2022: The Year in Translation from Korean
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.
2022: The Year in Translation from Japanese
A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Japanese, including fiction, story collections, poetry and non-fiction.
2022: The Year in Translation from Chinese
A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Chinese, including fiction, story collections, poetry, classics and essays.
“Three Streets” by Yoko Tawada
Yoko Tawada is a compelling, prolific, and award-winning writer working in Japanese, German, and English. Three Streets is her most recent collection published in English, here not so much short stories as they are strolls through three streets in Berlin. Throughout her works, her narrators are often strangers in a strange land, living in between…
“Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea” by Hwang Sok-yong, Jeon Yong-ho and Lee Jae-eui
A moving work of exceptional scholarship, Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea was commissioned in an era of rising fake news to combat false narratives that had become popular on the internet, not the least of which was the idea that the events of the Gwangju Uprising were sparked by North Korean…
“The Boy and the Dog” by Seishu Hase
Seishu Hase’s The Boy and the Dog opens with Kazumasa Nakagasi. He finds an emaciated dog outside a convenience store. The dog is wearing a tag engraved with his name, Tamon, short for Tamonten. Tamonten is one of four guardian deities of Buddha’s realm. The dog Tamon becomes a guardian for the people he encounters…
“Concerning My Daughter” by Kim Hye-jin
The narrator of Kim Hye-jin’s Concerning My Daughter believes that “some things aren’t spoken out loud.” As she ages, she doesn’t want to discuss the lack of facilities willing to care for the elderly. And as a mother, she doesn’t want to talk about her adult daughter, who doesn’t have stable employment and is involved…
“Tale of the Dreamer’s Son” by Preeta Samarasan and “The Age of Goodbyes” by Li Zi Shu
In Preeta Samarasan’s new novel, Tale of the Dreamer’s Son, the caretaker of a commune in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands states that “some nations were sending people to outer space while our countrymen were busy butchering each other.” Mrs Arasu, the caretaker in question, was referring to the 1969 race riots in Malaysia, namely the May…
“Cocoon” by Zhang Yueran
Whether Jeremy Tiang chooses the books to translate or the books choose him, his name on the cover nigh guarantees that the novel is extremely good, remarkable or, in the case of Zhang Yueran’s Cocoon, a triumph.
“The Silk Road and Cultural Exchanges between East and West” by Rong Xinjiang
How the world has changed in a few years. When Rong Xinjiang first published the papers collected in this volume, between 2002 and 2015, China’s Belt and Road Initiative had captured the world’s imagination. A flurry of scholarly research rediscovered historical ties between China and its western neighbors. Nowadays managing Covid is China’s highest priority….
“Basho: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Basho”, translated by Andrew Fitzsimons
Active in the 13th century, poet Matsuo Basho has been a cornerstone of literature globally since the late 19th century when the word haiku was used to cover traditional “haikai” and “hokku” (more about which further down). Largely due to 19th-century Realism, Western onlookers and practitioners have made much of direct personal experience in haiku;…
“Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing”, edited by Anjum Hasan and Sampurna Chattarji
A new anthology of Indian authors writing in, and translating into, English, Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing creates a new sense of contemporariness on the Indian literary scene. This arrangement distinguishes the book from other anthologies of Indian literature which are for the most part organized around a linguistic binary: they are collections either of…
New Book Announcement: “Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk” by Lu Xun, translated by Eileen J Cheng
This captivating translation assembles two volumes by Lu Xun, the founder of modern Chinese literature and one of East Asia’s most important thinkers at the turn of the 20th century. Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk represent a pinnacle of achievement alongside Lu Xun’s famed short stories.
“Graft” by Li Peifu
Power corrupts, so the saying goes. Award-winning author Li Peifu suggests there is more to it than that in his novel A Man of the Plains, now translated into English by James Trapp and retitled Graft.
New Book Announcement: “Calling for a New Renaissance” by Gao Xingjian
Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian presents his primary concerns of the past decade or so. He indicts the lingering impact of ideology on contemporary literature and art, and for this reason calls for “a new Renaissance”, a result of which would be “boundary-crossing creations” such as the three cine-poems that he produced and describes in detail…
