- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison– I loved this so much that as soon as I finished it I started over from the beginning, and once I finished my re-read I went straight to…
- The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison – which I also loved.
- Riccardino by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli
- Stories from Apex: “On the Sunlit Side of Venus” by Benjamin Parzybok and “The Day When the Last War Is Over” by Sergey Gerasimov
- The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (re-read)
- Gossamer Axe by Gael Baudino (re-read)
- The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
- The Gatekeeper by James Byrne
- A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark
- Kindness Now by Amanda Gilbert
- Radical Compassion by Tara Brach
- Witches by Brenda Lozano, translated by Heather Cleary: loved this one.
- Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
- Dark Earth by Rebecca Stott: loved this one too
- When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo: and loved this as well.
- Seasparrow by Kristin Cashore: I was afraid to start this book, as I love Cashore’s work in general but had such huge problems with her last book. I was worried that I might have similar issues with Seasparrow–but I didn’t! I read it fast enough that I don’t want to say more than that (am going back to re-read), but my first impression is positive.
What I’ve been reading lately, backlog edition
I’ve been reading…I just haven’t been posting.
- A Cathedral of Myth and Bone by Kat Howard
- A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers – I love Becky Chambers’ writing and this book is no exception, but I also found this work centrally flawed. I’ll keep it short, but: AN AREA ABANDONED BY HUMANS IS NOT “UNTOUCHED.” There’s a huge literature about this, in fact – about the inherent misconceptions of the idea that “culture” and “nature” are two separate things – and given that the relationship between humans and nature is so central to the entire concept of this work, I found the lack of understanding of this to be a huge problem. One concrete (hahaha) example of this: as anyone who has spent time in the backcountry would know, bicycling along a road through a forest that had been abandoned two hundred years prior would not be possible. It’s in fact kind of amazing how quickly human infrastructure turns to ruins…but it is still there, and it leaves a legacy. An abandoned place is not a “wilderness,” if you are defining wilderness as “untouched by humans” (as this book explicitly does, in a few places).
- An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard
- The Promise by Damon Galgut
- Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
- Banana Rose by Natalie Goldberg
- The Great Spring by Natalie Goldberg
- Cultivating the Mind of Love by Thich Nhat Hanh
- Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga
- The Actual Star by Monica Byrne
- Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
- People from my Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami
- Her Name is Knight by Yasmin Angoe
What I’ve been reading lately, shedding my skin edition
- Writing the Novella by Sharon Oard Warner – if you are looking for a writing craft book, I highly recommend this one, whether you write novellas or not. It’s one of the best craft books I’ve read in the past decade, perhaps longer. I suspect longer- and shorter-form authors will find it super-helpful (as will novella writers, of course) – well, I did!
- Around the Writer’s Block by Roseanne Bane
- The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel
- Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland
- Crow With No Mouth by Ikkyū Sōjun, translated by Stephen Berg
- Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
What I’ve been reading lately, deep dark midwinter edition
- Echo on the Bay by Masatsugu Ono, translated by Angus Turvill – this work is one where I’m super-curious about the choices made by the translator (if only I could read Japanese! I’m making progress with German so maybe Japanese is next).
- Das Doppelte Lottchen by Erich Kästner – see, making progress with German, above.
- Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick.
- Among Others by Jo Walton (re-read).
It doesn’t sound like a lot, and it is in fact not a lot. I’ve been tired, laboring under darkness both real and metaphorical. But we’ve passed the solstice now and I see a glimmer of light in the far distance…enough that I’m able to at the very least, record what I’ve been reading.
Here’s to light returning, for all of us (including those of us in the southern hemisphere, for whom the returning light will be metaphorical at this point).
What I’ve been reading lately: summertime book-and-ice-tea edition
Not beach reads, but things I’m reading outside with a jar of ice tea at my side…
- Babylon Berlin (English translation of Der Nasse Fisch, not the TV series) by Volker Kutscher
- Indian No More by Charlene Willing McManis and Traci Sorell
- Thunder and Lightning by Natalie Goldberg
- Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
- Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer (reread)
- When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (reread)
The adventure of reading literature in translation
Anyone looking at my what I’ve been reading lately posts would probably notice: I like to read books in translation. By books in translation I mostly (but not entirely) mean, books originally published in a non-English language that I then read in English. As I’ve discussed here before, one of my all-time favorite novels is If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler, written and originally published in Italian; a sampling of other things I’ve read in the not-too-distant past that were originally published in a language other than English include Basho’s poetry, The Godmother, Baron in the Trees, Core of the Sun, and the Mirror Visitor Quartet. It’s not too hard for me to rattle off others that I love: Smilla’s Sense of Snow. The Neapolitan Novels. Momo (the book not the internet hoax). What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I could go on and on. And that’s just the ones I remember offhand, not the ones that I enjoyed but am not remembering now, or the ones that I felt equivocal about, or even the ones I hated. I am glad I read them all, because they made my world bigger.
I will sometimes give works written in French or Spanish a read in their original language as well as in translation, but usually after having read the English version. This is partly because I’m not as fluent a reader in French and Spanish as I am in English, but it’s also because I love the insight into the art of translation. Reading the translation first and then the original not only improves my comprehension of the original, it renders me in awe of translators. Sometimes it also makes me frustrated with them, but when I read this way I am acutely aware that capturing an author’s art while getting meaning across is an impossible task (see this article for more about this!). A translation always walks a fine line between too literal and not literal enough. I find this line fascinating. I’m such a geek about this that sometimes I’ll try to read something originally published in – and which I first read in – English in its French or Spanish translation, just to see what it’s like, what new shades of meaning emerge when it’s put in another language.
(At least at this point, my reading ability in other languages isn’t good enough for me to be able to do this with works not in French or Spanish, but I keep on studying. I especially hope to add Italian to the list of languages I can read in – it’s close enough to Spanish and French that I think I should be able to get there with some concentrated study, and I am especially fond of the Italian works in translation I’ve read – but I’ve been working on German, for other reasons, recently. At some point I’d like to work on Japanese.)
Given this (admittedly peculiar) interest, and given that I travel (or used to, pre-COVID19) a lot for work, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that when I travel outside the USA I always try to spend some time browsing local bookstores. I find so many books that haven’t ever been translated into English; and at the same time, I’ve found that non-American bookstores often have an excellent stock of literature in translation (and not just translated from the English, either).
All this makes me wonder: what’s behind my difficulty in finding books in translation here at home? Are plenty of works translated, but the marketing machine for these books does not reach me, for whatever reason? Or are there in fact relatively few, and if so, does this indicate American insularity/unwillingness to buy translated works, or something more general such as the difficulty of the art of translation?
(In case you are wondering, as I was, if it is really true that books in translation aren’t as widely available in English as they are in other languages, a quick search found me a number of articles suggesting that indeed, this is the case: this article, which is about English-language translations in general, and this post, titled “Why Do Americans Read so Few Books in Translation?”, were two that I found particularly interesting. It does appear that the issue is not that I’m not able to find books that have been translated, but rather that there are relatively few non-English books that are ever translated into English.)
Works in translation are on my mind right now in part as a result of the recent passing of Carlos Ruiz Zafón, described as “the most-read Spanish author since Cervantes” in his obituary in the Guardian. I did eventually read The Shadow of the Wind in Spanish, but I started with the English translation. My life would be poorer without ever having encountered his work, or Italo Calvino’s, or Hannelore Cayre’s or Haruki Murakami‘s or Elena Ferrante‘s or Michael Ende‘s or that of so many others.