Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making
intelligible a whole culture.
~ Anthony Burgess
Sarasota seems quiet at the moment and the word is everyone is traveling. If you happen to be opting for a staycation, embark on a fascinating journey around the world through the pages of these seven recently translated works.
The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone
Translated from Italian by Oonagh Stransky
Told against the backdrop of Naples in the 1960s, a city that itself becomes a vivid character in this lush, atmospheric novel, The House on Via Gemito is a masterpiece of Italian fiction, one that is steeped in Neapolitan lore.
Owlish by Dorothy Tse
Translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce
A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong.
First Comes Summer by Maria Hesselager
Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken
Winding seamlessly between the psychological and the mythological, the spellbinding story of a young woman’s dangerous passion as it plays out over the course of an eerie summer.
Tomás Nevinson by Javier Marías
Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
The final novel from Spain's most acclaimed writer, a novel about a charismatic half-Spanish, half-English man who is recruited by British intelligence.
Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai
Translated from Japanese by Polly Barton
In this intoxicating stream-of-consciousness novel, Mieko Kanai tackles the existential traps of motherhood, marriage, and domestic captivity.
Juliette by Camille Jourdy
Translated from French by Aleshia Jensen
Camille Jourdy’s beautiful watercolor pages provide an unfeigned milieu for the subtle dramedy at hand in Juliette. All too real human emotions, bittersweet and relatable in their rawness, come together to form a poetic realism.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
Translated from German by Michael Hofmann
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the German Democratic Republic collapses and an old world evaporates.