Translators have made books from around the world available through the centuries to those unable to read the language in which a work first appears. Translation allows us to gain insights and grapple with the arguments of authors from around the globe. A world without translation would be, for most readers in the Anglosphere, a world without such works as Sun Tzu’s classic Art of War or Mao Zedong’s modern On Protracted War. While Asian literature is relatively well represented in English translation, from Murasaki Shikibu’s ancient Tale of Genji to Murakami Haruki’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translations of their non-fiction equivalents are comparatively rare.
Category Archive: Reviews
In her latest collection of short stories set in contemporary China, award-winning writer Yao Emei reveals that, as goes the song, “it’s hard to be a woman”, but not just sometimes: all the time. Alternately macabre, heart-rending and shocking, the four tales comprehensively skewer the aspirational notion of the happy family. No matter how hard Yao’s female characters work to get married, have children and put the rice on the table, they are continually thwarted by their menfolk generating crises which their long-suffering wives, mothers and daughters must clean up.
Eating out alone in Korea is not the done thing: minimum orders are often for three or four, and restaurants have an intensely communal atmosphere. Some coffee shops and restaurants have installed giant plush Moomins, Pengsoos and other characters so that solo drinkers won’t feel so alone (this may have inspired the cover of Table For One, which shows an anthropomorphic Zebra diner).
A severely injured nineteen-year-old soldier caught at the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War tries to piece together his life as he waits for aid that may never arrive. As he inches toward death, he recalls the minor and major events of his life and his country that led him so close to death. Told in vignettes that jump across time and place, Samar Yazbek’s newest novel Where The Wind Calls Home is a heart-wrenching story that questions the value of life in a combat zone with equal parts compassion and anger to craft a brilliant war novel. Translated from Arabic by Leri Price, Yazbek’s story introduces English readers to a moment in Syrian history that is equally haunting and beautiful.
Tara Isabel Zambrano has published widely in literary journals, mainly stories that center around mothering in one fashion or another, usually set in India or with Indian characters in the diaspora. Now she’s compiled these stories and more in Ruined a Little When We Are Born, which continues with the theme of mothering.
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s second novel, and the first to be rendered in English by Nguyễn An Lý opens with a mysterious description.
Chronic pain can be extremely frustrating to sufferers, especially as there are often no direct causes and can be hard to resolve. While pain may be linked to personal trauma, it can also extend to family and even historical events. In Nervous, Filipino-American writer Jen Soriano links all these in 14 thought-provoking, poignant personal essays about her childhood, family background, activism, and the Philippines, where her parents came from. In short, this is a book about personal, family and communal pain.