Each year in August, which is Women in Translation Month, a number of works and authors are chosen to be highlighted for their contributions to literature in a language other than English. Though translation can be controversial in nature, it has also enabled the wider world to access these women’s work and allowed readers worldwide to connect with and understand them despite the language barrier. This list brings you translated works you may already know, or may just be discovering for the first time, and are worth picking up before the academic year begins.
Elena Ferrante: Days of Abandonment
Ferrante is no stranger to being included on best translated fiction lists; however, she has time and time again proved herself deserving of this spot. With her emotional yet matter-of-fact prose, she speaks to an audience of women across all ages. Her topics, like divorce, female friendship, issues with love and depression, transcend generations. Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels series is by far her most successful. It follows the story of two women over the course of their lives as they grow at times closer and at times further apart.
Though Ferrante gained her fame with her realistic and at times gritty portrayal of female friendship, she began exploring this realism of emotions in her second novel, Days of Abandonment. A standalone novel, Days of Abandonment portrays a woman’s slow descent into a “loss of sense” after being left by her husband. His sudden decision shakes the foundations of Olga’s world, and what ensues are aimless days in which Olga struggles to understand her new identity, her past and her future. Ferrante’s portrayal of a wronged and abandoned woman is characteristic of her style. It portrays Olga’s varied and often extreme emotional states through her eyes, as the reader observes to what depths she can sink. Throughout the novel, Olga dissects her relationship with her now ex-husband, she recounts his numerous wrongs and becomes bitter and even vengeful. Once again, Ferrante excels in her uncompromising realism and reading Olga’s story produces a surge of emotions and opens one’s eyes to the reality of a housewife’s world. Ferrante’s second novel is for those who seek to understand how far human emotions can go and enjoy literature about the female experience.
Mieko Kawakami: All the Lovers in the Night (Book contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault)
Similarly to Ferrante, Mieko Kawakami seeks to portray women and their lives as they are, without additional need for flourish or drama. Kawakami incorporates social commentary on women’s status in Japan seamlessly into her novels, highlighting the everyday and constant nature of these issues. Gaining fame outside her home country for her novel Breasts and Eggs, an expansion of a previous novella, Kawakami has been praised for her deadpan and detached narration by publications like the New York Review of Books. Creating a contrast between the rich emotional lives of her heroines and their detachedness from the world, Kawakami’s works are ones that speak to isolation and even feeling out of body. In her other works, such as Heaven and All the Lovers in the Night, she keeps the same sense of detachedness but adapts it masterfully to various different contexts. Her last book to be translated into English, All the Lovers in the Night, is a blend between her classic style and a fresh new take on romance.
All the Lovers in the Night follows Irie Fuyuko, a freelance proofreader in her thirties living an extremely isolated life. Fuyuko has discovered from early on that she is inept at social situations and strives to make her existence as solitary as possible. Exploring themes not limited to isolation through Fuyuko’s life, Kawakami addresses issues like alcoholism and sexual assault with devastating candor. While Fuyuko cannot express herself in real life, the reader can see her deep introspection and watches as she fails to communicate her feelings to her new love interest, Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher in his late fifties. After meeting Mitsutsuka, Fuyuko’s life begins to change, but not always for the better. The novel defeats classic tropes of a woman’s isolated life being profoundly changed by a man and sees Fuyuko struggle still amidst her budding relationship and simultaneously fail to cope with the romance itself. All the Lovers in the Night speaks to the international reader with its focus on the universal feeling of isolation, which it of course explores to the extreme, all the while relaying specificities of the position of women in contemporary Japanese society.
Nuala Ní Dhomnaill: Pharaoh’s Daughter
An Irish speaker since childhood, Ní Dhomnaill has been credited with renewing an interest in Irish language and literature. Her poems often contain allusions to folklore, myths and portrayals of old Irish goddesses and queens, and she has continuously stressed the importance that writing in Irish has for her in her work as well. In her poem The Language Issue, she speaks both to the empowerment of her native language and combines it with female empowerment. These two issues are central to her poetry and reflect her lifelong desire to make the Irish revivalist space a less male-centred one. While a champion of her native language, Ní Dhomnaill has been enthusiastic about her English translations, allowing multiple poets such as Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon to translate her work freely in order to bring her postcolonial and feminist message to a wider audience.
Pharaoh’s Daughter is Ní Dhomnaill’s second poetry collection, first published in 1990 and containing 45 poems. In this collection, Ní Dhomnaill’s poems were translated into English by 13 different translators, allowing each translator to work in their creative perspective on her work. The title of the collection, inspired by her previously mentioned poem, The Language Question, juxtaposes Ní Dhomnaill’s view of the Irish language with the story of Moses and the Pharaoh’s Daughter. She hopes the language will be picked up, taken care of and brought a new life just like Moses in the biblical tale. Once again putting the female experience at the centre, her compositions include stories of both the experience of motherhood and of being a daughter.
Olga Tokarczuk: Flights
A recent Nobel Prize winner, Tokarczuk has gained notoriety for her mystical and “encyclopedic” form of writing. Educated in clinical psychology, her inquiry into the human psyche and her characters’ oftentimes strange personalities give her work a unique observatory quality. First experimenting with blending psychology and writing in her novel E.E., Tokarczuk has utilised her knowledge of the field to give her works a unique quality. Using this psychological lens, she explores characters in unnerving settings, with peculiar things happening to them. Whether it is a historical narrative, like The Books of Jacob or a more traditional novel like Drive Your Plough Over The Bones of the Dead, Tokarczuk keeps creating a mysterious atmosphere in her works, drawing the reader further into the story without revealing too much. Often featuring her home country of Poland in her writing, Tokarczuk has educated readers worldwide about her country and its language through the many translations of her novels.
Her third novel, Flights, is a collection of eclectic short stories, personal essays, and travel logs, among other writings. Described by the New Yorker as a “cabinet of curiosities”, it is much less a novel and more a patchwork of short stories that all focus around a central theme of travel, thus deriving the name Flights. Tokarczuk takes the name literally, producing multiple thinkpieces on airports, taking flights and travel, which highlight the narrator’s love for mobility and wandering. Short reflections are interspersed between longer fictional stories that appear and develop throughout the collection, such as a narrative surrounding a Croatian man whose wife and child mysteriously go missing during their vacation. Whilst Tokarczuk explores the human psyche and places it in strange, highly improbable settings, she also keeps the work grounded in reality by her essays on Wikipedia, hotel lobbies or even a solitary Polish word. Flights conveys to the reader what it’s like to truly go off the radar and keeps one engaged with a slew of quickly changing narratives and topics.
Clarice Lispector: Complete Stories
Originally from Ukraine, Clarice Lispector is revered today as one of Brazil’s prolific writers, writing in diverse genres, from short stories to children’s literature. Lispector has found a cult following in Brazil as well as fame worldwide for her style, which has been described by Colm Tóibín as “original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.” An enigmatic and mysterious writer, Lispector focuses similarly to Tokarczuk on the human psyche but in a much more emotionally pronounced way. Through her work, she combines philosophy and psychology, most visibly in The Passion According to G.H. One of her most popular works in Brazil, it follows a woman falling into a crisis after she kills a cockroach. Unsurprisingly, she has gained the Kafka-esque label, often being named the “Brazilian Kafka”. Experimenting not only with genre, Lispector challenged traditional form most notably in Agua Viva, which contains only double paragraph breaks, resembling a long scroll instead of a book.
Lispector’s Complete Stories is a good start into her work, showcasing her versatility and style. Spanning works written in her teenage years until her middle age, the collection takes its reader through Lispector’s development as a writer and features a wide variety of subject matter. Keeping with her fascination with moments of existential epiphany, multiple stories in the collection centre on a trigger point that then makes her characters spiral, letting them feel the chaos of the world. Through a compilation such as this, one is able to pick out which elements of Lispector’s writing one likes most, whether it be its metaphysical nature or language-bending style. The readers of Lispector’s collected stories are bound to find many points of enjoyment in this highly diverse work.
