The best recent translated fiction / Pirkko Saisio, Wolf Hass, Alejandra Kamiya, Lucia Odoom

 

A sense of the ridiculous and the serious … Pirkko Saisio.

Translated fiction roundup 

Review

The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio; Short Circuit by Wolf Haas; Cosmos by Lucia Odoom; The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest by Alejandra Kamiya

John Self

Friday 21 Augusto 2026

The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg, Penguin International Writers (£14.99)
Following Lowest Common Denominator and Backlight, this book completes Finnish author Saisio’s autofictional trilogy. It covers her young adulthood in the 1970s, where she comes out as lesbian (“The electricity doesn’t go out. The Richter scale remains still”) and falls in love. One of her lovers, Havva, is a communist who’s engaged to a man; she relies on his rich parents for funding, but pees in their private pool as a protest. Later, Saisio is voted vice-president of a political drama company, as “she has the skills to bring about the revolution, specifically via theatre” – despite half-baked productions such as the “napalm opera” Vietnam-a-Go-Go. As that suggests, this is a story with a sense of both the ridiculous and the serious. Told in clear prose, it playfully shifts between third and first person as Saisio recounts her memories then analyses them. This enchanting series deserves to become a modern classic.

The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte

The treachery of language: the limits of translation

Why language never says what we think it does

Madison Leeson

5 August 2026

In The Misery and Splendour of Translation (1937), José Ortega y Gasset relays his response to a conference attendee who remarked on the “impossibility of translating certain German philosophers.” Rather than dismissing this claim, Ortega leaned into it. He suggested that translation, as a practice, is in some sense utopian – that is, that it aims toward an ideal outcome (perfect equivalence between languages) that can never actually be achieved. In other words, there is no single correct translation, only approximations shaped by context.

Elisa Shua Dusapin / The Pachinko Parlor

 

The Pachinko Parlor

By Elisa Shua Dusapin

Translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Out this month from Open Letter Books, The Pachinko Parlor is the second novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin to appear in English. Her debut novel, Winter in Sokcho, also translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The Pachinko Parlor centers on Claire, a Korean Swiss woman who travels to Tokyo to spend the summer with her elderly grandparents, neither of whom has returned to their native country since fleeing the Korean War. In this excerpt, Claire tries to plan a trip to Korea with her grandparents and reflects on her limited ability to communicate with them.

September 19, 2022

 

Gabriel García Márquez

Photo by Colita

Interview

Gabriel García Márquez: 'I felt close to him immediately'

This article is more than 10 years oldSusanna Rustin

Translator Edith Grossman believes Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the great novels of the 20th century

Susanna Rustin

Saturday 26 April 2026

Tim Parks / The Writer-Translator Equation

 

Rijksmuseum

Jan Ekels (II): A Writer Trimming his Pen, 1784

The Writer–Translator Equation

By Tim Parks

September 21, 2020, 7:00 am

The translator is a writer. The writer is a translator. How many times have I run up against these assertions?—in a chat between translators protesting because they are not listed in a publisher’s index of authors; or in the work of literary theorists, even poets (“Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text,” observed Octavio Paz). Others claim that because language is referential, any written text is a translation of the world referred to.

JOHN LAMBERT
AND LITERARY TRANSLATION

"You sit down, you create. That’s hugely enjoyable."

John Lambert is a Canadian literary translator. He speaks English, French and German. He decided to answer our questions in English.

How did you start translating literature? What are “your” authors and languages?

That was in 1989, when I was studying in Paris. I walked by a bookstore at the Gare Saint Lazare and saw a copy of La salle de bain (The Bathroom) by Jean-Philipe Toussaint. I like small books, so I wrote Marion Boyars, the publisher who had bought the rights, and she asked me to translate Toussaint’s second novel Monsieur. Aside from Toussaint I’ve translated Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère, and I’m now working on his Le Royaume (The Kingdom).

What do you like /dislike about your job as a literary translator?

You sit down, you create. That’s hugely enjoyable.

What is the most enriching experience you have had?

My wife and I have had two children and we’re expecting a third: that’s hard to top. But as a translator, maybe the times when you feel you’ve really nailed it. This sentence from Carrère’sLimonov comes to mind: “When the director gets out of his Volga and sees you shoveling in the courtyard, he’s the one who feels vaguely like a douchebag.”

What made you feel closest to an author?

Working together, definitely. For example Jean-Philippe Toussaint is Belgian, and the European College of Literary Translation, headed by Françoise Wuilmart, has organised several summer sessions with his translators in the Walloon town of Seneffe. One memorable morning session , for example, Jean-Philippe demonstrated on the gravel courtyard the culminating action of the story cap corse (the best day of my life), in Autoportrait (à l’étranger), translated as self-portrait (abroad). It all climaxes with a “carreau sur place”, which is every bit as racy as it sounds. I refer you to page 44 of the original and page 31 of my translation to find out how it’s done.

What have you found most difficult to translate?

This sentence from Toussaint’s Monsieur definitely took the most time, several months. In the end I stuck all the possible words for the the final oxymoron “mol acharnement” on my wall and shifted them around until I got it right. I love the tectonic feel of it, we’re in geological time here: “Yes, Monsieur displayed in all things a listless drive.”

What have you enjoyed most translating?

In fact the book I’ve most enjoyed translating is my own first novel This Season’s Concerts. I’m working on a French translation with Jean-Philippe Toussaint. That’s highly rewarding, and Toussaint has this terrific energy and inspiration. Together we took my “absolutely apeshit” and came up with “un vrai truc de malades”, for example. Even better, Toussaint suggested translating my “damn it” by the French anglicism “damnèd”. That’s pretty hard to beat.

Which author would you love to translate?

Claude Cahun wrote some interesting texts. If the opportunity arose I’d certainly look in that direction.

If you were not a literary translator, what would you do?

Well, I like to hike, maybe a tour guide: a mountain tour guide.

Translated authors:

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Emmanuel Carrère

AUTHORS/TRANSLATORS

Soul mates … English language translator Flora Drew with Chinese author Ma Jian.
Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observ

'It's a silent conversation': authors and translators on their unique relationship

From Man Booker International winner Olga Tokarczuk to partners Ma Jian and Flora Drew … leading authors and translators discuss the highs and lows of cross-cultural collaboration

Claire Armitstead

Saturday 6 April 2019

O

n the night of last year’s Man Booker International prize ceremony, two winners swept up to the podium – novelist Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft – but a third was back at their table cheering louder than anyone. “I was thrilled to bits, I still am,” says Antonia Lloyd-Jones. What makes this unusual is that Lloyd-Jones is the Polish author’s other translator, who has been working with her far longer, but wasn’t responsible for the winning novel, Flights. With a shared purse of £50,000 at stake, was there not even the tiniest bit of envy? “We’re a team – of course it’s Olga and Jennifer’s win, not mine, but it’s great for all of us who have spent years trying to popularise her books outside Poland, and it’s great for Polish literature in translation,” says Lloyd-Jones. “This was a major breakthrough after almost 30 years of work. And it has done sales of my own translations a lot of good.” Nifty scheduling by the indie publisher Fitzcarraldo has meant that these include Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a quirky eco-thriller very different from Flights, which has won Tokarczuk her second Man Booker International prize longlisting. This year’s shortlist will be announced on Tuesday.

Lily Meyer / Translator's Note: Claudia Ulloa Donoso

Claudia Ulloa Donoso

Translator's Note: Claudia Ulloa Donoso

by Lily Meyer

Lily Meyer / Sobre Claudia Ulloa Donoso

The title story in Peruvian writer Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s collection Pajarito starts with a description of the narrator’s cat. He’s seven kilos, furry, antisocial. He has seven lives in Peru and nine in Norway, where he lost at least one by wandering outside in the polar winter. There are pictures of him on the author’s blog, but that’s not mentioned in the story. It’s just true. 

Darío Jaramillo Agudelo / Sergio Pitol, Translator

pitol15.jpg

Mexican writer Sergio Pitol.

Sergio Pitol, Translator

by Darío Jaramillo Agudelo

Translated by Christina Miller

Darío Jaramillo Agudelo / Sergio Pitol, traductor

Whoever has met Sergio Pitol, let’s say for example, in a book fair in whatever part of the world, who has seen him in some writers’ conference, who—getting into a time machine—had treated him like a diplomat, without digging too deep into intentions or into the nooks of his way of being, will always say that Pitol is an elegant, sober, attentive, chivalrous, elegantly mannered man. They will say, in short, that he is a well-balanced man.

Translations lost in Booker International prize judging

It's a sad truth that authors whose original work one cannot read are at an inescapable disadvantage


Rick Gekoski
Wednesday 25 May 2011 16.32 BST

Well, it's over, and Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International prize for 2011. I was delighted about that. The judges have read with great zest and pleasure – surveying, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, "from China to Peru" – a vast amount of fiction by contemporary writers. It would have been great to find, and to reward, a writer in translation, preferably one little known to Anglophone readers. But we have an "International" Prize here, which surely means that it is open to anyone – who either writes in English or is available in English translation.

There is an intractable problem here, isn't there, in comparing like with unlike? John Carey, in his judge's speech in 2005, noted that "some writers had to be read in translation, which is a disadvantage", which puts the matter almost too fairly. Like John, I grew up in a literary culture that insisted on the primacy of close textual analysis: after all, a writer chooses a word, a phrase, a sentence, because none of the millions of alternatives will do the job. To find an apt transposition into another language, as a translator must, is a frustrating process, like "kissing a bride through her veil," as Israeli poet Chaim Nachman Bialik put it.

I suppose that is better than not kissing her at all. Other commentators on the question are not as sanguine, even, as that. Thus we have:

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation." (Robert Frost)

"What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best." (Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel)

"What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is." (Jonathan Miller)

"Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful."(YevgenyYevtushenko)

"Translation is the art of failure." Umberto Eco

Indeed, in accepting Man Booker International Prize for 2011, Philip Roth was delighted that it might make his books available to people who had not read them, "despite all the heartaches of translation that that entails."

A recent article in the LRB, Julian Barnes discussed the problem with particular reference to Madame Bovary. He cites six different English renderings of a single sentence, which vary to one degree or another, and of which, he observes, none is obviously preferable to the others. He resorts to a wine-tasting metaphor called "mouthfeel" to make the necessary discriminations between the alternatives.

Equally, a "brilliantly witty but sparse and snappy tale" by the Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou was recently translated by two different people, who were unaware of each other's efforts until the time came to compare them. Their final texts had only one sentence in common. It read: "Really?" So: of the two versions of the story, which is "by" Alain Mabanckou? Both? The better of the two? Neither?

More the former than the latter, surely. I'm pretty clear that Crime and Punishment, even when indifferently translated, is by Dostoyevsky. Except, of course, I also know that it isn't, not quite. My editor at Profile Books, Peter Carson, a skilled translator from the Russian, told me that he regrets almost all of the translations of the book, because they miss a crucial factor: "Dostoyevsky is funny." Funny? Gosh. Maybe Notes from Underground, I get that, but Crime and Punishment?

It is an intractable problem, about which I have two, slightly uneasy, comments to make. The first is that we constantly encounter, in one form or another, the problem of not understanding what another person says or means. This not because they are speaking Cantonese, but because of who they are, and that they are speaking at all. James Kelman, twice a Finalist for the Man Booker International prize, makes the point with characteristic bluntness, when one of his characters, frustrated by his failure to understand and to be understood, says:

"...one never knows what other people are fucking talking about... We were supposed to speak the same language but did we fuck...I forgot if I was talking, who I was talking to. I came in and out of perception like I was on dope."

This piece of applied Wittgenstein suggests that shared perception is the problem. Is there any? Or are all languages private ones? Thus we encounter constantly, every day, the problem of translation. Not just from one language to another, but within the same tongue: from adult to child, man to woman, white to black, English to American, historical to contemporary. "Oh man, you don't know where I'm coming from," people used to say. All tongues are foreign tongues?

Not quite - if you ask the way to The Hermitage it helps to understand Russian. It helps even more if you wish to get the most out of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. But the great majority of us – and this is my second point – have grown up reading these authors, and dozens of others in translation, with enormous profit and respect. I prefer reading Dostoyevsky to reading George Eliot, any day. I may miss the nuances of the language, not to mention its funniness, but I still get the extraordinary emotional power, the memorable characters, the play of ideas, the thump of the narrative. I remember Crime and Punishment pretty accurately, though I have not read it for 30 years, but can hardly recall anything of The Mill on the Floss.

Unless you have the original language you cannot say with any precision how well an author writes. Yes, sometimes you can guess. I am told that Juan Goytisolo is very well translated, and Wang Anyi often is not. We encountered a number of writers who we rather suspected were of top quality, but whose work was dreadfully translated, often by local cooperatives, university presses or cack-handed professors (often American). I remember one translation of a Chinese novelist in which the father and mother of a family were called "Mom" and "Dad." In another, a dreadfully sadistic guard at a prison is described as "really mean."

What's one to do? You can't offer the benefit of the doubt, because what you have is all you can work with. But it is frustrating, and the impulse to return to the comforts of the mother tongue can be very strong, and needs to be resisted. The translated novelists on our list of finalists – Wang Anyi, Juan Goytisolo, Amin Maalouf, Dacia Maraini, and Su Tong – are wonderful writers. I wish I could have read them in the original languages. I'm sure they'd be even better.

Whether they'd be as good as Philip Roth I can't, quite, say. But it's hard to believe they are.

THE GUARDIAN