2021 International Booker shortlisted translator Sasha Dugdale's translated fiction recommendations
Por The Booker Prizes
Por The Booker Prizes
Autobiography of Death
Kim Hyesoon
12,99 €Translated by Don Mee Choi. A remarkable elegiac work, conceptually brilliant and startling in its language. I was taking notes from this book, until I realised I was simply copying the whole thing verbatim into my notebook.
The Bridge Of Beyond
Simone Schwarz-Bart
13,99 € 13,01 €Translated by Barbara Bray. This classic account of a childhood has inhabited my dreams since I read it. Full of water and light and miraculous mythic women, it has a driving, powerful narrative.
alphabet
Inger Christensen
10,99 € 10,22 €Translated by Susannah Nied. An epic poem, meditating on the human drive to destruction and its counterpoint: the beauty of the world. In its structure it echoes the Fibonacci sequence.
Still Life with a Bridle
Zbigniew Herbert
14,99 € 13,94 €Translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter. A magnificent collection of essays about Dutch painting: metaphorical, elusive, slyly political and full of wonderful and original insights into art and creativity.
Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad
Barskova
11,75 € 10,92 €Five surreal, acerbic, offhand, often horrific, but always human poets, whose work is in stark contrast to the stoic Soviet response to wartime suffering. This book would be an excellent accompaniment to Maria Stepanova’s accounts of the Siege of Leningrad in In Memory of Memory.
Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank
Hiromi Ito
9,99 € 9,29 €Translated by Jeffrey Angles. Hiromi Ito is one of Japan’s foremost women poets. In these great translations her long narrative poems have a sinewy strength and a cloying restlessness.