S everal translations from French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Russian, both fiction and non-fiction had links with Asia. Several classics from Arabic and Farsi appeared in translation, as did a children’s picture book, a contemporary Turkish novel and a translation of Hebrew poetry by an ethnically Vietnamese Israeli poet. Click on the title for the review.

French, Spanish & Italian

Khalil by Yasmina Khadra, translated from French by John Cullen

 

Khalil, a young Belgian, is set to blow himself up near France’s national stadium, in the outskirts of Paris, along with his best friend. Khalil reaches for the detonator of his explosive vest in a packed suburban train. There is a twist: he survives, and he wasn’t meant to. Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra’s latest novel explores European home-ground terrorism in a gripping psychological first-person novel.

 

Em by Kim Thúy, translated from French by Sheila Fischman

 

“I’m going to tell you the truth,” begins the narrator on the first page of Kim Thúy’s latest, Em, “but only partially, incompletely, more or less.” To put an even finer emphasis on the point, she tells us a couple pages later, that “truth “is fragmented”—as indeed it must be when dealing with a topic as vast as the troubled history of Vietnam. Departing from its brutal colonial entrapment as a rubber producing outlet for the French, cascading through the desolation of the Vietnam War, finally culminating in the strain of exile that became the sole reality available to those who managed to survive, Em accomplishes in some 160 pages what has taken many historians volumes to tell.

 

Mrs Murakami’s Garden by Mario Bellatin, translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary

 

The Peruvian-Mexican Mario Bellatin is one of the most acclaimed of the current generation of writers in Spanish. Mrs Murakami’s Garden, recently released in English, is at first glance a novella set in Japan about a widow who sets about dismantling her garden in reaction to her husband’s death.

 

The Phone Box at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina, translated from Italian by Lucy Rand

 

Inspired by a real telephone box located in the north-east of Japan comes The Phone Box at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina, a novel about Yui, a woman who lost her mother and daughter in the 2011 tsunami and is forced to navigate her grief as well as the life that lies ahead.

Russian

Orchestra by Vladimir Gonik, translated by Christopher Culver

 

Classically Russian in length and possibly ambition, Vladimir Gonik’s Orchestra, recently translated into English by Christopher Culver, might prove the sleeper of the year. Three interlocking narratives and families play out over almost 40 years with the doomed Korean Air Lines flight 007 as the linchpin.

Dutch

Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-colonialist Jacob Haafner by Paul van der Velde, translated by Liesbeth Bennink

 

Paul van der Velde’s biography of Jacob Haafner, translated into English as Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-colonialist Jacob Haafner by Liesbeth Bennik, is a rich source of insight not just into the subject but also into the times in which he lived—when the British were fast gaining control of various kingdoms in India and the hold of the Dutch was waning. It was a time when famine and war ruined cities; Haafner’s testimony provides a horrifying account of despair suffered by the Indians as well as the Dutch to some extent.

Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew & Farsi

Love in the Days of Rebellion, by Ahmet Altan, translated from Turkish by Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi

 

It’s 1909 and the Ottoman Empire is drawing to its close. The story itself opens with Hüseyin Hikmet Bey recovering from attempted suicide in the French Hospital in Istanbul. Hikmet Bey, the affluent and Europeanized son of Reşit Pasha, confidant of Sultan Abdulhamid II, was driven to this by his beautiful wife Mehpare Hanım running off with Constantine, a Greek from Salonica. Istanbul, meanwhile, is on the verge of upheaval: an Islamist “coup” is brewing to restore the Sultan to the absolute rule he had been forced to relinquish a few months previously. Ragıp Bey is an officer in the Ottoman Army pledged to counter this. With this turmoil as a backdrop, several interrelated love affairs play out: some bloom and others die.

 

The Book of Charlatans by Jamāl al-DīnʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī, translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies

 

Year in year out Spain produces 1,500 kilos of that delicate spice, saffron, sold wholesale for US$700 per 100 grams. Gourmets were puzzled a few years back when 1900 kilos of Spanish saffron hit the market. Food inspectors soon discovered that the yellow powder contained traces of the flavorless plant root, or worse, animal droppings. The huge increase in volume came from the diversion of Iranian saffron, whose sale is stifled by the American embargo, to Spain’s packagers. Along the way crooks put their fingers on the scale by adding the impurities. Similar scams were practiced by spice dealers in 13th-century Damascus, involving precious products like myrobalan, agarwood, ginger, indigo, musk, ambergris. “Wise up to these things,” exhorts the Book of Charlatans, this newly translated compendium of tricks, cheats and phony spells.

 

Samak the Ayyar: A Tale of Ancient Persia, translated from Persian by Freydoon Rassouli, adapted by Jordan Mechner & The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman: The Arabic Epic of Dhat al-Himma, translated from Arabic by Melanie Magidow

 

If you happen to have a few hours to spare and a swash to buckle, here are two rousing epic adventures from Persia and the Middle East to fill in the time. Two volumes are welcome additions to the list of “oriental” tales available in English, and both of them digress from the usual format of epics: the Persian tale Samak the Ayyar features a commoner as protagonist in addition to a gallant prince and beautiful women, while the Arabic Tale of Princess Fatima has at its core a warrior woman, other female fighters who oppose her, and the men who love her or fight with her.

 

In the Meadow of Fantasies by Hadi Mohammadi, illustrated by Nooshin Safakhoo, translated from Persian by Sara Khalili

 

First published in Persian in 2017, the gentleness and dreaminess of the prose is matched by the illustrations by Nooshin Safahkoo, who, like Mohammadi, lives in Iran. Safahkoo’s drawings are full of sharp details, offering young readers, for example, what it might look like for a horse to imagine being the fastest on the planet, or for a horse with no colours to then be offered parts of seven colors.

 

The Truffle Eye by Vaan Nguyen, translated from Hebrew by Adriana X Jacobs

 

A Vietnamese poet writing in Hebrew? Well, sort of. In 1979 a small number of Vietnamese refugees arrived in Israel, whose government had granted them political asylum. Among them were Vaan Nguyen’s parents, who had fled their home country in 1975 to the Philippines (where they were denied refuge) after Nguyen’s grandfather perished under the Communists. She herself was born in 1982, and grew up in Jaffa, after her family had lived in several other Israeli cities; she has since worked as an actor, film-maker, and journalist. Nguyen visited Vietnam with her father in 2005, and a film was produced about their attempts to regain family land and property there.