This post is courtesy of Best Translated Book Award judge, the inimitable George Carroll. Not only is he one hell of a West Coast sales rep for publishing companies large and small, he has an inexhaustible knowledge of translated literature.<\/i><\/p>\n
There are two books set in shantytowns that were submitted for this year\u2019s award: Shantytown<\/i><\/a> by Cesar Aira and Horses of God<\/i><\/a> by Mahi Binebine. Although the basic setting is similar, they\u2019re quite different books. <\/p>\n One of the main characters in the Aira book imagines that at the core of the network of narrow streets, behind the fa\u00e7ade of the shacks in Buenos Aires, there are towers, domes castles, ramparts, and groves. In Binebine\u2019s book, no one in the book imagines where they live as anything but what it is. <\/p>\n Horses of God <\/i>is narrated from beyond the grave by one of four childhood friends who wrench an existence in the Sidi Moumen slums in Casablanca. They form a soccer team that competes with teams from the other slums and dream of a soccer as a vehicle to escape from the squalor, violence, and unemployment. However, their fate is changed when they are attracted to a religion that offers them guidance and purpose, and training in martial arts. <\/p>\n Their choices and decisions transform them from lives of despair to religious extremism, and ultimately to become suicide bombers. The book is based on the 2003 suicide bombings at Casablanca\u2019s Hotel Farah. <\/p>\n It is the winner of the 2010 Prix du Roman Arabe and Prix Litt\u00e9raire Mamounia, was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004 and has just been awarded a 2013 English PEN<\/span> Award for outstanding writing in translation. Lulu Norman’s translation creates a genuine and authentic voice for the narrator. <\/p>\n I found Horses of God<\/i> to be tighter and more compelling than the other books on the longlist. The main reason that I\u2019m championing Horses of God<\/i> is that I read it months ago and still can\u2019t get it out of my head. <\/p>\n Odds are that this won\u2019t win The Best Translated Book Award against the firepower of the 2014 list. But if you\u2019re making a reading list based on this year\u2019s selections, this should definitely be on it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This post is courtesy of Best Translated Book Award judge, the inimitable George Carroll. Not only is he one hell of a West Coast sales rep for publishing companies large and small, he has an inexhaustible knowledge of translated literature. There are two books set in shantytowns that were submitted for this year\u2019s award: Shantytown […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297066"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338356,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297066\/revisions\/338356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}