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, July 17th, at 7 pm; we will be reading Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, translated from Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies.
About the book:
After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood—the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.
But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man—whom he has asked to look after his wife—in an unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.
Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.
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