In translation

‘I’ll never articulate what Journey to the West means but I do feel confident in saying that it’s the best epic Buddhist fantasy novel ever written.’

‘Each participant brought a certain cultural heft to this collective, creative, and collaborative writing process. Our distinctiveness as individuals made the process complex yet fluid: from being born and raised in the very places we had set our drama, to specialising in a particular art form, namely the Arabic qanun, or the contemporary urban movement of parkour. Together, we created a deep listening space where our shared cultural capital counted for a great deal.’

‘You’re meeting the FIFA of Argentine literature,’ one young Buenos Aires poet said: ‘Watch out she doesn’t sue you.’ María Kodama gave me the best part of three hours of her time, describing her life with Jorge Luis Borges and discussing his work. Her generosity and warmth were at odds with everything I’d ever read or heard about her.

Maximalist novels are large works that will strain the hands if you read them while standing on the bus. And to encompass these various books and trace out a common strand of meaning—to comprehend order in their chaotic vision of the world—is quite a task. Simply put the maximalist novel exists, according to Ercolino, to show the reader what it means to be human in the postmodern age.

What is particularly exhilarating – and ultimately frustrating – about “53 Days” is the sense that Perec himself hasn’t worked out where the book is going.

It is unsurprising, then, that testimonials and critical assessments of Modiano’s writing should so often resort (as I have already done) to vague terms like ‘mysterious’ and ‘atmospheric’ and ‘haunting’. But the element of uncertainty is not only thematically significant on both a personal and a historical level; it also renders these two levels indistinct. Modiano’s books are not simply preoccupied with memory and the elusiveness of the past; they are troubled by the fragility and impermanence of human relationships, which are depicted as unreliable and contingent. The world of his novels is one of coincidences and fateful encounters. It is a shady world of criminal dealings, in which people are unforthcoming or evasive, origins are unknown or unclear, identities are falsified. It is a transient world of hotels and cafés – a world of passing acquaintances and broken family connections, in which people are apt to run away, commit suicide or disappear without explanation, and characters are disturbed by feelings of emptiness and loss.

After learning spoken and then written French, Kristóf began writing poems, then plays for the radio and theater, before arriving, at last, at the novel. Kristóf’s trilogy, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie —published this month for the first time in Australia and New Zealand by Text—is her masterpiece.

‘Now that Joseph Roth has been thoroughly absorbed into English, it seems right to ask whether there is a more joyously unbridled – and a more appealing – writer of narrative fiction in the literary tradition.’ Luke Slattery on a new translation of Joseph Roth’s non-fiction.

‘Yuri Herrera’s novella Señales que precederán al fin del mundo is a special case: a work for which translation is a logical extension of its rationale. What I mean is this: when a work is so concerned with arduous journeys, borders, transculturalism and the underworld, reading a version of that work rebirthed in a new form after it has undergone its own transformation is quite fitting.’ Elizabeth Bryer on Signs Preceding the End of the World.

The English translations of Eka Kurniawan’s novels have been hailed for their beauty and situated within a global frame of reference – but when they were first published, critics were fascinated by Eka’s deviance and his willingness to flout contemporary Indonesian literary norms.