Why read literature in translation? (Pt. 2)

Recommending books by authors from Mauritania, Iceland, and Argentina (in the 2nd half of my August reading wrap-up)

Regan’s newsletter publishes twice-monthly book recommendations on a theme. Subscribe, and you’ll find 3 new book recs in your inbox every couple of weeks. Past newsletters have covered the Memoir-in-Essays, the Cure for Autofiction, Bookshelf Tarot, and more.

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“Why read literature in translation?” is a big question (!), and I’m doing my best not to overthink it. I’m not trying to offer a prescriptive answer, but I’ve been reflecting on the “why” behind my own interest and can boil it down, maybe, to a couple of things; I’m treating this intro more like a brainstorm than a manifesto.

Literary niche, community, and taste/preference all come to mind. I know I’m not the only one who has felt overwhelmed by the urge to read every classic, overlooked gem, and new release. “Translated literature” paradoxically narrows the literary playing field while simultaneously blowing it up onto a global scale: You can pay attention to a specific community of presses and publications that publish and promote translated lit, and you’re no longer confined to reading English-speaking, majority US and UK authors.

Readers can delve even more deeply into niche, developing expertise in one or two languages of particular interest, but there’s also a unique breadth: Unlike honing in on a favorite genre, the “niche” of translated literature includes work from across genres—historical fiction, horror, generational drama, magical realism, memoir, science fiction, etc. Even so, the bulk of works in translation published tend to fall under the umbrella of literary fiction as opposed to commercial or upmarket. Literary fiction as a genre feels less restricted by genre tropes or tried-and-true narrative structures; authors have more freedom to experiment with craft, form, and material. Because of its literary bent and simultaneous breadth of genres, I feel that contemporary translated literature especially has a tendency to lean into experimentation on any number of levels.

I was reading Danielle Dutton’s Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other a few weeks ago¹ and in the essay “A Picture Held Us Captive” she writes about a job she held at a publishing house that specialized in translation:

“A conversation that seemed always in the air there had to do with various ideas about how translation should work. One idea I found compelling was that a translation should try to create, as much as possible, the experience of what it would be like to read the original work. You can imagine this gets complicated when a book is formally challenging, has been written to upset easy assimilation. How do you render an experience of strangeness without causing the reader to assume that the peculiarities are in the quality of the translation rather than in—or also in—the original work? Yet what an impoverishment it would be for Anglophone readers not to have translators willing and able to capture in English the formal strangeness of Cristina Rivera Garza’s stories, for example, or the poems of Kim Hyesoon. I don’t mean the original is preserved in some pure or perfect state. It’s not a replicator I’m talking about, but a pulling through of strangeness into strangeness.”

The excerpt is captivating—as are the action and pursuit of translation, and the immense creativity, diversity, achievement, and, yes, strangeness of writers from around the world.²

What also draws me to translated literature—and reading, period—is that clichéd “journey in another’s shoes”: the fact that reading allows us to experience, empathize, and relate. Regardless of whether a specific character or experience is (or is meant to be) “relatable,” there’s something about glimpsing human detail in fiction and nonfiction that resounds, pulling me more deeply into literature but also into the world around me. The sensation is only magnified when some recognizable, humanizing detail—a moment of vulnerability, honesty, intimacy—occurs in an unfamiliar-to-me culture or setting. The world is so big, and here we all are, and we’re reading each other’s stories. How limiting it’d be, without translation, to be closed off from so many lives.

In her essay “Not a Good Fit” in the translation anthology Violent Phenomena, Madhu H. Kaza takes this idea a step further—distance is as important as familiarity:

“Translation is an obvious site to think through difference because there’s no way around problems of incompatibility, whether it’s the incompatibility of words and idioms in different languages or differences in literary traditions and cultural values. What translation opens us up to is not only the wider world that we are a small part of but also the possibility of seeing our own culture more clearly and considering how the languages and literatures of others might expand and alter our own traditions. […] Translation can show us that people are different—they think and write and organize their lives differently than we do. One thing that emerges from recognition of this difference is the opportunity to see our own lives in new ways and to energize our own literary culture.”

I studied international politics and German culture and literature for my bachelor’s degree, and the feelings and interests that compelled me to take courses on human rights, international law, foreign policy—or contemporary migration in Germany, Weimar film, German Romanticism—haven’t waned in the years since I graduated. I want to learn something even when reading for pleasure, which—though possible, too, with books written originally in English—is a quality foundational to translated literature: In addition to topic and content, there’s an immersive lens (a writer’s perspective, history, setting) that remains integral to a story without necessarily being its focus. 

I’d love to hear from you in the comments or as a reply to my email: What draws you to translated literature? Or, what makes you hesitate? What’s one of your favorite translated works? The most surprising?

With all that, let’s dive into this week’s recommendations! At the beginning of August (Women in Translation Month), I wrote about three favorite translated novellas by women writers and committed to reading women-written, translated books throughout the month. A few weeks later, I shared the first half of my wrap-up. And here (finally!) is the second half: a refugee ghost story set on Mayotte, a French island in the Indian Ocean; an academic, stream-of-consciousness spiral in Iceland; and a masterful collection of Argentine horror stories.

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Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah, tr. Geoffrey Strachan (Graywolf, 2020)

This book made me feel sick; it's also like poetry. Tropic of Violence is easily of the most violent things I've read—and probably one of the most magnificent, too. Mauritanian-French award-winning author Nathacha Appanah sets her novel on Mayotte, a French island in the Indian Ocean in the midst of a refugee crisis (an island I had no idea existed, also known as Mahoré, which in addition to French speaks the local language Shimaore).

Tropic of Violence moves like a ghost story. Its narrators—a gang leader, an aide worker, a police officer, a mother—come into and out of the picture, taking over from one another with distinct voices as they tell the story of Moïse, a thirteen-year-old boy who finds himself suddenly alone and is forced to navigate inequality, poverty, and the corrupt infrastructure of a neglected part of France. Of the six books across my two August wrap-up posts, I would recommend Tropic of Violence most strongly.

The story opens in Marie’s perspective, and I can’t help but try to hook you with its first paragraph—haunting, original, and charged:

You must believe me. In the place where I’m speaking to you from, lies and pretense are pointless. When I look into the depths of the sea, I can see men and women swimming there with dugongs and coelacanths, I can see dreams caught up in the weeds and babies asleep there, cradled in giant clam shells. In the place where I’m speaking to you from, this country looks like a handful of incandescent dust and I know it will only take some little thing for it to go up in flames. I can’t remember everything about my life for all that subsists here is the edge of things and the echo of what no longer exists.

Here’s what I remember.

(Like Burhan Sönmez’s novel Labyrinth, translated from Turkish—which I’ll absolutely be covering in a future newsletter—Appanah's novel was another surprise find from the Strand Bookstore's semi-secret $4 ARC shelves—check the basement! But also—support small presses!)

History. A Mess. by Sigrún Pálsdóttir, tr. Lytton Smith (Peirene Press, 2019)

In most of my newsletters, I aim only to include books I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. Since this is a wrap-up, I didn’t want to leave out Sigrún Pálsdóttir’s History. A Mess. I did not particularly enjoy this novel, but I did find it unique (and elusive). Pálsdóttir’s main character is a historian who has been working on her dissertation for many, many years; she’s making a breakthrough about a historic Dutch artist, whom she argues was actually a woman. And then—she discovers that she missed a page while painstakingly combing through the crumbling manuscript that is the artists’ diary, and this oversight unravels all 600 pages of her dissertation and its claims.

A mental health spiral ensues, and it’s mirrored in the novel’s form and style; Pálsdóttir’s prose is frantic, tumbling, and academic. I was never quite sure what was going on—what was “real” or imagined. Artwork crawls out of its frame; doors appear where they never were before. The main character grapples with headaches and hallucinations, and a mother/daughter theme unfolds when she begins to realize that her mother has also experienced much of what she’s going through.

At about the halfway point, I stopped trying to situate myself in the plot and narrative with any specificity, and I relaxed, let myself go with the flow, and found the experience somewhat more enjoyable (even when the story takes an unexpected dark turn near the end!!). History. A Mess. was my first Icelandic novel. I might recommend it to fans of Vigdis Hjorth who are seeking an even more unhinged, spiralling narrative (it’s possible!) with an overt academic tone.

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell (Hogarth, 2017)

Things We Lost in the Fire is the second horror/gothic short story collection by an Argentinian woman author that I read in August, so it’s hard not to put Enriquez immediately in conversation with Samanta Schweblin. Where Schweblin leans into fantasy, strangeness, and magical realism within her horror, Enriquez’s short stories feel much more steeped in everyday, gruesome terror: kidnapping, child abuse, mental health extremes, serial killers, drugs and cults, etc. Yet Enriquez still manages to incorporate gothic elements: haunted houses, monsters, and more. I covered a Q&A with translator Megan McDowell for my undergrad news site a few years ago, and she answered an audience question about what makes Enriquez’s stories distinctly Latin American, which draws on the braiding between real life and elements of horror:

Enriquez’s settings are distinctly Latin American, and so are her repeating phobic pressure points: homelessness, dictatorships, disappearances, violence against women, poverty, and so on. Enriquez also takes the tropes of gothic horror (storms, fog, ghosts, the occult, blood rituals, architecture, mansions, etc.) and mixes them with Northern Argentina’s mythology and canon of popular saints.

Enriquez’s stories feel more developed and complete in this collection compared to Schweblin’s, which could seem fragmentary or sketched out. Enriquez’s prose is lush and haunting, beautiful even when graphic and difficult to read. I could see myself returning to this collection—or picking up her newest, A Sunny Place for Shady People, the translation of which came out just last week—and I definitely see myself reading a novel by her soon—has anyone read Our Share of Night?

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This letter has gone out (quite) a bit later than planned; thank you for your patience! I’m a few weeks into a new program (grad school!), and I’m shifting the newsletter to a loose “twice a month” format rather than a strict “every other Friday” as I work on balancing and prioritizing various commitments. Thanks for sticking around! My next newsletter will be “back to school”-themed, highlighting three favorite works of nonfiction.

If you’re looking for more…

• This is one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever read. Read it for this exchange alone.³

• Last summer, The New York Times published a piece by translator Sophie Hughes where she discusses the process and decisions behind two passages from two novels she’s translated. I loved the behind-the-scenes glimpse and, ever since, I’ve held out hope they’d turn the article into a series featuring different translators, but no luck (at least, not yet).

1. Dutton’s collection of essays and some short fiction is not a translated book, but it is definitely worth your time!! The other English-language nonfiction book I read in the second half of August was Heather McCalden’s The Observable Universe, which is also absolutely worth picking up—I’m still recovering. Form, content, execution—all of it blew me away.

2. I get goosebumps if I think about this enough.

Karim Kazemi One thing that the protagonists of your novels often have in common is that they almost believe themselves to be clairvoyant, because the thing they’ve always dreaded would happen to them, or hoped would happen to them, happens. It’s not that they can see the future, but that they possess a kind of self-knowledge that other people don’t. They know what they’ll have to go through in order to become themselves.

Vigdis Hjorth I read a lot of the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He insists that to be an ordinary, mortal human being is a gift and a vote of confidence from the higher powers, so it is both a task and an adventure. The adventure is not to travel around the world, to have a lot of erotic affairs, to be famous, or to be the president of the United States. The adventure is to be exactly the human being you are, exactly where you are. He writes that so many people are living in the basement, the garage, the doghouse of themselves, even though they could live in the penthouse apartment of themselves, where the view is huge. I try to get my characters, my main characters, up from the basement. I try to follow them as they become more responsible, more grateful, and take themselves more seriously – not because they are particularly special people, but because being a human being is serious, and you should be so glad that you are alive on Earth. Once, I was standing alone in a little stone church, and I was lighting a candle for all of the people that I love. I saw the flame begin to waver, and then it was still, and then I saw it shake again. I thought, “Is there wind coming from somewhere?” and then I understood that it was my breath. Just by breathing, I understood, I make things move. 

3.