerged in the cultural detail and mentality of East Germany here, as if Reimann were able to instill in me a deeper understanding of the society and its complexity, than my experiences reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper, or Thomas Brussig’s comic The Short End of the Sonnenallee (although I enjoyed all these immensely).

I was transfixed by the novel's many intricate relationships: Elisabeth's charged and passionate sisterly love toward her brother Uli (which at times nearly transforms into a submissiveness that complicates her otherwise outspoken character); her unwavering, yet softer, love for her fiancé, Party-member Joachim; memories of a brief, lighthearted romance with Gregory in the West; her parents (and their pasts); her oldest brother Konrad (a defector); and her socialist brigade members.

I’d consider Siblings a must-read for those interested in German literature and post-war history. What’s especially exciting is that, in a conversation I had with translator Lucy Jones at the end of last year, Jones confirmed that a translation of Reimann’s vast, 600-page unfinished novel, Franziska Linkerhand, is currently in the works.

Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić, tr. Celia Hawkesworth (Peirene Press, 2022)

I’m self-plagiarizing here just a bit; this review is an excerpted, very abbreviated version of a longer piece I wrote for Necessary Fiction in 2022.

Kintsugi is a centuries-old Japanese artistic technique that involves repairing shattered objects with liquid gold. Imagine ceramic vessels spiderwebbed with gleaming yellow: broken dishes not only made whole again but enhanced. In her autobiographical debut, Bosnian writer Senka Marić traces the scars resulting from a breast cancer diagnosis and its subsequent, increasingly invasive treatments.

Hawkesworth’s fluid translation showcases the unique qualities of Marić’s intimately second-person prose. It’s as if writer and translator are telling you a story about yourself; the narrator’s circumstances could easily be the reader’s. One chapter begins, “You knew on that day, sixteen years ago, when your mother’s diagnosis was confirmed, that you’d get cancer?” The next: “You were a sad child? That’s how it seems now.”

Interspersed with a core narrative about family life and hospital visits in Zagreb and Sarajevo are technical passages about anti-cancer drugs and their side effects, contrasting powerfully with haunting dreamscapes and reflections on childhood that allow Marić to examine her narrator’s relationships to fear and care over time; Marić’s protagonist is a woman at forty-two connecting shamelessly and with immense clarity to the experiences of her past selves. Only when her narrator is “criss-crossed with scars” and “everything seems to have cracked” does the opportunity for beauty arise. The body becomes “enchanting, beautiful and soft, self-contained,” where “the scars scrawled on it are a map of your journey.”

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I’m back in New York! And I’m putting together a list of books by women in translation I’m hoping to read this month (right now, I’m three stories into my first Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell⁵), but I’m also expecting to be busy moving into a new apartment, starting a new program, etc. Still, I’d love to hear about any favorite fiction or nonfiction in translation you might have! Feel free to reply (if you’re reading an email in your inbox) or comment below (if you’re on the Substack app or desktop site). You can expect another newsletter in two weeks, but in the meantime, keep reading for some news re: a couple of the projects I mentioned in my last letter!

If you’re looking for more…

• For those interested in Siblings’ East German setting, you might also enjoy Wolfgang Hilbig’s early GDR-era work (although his fiction is darker and stranger than Reimann’s). This week, the LA Review of Books published my review of his two newly translated collections, Under the Neomoon (tr. Isabel Fargo Cole) and Territories of the Soul/On Intonation (tr. Matthew Spencer, who writes the newsletter Paradise Almanac).

• For New Books in German, I had a wonderful conversation with translator and publisher Stefan Tobler. His UK-based independent press, And Other Stories, publishes outstanding work in translation—as well as some spectacular original English-language work. Two women-in-translation mentioned in the interview: Catalan novelist and poet Eva Baltasar and South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon.

1. I’ve heard this 3% stat in various situations and from various sources over the past few years. A quick google search asking how much US/UK lit is translated brings me to a UC Press research article, a University of Rochester “international translation resource,” and an article by the Booker Prize, among others—all of which refer to a more or less plateaued 3% stat.

2. From the Women in Translation month home page

3. Check out discounts from Open Books and Feminist Press, this reading list by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses and this one by the Center for the Art of Translation—for just a handful of examples.

4. Swiss writer Gianna Rovere and I were invited to read from my translation of her short story “Incidents of Everyday Elephants” in last year’s series.

5. Back in undergrad, I covered a campus craft talk and Q&A with McDowell on our online student news site, which you can read here if you’re interested!