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Contributor
Now based in Washington, DC, Agnès Bun is a French reporter who has previously worked out of New Delhi and Hong Kong. She won the Daniel Pearl Award in 2010 and is the author of There’s No Poetry in a Typhoon: Vignettes from Journalism’s Front Lines (Abbreviated Press).
A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Chinese, including fiction, story collections, poetry, classics and essays.
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.
Rated R Boy: Growing Up Korean in 1980s Queens is a memoir of one family’s move from South Korea to the United States. Told by its child narrator, it describes life in mid-1970s Korea and compares it to life in America, where he is exposed to things that challenge what he’d held to be sacrosanct.
Marlene Dietrich famously sang of still having a suitcase in Berlin, a wistful testament to the evocative power of memory and the hold that people and places can have on us. In many ways the unnamed Korean female narrator in Bae Suah’s novella A Greater Music has left her own suitcase in the German capital,…
Yu-jin wakes up after a late night out smelling blood. It turns out he’s caked in it and there are bloody footprints all over the floor. He staggers downstairs and finds a body. His mother’s body.
If there’s a country that “punches above its weight”, it’s South Korea. It’s home to some of the world’s largest and most important companies, and the source of pop culture that dominates Asia—and even planted a foothold in the West.