Category Fiction in translation

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Fair by Jen Calleja review – on the magic of translation

A highly original book from the author of Goblinhood explores the art and work of translating fiction

Jen Calleja is used to making things happen for herself, by herself, despite the fact that collaboration is vital to all her endeavours: her work as a literary translator, rendering German prose and poetry into English; her life as a publisher, and co-founder with her friend Kat Storace of Praspar Press, which aims to bring Maltese literature to a wider audience; her own writing, which includes the novel Vehicle and the essay collection Goblinhood; and her other incarnation, as a member of the post-punk band Sauna Youth.

All of this takes a significant amount of energy and determination, but one of Fair’s central contentions is that it is all made far harder than it ought to be by, in effect, the covert acceptance of inequality and exclusion in the arts and literature. She recalls, for example, finally feeling that she has made it as a translator when she is invited to speak at the London Book Fair; years later, she returns to tell the audience that she has plenty of work, but only £30 in her bank account because so many of the organisations in the room are behind on paying her. “Out of the frying pan of grifting,” as she acidly notes, “into the fire of contempt”.

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Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov review – how it feels to lose a father

The International Booker winner explores Bulgarian family life under communism in this moving depiction of a son’s bereavement

The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was published quietly in the Anglophone world for years before he won the 2023 International Booker prize with Time Shelter, about an Alzheimer’s clinic that recreates the past so successfully, it beguiles the wider world.

He is perhaps now Bulgaria’s biggest export. Ever playful, never linear, his new novel Death and the Gardener consists of vignettes of a beloved dying and dead father, told by a narrator who, like Gospodinov, is an author. Gospodinov has spoken publicly about losing his own father recently, and the novel feels autobiographical in tone. When we read “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden,” it is not the beginning of an Archimboldiesque surrealist tale, but rather a more direct exploration of how we express and where we put our love.

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AI translation service launched for fiction writers and publishers prompts dismay among translators

UK-based GlobeScribe is charging $100 per book, per language for use of its services, but translators say that nuanced work can only be produced by humans

An AI fiction translation service aimed at both traditional publishers and self-published authors has been launched in the UK. GlobeScribe.ai is currently charging $100 per book, per language for use of its translation services.

“There will always be a place for expert human translation, especially for highly literary or complex texts,” said the founders Fred Freeman and Betsy Reavley, who previously founded Bloodhound Books, which specialises in crime and thrillers. “But GlobeScribe.ai opens the door to new opportunities, making translation a viable option for a much broader range of fiction.”

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Autocorrect by Etgar Keret review – endlessly inventive short stories

Alien spaceships, parallel worlds… the Israeli writer’s seventh collection is vast in reach, yet grounded in the bewildering absurdity of modern life

‘It’s time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener. Giyora Shiro, may he rest in peace, was thinking all this while standing in line to get into the next world …”

That’s quite the opener for a story, isn’t it? The apt but just slightly ridiculous metaphor, which is then revealed as not an authorial pronouncement but a character’s ruminations. And then we meet the character – excellently specific name – and we find out he’s dead, and, in that drolly formulaic aside “may he rest in peace”, we meet the author too.

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I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà review – makes most fiction feel timid

This Catalonian tale of a botched pact with the devil has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting

Margarida is trapped in Mas Clavell, a farmhouse in the Catalonian mountains, with Bernadeta. Bernadeta is dying in an annoying way, with “deep, raspy snores”. Margarida herself has been dead for some time. Rather than ascend to heaven, she has been “dragged downstairs by the ghastly, insufferable women of the house”. Irene Solà’s teeming third novel, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, follows these women, both dead and alive, as they prepare for a party. They cook and scrub, tell stories and make fart jokes. The novel begins at dawn and ends at night, but the historical era jumps around without warning. Now the viceroy’s men are arriving on horseback. Now a teenager is calling everyone a “dumbass”. Now local women are fleeing from Nazi soldiers. Characters shape-shift as much as the timeline. A he-goat becomes a bull, then a cat, then “an unusually long, skinny man with the toes of a rooster”. Now the viceroy’s men are demons, dragging Margarida into a “sea of blood”.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness references Mrs Dalloway, and shares the modernist interest in formal experimentation and action that unfolds over a single day. Instead of tracking interior sensation, Solà presents a seemingly inexhaustible slew of bodily description, held together by the opaque, vindictive logic of a folk tale. There are wonderful lists: of the different kinds of shit on the mountain, of cheese-making equipment, of body parts fondled by hands in the dark. I read the book twice in quick succession and every time I opened it, I found something to savour. The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

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