When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem
I finally got around to reading Irene Solà’s novel recently, and what a read it was. The translation from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem is so playful and joyful, masterfully capturing the vast cast of human, animal and inorganic voices that the novel encompasses, deftly jumping between registers with a grace that most translators and writers can only dream of. Moving, endlessly surprising, and utterly charming.
Recommended by Polly Barton, who translates books from Japanese, most recently Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa
Chinatown by Thuận, translated by Nguyễn An Lý
This novel is gripping from the very beginning, as propulsive a read as its lack of paragraph breaks suggests. A Vietnamese writer on a stopped train in the Paris Metro plummets into her thoughts and memories, which unspool into an interior monologue that makes up this delightfully disorienting novel, starting with her personal journey and expanding to take in larger swathes of history and migration. Nguyễn An Lý’s translation from Vietnamese is sure-footed in navigating Thuận’s tricky language and time shifts, and it is a pleasure to surrender to the steady hands of a translator who moves with such confidence and style. One for the ages.
Recommended by Jeremy Tiang, who translates books from Chinese, most recently Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan
Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes
Clean, which has just come out in paperback, is a pacy yet vivid novel about class, intimacy and the loss of self through service. The novel, set in a transforming Chile, is told by live-in housemaid Estela after her employer’s daughter is found dead. It’s one of those books that grips you and has you endlessly switching your loyalties and sympathies. I would read anything Sophie Hughes translates (she is currently on the International Booker shortlist for her translation of Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico) and while reading Clean, I could spot her genius touch in the language and turns of phrase throughout.
Recommended by Jen Calleja, who translates books from German, and whose book Fair: The Life-Art of Translation is out 29 May
The Notebook by Ágota Kristóf, translated by Alan Sheridan
In her brutally spare and vivid debut novel, Kristóf, who had fled Hungary for Switzerland at the age of 21, put the French she was only just beginning to master to extraordinary use. The Notebook tells the story of twin boys, sent by their mother from the war-torn Big Town to the Little Town where their estranged grandmother lives. What follows is no ordinary childhood tale, and there is something astonishing and bewitching in the way Kristóf endows her twin protagonists (always “we”) with grace and integrity, even as they explore and channel all the violence of the world around them. Her language is bewilderingly simple: how does she manage to paint such detailed pictures with so few words?
Recommended by Nichola Smalley, who translates books from Swedish and Norwegian, most recently Back in the Day by Oliver Lovrenski
Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury, translated by Humphrey Davies
The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, who died last year, is one of my favourite writers. Star of the Sea, the second instalment of his brilliant trilogy, Children of the Ghetto, was published in Arabic in 2019. It arrived in English last year, elegantly translated by the late Humphrey Davies, one of the best translators of Arabic literature into English. Palestinian identity is at the heart of this novel, inflected and refracted through memory and encounters with the brutality of history and its repeated catastrophes.
Recommended by Sinan Antoon, who translates from Arabic, and writes and translates his own poetry, most recently in the collection Postcards from the Underworld
Faraway by Lo Yi-Chin, translated by Jeremy Tiang
Faraway is far and away my favourite work of translated Chinese literature I’ve read in the past decade. Set around the turn of the millennium, it follows a middle-aged Taiwanese man as he travels to mainland China to retrieve his comatose father, who has suffered a stroke during a trip. Through a delivery that is somehow both deadpan and vibrant, the protagonist recounts his efforts to navigate between a bribe-fuelled hospital bureaucracy, his elderly mother, and his estranged local half-brothers. Tiang brilliantly manages to convey these relationships with alternating degrees of subtlety, awkwardness, irony and depth, which perfectly cohere to make the overall work so genuine, hilarious, and devastating. Recommended by Todd Foley, who translates books from Chinese, most recently City of Fiction by Yu Hua
Shade and Breeze by Quynh Tran, translated by Kira Josefsson
This quiet, lush novel follows a Vietnamese family – a mother and two sons; one precocious, the other errant – on the west coast of Finland. It’s a book about the struggle to belong, not only to a place but to the families we’re born into and the personal histories we didn’t get to experience first-hand. Like most of the novels I find myself falling in love with, it’s also a book about the slipperiness of memory. Josefsson navigates these layers with ingenuity and a feather-light touch, and the result is a novel that will haunt readers as much for what it says as for what it does not say.
Recommended by Julia Sanches, who translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan, most recently Living Things by Munir Hachemi
Eleven Percent by Maren Uthaug, translated by Caroline Waight
A book I’ve passed on to many people over the past few years comes out in the UK tomorrow. It is set in a near-ish-future world where only 11% of the population are men. The idea is that there are enough men to ensure genetic diversity, but they are held in captivity in “spa” centres. Women can choose to visit if they want to “encase penis” (the new term for penetrative sex) and, if they don’t want to go the insemination route, to get pregnant.
The logic underpinning this matriarchal society is disturbingly persuasive: If the vast majority of violence, war and systemic oppression throughout history has been caused by men, why not remove the common denominator? But this genius novel is also an interrogation of power itself, as we witness the women of the New Time perpetuating a similar dehumanisation to the one they once suffered – a classic case of dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools that left me with the question: Is a world in which no one is oppressor or oppressed possible?
Recommended by Hazel Evans, who translates books from Danish. Her translation of Girlbeast by Cecilie Lind comes out next month.
<br> Photograph: Panther Media GmbH/Alamy
