While the foreigner in colonial India has become, at least since EM Forster, something of a genre unto itself, the foreigners are almost invariably British and the novels mostly in English. Museum of the World by Christopher Kloeble is something of a novelty not just because it is based on the true story of the three Bavarian Schlagintweit brothers who explored India for the East India Company in the mid-19th century, but also because it was written in German; this new member of the canon appears via translation.
Translation
Amado V Hernandez’s The Preying Birds (Mga Ibong Mandaragit, first published in 1969) is a classic of modern Filipino literature and, according to translator Danton Remoto, a required text in Filipino schools. That it is only just now appearing in an international English-language edition is something of a surprise.
A 2022 round-up of reviews of works in translation from Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Dari, Pashto, Kazakh, Russian, French and Spanish.
Coming from a literary family, Hajra Masroor and her sister Khadija have been referred to as the Brontë sisters of Urdu fiction. While Khadija was known for her novels, Hajra was a writer of short fiction and plays. A new translation of a collection of Hajra Masroor’s work, The Monkey’s Wound and Other Stories, by translator Tahira Naqvi, now gives English readers an opportunity to read eighteen of her stories, all centered around the hardships of being a woman in pre-Partition India and the new state of Pakistan. Masroor lived from 1929 to 2012 and started writing in the early 1940s, several years before Partition.
A round-up of reviews of fiction and short story collections in translation from Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesia and eight different South Asian languages, classical and modern.
A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Korean, including fiction, story collections, poetry and non-fiction. Click on the title for the review.
A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Japanese, including fiction, story collections, poetry and non-fiction.