2021 International Booker shortlisted translator Mark Polizzotti's translated fiction recommendations
Por The Booker Prizes
Por The Booker Prizes
The Sailor From Gibraltar
Marguerite Duras
11,99 € 11,15 €Translated by Barbara Bray. This early novel, predating the acerbic compression of Duras’s final books, already explores the preoccupations — of loneliness, obsession, and the intricacies of real and imagined relationships — that haunt her later writings. For years, it was my CliffsNotes on the beauties, dangers, and perplexities of love.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9,99 € 9,29 €Translated by Gregory Rabassa. The first time I finished this novel, I stared at the wall for half an hour, unable to remember where I was — so powerful and all-absorbing is the alternate reality that García Márquez conjures, and that Rabassa magnificently conveys. This is in every way a dual masterpiece.
Cockroaches
Scholastique Mukasonga
12,99 € 12,08 €Translated by Jordan Stump. Anyone who doesn’t believe simplicity can carry moral authority should read Mukasonga. Brief, unadorned, but redolent with the magic of truths uniquely seen and straightforwardly expressed in all their understated tragedy and irony, her books do what writing does at its best: they open another world and, compellingly, compassionately, invite us in.
A Void
Georges Perec
10,99 € 10,22 €Translated by Gilbert Adair. This dark, brilliant whodunit, “chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails,” mixing autobiographical anguish with linguistic occultation – and containing not a hint of our most common typographical sign, e – abounds in adroit adaptations and circumlocutions by both author and translator, and is an out-and-out thrill.
Cathay: A Critical Edition
Ezra Pound
22,99 €As execrable in his politics as he was exquisite in his linguistic choices, Pound was a one-person graduate seminar in the art of translation: inventive, adventurous, cunning, wise, and sometimes off-the-wall. The Cathay poems in particular delicately meld Eastern and Western sensibilities, both “making it new” and showing how literature can lift us above even our worst selves.
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Gilles Deleuze y Felix Guattari
160,00 €Translated by Brian Massumi. A complete mind-bender of a book. It rewired my brain.