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 Monday, March 17th at 7 pm; we will be reading Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater.
About the book:
A 19th-century Russian masterpiece about love, politics, family, and the tension between the new generation and the old world.
Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children is a book full to bursting with life, both comic and tragic. At the heart of this novel about love, politics, and society, strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death, is the generational divide between the young and the old. When the young university graduate Arkady and his mentor, the nihilist Bazarov, leave St. Petersburg to visit their aging parents in the provinces, the conflict that ensues from the generations’ clashing views of the world—the youths’ radicalism and the parents’ liberalism—is both representative of nineteenth-century Russia and recognizably contemporary. At the time of its publication in 1862, the book aroused indignation in critics who felt betrayed by Turgenev’s refusal to let his novel serve a single ideology; it also received a spirited defense by those who saw in his diffuse sympathies a greater service to art and to humanity. In this fresh new translation Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater have captured Turgenev’s subtle humor, his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, his compassion, and, above all, his skill as a storyteller
In Translation will be meeting on Thursday April 17th at 7 pm; we will be reading Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt.
About the book:
From one of the most significant contemporary Japanese writers, a haunting, dazzling novel of loss and rebirth
I was puzzled by how I had changed. But I could no longer go back…
It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light streaming through the windows, so bright she has to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness, becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become.
At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire, and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real time. It won the inaugural Noma Literary Prize.
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