“The Analects”, translated by Moss Roberts and “Confucianism and Sacred Space” by Chin-shing Huang
Is Confucianism a religion, or is it a philosophy?
“Memoirs of a Kamikaze: A World War II Pilot’s Inspiring Story of Survival, Honor and Reconciliation” by Kazuo Odachi
For nearly seventy years, Kazuo Odachi, a respected police officer, insurance investigator, and Kendo-sensei in Japan, kept secret that during the last months of World War II he was a young kamikaze pilot who flew eight suicide missions but miraculously survived. Odachi’s memoir was published in Japanese in 2016, and has now been translated into…
“An I-Novel” by Mizumura Minae
Mizumura Minae’s An I-Novel begins with a caveat: the author herself once suggested that translating the novel, originally published in Japan in 1995, into English was singularly impossible.
“The Drunkard” by Liu Yichang
A novel set in capitalist Hong Kong in the 1960s and steeped in alcohol, prostitution and stream-of-consciousness narration might not suggest a controlled work of fiction. Yet Liu Yichang’s classic The Drunkard, in Charlotte Chun-lam Yiu’s new translation, is measured, uninhibited and very good.
“Purple Perilla” by Can Xue
A desire to love, befriend, and uncover characterize Purple Perilla, a short collection of three stories from acclaimed Chinese author Can Xue. The book offers a poetic reckoning for our present moment, while the COVID-19 crisis continues to shape our lives.
“Phone Box at the Edge of the World” by Laura Imai Messina
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…
“Khalil” by Yasmina Khadra
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.
“Monkey King: Journey to the West” by Wu Cheng’en, translated by Julia Lovell
Centuries ago, in an empire far far away, an anonymous journeyman scribe authored and assembled a picaresque that became one of China’s most revered and influential literary works. “Assembled” because Monkey King, or Journey to the West (c 1580), is in substantial part a collection of the folk tales of many previous centuries, based on…
New Book Announcement: “Writing Poetry, Surviving War: The Works of Refugee Scholar-Official Chen Yuyi (1090-1139)” by Yugen Wang
The book is a study of the works of the Northern Song Chinese poet Chen Yuyi (1090–1139) as he fled the invading Jurchen soldiers in the political throes of a dynastic transition. Author Yugen Wang demonstrates how Chen’s poems epitomize the new style of writing in the Song that is markedly different from that of…
“Sunday Sparrows”, poetry by Song Lin
The poems of Song Lin, born in Fujian in 1959, are, according to his translator and personal friend, the poet Jami Proctor Xu, “weavings of history, myth, nature, city, everyday life, melancholy, joy, story, image, and classical and modern Chinese.” This would be a formidable range for any poet, but reading Sunday Sparrows leaves little…
“Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-colonialist Jacob Haafner” by Paul van der Velde
Indology—a field of study about India’s history and culture associated with 19th-century British and German figures—had an interesting German-Dutch predecessor, Jacob Haafner (1754-1809). The man reached India as the servant of the VOC (or the Dutch East India Company) after having lived in South Africa and Java for a while. His travel-writing about India, vituperative…
“Mrs Murakami’s Garden” by Mario Bellatin
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.
2020: Translations from Southeast, South and West Asia
A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Pali, Bengali, Tamil, Farsi, Armenian and Arabic: classics, contemporary fiction, short stories and poetry.
“Hōjōki: A Hermit’s Hut as Metaphor” by Kamo no Chōmei, translated by Matthew Stavros
The Hōjōki, written in 1212 by the Buddhist monk Kamo no Chōmei, is one of the most beloved works of medieval literature in Japan. The opening lines of his chronicle are familiar to most people: The flow of the river never ceases And the water never stays the same. Bubbles float on the surface…
2020: Translations from European languages (Russian, French, Spanish)
Not only does a good chunk of Russia, most of it in fact, lie in Asia, but Russian-language writers (not all of them Russian) have works set in whole or in part in Asia. 2020 saw new translations of modern classics by Sergei Tretyakov and Alexander Grin, as well as translations of new novels set…
