literature in translation
FICTION
Join our host Adam for In Translation, a book club dedicated to exploring the richness of translated world literature with a focus on contemporary international publishing and recently translated work. This book club will attempt to explore as many parts of the world as we can, always attempting to find work translated from as many world languages as possible. We'll focus mostly on fiction, but who knows, maybe we'll veer off into other genres and forms. We’ll meet every month!
You can find some of Adam’s staff picks here.
In Translation will be meeting on Thursday, May 15th at 7 pm; we will be reading Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, translated by Sassan Tabatabai.
About the book:
A new English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels of the twentieth century Winner of the 2023 Lois Roth Persian Translation Award
Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In first person, the narrator offers a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the exact same scene on the covers of pen cases: an old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful woman in black who offers him a water lily. In a one-page transition, the reader finds the narrator covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrest him. In part two, readers glimpse the grim realities that unlock the mysteries of the first part. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat’s conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche.
In Translation will be meeting on Thursday, June 19th at 7 pm; we will be reading Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali, translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe.
About the book:
Available in English for the first time, this best-selling Turkish classic of love and alienation in a changing world captures the vibrancy of interwar Berlin.
A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin. There, amidst the city’s bustling streets, elegant museums, passionate politics, and infamous cabarets, a chance meeting with a beautiful half-Jewish artist transforms him forever. Caught between his desire for freedom from tradition and his yearning to belong, he struggles to hold on to the new life he has found with the woman he loves.
Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric, and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings, the relentless pull of family ties, and the unfathomable nature of the human soul. First published in 1943, this novel, with its quiet yet insistent defiance of social norms, has been topping best-seller lists in Turkey since 2013.
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