“Reading these stories at times feels almost like complicit voyeurism—witnessing pain through a one-way mirror in the laboratory of Nors’s world.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviews Dorthe Nors’s new collection, Wild Swims, out tomorrow from Graywolf.
“It is Ndiaye’s voice—resonate, ruthlessly matter-of-fact, deeply wounded—which will be our light in this blood-soaked landscape of rusting barbed wire and whizzing shrapnel.” Travis Holland reviews David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black.
“The novel is narrated as an episodic composite, linked by the author’s narrative conceit: a persistent Argentinian journalist has been seeking to interview elusive, reclusive Watanabe.” Ellen Prentiss Cambell reviews Fracture, by Andrés Neuman.
Andre Dubus’s Italian translator, Nicola Manuppelli, describes how he came to work with short story master’s writing, and interviews the author’s son, Andre Dubus III.
“What color is a heartbeat? What does a word taste like? What is the fragrance of happiness?” Julian Anderson reviews Andreas Izquierdo’s recent novel, The Happiness Bureau, translated from the German by Rachel Hildebrandt.
“In Slimani’s novel, the burden placed upon women to care for children balances alongside the treatment and perceptions of immigrant women. And rendering these issues to subtext, rather than treating them head-on and politically, the narrative forces the reader to become complicit in the shoddy treatment of others for the sake of convenience and creature comforts.”
In the introduction to their forthcoming translation of Apollo in the Grass: Selected Poems, by Aleksandr Kushner, Carol Ueland and Robert Carnevale write that “translators simply have to admit that most of the music of most all lyric poetry, and most of its phenomenal presence, stay at home, in the native tongue. But ‘music of language’ is a metaphor.” Ian Singleton examines how this claim plays out in their translation of Kushner’s poetry.
“No relationship is entirely transparent. More important, our understandings of relationships evolve and shift—knowledge dawns on us, bit by bit with new information, context, and different points of view. How two bodies interact in unseeable places and ways can tell an entire story, whether particular…or universal.”
“There is an experience it implies, a weary worldliness with which many writers aspire to imbue their characters.”
Thanks to an unusual collaboration between two translators, Marguerite Duras’ 1971 novel L’Amour has been translated into English for the first time.
