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Kjell Askildsen, winner of the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize in 2009, is a consummate chronicler of contradictory, quicksilver emotions and impulses. There is in his work a careful calibration of his characters' inner lives, of small dramas in no way empty of incident, whose ultimate crux is the desultory, dangerous weight of time: time is too slow, nothing ever changes, time doesn’t matter, then it is too abrupt, it’s unbearably long—all in prose that is as...

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For May's installment, Julia Powers passed the baton to Adam Morris, who translates from Spanish and Portuguese into English.   What is your connection to the language(s) you translate from and/or the place(s) where the books...

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We’re speaking with some of the extraordinary publishers who make these books possible about their experience working in this vital field. For the tenth installment in the series, we spoke with Karen Li, publisher of Canada-based Groundwood Books.   WWB: Could you tell us about the history of Groundwood Books...

The release of the Hollywood film The Mauritanian earlier this year made a harrowing tale of torture and injustice at Guantánamo Bay the first Mauritanian story to truly reach the world. When the book the film was based on—Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi—came out in 2015, there were only three books written by Mauritanian authors available in English.[1] The number of Mauritanian works which had been translated into other languages or won regional literary...

A currency linked to worker productivity becomes a global economic force—and the target of a devastating cyberattack—in this excerpt from Ahmed Isselmou's novel. “Time is the God of our era,” Hammoud al-Jamloudi, the governor of Futurcity’s Central Bank, declared to the delegates packing the assembly hall. “Time is the sacred arbiter we worship today. Time is the true revolution that offers justice to all classes of society. Time cannot submit to...

This excerpt from Aichetou’s historical novel Je Suis N’Daté . . . details the legend of the Forsaken, a community of Bedouin women in a seventeenth-century nomadic encampment.  “You don’t know who the Forsaken are?” O Sand! Son of the impudent Wind . . . Much later, for want of having made good my escape, I was to come to know these Bedouin women, the Forsaken: The Mariemes, eldest daughters of their families, are insignificant but...

In this excerpt from Cheikh Nouh’s novel Adabai, we're introduced to the history and myths of the eponymous Mauritanian village.  Musa says that Ibrika founded the village of Adabai twenty years after “the year of Ja’bara’s death,” which was an important year in Adabai’s history. Ja’bara was a female slave from the nearby village. “Ja’bara had confided to some of the women while drawing water from the well that she was...

Mauritania, its geography, and its women come to life in vivid detail in this poem by Mariem Mint Derwich. You will tell them, my country, you will tell them of your daughter, daughter among your daughters, daughter among your men, you will tell them of the winds that engendered her, your winds of the East and your winds of the sea. You will tell them that around her ankles she wears your dunes, your tales, your griots, your notes of the moon, your notes of the sun. You will say to them...

Two activist groups meet to discuss joining forces in confronting the repressive state in this excerpt from Mamadou Kalidou Ba's novel La résistance pacifique.   It’s now six months since Bilal, the leader of the Call of the Muezzin group, was arrested. And three months since Gayel, the leader of the Walfugui youth movement for Equality and Justice (WEJ), and some of his comrades were also apprehended during a demonstration in Place des Martyrs. These activists...

Poet Bios Diallo connects Mauritania’s struggle to form a united national identity with similar conflicts elsewhere on the continent.   And Say to the tomb, without pride Here the poem ends Here identities, prayers bleed And, look Here also the nation is reborn   And since a country has but one language That of its future, of its people             I will brandish my own...

A time traveler finds himself in a harsh new society in this excerpt from writer and critic Moussa Ould Ebnou’s novel. That night I slept a troubled sleep, and when the time came to dream, my memory and consciousness recalled the beyond-time. I began to cry and scream with all my might, calling for the Master of Time: “Khidr! Khidr! What disaster have you caused to befall me?! Take me from here! You know very well that I am traveling through the beyond-time searching for a...

Anke Stelling's award-winning novel Higher Ground, translated from German by Lucy Jones, is out tomorrow from Scribe. An examination of class, friendship, and parenthood in contemporary Berlin, the book follows the escalating conflict between Resi, a writer, and her comparatively wealthy circle of friends. In the excerpt below, Resi discovers that her most recent book has alienated her friends—with severe consequences for herself and her family. A letter came for...

I met Sarah Booker virtually in 2018 when she spoke with a graduate student reading group about translating Cristina Rivera Garza's The Iliac Crest. During her virtual visit, Booker was gracious enough to talk with us about her translation process, and I have kept an eye on her work ever since. In this interview, conducted over email, Booker tells WWB about what drew her to translation work, her praxis, and her vision for translation in public life. ...

Having written my novel Dove mi trovo in Italian, I was the first to doubt that it could transform into English. Naturally it could be translated; any text can, to greater or lesser degrees of success. I was not apprehensive when translators began turning the novel into other languages—into Spanish or German or Dutch, for example. Rather, the prospect gratified me. But when it came to replicating this particular book, conceived and written in Italian, into the language that I...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. This month's selection includes books translated from Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, Hebrew, Korean, and Catalan.    From Verso | Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan | Fiction | 224 pages | ISBN 9781788739887 |...

My writing is a product of my reading, so today, on Earth Day, I am pleased to share some of the books that inspired me to write On Time and Water. The theme of the book is, as the title says, time and water, and how all the elements of water that used to change on a geological scale of thousands or millions of years now change in a single human lifetime. Sometimes the issue is called "climate change," but that is just a term, and it comes nowhere close to expressing how large and serious...

"Brazil's Virginia Woolf." "Sebaldian." An heir to Flaubert, Stendhal, Sterne . . . Comps—or comparative titles/authors—are ubiquitous in publishing, particularly when it comes to international literature. They are intended as a guide for publishers, readers, booksellers, critics, publicity teams: situating new works and writers in the context of the well-known, it is thought, can help these new works succeed. It is common among all of the aforementioned groups at...

I discovered The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank in the library of the dead wife of my mother’s then-partner. At eight, I was three years fatherless and about a year into a bewildering blended family situation. Over several readings, Anne’s confessions provided much-needed escape and empathy. I never considered that Anne was writing to Kitty in Dutch, which makes The Diary my first translated book. It never occurred to me even though I grew up with multiple languages in...

In my early teens, I moved from Paris to Nice, in the south of France. A much smaller town meant a newfound autonomy, and as I grew older, I started gravitating toward the poky secondhand bookshops near the old town. Those shops, now long gone, shaped me as a reader. Alongside the mostly stale set texts of the now rightly defunct French literature schoolbooks (back when the canon was almost exclusively male), I discovered Romain Gary, Colette, and also James Baldwin, Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa...

In 1866, Claude Monet—at the insistence of Gustave Courbet—made a figurative painting of his lover Camille Doncieux, who would later become his first wife, dressed in a dazzling green silk dress. The way he captured the slightly stiff and radiating hues, shades, and nuances of the silk made Camille simultaneously a mythical and a modern woman. She is of the old and the new times. In 1936, Amrita Sher-Gil painted an almost melancholic portrait of her cousin, Sumair,...

Comparable titles, or comps, are a widely used way to describe books throughout the publishing process, from an agent’s pitch all the way to the sale of the finished book. The first time I was asked “What are the comps?” I had to ask for clarification. I had been working in Spain, where books are also widely compared to other books, but where there isn’t a nice short term for it. “Comps,” with its abbreviated zing, sounds like an essential part of the...

The most recent novel by Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh, My First and Only Love, is out this week from Hoopoe. The book follows the protagonist, Nidal, as she returns to her family home in Nablus after decades in exile. In the excerpt below, translated by Aida Bamia, a visit to the old house sparks vivid memories of Nidal's beloved grandmother. My grandmother used to spend time in this spot every morning, sitting on a mattress stuffed with soft wool and covered with a...

Fifty Sounds, Polly Barton's memoir of moving to Japan, immersing herself in the language, and becoming a literary translator, is out tomorrow from Fitzcarraldo Editions. In the excerpt below, Barton recalls the elation brought on by her growing understanding of Japanese and her clandestine relationship with a coworker. bare-bare: the sound of being so invested in something that it leaks into everything you do, or abandoning hope of appearing cool, or...

Do Palestinian authors speak for their people, or for themselves? Should they write about politics, and if so, how? These dilemmas face many “resistance poets,” but especially Najwan Darwish, who burst onto the world stage in 2000 with his first collection, Kaan yaduqq al-baab al-akhiir (He Knocked the Final Door), and who had his English debut with a volume of selected poems in translation, Nothing More to Lose (NYRB Poets, 2014). Since then, he has been translated into ten...

Natasha Lehrer is a prize-winning literary translator from French to English. She recently translated Consent, Vanessa Springora’s memoir of her teenage relationship with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, which sent shock waves through France and triggered a rape investigation; and Pauline Harmange’s bestseller I Hate Men, a book-length essay that found unexpected success after an employee of the French ministry for gender equality attempted to have it banned. In this interview,...