letters from a seducer – Three Percent

Why This Book Should Win: BTBA Judge Daniel Medin Q&A with John Keene about Letters from a Seducer

Monica Carter — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 10:00:00 +0000

John Keene is the author of , and , both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection , with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer.

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators and is Associate Series Editor of

– Hilda Hilst, Translated by John Keene
Nightboat Books

Daniel Medin: How did you discover Hilda Hilst’s writing? What led you to want to translate this book?��

John Keene: My first real encounters with Hilst’s writing are a decidedly 21st century phenomenon. I had seen her name mentioned several times in various critical texts, and finally did an online search for her work about a decade ago. What I found and dove into was the old Angelfire website, still live, that Yuri Vieira dos Santos set up for her in 1999, and launched from her Casa do Sol. It was via that site, which features links to many of her works, photos, and lists of translations, that I was able to immerse myself in Hilst’s world. I only wish serendipity had led me to it before she passed away in 2004, so that I could have contacted her to let her know how deep my enthusiasm for her work was and is, just based on what I found there. After learning that although passages of her work had been translated into English, none of her books had, I immediately wanted to do so (I often have delusions of being the one to translate this writer or other’s work into English to introduce her or him to Anglophone readers), and fortuity again intervened when Rachel Gontijo Araújo invited me first to write the introduction to her collaborative translation with Nathanaël of��, and then to translate the deeply challenging but exhilarating��Letters from a Seducer.

DM:��Letters from a Seducer��is a part of Hilst’s famous “pornographic tetralogy.” How are these works different from what she was had been doing before? What distinguishes��Letters��from the others?

JK: Let me begin by saying that all of Hilst’s prose fiction is experimental, from her initial fiction text,��Fluxo-Floema��(1970), on, and is informed by her prior primary focus as a poet and a playwright. (She continued writing poetry throughout her life, I should note.) Her earliest poetry, published in the 1950s, is fairly conventional, but by the 1960s you can detect subversive notes, experiments with earlier Lusophone (and Iberian) forms, etc., so that when she began writing prose, it was hardly surprising that she would not follow the standard route. Yet I think it’s fair to say that her fiction is distinctive even from parallel experiments that were happening in Brazilian literature at the time, as a comparison between her texts of the 1970s and those of her close friend, Lygia Fagundes Telles, one of the major fiction writers of Brazil and in the Portuguese language, will suggest. While a book like��The Obscene Madame D��(1982) does overtly treat sexual themes, in the “porno-chic” works, as she called them, she more openly and directly uses and plays with pornographic language and discourse, and the works themselves turn in part on themes that might be considered pornographic, except that Hilst’s artistry, irony and wit transform them into something quite different.��Letters��(1991) is the second novel and masterpiece of the four texts; one of them,��Contos d’Escarnio: Textos Grotescos��(1990) is a collection of stories;����ܴ�ó����(1992) comprises poems; and��O Caderno Rosa de Lory Lamby,��ǰ��Lory Licky’s Pink Notebook��(1990),��as I think the brilliant translator Adam Morris dubbed it, is an extremely ludic, graphic precursor to��Letters��written in the voice of a child. (And possibly not publishable in the US, despite its relentless humor.) With��Letters,��Hilst reaches the pinnacle of the tetralogy and, I think, her art, fusing all the strands that have come before into a profound text about writing, living, sex, human mortality, and so on. It is also quite funny; she never sheds her humor, even at some of the most outrageous moments in the text, which is one of the things I really appreciate about her work.

DM: Could you point out one of your favorite passages, and tell us what you like about (translating) it?

 J��: To anyone who has heard me expound on this passage before, my apologies, but towards the beginning of the “Of Other Hollows” section, there’s a passage where Stamatius (Tíu) is meditating, as he’s won’t to do, about what he should be up to instead of agonizing of his writing and his life, as practical Eulália is off keeping things together for them, and Hilst writes:

E deveria ter procurado os cocos e os palmitos. Mas fico a escrever com este único toco e quando acabar o toco troco um coco por outro toco de lápis lá na venda do Boi (tem esse nome porque um boi passou certa vez por ali e peidou grosso). Vendem cachaça pagoça maria-mole carne-seca latas de massa. Então deveria ter ido a cata dos cocos, dos palmitos, e não fui. Continuo dizendo o que não queria. Minhas unhas. Curtinhas e imundas. E as dos pés?…��que��bom estão limpas.

Now, this probably won’t register immediately if you don’t read or speak Portuguese (or Spanish), but what Hilst is doing here is playing repeatedly with the word��“oco,” such that you get a string of those��“hollows” (“ocos”) one after the other, as well as other rhymes, assonances and consonances, a veritable seemingly untranslatable—into English—music, through the words that she uses: os cocos (coconuts), toco (stump/stub, also: I play, touch), troco (I exchange), etc. In fact, the��“o/ou” (OH) and��“u/o” (OOH) sounds appear in sentence after sentence, sometimes in a string of words, so that even when you don’t exactly get the��“hollow,” you get the sound that embodies it. This is the work of a true poet, and someone incredibly attentive to language. There’s also a great deal of polysemy here at the phonemic level. So this was a huge challenge: how to bring this into English, since it will by necessity be lost? I had to find an equivalent but distinctly English music, and realized that English does have musical resources of its own that would work. But it wasn’t easy, and when I felt I’d figured it out, I was exhilarated. There are many such moments, but this remains my favorite, and I could read the Portuguese aloud over and over. It’s amazing how she pulls it off.
My translation:

And I should have looked for coconuts and palm hearts. But I’m here writing with this lone stump and when I stop I’ll swap a coconut for another pencil stub over there at the Ox shop (so named because an ox passed through there once and let out a huge fart). They sell cachaça peanut fudge maria-mole dried meat tin cans of sauce. But I should have gone to gather up coconuts, palm hearts, and I didn’t. I keep talking about what I don’t want. My fingernails. Tiny and filthy. And my toenails? good to say, they are clean.

��
DM: You’ve a new collection of fiction publishing soon, some of which is set in Brazil. Have the two projects—your translation of Hilst and your writing of��Counternarratives—overlapped in any way? Or did they largely run parallel to one another?��

JK: This is an excellent question. I wrote or began several of the Brazil-related stories before translating Hilst, but I did draft and complete one—“Anthropophagy,” about the great Brazilian Modernist poet Mário de Andrade toward the end of his life, during his short stint in Rio de Janeiro—after finishing the translation. When I reread, sometimes aloud, the galleys after New Directions President and Editor-in-chief sent them to me, I could hear��my��poetry and music asserting itself in the prose. This is a tendency of mine, but I also think Hilst’s work played a role. It is probably most evident in a story called “Cold,” about the great minstrel performer, composer, actor, director, and impresario Bob Cole. In the story, which is about a musician who cannot get music out of his head to the point that it drives him to the mental brink, I have text boxes with snippets of his lyrics, and I also collage in lyrics into the main body of the text. This was all quite deliberate. The prose at certain points��breaks into music; it isn’t just lyrical, though. There are moments, I realized during a reading at Kean University the other day, where the music of the words themselves takes material form, sounding almost like drumming or hip hop, and I have to admit I was a little startled, because I had written the story and could hear it in my head, and had even read it before an audience last spring at the University of Montana, but this time, I was quite aware of what I’d done, under, I am willing to admit, the influence and sign of Hilst. That is just one example, and I’m sure there are more. Like other great authors, she shows in her work that anything is possible, if you can pull it off. That also was something I took to heart when finishing��Counternarratives.

—
The preface to Letters of a Seducer was published in the 2014 Translation Issue of The White Review; you can read it

Daniel Medin’s BTBA favorites: Autumn reading

Chad Post — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 15:29:28 +0000

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators, is an editor of The Cahiers Series ,and co-hosts the podcast entitled That Other Word. He has authored a study of Franz Kafka in the work of three international writers (Northwestern University Press, 2010) and curated the second volume of Music and Literature magazine (Krasznanorkai/Tarr/Neumann). He advises several journals on literature in translation.

This seems a timely moment to announce the forthcoming appearance of a translation issue I’ve edited for The White Review. For those unfamiliar, TWR is a London-based journal of art and literature that publishes print (quarterly) and online (monthly) editions. In addition to supporting new writers, the editors make it a point to highlight literature in translation. Recent numbers have included contributions by Dubravka Ugrešić, Vladimir Sorokin, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Javiar Marías, to name but a few.

I spent this past autumn selecting material for the issue, which is slated to go live early next month. Not surprisingly, there was significant overlap with my readings for the BTBA. Here are a few examples:

One’s by the late great Hella S. Haasse, whose gem, The Black Lake, I cited in a previous post. I’ve found the lack of attention devoted to this novel baffling. It is a beautiful little book, conceived and executed with intelligence and grace. The translator, Ina Rilke, ranks among the very best working from Dutch today. You’ve probably come across her work at one point or another by now: Rilke was behind the classic Eline Vere by Louis Couperus, which Archipelago brought out back in 2010; she’s translated multiple titles by W.F. Hermans and Cees Noteboom; and she’s currently at work on Max Havelaar by Multatuli for NYRB Classics. (There’s a full overview of her activity, along with a lovely snapshot of Rilke with Haasse, ) We’ll print the striking first pages of The Black Lake in The White Review. If your experience of them in any way resembles mine, then you’ll find yourself unable to stop.

I’m delighted that we can include an excerpt from the third volume of Faris al-Shidyaq’s Leg over Leg. The publication of earlier this year by NYU Press’s Library of Arabic Literature was a moment of glory for literature in translation. Expect plenty of hot sauce in this excerpt—that, and no shortage of ingenious linguistic dexterity on the part of translator Humphrey Davies. For an in-depth take on volume 1, have a look at this by Michael Orthofer. I share his excitement entirely, and am certain that others will as well once given a taste of al-Shidyaq’s writing.

Occasionally, a work of brilliance will make it possible for a virtuosic translator to outdo, line for line, a great deal of what’s recently appeared in her target language. In 2012, the English of George Szirtes for Satantango’s Hungarian struck me as superior to the sentences of most novels written that year in English. The same’s true of John Keene’s version of Letters from a Seducer by Hilda Hilst. Scheduled to appear this month, it was perhaps my most unforgettable reading experience of 2013. I’m terribly eager to read more Hilst now—and impatient to get my hands on Keene’s too.

I was glad I could include an excerpt from Orly Castel-Bloom’s acutely funny—and correspondingly painful—Textile. Castel-Bloom writes uncanny narratives that depict, with sensitivity but very little mercy, contemporary Israeli society. First published in 2006, this unpredictable and frequently grotesque novel is unlike most other Israeli fiction that I’ve encountered; it’s as close to Gogol as Hebrew can get. Translated by the eminent recipient of 2010’s BTBA, Dalya Bilu.

I’d like to devote a bit more space to two titles that have survived months of BTBA reading on my own personal shortlist. The first is Stig Sæterbakken’s Through the Night, whose emotional resonance brought me to tears. I found it the bravest, perhaps even riskiest of the novels in competition. (I was also surprised to discover, in its weaknesses as in its strengths, unlikely affinities with The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol.) Here’s the beginning of a review by Taylor Davis-Van Atta that will appear soon at Asymptote:

In an essay completed not long before his death last year, Stig Sæterbakken wrote: “How strong would our passions be, separated from our fear of dying? We want to live, sure. But we want to die as well. We want to be torn apart. We want to drown in the wonders of ecstasy.” Both the craft of this passage—a single rhetorical question opens a rich vein of content—as well as its sentiment seem to me to epitomize something of both Sæterbakken’s personal philosophy and his artistic ambition. As with all of his writing, the question posed by the Sæterbakken is simple, but deceptively so, situated as it is at an existential crux. And, as with all of his writing, it cannot be ignored nor easily grappled with. Sæterbakken seemingly holds no fear himself when examining the heart of his own experience, swiftly identifying a terrible and unavoidable paradox, an impossibility that nonetheless must be negotiated and further explored. His prose, which so often conveys the mandatory ugliness and pain of existence, yet which is always charged with beauty and great tenderness, is itself infused with paradox. The author of endlessly interesting novels and essays, Sæterbakken is an indispensable artist, one who must be reckoned with and one whose day in the Anglophone world is, I believe, shortly at hand.

Through the Night, Sæterbakken’s last published novel, centers around Karl Meyer, a middle-aged man who, prompted by the sudden suicide of his teenage son, Ole-Jakob, is forced to confront his past disgraces and contemplate his complicity in Ole-Jakob’s death, all while enduring overwhelming feelings of grief. The novel, which almost reads as two separate works, opens in the immediate aftermath of Ole-Jakob’s suicide, with Karl’s wife, Eva, having just lodged an ax in the screen of the family television set. The act is a statement of protest (Karl has been binge-watching since their son’s funeral), but it could almost be interpreted as a telegraphed message from Sæterbakken to his reader regarding what is to come: there will be no further distraction from the situation at hand, however terrifying and all-consuming it becomes. Indeed, the novel quickly delves into Karl’s past through a series of short vignettes in which Karl sets about tracing the history of his life’s two defining love affairs—with Eva and with another woman, Mona, for whom he had recently, if temporarily, left his family.

Issue 5 of Taylor’s Music & Literature, which will publish in spring 2015, will be devoted to Sæterbakken, Chinese novelist Can Xue, and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. You can order your subscription, and explore numerous reviews and features,

Stig Sæterbakken makes a brief appearance in the introduction to the below interview of Mircea Cărtărescu. As director of the Lillehammer Festival, Sæterbakken was instrumental in bringing the Romanian novelist to Norway. There, Cărtărescu spoke with Audun Lindholm, the editor-in-chief of Vagant, Norway’s most prestigious literary magazine. (Before he embarked upon My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgård directed the same journal.) The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation includes a long conversation between Lindholm and Cărtărescu about the Blinding trilogy. Below, a few questions and answers concerning the volume that has just appeared in English—The Left Wing— thanks to Archipelago Books.

AL: You call the child a bricoleur—could the same be said of the novel’s author?

MC: Yes. Generally, I begin with something ordinary and realistic, something I know well, and then, step by step, the logic of the text takes over. I never know what I’m about to write on the next page, I have no plan, I don’t know where I’m headed. I take advantage of the fact that I write quite slowly: because I write by hand, I have plenty of time to think at the same time. The most important thing is the texture of the individual page—it takes precedence over the story or the characters or the larger structure. Writing by hand creates an intimate relationship with the white sheet of paper, almost functioning like a mirror. When the writing turns out really well, it is as if I saw the final text in front of me, I simply erased the white of the paper that hides it. I have the impression that most prose writers start with a strong impression or a clear image in mind, gradually expanding on it and constructing a whole. I, on the other hand, aim at a writing process that consists of a series of such impressions. And I must admit that when I read other novels, even the most realistic among them, my attention is drawn to these very moments, to certain pages and specific formulations.

AL: “You do not describe the past by writing about old things, but by writing about the haze that exists between yourself and the past,” we read early on in Blinding: The Left Wing. And later: “I was always afraid to go to sleep. Where would my being go to during all those hours?”

MC: Yes, I think that the best pages of Blinding are not those that are realistic but those that are phantasmal, oneiric. The earliest memories we have, from the age of two, three, or four, mainly resemble dreams. We may recall buildings, landscapes, and people, and we have the feeling that they must have been real—otherwise we could not have seen them in such vivid detail. The same is true of some of our dreams. I have strong memories of particular dreams I’ve had, outrageous and disturbing dreams. I envision dreams, memories, and reality like a Möbius strip whose sides are indistinguishable from one another. I try to avoid changing historical facts and instead fill the gaps in my memory with fantasies. When information is hard to come by, I let my pen do the work.

To read the interview in its entirety—or a review of the novel published in the same issue—visit the Winter 2014 number of

Pixy Stick Infused Candy Canes [Some December Translations]

Chad Post — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 19:00:02 +0000

So, my 9-year-old daughter recently moved to a new school—one that encourages its students to participate in something called If you’re not familiar with this, which I totally wasn’t, it’s basically a competition in which teams perform different tasks that highlight “creativity”: some build a new form of transportation, others make a funny haunted house, or some, like my daughter’s group, act out a scene from a historic royal court and then act out one from an imagined court.

All sounds great, right? Kids learning to work together, doing something that doesn’t involve the Disney channel, learning to compete, etc.

And maybe this is great for some people. But with a team consisting of all fourth grade girls? HOLY SHIT. Basically, our weekly meetings are a competition to see which girl can be the loudest, the most distracting, the “funniest,” mostly at the expense of the hearing and sanity of the two adult coaches. You ever want to know what tinnitus is like? Attend one of these gatherings. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Here’s a little breakdown of how last night’s meeting went just to give you an idea.

6:30-6:40

Five girls descend upon this poor woman’s house. They great each other banshee style, and are seemingly incapable of understanding that when everyone talks simultaneously, no one hears anything. Keep in mind that these kids all go to the same school, are in the same class, and just saw each other about two hours ago. (As will become clear, spending time around gaggles of young children is turning me into Andy fucking Rooney.)

6:40-6:45

The primary coach of the team tries, valiantly, but unsuccessfully, to describe once again the nature of the “problem” our team has to work on. Basically, it went a little something like this:

Coach: We need to start by learning about a real king and queen.

Girl #1: KING ARTHUR! THAT WAS A KING!

Girl #2: I LOVE FASHION. I WILL DESIGN ALL THE ROBES.

Girl #3: CAN I BE THE QUEEN? WAIT, I’M THE JESTER!

Girl #4: DO WE HAVE SNACK TONIGHT?

Girl #1: CLEOPATRA! QUEEN ELIZABETH! HENRY THE VIII!

Girl #4: CAUSE, LIKE I’M REALLY HUNGRY.

Coach: Well, yes, if you’d all just listen for a—

Girl #3: WE CAN MAKE A SONG AND THE QUEEN CAN DANCE AND WE CALL ALL BE FUNNY AND OMG I LOVE SEAN!

Coach: If—

Girl #2: DID YOU SEE JESSICA’S HAIR TODAY? I CAN BRAID MY HAIR JUST LIKE THAT.

Girl #1: KINGS OF LEON!

6:45-7:00

In an attempt to remain sane, we let the girls spend 15 minutes researching kings and queens and decrees on their own. This was totally pointless, obviously, but helped to keep the total number of kid strangulations close to zero.

What I hadn’t realized before last night is that kids believe that Siri is the one and only gateway to knowledge. These kids had computers and iPads and phones and all the normal stuff, but not a single one of them went to Wikipedia, or used Google, or anything. They all just took turns yelling shit at Siri and expecting her to provide the answer. Their questions ranged from the reasonable, yet too complex for Siri, “WHAT DECREES DID QUEEN ELIZABETH MAKE?” to the utterly ridiculous “WHAT KING SHOULD WE DO OUR PROJECT ON TO WIN ODYSSEY OF THE MIND?” I always wondered who actually used Siri for things other than cracking wise (“Siri! What is a butt, Siri!”) or setting alarms (“Wake me up when I’m not hungover.”)—it is children. I have seen the future and it is a bunch of hyperactive homunculi expecting a non-existent woman to provide answers to the mysteries of life. We should all be afraid.

7:00-7:30

We coaches try and regroup and gain control of the team, but shit is too far gone. One girl has decided that the best research option is to play “Call Me Maybe” at like 200,000 decibels, so as to drown out the other screeching noises erupting from her teammates. Obviously.

Our only option to overthrow this band of renegade fourth graders is to bring out the snacks.

Every parent knows this next part. Snacks—which I remember as being peanut butter and celery, crackers, Hi-C, etc.—have become super-potent sugar transporters specially designed to transform every normal kid into Animal from the Muppets.

For example, last night’s snack was popcorn (good, good), fruit juice (made with exactly 1% real juice and 99% aspartame!), and I am not shitting you. As if a candy cane wasn’t sweet enough that we need to actually inject it with ANOTHER CANDY, one that’s simply colored sugar.

Five minutes after they all ingested this terrible Franken-candy, I was ready to bust out a plate of Ritalin and let them snort it until they were zombified. That’s what people should be injecting into candy canes.

7:30-8:00

In addition to their planned performance, each team also has to participate in a “Spontaneous Challenge” in which they’re given a problem that’s either verbal, hands-on, or hands-on and verbal (don’t ask) and have to solve it in five minutes. According to the coaching manual, this is the part that almost all the teams suck at, so you’re supposed to practice it a lot.

We decided to start with a verbal challenge. The group would be given a question, and then go around in a circle throwing out as many responses as possible in a five minute time period. Each answer would get 0, 1, or 5 points based on creativity, and you would lose points if more than one team member spoke at once. (Needless to say, our team ended with -46.)

Coach: So, here’s your question: “Name something that causes pain, and what pain it causes.”

Girl #1: WELL, SO, UM, DIVORCE? DIVORCE CAUSES PAIN IN YOUR HEART.

Game. Fucking. Over.

After that creepy, heart-breaking answer, everything devolved into a sort of therapy session with all the girls confessing to things that they felt guilty about:

Girl #2: YOU KNOW WHEN YOU TURN SOMEONE DOWN FROM BEING YOUR FRIEND? THAT HURTS IN YOUR CHEST.

Girl #3: WHEN YOU TELL SOMEONE THEIR CLOTHES ARE UGLY IT HURTS ALL OVER HERE (waiving hand over her head and face).

Girl #4: I THREW A BALL AT MY BROTHER AND BROKE HIS LEG. THAT HURT HIS LEG AND MY BRAIN.

Girl #5: FIVE. SQUIRREL. FOUR.

All Girls: HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER

Our official competition is sometime in March. Wish me luck. Not them—they’re totally fine with showing up juiced on Pixy Crack, yelling over top of everyone, and losing by a million points. I just hope my mind—and ears—can last that long.

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov (NYRB)

Probably the book I’m most looking forward to this month. Sigizmund UNPRONOUNCEABLE NAME was one of Russia’s wildest authors of the twentieth century—which is saying a lot. Adjectives tend to fall short in describing his surreal, fantastical, satirical stories, but here’s a great description from Adam Thirlwell’s introduction to this volume:

Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction is based on the fact that language makes things possible that are not possible in reality. If there is a word for “role” and a word for “character,” then naturally it follows, according to this method, that the two could possess separate existences. Or, to put this maybe more precisely, he investigated whether the distinction between what is possible in language and reality is even tenable at all. And so the central mechanism of this writing is metaphor (“a three-by-four-inch slip of paper torn from the notepad had miraculously turned into lodgings measuring one hundred square fee”)—the hinge between animate and inanimate objects, which allows figures of speech to acquire a strange kind of life.

by Jussi Adler-Olsen, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitkin (Dutton)

When Kaija and I were in Copenhagen, we had a chance to meet with Martin Aitkin, one of the premiere Danish translators working today. He’s a great guy, is constantly booked with translation job after translation job (including a lot of Danish mysteries), and showed up to our meeting wearing a My Bloody Valentine t-shirt. That’s bad ass.

by Wiesław Myśliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books)

How many times can we mention this on Three Percent in one week? I read this over the holiday weekend, and although it’s not as immediately gripping and hysterical as Stone Upon Stone, it’s a really solid novel—one of my favorites from this year. I’m planning on writing a real review of it in the near future, but in short, it’s a novel about an old Pole whose village was annihilated in World War II and his ensuing adventures as an electrician and saxophone player. Similar to Stone Upon Stone, the novel runs off of his voice and elliptical story-telling style. Bill Johnston hit another home run with this translation. He’s an absolute genius.

by Jean Ferry, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin (Wakefield Press)

This is a combination of a bunch of things I love: Wakefield Press (simply amazing books, and so well designed), Edward Gauvin, pataphysics, and, from the jacket copy, this collection includes a story about “secret societies so secret that one cannot know if one is a member of not.” SOLD.

by Tilman Rammstedt, translated from the Germany by Katy Derbyshire (Seagull Books)

This novel just sounds like fun. At least at first. It’s about a guy and his grandfather pretending to be on a trip to China, sending wild letters back to their family about their “Chinese adventures.” Along the way though, the grandfather dies unexpectedly and Keith is left writing longer and stranger letters about all sorts of bizarre things, like “non-stop dental hygiene shows on television, dog vaccinations at the post office,” and anything but news of their grandfather’s death and his ruse . . . Plus Katy Derbyshire is definitely on my list of books I read because I like the translator . . .

by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Even though Esposito shit on this in his recent I actually want to find some time to at least check it out. Molina is a masterful writer, and Scott’s logic—that he’s already read War and Peace so why read the War and Peace of Spain’s Civil War—is incredibly dismissive and flawed. By his logic, since I’ve read Don Quixote, all of contemporary literature can fuck itself. Besides, the Spanish Civil War is fascinating.

by Hilda Hilst, translated from the Portuguese by John Keene (Nightboat Books)

Hilda Hilst is like Clarice Lispector’s raunchy twin sister. In a literary sense of course. Her books are just as experimental as Lispector’s, but are much dirtier. In an strange, complicated, experimental way of course.

Here’s a bit about Hilst from Triple Canopy:

In 1990, the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst—a prolific writer of experimental poems, plays, and fiction, beloved by initiates and completely unknown to the broader public—declared herself fed up with the punishing obscurity of high art and started writing smut for money and fame. Really filthy stuff, like a pornographic memoir narrated by a nine-year-old girl. The literary critics, those few but loyal readers, were left baffled and betrayed. “I think money delicious,” Hilst explained, chain-smoking her way through interviews that accompanied the celebrity with which she was instantly rewarded. She said the idea came to her after witnessing the international success of The Blue Bicycle, a hugely popular erotic French novel—Fifty Shades of Gray for the 1980s. She figured she could make a buck the same way.

Or, at least, that’s one of the versions of events that Hilst slyly propagated. In fact, the bizarre series of obscene books she wrote in the early ’90s—three novels and one collection of poetry—is far from possessing broad popular appeal; the stunt brought Hilst more recognition as a personality than as a writer, and she never got to taste much money.

by Napoleon Bonaparte, translated from the French by Peter Hicks (Gallic Books)

Not to make fun of Gallic Books—they’re doing a lot of great stuff, including a Pascal Garnier book that I’m really looking forward to—but this “novel” by Napoleon consists of: a 13-page introduction, an 8-page afterword, a 28-page interpretation, a 5-page “Brief History of the Manuscript,” a 3-page “Note to the Readers,” and a 20-page novel. For those keeping track at home, Napoleon’s novel makes up exactly 26% of this total volume.

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely (Penguin)

The description on Penguin’s site is a bit lacking (SPOILER ALERT: The “Summary” is completely blank), but regardless, I’d read this anyway just because Maureen Freely translated it. Her essay in In Translation about translating Orhan Pamuk is one of the strongest in that collection and has turned me into a Freely Fanatic. Thanks to her essay I’m finally getting around to reading Pamuk’s Snow, and then will dive into this book.

by Grzegorz Wroblewski, translated from the Polish by Piotr Gwiazda (Zephyr Press)

Pretty sure this is the first poetry collection to appear on one of monthly round-ups. I wrote about this collection a while back though, and I still love these two poems:

You will survive in the minds of distant relatives and cousins, in their memories of you . . . (Motherfuckers! What if they deliberately choose to forget you!) And then, when they also depart, you will be no more.

and

You’ve got to watch experimental films! Underground. Underground poets. Tripping. Alcohol and sluts. Everything experimental. Nothing ordinary. (A: “Alcohol slows your reflexes.” B: “What reflexes?” A: “Your judgment.” B: “Is judgment reflexive?” A: “Fuck off.”)

by Sun-Mi Hwang, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim (Penguin)

After all that above, it seems fitting to end on a nice, charming, polite, allegorical novel about a hen.

This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to lay eggs on command, only to have them carted off to the market, she glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild—and to hatch an egg of her own.

An anthem for freedom, individuality and motherhood featuring a plucky, spirited heroine who rebels against the tradition-bound world of the barnyard, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a novel of universal resonance that also opens a window on Korea, where it has captivated millions of readers. And with its array of animal characters—the hen, the duck, the rooster, the dog, the weasel—it calls to mind such classics in English as Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web.