Jeffrey Zuckerman is an editor at Music & Literature and a translator from French, most recently of Jean Genet’s The Criminal Child (NYRB, 2020). A finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and a recipient of the French Voices Award Grand Prize, he is currently at work on Lutz Bassmann’s Black Village (Open Letter, 2021).

by Jean-Baptiste del Amo, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (Grove Press)

It’s the words that stand out first: guttering, hobnailed, eclose. Genetrix. Words unearthed from the archeological depths of our own language, some still evincing the crude rawness of their Anglo-Saxon origins, and others bearing the more finely wrought curlicues ported over by William the Conqueror and his Norman men from the Latin realm. Time, these words tell us, is a stubborn thing: the past is not easily washed away by the present; the long branches of past centuries can still jut unexpectedly into our own. The book’s very title underscores this: in French, Jean-Baptiste del Amo’s Rùgne animal simply means “animal kingdom”—in contrast to those of plants, fungi, protists, and monera. Not for many decades has anyone, in common parlance, used the original, deeply Latinate word, and yet no other word could fit so perfectly as the title Frank Wynne has chosen for his translation: Animalia.

Some authors use their vocabulary as a currency of sorts, a way of boasting that they have certain resources at hand, but what is remarkable about Animalia is how these words are there out of sheer necessity. I first read the book, in French, in 2017, and these same words leapt out to me: toussotant, łŠ±ôŽÇłÜłÙĂ©, Ă©łŠ±ôŽÇČő±đČÔłÙ, ȔéČÔĂ©łÙ°ùŸ±łŠ±đ. Literally: coughing, nailed, hatching, and the female counterpart to genitor or sire. In looking at the choices that Frank Wynne made, I am reminded of what he told me about how he grew up: in County Sligo, along the northwestern coast of Ireland, where his mother, a weathered and widowed matriarch now in her nineties, still tells him not to bother bringing in the coal during his visits because she can do it herself. And because of this life, he has a wealth of experience with which to fit these French descriptions to English phrasing: candles do not cough; they sputter, or are guttering. If benches have visible nails, they’re not nailed; they’re hobnailed. Insects can technically hatch, but eclose is more exact. Genetrix, though—why would such a word be deployed, whether in French or in English? Maybe because it strips away all the warm connotations of motherhood, maternity, and caring from the fundamental role that women once played and, in many places, still play: breeding, genesis, propagation.

Which brings us to what Animalia is actually about: the members of that strange kingdom, from insects to birds to mammals, including swine and humans alike. It is so vivid and coarse and unrelenting in its detail that one can hardly be surprised to learn that Jean-Baptiste is a member of . The wealth of attention that he bestows upon the natural world and the surroundings of the family whose trajectory he will follow over four generations and almost the entirety of the twentieth century is just as adroitly deployed on those bipedals peopling his text:

The pain gives Marcel only rare moments of respite. At best it fades to a dull ache that quietly throbs to the rhythm of his pulse somewhere in his devastated nerve endings. Even in his sleep he feels it lodged within him like a separate organism, a parasite, sometimes at the back of his patched-up jaw, sometimes deep in the empty eye socket, sometimes in his cervical vertebrae, patiently sinking its jaws into his bones, his tendons, his marrow, to feast on them.

It is moments like this, where the humans are barely described differently from the animals they raise and farm and slaughter, that I am reminded of when I learned the origins of the phrase “long pig.” And lest anyone should make the mistake that any degree of intelligence separates humans from swine, one of the most memorable boars, nicknamed The Beast, is made one focus of the narrative, with thoughts and memories and needs of his own fully articulated.

It may be a truism that every human has some bestiality, some animality in their core, just as each animal possesses something of the human in their heart—but that does not make the exposition of that principle any less fascinating in del Amo’s hands. Particular images linger long after reading (especially the repeated trope of describing the world as seen, or reflected, in the eyes of cows and crows and indeed pigs), and certainly the later descriptions of how Serge and JoĂ«l run the factory farm of pigs makes it as hard to look at a slice of bacon afterwards as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle once disgusted those who had bought mass-slaughtered meat. But Jean-Baptiste del Amo’s intention has never been to shock or to disgust: only to depict, without any hint of modesty, the full emotional breadth of the world in which his characters live.

If I had been asked three months ago to make a case for why Animalia should win the Best Translated Book Award, I would have pointed to how the text’s beauty of language is a direct outgrowth of both the author’s and the translator’s backgrounds, and of how it forces those of us who very rarely spend long stretches of time among other animals to realize how dependent we are on farming for our daily bread, how divorced we are from how these living creatures are transformed into shrink-wrapped slabs of meat on refrigerated, fluorescent-lit shelves.

But because we are in the middle of a pandemic, the mentions of fever and illness have taken on fraught significance, and that factory farm I mentioned feels even more unnervingly symbolic:

‘What the fuck happened?’ Serge asks, looking at the miscarried foetuses.

‘I don’t know . . .’ JoĂ«l says, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. ‘Two sows have miscarried. One of the gilts in the first pen, and a sow on her second farrowing in the third pen.’

‘Are they running a temperature?’

‘No, I checked both.’

‘In that case, it must be a coincidence.’

‘We have to tell him, though, don’t we?’

‘Absolutely not, not right now. I don’t think it’s anything serious,’ Serge says, staring at the bucket. ‘One of the crop fields on the Plains has been destroyed.’ . . .

They will say nothing to Henri. Why give him another reason to worry? It is not as though an epidemic is going to decimate the herd in the next couple of hours . . .

The sad truth, as we have come to understand on a social level, is that epidemics are always detected too late, and that their origins are all too often deeply rooted in our breeding and sale and consumption of animals, fostering the transfer of viruses from one species to another. Whether they come from fowl or swine or bats or pangolins, from the wet markets of Wuhan or the farmlands of western Kansas or the rural countryside of Guinea, our tangled and violent relationship with other species of Animalia underscores just how little we have to distinguish ourselves from the kingdom’s other species—and how willingly we put ourselves at risk for our own downfall.

No other book on this list so clearly lays bare the filth out of which we have risen over the past hundred years, nor how we have arrived at this moment—and how we, through our practices and our demands, have found the pestilence of the past still thrusting its brutality into our present moment, unable to be easily washed away by the breakneck pace of human progress. This book, like the Beast that comes every so often to the fore, is quite simply both beautiful and terrifying:

Three or four boars are sufficient to impregnate the breeding sows. One of them, the one they have nicknamed the Beast, is the result of years of selection and clever interbreeding. Never before have the men managed to breed such a specimen. The Beast weighs four hundred and seventy kilos, stands one metre forty hoof to shoulder, and measures four metres long. When they parade him past the stalls to check whether the sows are in their heat, the huge testicles swinging from left to right in his scrotum are like a sneer at the men’s impotence, while urine trickles from the vulvas of the sows as they smell his sour breath. Aware of his physical superiority, frustrated by the proximity of sows, his confinement and the competition from other boars, the Beast can be volatile. He has already managed to corner Henri in one of the aisles of the pig shed, pinning him against the bars of a stall, and would have ripped off the hand he was about to bite had Serge not intervened and beaten him viciously. Yet the Beast is the father’s pride and joy. Henri believed in him from the beginning. When he emerged from the womb of his mother, a first-class breeder, he was twice as heavy as the other piglets in the litter, four of which were so puny that the men had no choice but to destroy them.

‘We’ll not be castrating this one,’ Henri said, pointing to the boar.

by Antoine Volodine, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman (France, Open Letter Books)

In Radiant Terminus, we have a novel that disturbs and enthralls, sucking us in to a nightmarish void of a world that might be Purgatory or the Buddhist “Bardo” or some dystopian point in the near/far future. Needless to say, in this moment when the “Second Soviet Union” has fallen and nearly all mammalian life on Earth has died, one wonders if such a distinction even matters anymore.

Antoine Volodine, author of “post-exotic” works, has created a cast of characters who move across this wrecked yet lush landscape, seeking some sort of (radiant?) terminus where they can finally find shelter and rest. They converge on a small commune that is slyly named “Radiant Terminus,” run by a man named Solovyei, who spins and declaims his own epic narrative prose poems that tell of his malicious capacity to bring people back—but only partly—from the dead. And then there are people like the Gramma Udgul (and Solovyei himself?), whose exposure to high levels of radiation have rendered them, in some sense, immortal.The title itself suggests a terminal that emits radiation (e.g., energy unleashed by nuclear reaction)—thus an end point that is always in flux.

Often, the narrative itself starts sounding like Solovyei’s strange and haunting prose poems (or vice versa), the sentences building up momentum as they amble along toward a terminus:

The time did come when those who had the talent declaimed epic chants, invented poetic or comedic monologues, or recited propaganda texts that had stuck with them in their earlier life, or parts of communist, post-exotic, or feminist romances. The audience accompanied them by approving or voicing speeches, as we did in the old days during Korean pansori performances, when Korea still existed and we still believed in beauty, the future, and the impossibility of death.

Volodine’s deft manipulation of irony and careful weaving together of narrative perspectives and voices, all stage-managed, perhaps, by Solovyei, makes Radiant Terminus worthy of the BTBA prize. By the end of the book, you’ll feel like you’ve wandered across the bewildering landscape of Volodine’s own mind, and how many authors have you read who can do that? Exactly.

The entry below is by Jennifer Croft, who is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation. She has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a Founding Editor of the Buenos Aires Review.

by Ananda Devi, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Mauritius, Deep Vellum)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 72%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 13%

Men’s hands take hold of you before having even touched you. Once their thoughts turn toward you, they’ve already possessed you. Saying no is an insult, because you would be taking away what they’ve already laid claim to.

Like the hand snaking up my T-shirt, they need me to lift my skin so they can feel my organs, or even stop my heart from beating. Their urges won’t be constrained. Soon they’ll be nothing left to take but they’ll keep going anyway.

But why should I let them?

This is the most vivid novel I’ve read in ages, magnificently translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman. The gorgeous, profoundly poetic writing is completely mesmerizing and viscerally affecting: it gave me goose bumps several times. Cycling through four main adolescent voices in an impoverished neighborhood of Port Louis, Mauritius, the narrative slowly escalates through brilliant and memorable scenes, as well as haunting inner monologues, to its glorious conclusion that manages to somehow be both devastating and uplifting at once.

I am your double. I am your single. I have split completely and totally in two: I was Saad, sitting transfixed in my stiff chair (or stiff in my transfixed chair), and I was someone else, unmoored, observing things but pushing them away through his thoughts, his defiance, his mortality.

There is something so triumphant and so powerful in the structure of Eve, and something so real and touching in these characters, each consistent, unexpected, thought-provoking and wonderful.

My older brother Carlo is gone. He went to France ten years ago. I was little. He was my hero. When he left, he said: I’ll come back to find you. I’m waiting for him. He never came back. He calls sometimes, but only to make small talk. I don’t know what he’s doing over there. But when I hear his voice, I know he’s lying, that he hasn’t done well. When I hear his voice, I know he’s dead.

And I’d love to kill, too.

A work of profound sympathy and deep desire.

by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

(Words Without Borders)

PK: You often write of surreal realities. “Other worlds,” one might even say, or “dream realities” or the realities of subconscious. But what do you think when the surface is also so surreal? For example, America right now is in chaotic, almost psychedelic, upheaval. What happens when the truth is stranger than fiction? What do you think of Trump and the chaos in America at the moment? I know things have not been easy in China either, but how do you handle it? Do you think much about politics anymore? Do you feel it matters for art? How can readers and writers alike approach this—should we immerse or ignore?

CX: As the saying goes, “onlookers see more than the player.” As an eastern artist and a foreigner who has closely watched the changes in the United States, I don’t think the current situation in the country is that strange. Although American people have a long excellent tradition of democracy, and the system of the country is relatively good, at the same time, the country also has a long conservative tradition. This tradition usually functions as nationalism. For many years the political elite who led the country followed the principle of “political correctness.” They neither really knew their own people, nor understood people in other countries. The only thing they usually did was to hold high the banner of justice for their policymaking. So I think that the phenomenon of Trump is a great explosion of contradictions. It shows that the leaders of the country are more and more out of touch with the American people. They don’t know what people think about, and how they feel about their lives nowadays. And also, the theory the leaders depend on to rule the country, to deal with their foreign affairs, is a very old one that is not suitable for the situations of the world that is changing rapidly.

(NPR Books)

Reading this book is like trying to solve a mystery in a dream. Like the Pleiades, it’s best glimpsed without looking at it directly. Patterns recur, but to track them or expect them to lead to something is a mistake. (Imagine a Mirkwood where the only caution is not to walk the path, because to do so is to walk it forever.) Porochista Khakpour, in a beautiful, thoughtful introduction to the book and Can Xue’s work, notes that the book seems pleasurably to lengthen as we read it — and this was absolutely my experience. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping’s translation is that species of wonderful that makes you forget you’re reading a translation until they see fit to remind you, which is also deeply of a piece with Pebble Town’s absent-minded strangeness.

“Review by Beau Lowenstern”: (Asymptote)

As with much of Can Xue’s translated work, people and things, time and space, all tend to envelope each other like a mist. Perhaps most notable in her short stories, her ability to find careful footing in the space between the real and the surreal is unique and achieves a balance that is both remarkable and often unsettling. In Frontier (Open Letter, 2017), her newest novel to appear in English, this balance is penetrating and comes through most forcefully in the town itself. In a letter to her parents, who have left Pebble Town to return to the city, one of the primary characters, Luijin, writes, “she felt that Pebble Town was a slumbering city. Every day, some people and things were revived in the wind. They came to life suddenly and unexpectedly.” For the reader, Pebble Town both grounds and disorientates us at the same time, without interruption. It serves as neither a character nor a place, but magnifies what is around it; enhances and completes it. Can Xue leaves no landmarks or way points to light the path when navigating this curious place, except to remind us “on snowy days, one’s field of vision widens.”

and by Antoine Volodine, transalted by J. T. Mahany and Jeffrey Zuckerman, respectively

(Complete Review)

Volodine’s novel isn’t so much an end-of-times dystopia of the dime-a-dozen sort found nowadays (catastrophe, apocalypse, bla bla bla), as a philosophical-literary exploration of the literal, at-infinity end of times. And it’s a great success as such. No small part of that is due to tone and voice, a register captured just right in Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation.

In its detail, Radiant Terminus is arguably dreary and bleak, and the novel is certainly long—but, in fact, it is thoroughly engaging, the stories unfolding, and dosed out, at the perfect pace, making for actual suspense, even beyond the constantly intellectually intriguing premises. And while an all-powerful character like Solovyei can be difficult to handle (or, for readers, to put up with . . .), Volodine deftly employs the puppet-master-man.

( to help Bardo advance to the finals!)

Like all great writers, the most enduring, [Volodine] approaches his subject matter and characters with a dazzling blend of empathy, pathos, and humor, all of which creates a pleasantly beguiling reading experience. [. . .] Volodine, however, echoing Samuel Beckett’s macabre-absurdist tradition, refuses to allow anyone to attain enlightenment without a certain number of missteps, misunderstandings, and outright failures.”

(Asymptote)

I just gave a different interview a couple months ago about this where I was arguing that we shouldn’t try to ghettoize international literature and translations as being super separate. Most translations tend to be high works of literature because of the nature of the small presses that are publishing these books. They tend to want to do important books and not thrillers, not romance novels, not things that are like, “Who cares, in five years no one’s going to remember this book anyway; it’s just like popcorn.” They’re investing these resources and, because they’re not going to make money and are doing this out of a passion for literature, they tend to do high literary works—pure literature. And the readership for pure literature, be it written in English or German or Hungarian or Japanese or whatever, is pretty small. But if we can appeal to that audience as a whole—instead of being like, “Oh, are you a reader of translations?” saying, “Are you a reader of literature?” Dividing those readers is not useful because we’re still talking about the same sorts of books. In comparison to Dan Brown. That’s a difference. But within that realm, it’s pretty much overlapping. I think that the booksellers and the people that are tastemakers, who are reading a lot of literary works from American writers or British Writers or whomever, are reading more and more books in translation that fit into that world and are making that more a part of their conversation.

by Rodrigo FresĂĄn, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden

(Kirkus)

Think of it as a portrait of the artist as a young cultural omnivore grown old, under whose lens Heraclitus, Einstein, and Looney Tunes all have more or less equal footing. Fresán’s long novel begins with what may be a subtle nod to Proust, save that instead of retreating to a quiet room The Boy, our protagonist’s first emanation, is afoot and on the run, tearing around on street and sand, “running like that Roadrunner the Coyote can’t stop chasing.” [. . .] Studded with references to everyone from Dylan and the Beatles to Stanley Kubrick and F. Scott Fitzgerald, it adds up to a lively if sometimes-disjointed paean to creativity.

An exemplary postmodern novel that is both literature and entertainment.