Marcel Inhoff is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn. He is the author of the collection Prosopopeia (Editions Mantel, 2015), and Our Church Is Here (Pen and Anvil, 2018) as well as numerous poems and essays in German and English. He is currently working on his first novel.

by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Knopf)Ìę

Marie NDiaye’s gifts as a psychologically acute observer, a novelist with exceptional skill in depicting characters at an extraordinary depth and vividness have been well observed and described. The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel is one more in a row of widely acclaimed novels about all kinds of characters. This one is about a cook who rose from rags to riches, not without being profoundly uncomfortable about the whole affair. The descriptions of her tumult, her growth, of the way she came to become a cook, through an accident, the sumptuous descriptions of her delight in the art of cooking, of her shame of her upbringing, all of this is masterfully evoked. Except—we see it all indirectly. The Cheffe does not speak with us—we hear the voice of a seemingly devoted narrator who works with and admires her, a factotum, almost.

It is tempting to read this novel entirely as a biography of the titular cook. After all, NDiaye fills her novel with extraordinary elements. There is the sense of class—the shame of one’s roots, and the quiet, but conflicting pride in having elevated one’s craftsmanship to such a prominent level as the Cheffe has. Cooking is, like writing, a craft that best works with an audience: readers, eaters. And the moment of reading, eating, is central to the book’s most pivotal moments. She finds herself a cook because she works in the kitchen of a rich, strange family, and is suddenly afforded the opportunity to take over duties as head chef. So she, already dissatisfied with the previous cook’s work, works out her own dishes and impresses her employers, the strange Clapeau family. Another such moment presents itself when she cooks refined dishes for her parents, who do not like their daughter’s vaunted cooking skills. At this point, we know that “refined” doesn’t mean “pretentious” in the dismissive sense of the word. The Cheffe has genuinely elevated her craft—and her palette in a way that shifts her sense of place and class so much it creates a rupture with her origins. As Pierre Bourdieu noted about himself: a second habitus has developed, and a shift has taken place, which the Cheffe finds disturbing.

Without unnecessarily going into details, this is the rift that motivated the self-examination at the heart of some of Didier Eribon’s recent work, most famously the Return to Reims, and it is not overall uncommon in literature. What is different here is the way NDiaye presents her female protagonist at the levels of the process—she is the head chef, a position unusual enough and important enough for the book that Jordan Stump’s translation has preserved it as the book’s title. It is an unusual choice—the Grand Robert, the Merriam-Webster of the French language, recommends turning the customary “le chef” into “la chef”—but that is not an option here. What’s more, the mastery of cooking—and the concept of mastery per se—is still understood as inherently male. 77% of professional chefs in the US are male, while home cooks are majority female. The difference here is written into the title of the book and its protagonist. She is one of modern cooking’s auteur chefs—with specific, painstakingly created, unique signature dishes, and the kitchen doubling as a “room of her own.”

One has to admire the book’s style, well translated by Jordan Stump, of what could maybe be called exact sumptuousness—a style that perfectly conveys the seductiveness of cooking, the richness of flavors and scents, the attraction of each individual element that composes a great dish, without decomposing into faux-baroque mush, a danger in books about the senses. This skill is heightened by the fact that all this description is wrapped around the simpler, sometimes strangely whiny discursive language of the narrator, a former cook in the Cheffe’s restaurant, hopelessly infatuated with his boss, and still writing, from his elegant retirement home, with a gesture of longing and admiration. His language is halting, self-correcting, searching, and contra many reviews of the novel, it is this narrator that elevates NDiaye’s novel above many of its contemporaries.

NDiaye has long been suspicious of autofiction and autobiography. Not belonging to the community LĂ©onora Miano’s Afropeans, or at least not overtly identifying with them, she has often described herself as French, her Senegalese roots not as central to her identity as her interlocutors and reviewers like to make them, at least, not explicitly. In her work, her heritage and background shines through in much of her best work—but how does it relate to the “Cheffe” at the center of the work? In what I think is her most underappreciated work, the Autoportrait en Vert, NDiaye offers a strange hallucinatory search for a self, an apparition. The book is a challenge to readers, a book at odds with some fashionable assessments of what autofictional literature can, and maybe should, do. It is literally an evasive book—a chase for a phantom.

In The Cheffe, Marie NDiaye writes about a woman who does not want to be defined by her biography, who does not want pictures taken of her face to overshadow the work she produces. The Cheffe wants her work to speak for itself, her dishes to be tasted without being seen as reflections of any specific person. This fact is so central to the book that the narrator begins by explaining it to us before pushing aside any such concerns, before digging up and uncovering the biography of someone who hated being so uncovered. His doubts and thoughts are constantly with us. It is a mistake to read Marie NDiaye’s novel as a psychological portrait of the cook alone or even primarily. It is a portrait of the act of biography, the epistemological violence of dragging an author into a spotlight not sought by them. It is by no means an accident that this factotum, this insistent biographer is male—and that he pushes himself to the front of the picture, so that we never see the Cheffe without also seeing him, and his woeful inner torment. In French literature, this ponderous male voice is common—for example, it is all over Laurent Binet’s HHhH, a biography of Reinhard Heydrich and his two assassins. Not content to write the story of the assassination, Binet also writes the story of writing the story—including a discussion of other books being written about the topic and why his project is superior, more truthful, better.

It is difficult not to read The Cheffe as a novel not just about female ambition and success, not just about class and power, but a book about how interwoven our knowledge of the world is with the masculine push to dominate narrative. As in Autoportrait en Vert, here, too, Marie NDiaye offers us a chase—and a trap. The Cheffe’s psychology is given to us by the narrator, and the narrator alone. This is not about him being reliable or unreliable—it is about him being a central character of the story. Patriarchal constructions of narrative history as well as masculine dominance of literature mean that we must always be careful around these tales of female lives told to us by men. And where we must be most on our toes is about stories about female relationships with other women, in stories written by men. And so NDiaye includes a difficult relationship, between the Cheffe and her daughter, but makes sure we understand the extent to which this relationship is refracted through the eyes of the narrator.

And yet, despite all this metafictional finesse, this cleverness, this, even, bitterness of Marie NDiaye, a cheffe herself struggling with the narratives draped upon her shoulders, the book is never bogged down. Often, you have to choose—some of the clever books praised by reviewers and readers for their intelligence offer little in the way of story and characters, falling back on the bare bones of cleverness and conceit. This is not the case here. The book is never less than richly readable, engaging, a brilliant book by a great storyteller and a sharp thinker.

Pierce AlquistÌęhas an MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is a freelance book critic and writer. She is also the Communications Coordinator for the Transnational Literature SeriesÌęat BrooklineÌęBooksmith, an author events series thatÌęfocusesÌęon stories of migration, the intersection of politics & literature, and works in translation.ÌęShe can be found on Twitter @PierceAlquistÌęandÌęonÌę.

by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (Graywolf)

In Selva Almada’s arresting debut, translated by Chris Andrews, four souls are “thrown together on a single day in rural Argentina” as a storm brews overhead. When Reverend Pearson’s car breaks down, fate leads him and his teenage daughter Leni to the dusty, out-of-the-way garage of Gringo Bauer and his assistant Tapioca. The traveling Evangelical quickly takes an interest in Tapioca’s pure soul, setting up the increasingly tense relationship between the mechanic and the man of god. As the storm breaks and the titular winds lay waste, the lives of these characters will be forever changed.

The Wind That Lays Waste is a profound examination of family and faith, a modern fable really. In comparison to the other books on the longlist, it’s one in a trend of rural novels and yet it stands apart in its writing and approach—told in one day and with only four main characters it may seem simple but in reality it’s this refreshingly deep and thoughtful novel, a self-contained moment of time and place. A simplicity that I can imagine is one of the most challenging things for an author to write, and then a translator to convey.

And what a translation it is! Perfect sentences abound, “His mother’s skirt moved in front of him like a curtain revealing and hiding the landscape as the cloth blew about in the wind.” And each character is compelling—to describe them as “fleshed out” seems almost tongue-in-cheek as it doesn’t come close to encompassing the depths to which Almada plunges into each character’s heart and soul and Andrews masterfully captures it:

But Leni had no lost paradise to revisit. Her childhood was very recent, but her memory of it was empty. Thanks to her father, the Reverend Pearson, and his holy mission, all she could remember was the inside of the same old car, crummy rooms in hundreds of indistinguishable hotels . . . and a mother whose face she could hardly recall. The Reverend completed his circuit and came back to where his daughter was standing, as rigid as Lot’s wife, as pitiless as the seven plagues. Leni saw his eyes glistening and quickly turned her back on him.

The Wind That Lays Waste is also set against one of the most powerful and beautifully described atmospheres of a novel I’ve ever read. It’s a novel that tangibly feels like weather. As the plot picks up, the characters swirl around each other and everything thickens like the dense, sticky, humidity that comes before the storm. As the story reaches its peak, tensions erupt like thunder and lightning and then the rains finally come. Whether or not they could have been stopped and the fate of these four characters changed is anyone’s guess.

The storm had gathered in the blink of an eye. If they hadn’t needed the rain so badly, the Gringo would have stopped it like his mother had taught him, because it wasn’t looking pretty. She had passed the secret on to him before she died. Out in the open, facing the storm front, you drive an ax into the ground six times, to make three crosses and after the last blow you leave it stuck there. It’s hard to believe if you’ve never seen it done, but the sky opens and the raging storm turns into a blustery passing wind. The storm slinks off, with its tail between its legs, to someplace where no one knows the secret. But those who know it must use it with care. Every crack in the earth was crying out for rain. This was no time to turn a storm away.

Nature’s secret thought the Gringo, kills any secret man can know.

Barbara HallaÌęis an Assistant Editor forÌęAsymptote Journal. She worksÌęas a translator and independent researcher, focusing in particular on discovering and promoting the works of contemporary and classic Albanian womenÌęwriters. Barbara holds a B.A. in History from Harvard and has lived in Cambridge, Paris, and Tirana.

by Igiaba Scego, translated from the Italian by Aaron Robertson (Two Lines Press)

“Oh, Mar,” writes Miranda, one of the five narrators of Beyond Babylon, to her daughter, “you have so many cities within you. You represent Venice and also Genoa, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Mogadishu, Rome.” There is no one-liner that can easily summarize an epic like Beyond Babylon, and while this quote itself might feel useful as a starting point to understanding the book, it can also be misleading.

Like its five main characters, who divide their lives and identities between some half-dozen cities and cultures, Beyond Babylon belongs to many countries, and many eras: Zuhra and Mar, two young Italian women of Somali descent, spend most of the book in Tunis taking an extended course in modern Arabic and both have ties to Spain. Miranda’s chapters take us back to Buenos Aires in the 1970s, at the height of Argentina’s “Dirty War.” And through Maryam and Elias, the reader explores a remembered Somalia through more than three decades of national and personal history, from the years Somalis spent under Italy’s brutal colonial rule, to the first few years of the country’s independence.

It’s a sprawling journey across continents and generations that begins and ends in Rome, the city that all characters have called home at one moment or another in their lives, though Rome is not an uncomplicated home.

And yet, describing Beyond Babylon in these terms would mean to perhaps unfairly categorize it as one of those “global novels” not seldom by critics for trying to achieve some sort of universal truth through the medium of literature. It’s true that Beyond Babylon hops from one place to the next, giving us the perspectives of characters at the center of history being made, perspectives often left at the margins of recorded history itself. It is also true that, despite it being written and published back in 2006 (which from 2020 feels like a completely different world altogether), it will strike a nerve with readers today because it is a book that engages directly with issues pertaining to sexual assault, womanhood, race, immigration, and colonialism.

And it couldn’t be otherwise considering the characters that inhabit this story. Zuhra and Mar are both black and Italian and forced to navigate and negotiate their existence in a country that seems to simultaneously despise them and forget that they exist. Zuhra works as a stocker at Libla—a retail chain for books, movies, and music—where she is ignored by white customers who meander the floors looking for someone (white) to help them. Both Zuhra and Mar are always conscious of their bodies not just as women, but as black women, with Mar fielding questions that try to have her explain her existence: “Why are you black, if your mom’s white?” A constant reminder that marginalization entails self-alienation, always looking at yourself how others look at you.

Like all books about displaced people, Scego’s characters are steeped in history, theirs and their ancestors, and much of the book is them trying to make peace with their complicated history. The beauty of this book is that in one way or another these characters are all so humanly flawed, and for all the progressive politics the novel embodies, sometimes personal politics do not quite catch up with their personal feelings. Miranda is an Argentinian immigrant, who escaped Buenos Aires after her brother was kidnapped and tortured by Videla’s regime at the same time that she herself became the lover of one of her brother’s potential torturers. Now a famous poet, people come to her for her opinions on the latest world events.

Meanwhile, Zuhra tries to smuggle her cousins from Italy to Sweden, where she hopes they will be able to find a better and more welcoming new home, and when faced with the ethical questions of what that would entail, she offers this indictment of the system that has forced her into that decision in the first place:

If this meant paying a soul smuggler to drive them around half of Europe, so be it. Was it illegal? No more than it was tossing toxic waste in Somalia or feeding civil wars and insecurities to plunder the riches of African countries as the West did. The word illegal didn’t make sense anymore. Not for me.

But while Zuhra is constantly aware and vocal about a number of institutional and societal ills, that doesn’t mean that she herself isn’t victim to some poor decision-making, chief among which is her propensity to fall in love with sickly-looking white boys who don’t give her the time of day.

Sometimes I fear that talking about Beyond Babylon only in these terms makes it easy to fall into the trap of feeling like Scego has written a book that deserves a prize or acclaim because it checks a number of boxes. That sort of trap leads to looking at the socially relevant aspects of this book at the expense of the intimacy that imbues its pages, not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive.

Yes, this is a book about capital I important topics, but it’s also a book about the characters’ fraught relationship to their own fragile bodies, to their families, to their surroundings. There is an unvarnished focus on the female body, on how it keeps women alive, and how it can burden them through menstruation and defecation. But it’s not just bodily functions, much of Beyond Babylon is also about pain and pleasure as experienced (or perhaps dictated) by the body: how the characters’ eyes see (or miss) the vibrant colors of Rome and Tunis, the smells of Brava, the taste of familiar food. Look at how Maryam, Zuhra’s mother, describes the all-day feast held in her native Brava to celebrate Somalia’s independence:

They gave themselves merrily, especially that day, in a constant give and take. They filled their mouths with halwa, hot dumplings, fragrant injera, spiced rice, stew. Everything was gulped down with shai and ginger coffee. There were also colorful drinks being passed around, and the children argued briefly over sugared bur.

It’s important to mention that if Beyond Babylon works so well, it is especially thanks to Aaron Robertson’s pitch-perfect translation. Scego has carefully crafted the narrative voice of each character in her novel, they differ in tone, register, in the turns of phrases they use. And you can tell how Robertson has worked just as meticulously to map these differences into English: Zuhra’s tone is scathing and self-deprecating, Mar’s aloof, scared, a person not yet in touch with her own feelings. Miranda’s writing has a poetic yet almost artificial quality to it, as befits a poetess who strives for honesty but isn’t quite there yet. No wonder her section is filled with phrases such as, “Everything is parenthetical in life.” Whereas Maryam, who is trying to dredge up the memory of her past in Somalia to gift it to her daughter, takes often the tone of a parent recounting a messy fairytale, her home “a past that bordered on legend.” And finally, Elias, the only male point of view in this tale, whose pages sometimes read like dense, though no unpleasant, historical treatises.

Language is a driving force in Beyond Babylon which mixes various tongues—Spanish, Italian, Somali and even Arabic. It is languages that bring people together, as Miranda, Maryam, and Elias record for their children the stories they can’t bear to tell out loud. It is also what drives people apart in all that language cannot express, in the barriers that are erected between second-generation immigrants and their parents when the former never quite learn their mother’s tongue under pressure to integrate to a new home. Beyond Babylon raises these issues, while also rejecting the very premise of strict integration and fluency, taking pride in not being one sole, uncomplicated thing. As Zuhra, first reluctantly, then proudly says in the book’s epilogue:

“I don’t speak, I mix.”

Adriana X. Jacobs is the author of (University of Michigan, 2018) and associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Oxford. Her translation of contemporary Hebrew poetry have appeared in Gulf Coast, Anomaly, World Literature Today, North American Review, The Ilanot Review, among others. Her translation of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye, for which she was awarded a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press.

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by Shimon Adaf, translated from the Hebrew by Yael Segalovitz (Alice James Books)

Shimon Adaf’s first two collections of poetry—The Monologue of Icarus and What I Thought was Shadow is the Real Body—were published in 1997 and 2002 to wide acclaim, establishing him as one of his generation’s most exciting writers. From there, Adaf pivoted to prose, publishing short stories and novels in a range of genres, from detective fiction to sci-fi, and appeared to have put poetry behind him. But then, in 2008, his beloved, older sister Aviva died. Her death was sudden and unexpected—“the heart is arrested and named mere breath”—and in the months that followed, he was drawn back to poetry. In an interview with Adaf, , he described this turn as a search for his own language of grief: “I had to find out my rituals, my language, and the only way that I can do it is starting when there is no language. And I think that poetry always starts with no language at all.” From “no language” the poems of Aviva-lo took form.

Yael Segalovitz’s translation Aviva-No was published late last year by Alice James Books, but rereading it now in this time of pandemic, I am struck by the timeliness of this collection, how the personal crisis that Adaf explores—in a book first published in 2009—speaks so clearly to the crisis of this current moment (maybe poetry of crisis is always of the moment?). In the days and months after Aviva’s death, the speaker/Adaf reflects on how “the whole world has broken so” (Poem 19). Across its 43 poems—the number of Aviva’s years—Aviva-No considers the capacity of poetry to open up a space where our dead may live on, while acknowledging how grief disorients our relation to place, to language, to our own living bodies.

Adaf’s speaker welcomes the pain of grief and even dreads losing it. In the first line of Poem 24, we come upon the declaration “my heart, don’t cease in sorrow” (Poem 24).Ìę Grief is experienced in the mind and body. The physical pain of grief embodies our dead, and so long as we grieve, they remain with us, in us. Poetry is a kind of scratching at this wound, as described further on this poem: “pinch, scratch them some, so that abscess will emerge/
/thus I shall not let slip between my hands/ a sister into time.” Even though “abscess” and “cease” are not etymologically connected in English, or in Hebrew, I want to highlight here how the English “abscess” carries the “cess” of “cessation,” thereby linking to the “cease” of the first line of the poem. This is one of many instances in this collection where Segalovitz seizes an opportunity to allow her English to thread its own linguistic relations in the space of grief.

The collection unfolds over the course of the first year of Jewish mourning, and in both the Hebrew original and English translation, the months of the Jewish lunisolar calendar are indicated by their Hebrew names. In addition to these references, Hebrew terms for flora and Jewish prayers and rituals appear throughout the translation. Segalovitz’s introduction offers a summary of this material, but otherwise, this Hebrew (and sometimes Aramaic), occasionally italicized, appears without explanation (the book includes no glossary or endnotes). This may not be an issue for readers versed in Judaism and the Hebrew language, but for other readers, words like Tevet (the month corresponding to December/January), sheizava (from the Sephardic version of the Kaddish prayer), Rephaim (an ancient race of giants mentioned in the Hebrew bible) infuse this text like words from an ancient myth or a work of fantasy. Lines in Arabic are transliterated and italicized, but you would need to know what they mean to know whether or not the subsequent lines in Hebrew or English offer a gloss or translation. These multilingual moments, particularly when left unexplained and untranslated, can be unsettling and disruptive, allowing for a personal language of grief to take shape beyond traditional prayers or stock phrases of consolation. These instances also call attention to the texture of this language. Where Adaf’s polyphonic Hebrew creates these effects through neologisms, punning, and onomatopoeia, Segalovitz turns to alliteration, homophony, assonance, and consonance. In poem 4, for example, sibilance knits together a vivid sequence of images: “sparrows and bleeding wrens/ sap seeping out of balsam trees/ frozen as glass, shining/ as a plastic scarf.” This line from Poem 19 is a particularly outstanding solution to Adaf’s wordplay in the Hebrew: “the end of time has wakened” (my emphasis).

Adaf’s sister introduced him to the works of Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes, and the songs of Patti Smith, all of whom make appearances in Aviva-No. Translating the collection into English underscores these relations, but it also requires that the translator wrestle with a very particular challenge—specifically, how to translate a poem that is already in English. Poem 28 is an English-language poem transliterated in Hebrew letters (). When English is rendered in Hebrew script distortions in pronunciation inevitably occur, but rather than produce a phonetic version that would replicate the way English sounds in Hebrew, Segalovitz recasts most of the poem in “standard” English. But as we read this poem in Roman script, we encounter a few words that feel a bit out of place: “ay em def” (I am deaf) becomes “I am deft”, “keri der do’oters” (carry their daughters) appears as the slightly Germanic “carry der doters,” also suggesting the figure of a “doting daughter” (a reference to King Lear). Deploying these disruptions sparingly, Segalovitz avoids turning this technique into a gimmick; instead, she highlights startling double meanings in Adaf’s Hebraized English, like the poem’s final words, “az yu go bay” (as you go by), which become, in her poignant English, “as you go bye.”

Poem 26 opens with a simple, heartbreaking truth: “Forty-three years old, you are the woman you will always be.” There are no more poems beyond this number, but by shaping the collection around the Jewish calendar, the cycle repeats again, creating an orbit of time that keeps Aviva close. Judaism discourages the living from making frequent visits to the graves of their dead. There are many possible reasons for this, among them ancient prohibitions against worshiping the dead, but also because the living must continue with their lives, untethered from the dead, and the dead also must release their attachments to the living if they are to move on.

Throughout the collection, Adaf resists letting go of Aviva, a resistance that recalls the work of the Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun (1904-1992)—whose presence is felt throughout these poems. “[B]y by the power of my yearnings/ I am in the family./ And if I will not yearn,/ I am not in the family,” writes Yeshurun in “” (trans. Leon Wieseltier), a poem that considers how long memory can hold a family and a home together. If it is the memories of the living that keep the dead in the orbit of life, what happens when we the living inevitably die? Can a poem house our dead, and eventually us—keeping us in life’s orbit through the various readings and translations that poems undergo? These are questions that Adaf’s collection raises, but its translation into English offers the possibility of an expanded orbit, one that pulls in other works that I see in conversation with these poems, like Anne Carson’s Nox—also a work about a sibling’s death, memory, and translation—as well as and (forthcoming from Action Books in Michelle Gil-Montero’s translation).

Poem 26 closes with the line “pachot basar mi-zikaron,” less flesh than memory. Memory lives on, superseding the body, but Segalovitz’s translation inverts the formula, “more memory than flesh.” This inversion proposes translation as a kind of insurance against “cessation.” Translation converting less into more, multiplying grief, but also multiplying Aviva, like the stars and galaxies of an expanding universe, “ramming against the void.”

Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She was the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and a finalist for the 2019 BTBA. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere.

by Marcus Malte, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge (Restless Books)

First sentences aren’t everything. Except they kind of are, aren’t they? This is the opener of The Boy:

Even the invisible and the immaterial have a name, but he does not.

“He” is the mute, feral boy who drives Marcus Malte’s sprawling novel, which spans thirty years, much of France, one world war, and the earliest harbingers of the second one. The Boy won’t say a single word.

Occasionally, I will read a novel without looking at the front inside flap or back cover, going in blind. I wish I’d done that with The Boy. The book starts like a grim, dystopian tale: the Boy lives with his mother in the wilderness that still remains in turn-of-the-century France. She dies, leaving him to fend for himself able to hunt, fish, climb, hide, etc. but with no conception of his fellow man. What follows is the Boy’s journey toward (into) society, slowly leaving behind woods and rivers for farms, running water, prejudice, and worse.

This part is long—so long that a reader might justifiably be concerned about a Castaway-esque monotony: boy hunts rabbit, boy skins rabbit, boy eats rabbit. But no fear, Malte is an expert craftsman, his plot quietly accelerating despite the painstaking detail accorded the Boy’s physical environment. The author also knows to give us breaks, offering piercing observations about the human condition:

He has not yet asked himself whether [mankind] is a good thing in the end. Whether it’s a desirable thing. He has not yet told himself that it’s meaningless.

And then cuts to this, which I can confidently describe as my favorite literary passage about frogs:

He eats the frogs dusted with rosemary flowers.
He eats the frogs sprinkled with savory.
He eats the frogs rubbed with sage leaves.
He saves the last bone of the last skeleton and places it in his matchbox as a kind of talisman.

Had I not read the synopsis, or glimpsed the cover of the book, I wouldn’t have known The Boy is a war story. I wouldn’t have known because after starting as a pseudo-post-apocalypse novel, unexpectedly, after pages of frog-hunting and tree-climbing and apple-picking, The Boy gets steamy, pages and pages of sex, until, finally, we get it: this is a book about war. The author tells us as much on page 307:

This is the story of those who will die.

The first two sections of the book—the journey from wilderness to society, and a sexual awakening—could be novels apart. But the war part is what gets you, is what got me. The Boy is punctuated with historical asides, frequently as stark lists of dates and names—just often enough for effect. In 1912, “Eva Braun comes into the world.” The same year,

Jean Baptise Blumet, twenty-six years old, dishwasher, perish[es] off the coast of Newfoundland, at 41° 46’ N latitude and 50° 14’ W longitude, in the shipwreck of the unsinkable transatlantic liner baptized Titanic.

Malte interweaves this historical framework with visceral portraits of the battlefield. Death, dismemberment, disease, all of it; but also, monotony, resignation, boredom, terror, the savagery that forms, or rather rises from within. All with a protagonist who never speaks.

There’s little doubt Malte gave his translators a difficult challenge. To their credit, you can’t tell there were two of them—Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge, who, incidentally, are married. Or not incidentally. Having co-translated with both friends and acquaintances, I can easily believe that the intimacy of marriage fosters an especially seamless translation, though perhaps the arguments over semantic choices are somewhat more intense. I like to picture chilly debates over morning coffee: innards or viscera, dear?

The Boy is rife with translation pitfalls. French has the perfect noncommittal pronoun—on, which can be understood as either “they” or “we.” If you opt for they, you risk removing the universality of a text; we, and you might eliminate necessary distance. In this novel, imagine a world-weary narrator, he’s told this story before, or some version of it; he uses on constantly. Ramadan and Roberge smartly chose to translate it as “we.” As a result, as with the French, the reader is involved, attentive.

Now the boy has his bearings, he recognizes his guideposts, he is back on his path. [. . .] Towards what destination? To what end? Deep down, we don’t really care to know, but we catch ourselves hoping that they’ll reach it.

Verb tenses in the book are tricky too, switching from present to past in a way that shouldn’t function, grammatically speaking, yet does. These passages can’t have been easy to translate, but again, Ramadan and Roberge look to have navigated them with ease. The same for transitions between second person and third.

I’m always wary when cautioned to patience before even starting a book, as Julie Orringer does in her preface to The Boy. But to be fair, patience is required. The novel isn’t perfect. To start, it’s thirty or forty pages too long. And at times Malte can be too clever by a tad. The Boy is teeming with obscure references—music, history, art, literature (and smutty literature! the smuttiest of nineteenth-century French poetry and prose, folks!) But the author is easily forgiven. A French reviewer, Christine Ferniot, wrote that Malte “has both nerve and well-placed ambition.” Well-placed being the important bit, I think. This is hardly the sole novel to tell of a boy returning from war, no longer the same, to a girl, no longer the same. And yet, it’s all in how the tale is told, right?

Henry N. Gifford is a writer, emerging translator from German to English, and Assistant Editor at New Vessel Press.

by Pere Gimferrer, translated from the Catalan by Adrian Nathan West (Carcanet)

It’s possible that the titles of Pere Gimferrer’s collections alone—from 1970’s The Mirror, through Apparitions, and Light, to 2014’s The Castle of Purity—evoke the spirit and development of the Barcelona-based poet’s work more effectively than I could ever hope to. The Catalan Poems’s table of contents, that list of titles, selections from the aforementioned collections, translated by Adrian Nathan West as gorgeously and precisely as the poems they foretoken, is a poem in itself that, making a stronger claim than I can for why this book should win the Best Translated Book Award. The elemental titles of the poems—“May,” or “Vision,” or “Bell”—speak to the effort towards the essence of things that occupies Gimferrer through his career. “There is a poetic truth deeper than scientific or material truth,” Gimferrer writes. But that poetic truth is not antithetical to material truth. For Gimferrer there is great overlap between the real and the ideal.

A single noun in isolation, like “Bell,” is a beautiful illustration of this overlap. A poem, Gimferrer convincingly suggests, may in fact be an attempt to use many words when one will do. As the final lines of his 1978 poem “Light of Velintonia” put it: “The word of a man makes visible the real: / in the light, we may see the garden as garden.” His succession of images, his use or eschewal of imposed form, his sometimes straightforward declarations or descriptions, come together and succeed greatly at just this, making visible the real. I am grateful to witness the success of a poet with as great a vision as a style.

I am grateful, too, that West is a translator with such a remarkable capacity to convey that success without once faltering, a testament both to his linguistic dexterity and the intense care he must take as a reader—In other words, to his own profound poetic sensitivity and talent. Take, for example, “Now the Poet Undertakes a Practical Act,” a poem in quatrains each with a strict abba rhyme scheme and nearly each line perfectly anapestic. Within these limits, West manages a beautifully alliterative line to start one stanza—“When the swords bar your body I will not seek for death”—only to break the metric consistency (though maintaining the syllable count) for the painfully and powerfully fragmented line to follow: “bars of darkness bars body body bowed blood in teeth.” All together: “When the swords bar your body I will not seek for death / bars of darkness bars body body bowed blood in teeth.” I am reminded of the violently defamiliarizing language of Edmund in King Lear: “Why brand they us / With ‘base’? with ‘baseness’? ‘bastardy’? ‘base, base’?”

It can be useful to know what a poet believes about poetry, to see first of all whether we agree, and second whether the poet follows their own prescriptions and achieves their own goals. It can be equally useful to examine a poem up close. Gimferrer’s 1980 collection As an Epilogue, from which 15 poems are included in The Catalan Poems, offers among its very short poems a beautiful opportunity for both useful exercises: a two-line poem entitled “Poetic Art”:

More than the bestowal of synthesis:

to see in the light the transit of the light.

I agree with Gimferrer, that the bestowal of synthesis, the Metaphysical Poets’ “most heterogeneous ideas 
 yoked by violence together” of which Dr. Johnson disapproved and which T.S. Eliot reclaimed, for instance, is part but not all of poetry, perhaps necessary but insufficient, in the useful language of statisticians. Eliot himself, especially in The Waste Land, the poem of fragments promising (though often withholding) union, seems to crop up quite frequently in The Catalan Poems, especially in “Deserted Space” with the reference in its first few lines, if West’s translation is to be trusted, to “cruel / spring”—despite the greater acknowledged importance of Pound and Stevens (I rarely fully believe a poet’s prose, anyway).

I agree also that any purpose of the bestowal of synthesis, as imagists like the young Ezra Pound knew, was to capture something about time—moment and movement. The point of seeing the light is to see the transit of the light, to see the most true sense of the light as a thing with two termini and a path in between them, not the shadow only, but the form casting the shadow. Many poets have attempted to capture this, and many philosophers have failed even more dramatically than those poets. Gimferrer succeeds to a great extent in addressing and displaying the ideal reality of “the persistence of atemporal time” (“Light of Velintonia l. 14). He achieves in that two-line “Poetic Art” the bestowal of synthesis—of synthesis itself and light—as well as the perception of the transit of the light. At the close of West’s interview with Gimferrer in this volume, the poet and translator discuss abstraction in poetry. West remarks that if poetry is “abstract, there’s not really a hermeneutic entryway.” Gimferrer acknowledges the importance of abstraction in poetry, for which he credits Rimbaud, and says, “This was revolutionary, and its effects are evident in certain of my poems.” Its effects only, and certain only. I find Gimferrer delightfully, graciously interpretable, but with some work. Without the work, there is an abstraction to them that nevertheless succeeds in its poetic aims. For this reason, among so many others, this book ought to win the BTBA for Poetry.

At the close of The Catalan Poems we find a selection from the poet’s Dietari 1979—1982, a series of elegant brief essays, both diary of Gimferrer’s literary life and artistic dietary for his ideal reader. The Dietari include a story about an aging MallarmĂ© delivering a toast at a banquet; pithy crepuscular anecdotes about Ruskin, Monet, and Paz; and an essay on the morality Georges Simenon and John Le CarrĂ©. West spares none of his rhythmic brilliance or creativity in all types of rhyme in his translations of these prose pieces: “Like sheaves of wheat, we await the hour of final silence. Further afield, the reaping goes on into the evening,” he translates Gimferrer in a meditation on personifications of death by way of Wallace Stevens. Tolstoy’s death during a sudden inspired train journey is, we are told, “moving.” These brief essays are a blessing for those of us looking to understand the poems we have read. They are beautifully written, translated with remarkable insight, and offer us access to something profound, true, instantaneous and eternal: poetry.

Chris Clarke grew up in Western Canada and currently lives in Philadelphia. His translations include books by Ryad Girod, Pierre Mac Orlan, and François Caradec. His translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for fiction in 2019, and his translation of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s In the CafĂ© of Lost Youth was a finalist for the same award in 2017. He is currently retranslating a novel by Raymond Queneau for publication in 2022 (NYRB Classics).

by Nona FernĂĄndez, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Graywolf Press)

How do memories differ from dreams? Sure, dreams are all jumbled up, built of slivers and shards, and their combinatory narratives, if they can even be called that, borrow from any perception, experienced or not. They aren’t to be trusted. Memories are supposed to be more concrete, more linear, more factual. But are they? When I think back to my youngest years, I have few memories, and of some of those I can recall, I have since grown suspicious. I remember a great weeping willow in front of our house when I was first learning to ride a bicycle. The bike was red and white with a long banana seat. I feel pretty certain about that one. Even earlier, I remember a hobby horse of sorts, colorfully painted with spots of blue and red on white, which I received one Christmas morning. And yet, while going through old albums during a visit back home, I came across the photograph that lies at the root of that memory. I no longer believe I have a true memory of the horse, or of that Christmas morning, but instead, my mind has incorporated the details of that photograph into its reservoirs and has constructed a memory from its details. Add to these uncertainties other memories that are surely the result of being told a story about my own childhood repeatedly, and it becomes hard to tell what is memory and what is instead internal literary or cinematic construction.=Ìę

Space Invaders was Nona Fernández’s fourth novel, first published in Chile in 2013. She has since published two more. Another in a growing list of stellar translations by Natasha Wimmer, Space Invaders is a labyrinthine investigation of how collective memory is formed during large-scale traumatic events. Fernández presents the layered and fragmented recollections of a group of young classmates during the “politicide” years of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Like their memories, the timeline of the narrative is fragmented and inconsistent: the children are about ten years old, and it is about 1984; the children are no longer children, but in their early forties; or, they are about twenty, around the time the media announced the legal rulings on the Caso Degollados, the “Slit-Throat Case,” bringing the grisly murders back into the public eye. Whether ten, twenty, or forty years old, their thoughts are always focused on that same time period, seeking to construct sense from what they remember, what the evidence tells them, what they have since learned and unlearned.

People remember things in different ways; my wife almost always remembers her dreams, and she seems to have detailed memories of her childhood in a way that I don’t. This variability of memory is evident among Maldonado and her friends, as well. Not only in what they remember, but in how they remember it. But there is one focal point they all share, a girl who became the star of the traumatic mental film reel of their youth. Even though she is a shared feature of all their memories, they all remember her differently. One remembers her hair pulled back in long braids, another swears she wore her dark hair long and loose, framing her face. They can’t agree on the details, but her place in their memory is certain:

It’s her. Nothing else matters, not the style of her hair, the color of her skin or her eyes. Everything is relative except for the sound of her voice, because in dreams, according to Fuenzalida, voices are like fingerprints. González’s voice seeps into us from Fuenzalida’s dreams, invading our own visions, our own versions of González, settling in and keeping us company night after night.

Fernández paints this mysterious central figure, Estrella, with a dash of this dream, a pinch of that memory, from then, from later, from after. Subtle and not-so-subtle repetition and modulation give shape to key scenes and relationships. Strong visual recollections take central places for the members of this group, and these striking elements also mingle and stack. The spare hands of an amputee parent merge alarmingly with the projectiles of their Space Invaders video game. An unmatchable high score left as a challenge by a vanished older brother. A mysterious man with dark glasses and a red Chevy drifts through the background like smoke. The story is built of images, and the images are painted in words. “Maldonado dreams about letters. They’re old letters in the handwriting of ten-year-old girls. [
] Maldonado’s dreams are of reading each of these letters. Dreams are built of words, assembled from letters and sentences.” Our understanding of a troubled past is built on shaky evidence, a binder of news clippings, mental inconsistencies, and remembered childhood correspondence.

Natasha Wimmer’s skilled touch is made evident in this translation through her attention to register and tone. Among the various memories, dreams, and attempted explanations, Fernández intersperses a series of short letters from one of the classmates to another, and here, Wimmer’s attention to detail is on display. She informed me that for her, the difficulty lay in finding “the right mix of lyricism and child-like candor.” And indeed, she has, as the letters are charming without being infantile. Devices of this sort risk overwhelming a book, especially one of this length, but in Space Invaders, these epistolary memory-artifacts are occasional anchors to a time of innocence that faded under the weight of the realizations the characters later faced.

The things I have to tell you are other things. More important things, secret things. But this paper is tiny and my writing is so big and fat. My dad says I have to write smaller and stay on the lines but the lines are so thin they’re hard to see. If I listened to my dad I could write more but since I can’t write small and stay on the tiny little lines I have to write less. I should try to obey my dad.

Beyond the letters, it gets increasingly difficult to tell the speakers apart, to tell which of them is relating events, to be certain of whether they are remembering or dreaming. Carefully-crafted repetitions help to tie some things together, just as they help to further blur chronological lines. This is the composition of a generation’s collective memory during times of shared trauma, and it is taking place at a formative age. As many of us have seen recently, when times are tough, memory and dream tend to overlap more than usual. Dreams color memories, and collective memories tug and pull in all directions at once.

Our ten-year-old sons and daughters must be experiencing something similar right now, in these shared days of pandemic-inspired anxiety and uncertainty. While we’re all stuck indoors, many of us are having trouble sleeping, or perhaps having trouble not sleeping. In such a situation, dreams can take on new forms as, for lack of routine and typical stimuli, they are invaded by older memories, by television and books, by the news. What memories are our youngest generation forming of these peculiar days? What will they remember of the great 2020 pandemic? A house full of anxiety? Boredom? The disappearance of a loved one that they were not able to be present for? When we come to the other side of this, they will all share in the memory of this time, of what it was like to be ten in the spring of 2020. They will each remember it differently, they will have retained different details, but together, they will possess a shared experience, because they all went through it simultaneously.

This is not to say that COVID-19 can be compared to an authoritarian military dictatorship and a complete breakdown of democracy, nor that this pandemic will go on for seventeen years. ÌęI only suggest that there is a similarity between the two along the lines of the formation of collective memory during trauma. And in a way, during all the anxiety and fear that we are facing throughout such an unexpected and unimagined situation, there is something vaguely comforting in knowing that everyone else is dealing with some version of the same thing, to a lesser or greater degree. This was the case for Maldonado, ZĂșñiga, and their friends, and it comes across in the prose of Space Invaders. As Natasha Wimmer put it, “There’s something about the third person plural that is just perfect for this child’s-eye perspective–maybe because as children we’re more likely to feel ourselves part of a collective.”

While it is unusual for a novel of this length to win a major award, clocking in as it does at under eighty pages, even at this length, Fernández’s short book is a fully formed reading experience. There is more than enough enjoyment, introspection, and style here to validate picking it a copy. This is a one- or two-sitting read, and as such, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t dive in and experience this insightful meditation on memory, dreaming, and trauma. As an added bonus, it could provide your pandemic-addled dreams with a bit of spice in the form of green-glowing projectile hands.

Laura MarrisÌęis a writer and translator from the French. Recent projects include Paol Keineg’sÌęTriste TristanÌę(co-translated with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press) andÌęIn the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, a comic-book version of Proust’s classic. Her translation of Louis Guilloux’sÌęBlood Dark(NYRB) was shortlisted for the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She teaches writing at the University at Buffalo and is currently at work on a new translation of Camus’ÌęThe Plague.

by Stéphane Bouquet, translated from the French by Lindsay Turner (Nightboat Books)

There’s an old idiom in French that goes straight to the heart of this book. Le dĂ©sir oĂč je suis means the desire I am feeling, or more literally, the desire where I am, the desire inhabiting me. In Lindsay Turner’s exceptional translation, StĂ©phane Bouquet’s voice speaks from the place of that idiom. These poems are both electric and grounded, acknowledging the hope that comes from wanting something, while also admitting the effects of heartbreak—the half-life of desire that permeates the interior world of this book. Take, for example, the brutal hopefulness of this chance meeting:

In the metro I look up from reading and

ohÌęÌęÌęÌę he’s holding flowers they’re not for me

and a pastry-box

it’s not for meÌęÌęÌę one more time where a face is dangerous

hopeful landing

i.e. tomorrow hasn’t yet deserted usÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę the proof is, you’re

thereÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę beginner at the edge

of human acts

This edge relies on the intimacy of cities, of public transportation and human circulation. The metro is a train of thought, ravenous, restless, but always purposefully seeking the next moment of beauty. Everything in this book is close enough to collide, and those collisions refract imagined futures, existing in a kind of hyperreality of potential missed connections. The mind wanders in these poems, but its associations are not random—instead they create a momentum of nuance and association, rocketing forward:

blond elf Peter Pan superhero

of service

so thin his skin lay

directly

on his bones the 2 yogurts

aren’t the cheapest

ones, are they equivalent

to the light that falls sometimes

adding districts

to the brightness

These districts are illuminated by the searching quality of the forms Bouquet creates. Rather than a simple progression of encounters, the idea of sequence here is a way of moving forward, both hopeful and tragic. Each moment this book is an accounting, both for the speaker and for those in his community who, through addiction, violence, and other forms of trauma, didn’t survive to experience it. These poems allow hunger to be a form of collective healing, where the vitality of the moment remembers the dead. In “Light of the Fig,” which is a love poem as well as a memorial for victims of homophobic violence, Bouquet writes:

If I weren’t so tired I could invent

for us

an electric lavender for automatic honey, greenhouses

for butterflies, thickets

teeming with caterpillars, a burgeoning anonymous happiness.

And later, in that same poem:

Ìę Ìę Ìę Ìę ÌęI find

in my inbox the photo of a soldier who’s sweeping

the alleys

of a military cemetery after a volcanic eruption. A friend

has remembered

that more than anything I like putting the days in order, endlessly

counting the rhythm of things,

which is to say that everything needs to be evacuated immediately

from death

Rather than eclipsing what has been lost, marking time is a rescue mission, a form of vitality that never forgets it is living in the aftermath. The speaker of these poems is living twice, or one hundred times, through each of the lives he intersects. The spaces of these poems are loaded with all the passing desires and interactions that inhabit them—they constantly accommodate this teeming of pleasure and pain, but they refuse to take survival for granted. Bouquet’s formal innovations capture the way these poems hold their breath from one moment to the next, like someone driving past a graveyard on a sunny day. The lines dramatize the leap between the silences, the gaps, and their reclamation, “because we must steal constantly/ from absence.”

There’s an honesty to this admission—that this poet is not speaking just to cover an absence but writing into it, to discover its origins, to try to get closer. As a translator of Robert Creeley, James Schuyler, and Peter Gizzi into French, Bouquet is hyperaware of how physical experience might be translated into the poem, and how intimacy might be not only communicated but also created through this work. In “The Covers,” a dazzling lyric essay, the speaker has just slept with a man who has Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his library. “To what degree and under what conditions,” he asks, “can the verb to speak be substituted for the verb to touch?” This transformation is one of precarious hope and loneliness, and the text that carries it deserves to be read in all its rhapsodic and difficult tenderness.

The fact that Turner’s translation communicates all the fierce intricacy of this voice into English is a gift that brings the book full circle, back into dialogue with the poets its author has been translating. It is fitting that a book about connection, intimacy, and closeness has traveled and transgressed the boundaries of its original language. The Next Loves reaches out for what is beautiful and risky, attempting the impossible metamorphosis of speech into touch. Or, as Dylan put it, beauty walks a razor’s edge—someday I’ll make it mine.

KĂĄri Tulinius is an Icelandic poet and novelist. He and his family move back and forth between Iceland and Finland like a flock of migratory birds confused about the whole “warmer climes” business.Ìę

by Yuko Tsushima, translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt (FSG)

Writers cannot choose the moment in which they are read. They may imagine the circumstances their readers will find themselves in, or the concerns and preconceptions that are brought to the work,Ìębut even at a writer’s most perceptive, it is just a vague generality. This goes exponentially once a text has been translated and is even further compounded as decades and centuries pass. All of which is a fairly circuitous way of saying that YĆ«ko Tsushima almost certainly never thought that her novel, if it’s even correct to call it a novel, would be read by an Icelander during a pandemic in the year 2020.

When I was contacted by Patrick Smith about writing a “Why This Book Should Win the Best Translated Book Award” post, I asked if I could write aboutÌęTerritory of Light. I hadn’t read it, but had the idea that it was something akin to one of my absolute favorite films, Chantal Akerman’sÌęJeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a portrait of a single mother slowly cracking under the pressures of a sexist society. That is, of course, a reductive summary of a deep, brilliant film, and while I would not balk at a similar description ofÌęTerritory of Light, the situation in which I found myself reading Tsushima’s book made me focus on very different aspects of it.

Before getting into the content, I need to discuss structure.ÌęTerritory of LightÌęis one of those books that asks its readers to think about what a novel is. This is partly an accident of how it was first created.ÌęTerritory of LightÌęwas originally published as a monthly series of short stories in a magazine from July 1978 to June 1979, following the travails of its divorcing protagonist in real time. When collected as a single book, the month forward jump between each chapter, each of which are a similar length, gives the book a strong formalist rigor. The effect is Oulipian, anticipating in novel form Jacques Jouet’s “metro poems,” where each line is composed while the train is moving, and written down while it waits at the station.

Each chapter is therefore episodic, following its own inner logic, with its own cast of characters, some of whom appear in other chapters, but many who do not. This gives the book the feel of real life—random people show up, events lead to nothing, significance found just as often in happenstance as well-laid plans. I have no idea whether Tsushima had worked out the structure before she started, but it certainly doesn’t feel like there is a plan. Which is remarkable and refreshing in a novel.

Another aspect of the structure feels much older than OuLiPo. The protagonist’s dreams are part of the narrative in a way that reminded me more of medieval literature than modern. To reach for an obscure term from my university days, I was specifically put in mind of the prosimetrum form, which mixes prose and poetry. InÌęTerritory of Light,Ìęthe protagonist’s dreams read more like poems than fiction, which both opens the world of the story up, and comments on it from an angle askew from realism, which is otherwise the book’s dominant mode.

Though it is not the rule-bound realism found in most fiction, I cannot remember the last time I read a novel where I never felt like I knew where the story was going. At first, it was a bit confounding—my empathetic faculties started expecting that awful things were about to happen, as is generally the case in chaotic stories, and sometimes they did, but then they were over, and soon enough, another month had gone by in the protagonist’s life and the cares of the previous month were long gone. It was remarkably soothing, because I could let go of my readerly need to recognize patterns and guess what was coming. Because nothing was coming; only life, only everything.

Over the last eight weeks, the entirety of my social life has been reduced to ten people: my immediate family and the staff of the bookstore and bakery near my apartment. I haven’t talked, in person, to anyone else. My social life had been reduced to that of a character in a novel. Though not a character inÌęTerritory of Light, which reproduces the randomness of normal life more faithfully than daily existence during the pandemic. Life has no need to be realistic, after all. While I move in my restricted fashion around my world, the protagonist strikes up an acquaintance with another parent at her daughter’s daycare, has a heart-to-heart with a woman at a bar, gets into a dispute with a neighbor; all the incidental encounters that make up one’s day-to-day existence in non-pestilential times.

So what I focused on as I read the book was all that randomness, those run-ins with strangers: being at a crowded neighborhood festival, going about the city in your day to day, taking a child to kindergarten. Experiencing all these events with the protagonist was deeply pleasurable—it was like going on a holiday in normal life, though 1970s Tokyo is far removed in time and space from Iceland in 2020. Quite a few scenes that probably would have made me feel nothing but anxious if I had read the book in normal circumstances—such as when the protagonist leaves her child sleeping alone in their apartment to go out for a drink—were tinged with nostalgia now that the simple act of going out for a drink is impossible.

In some cases, this mix of readerly nostalgia and anxiety would throw some of Tsushima’s themes into an even starker relief. One reoccurring trope in the tale involves random people, strangers even, telling the protagonist that she should get back together with her estranged husband. The way society pushes and constrains her, while making every excuse for her husband, is a good reminder that, as much as not being able to meet people is awful, people are awful.

Incidentally, her husband, Fujino is awful. He’s the sort of fuckboi that deserves at least a paragraph’s worth of ranting, but Tsushima skewers him—and his ilk—beautifully enough that I’ll limit myself to just quoting in brief: “Before he left, Fujino did some explaining: he wouldn’t be able to repay the money he owed me for some time yet; he meant to pay child support when he was able to, but this too was impossible for the present; he didn’t want to let people down by abandoning his dreams of making a movie and creating a small theatre company.” And though I’m not qualified to comment on the accuracy of Geraldine Harcourt’s translation, I hope this short excerpt shows how smoothly the text flows, and how well-wrought the sentences are.

Territory of LightÌęshould win because it is the right book for right now. Not only because it has absolutely nothing to do with pandemics, thankfully, but because the way it portrays reality feels genuinely fresh, making most novels seem overly restricted by contemporary storytelling conventions. That it achieves this using formal constraints somehow makes it even more appropriate. And the way it handles social ills, especially everyday sexism, is a reminder that once the pandemic is past, the human species still has to reckon with a lot of awfulness.

The one definition of the term “classic novel” I have found to have a ring of truth to it is that some books find a way to speak strongly to people in all kinds of different circumstances and eras.ÌęTerritory of LightÌę spoke very strongly to me at a remove of forty years and thousands of miles.ÌęIt should win the Best Translated Book Award because it is a novel for every sort of time and place.

Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Quarterly Conversation, Book Riot, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Rumpus and other online publications. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram

Ìęby Sinan Antoon, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright (Yale University Press)

The protagonist of Sinan Antoon’s novel, The Book of Collateral Damage, is an Iraqi expat who returns to Baghdad as a translator. Nameer is hired by a pair of Americans filming a documentary. It’s his first time back since his family emigrated to the United States when he was a child.

While in Iraq he decides to visit the bookshops on al-Mutanabbi Street. There he meets a bookseller named Wadood who is working on an unusual project: a kind of catalog of the objects destroyed in the bombings. It includes commonplace items like a handmade kashan, a stamp album and a stone wall. But also a fetus, a Ziziphus (or Christ’s Thorn) tree, and a pair of twins. His stories are often told from the point of view, and in the voice, of the anthropomorphized objects. Structured as colloquies, or “conversations,” they call to mind the Aesop’s fables and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales. Nameer, intrigued, tries to convince Wadood to let him translate the writings into English. And Wadood, considering the offer, leaves a copy of his manuscript at Nameer’s hotel in an envelope. Nameer takes it back to America with him.

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, another book on this year’s longlist, is also concerned with the disappearance of everyday things. Particularly the items we most take for granted. In both Ogawa’s and Antoon’s writing the empty spaces left behind are imbued with emotional and cultural significance. In The Memory Police, each disappearance is a loss to the community, but one which most of the community accepts in silence. There is a gentleness to her descriptions, and a tangible sadness. Even if they don’t remember what they’ve forgotten, they remain aware of the act of forgetting. In The Book of Collateral Damage the colloquies are more violent, but no less haunting. Each loss is a complete erasure and the human component, as perpetrators and victims, is surprisingly powerful—even when described by an inanimate object without contextual awareness.

I say “my mother” because I claim that she loved me as if I were her son. I remember how her son used to cry in her arms when she fed me. He and his three brothers. But he’s grown up now. But even so she told him off when he tried to persuade her to get rid of me and replace me. “But this oven is older than you. It has fed you and your brothers since your father died and it has helped pay your university fees. I won’t let it go till I die,” she said. She used to swear by me, saying, “By this oven!”

After returning to the United States, Nameer takes a job at Harvard, and then NYU, teaching Arabic language and literature. He keeps the manuscript. Years pass. He completes his dissertation, falls in love, and remains in contact with Wadood—though the ongoing war and Wadood’s personal situation make it difficult at times to stay in touch. Nameer remains obsessed with translating Wadood’s stories, despite Wadood asking him not to. Nameer has also begun collecting articles and pictures from newspapers about the continuing war in Iraq. He hangs them on his apartment walls in hope they will provide him with the inspiration he needs to write a novel of his own.

The Book of Collateral Damage reads as semi-autobiographical. At one point, Nameer talks about an idea he has for a novel about a young man who washes the corpses of the dead in Iraq—pretty much the plot of Antoon’s 2013 novel, The Corpse Washer. His protagonist identifies with Iraq as his home country, but as an American he is far removed from the actual fighting. The truth is that other than a few insensitive colleagues, and family members who still reside in Iraq but with whom he doesn’t seem particularly close, the war barely impacts his day-to-day life. And, yet, he struggles and cries out in his sleep. He’s often angry and unhappy. He carries the war inside him and his girlfriend believes he suffers from P.T.S.D. As the book goes on we see that the occupation of Iraq has affected Nameer and Wadood differently, but both men carry emotional and psychological damage because of it.

I was going to ask him whether he knew that in Arabic the words for hope and pain were almost the same, with just the two consonants transposed—amal and alam.

Most of what I’ve written so far is plot summary, barely touching on the overarching themes or the translation or how strange it was to be reading this book while I, like other non-essential workers, sit at home in obeyance of stay-at-home orders issued in response to a global pandemic. Antoon is very good at capturing the strangeness (and frustration) of living tangential to, yet still affected by, historical events. Years from now, when someone asks what it was like during COVID-19, what do we say? We stayed at home, took long walks, sewed masks and worried about how to pay our bills. While the men and women in hospitals and grocery stores, distribution centers and manufacturing, public service and food delivery, still went to work every day. Nameer wants to do something, to have some positive impact on what is happening in Iraq, when in reality he is both helpless and irrelevant. He is also aware of the hypocrisy of his position. It’s not all that hard to relate.

Should this book win The Best Translated Book Award? Maybe. If I’m being honest . . . I don’t know. Its chances seem slim, when you consider that I’m writing about it rather than one of this year’s judges. My recommendation is read it anyway. Jonathan Wright’s translation is keen and light. He wisely lets the plot bear the weight, not the prose. It’s a good book. And a good reminder that our present situation is just another blip in the history of civilization. Antoon writes about the Iraq war from a different perspective than we’re used to seeing. Nameer is both Iraqi and American. He is aware that he is in a privileged situation—working for an elite university and living comfortably in one of the most expensive cities in the world. His family remains safe. In one sense, the bookseller Wadood is a thread that stretches between Baghdad and Manhattan, allowing Nameer a connection to a country and a war he feels increasingly removed from. As I said, Antoon writes best about ordinary people caught on the periphery of battle. He does so honestly, without shying away from the truth about his characters or their situations, even when those truths are sometimes unattractive and those situations far outside our ability to control.