One of the first poems in Wang Yin’s recent collection, A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts, finds the Chinese poet in an unexpected place: Vermont. “The Task of the Poet, Written in Vermont After Robert Bly” opens with a pastoral scene on a front lawn, where the poet peacefully observes—and records—the sights and…
Vasily Eroshenko was a transnational writer working in the early 20th century, writing in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese and Russian to Esperanto as he moved about Europe and Asia. He was born in Ukraine and lived, among other places, in Russia, England, Japan, Myanmar, India, China, and the Soviet Union. His writings…
The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in titles translated from Japanese into English. While many of these novels and short stories collections are by rising authors, publishers also present readers with classic works by authors already well-known outside of Japan. These include Osamu Dazai, long celebrated for his No Longer Human, first…
Literature tends to be defined by language and place. For instance, Japanese literature is written in Japanese, or translated into another language, and written by Japanese authors. Chinese literature is however a little more complex because writers may also hail from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. In most of these places, citizens—a significant minority…
Banine’s Parisian Days picks up from where from where Days in the Caucasus leaves off: with the still very young woman pulling into the Gare de Lyon having the escaped the clutches of her besotted yet unwanted husband—the result of a deal to get her father out of jail, out of Bolshevik Baku and out…
Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s Whale is a sweeping epic mostly set in Pyeongdae, a remote mountain town that immediately evokes Macondo from Gabriel García Márquez’s similarly sprawling epic One Hundred Years of Solitude. Depicted with the same sort of dreamlike magical realism, Pyeongdae goes from a forgotten mountain hamlet to a booming railway city to a ghost…
Kotaro Isaka’s Three Assassins follows hot on the heels of the release of Bullet Train, the Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt, based on the English-language edition of the author’s previous thriller of the same name. The novel alternates between the voices of Suzuki, a former middle school math teacher turned scammer; The Whale, a towering…
The Mongols, their khans, and the empire they built and ruled in the 13th and 14th centuries exert an enduring fascination. Caricatured as a marauding horde that ravaged surrounding peoples, in reality the Mongols created institutions, trading networks, economic systems, and intellectual and technological exchanges that shaped the early modern world. However, the centuries after…
Yamuna’s Journey is the English translation of Baba Padmanji’s 1857 Marathi novel Yamunaparyatan. “Yamuna” is both the name of the female protagonist of this novel as well as a reference to the river Yamuna in India; “paryatan” means journey or travel. “Yamunaparyatan” (“Journey to the Yamuna”) can be interpreted as travel to Vrindaban, a holy…
Several times a year, the narrator of Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller boards a Transpacific flight to care for her elderly Japanese parents. She ferries her mother to and from the doctor. She keeps her father company. She buys him a dog. She reflects on her childhood.
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…
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…
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.