I always find the consuming too much of one thing to be detrimental to my reading health, like eating a menu of only grilled cheese sandwiches would be for example. For a wider, more nourishing literary diet (and to get another square for your Book Bingo blackout), I suggest adding books translated from other languages to your reading list.
For me the reading of translated works brings the novelty of glimpsing a worldview beyond the perspective of my own language. Here are a few I have recently enjoyed.
Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi, translation by David G. Boyd. In this quirky satire, a young office worker tells her fellow employees that she is pregnant in order to be excused from breakroom kitchen chores at work. Her deceit snowballs into her joining a prenatal exercise class, downloading a popular pregnancy-tracking app, and more. Thriving on the attention she gets, it becomes harder and harder for her to reveal the truth. Readers are left wondering how well do we really know the personal lives of our co-workers?
The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog, translation by Michael Hofmann. While visiting Japan, Herzog is asked whom in the country he would most like to meet. His hosts expect him to request an introduction to the Emperor, but instead he asks to speak to Hiroo Onada, an infamous veteran of the WWII conflict. Onada successfully hid in the Philippine jungle for decades after hostilities ceased, preparing for a resurgence of Japanese forces. In this novelization of Hiroo’s experiences, Herzog ponders the mysteries of human motivation, how we adopt to our life tasks and follow through with them regardless of cost to ourselves.
Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal translation by Jessica Moore. In a haunting meditation on personal freedoms, the trans-Siberian railway brings together a young Russian conscript shipping out on assignment to Siberia and an older French woman fleeing a stagnant romantic relationship. Beset with doubts about his mission, the soldier begins making dangerous plans to desert his troop and finds himself turning to fellow passengers on the train for aid. Elegantly told to a soundtrack of rumbling trains and the vast landscapes of eastern Russia as a stage set.
An even more considered experience of the act of translation are two recent books by Jhumpa Lahiri, who grew up hearing Bengali, reading and speaking English, but fell in love with the Italian language later in life and became determined to write her works in that language. She writes about this in her non-fiction work In Other Words, translated to English by Ann Goldstein. She followed up by writing her next novel Whereabouts in Italian, then translating it into English herself.
Find a list of some recently published works in translation in our collection here; or try a catalog keyword search on the word “Translation” to explore more widely.
~Posted by Kay K.
For more ideas for books to meet your Summer Book Bingo challenge, follow our Shelf Talk #BookBingoNW2023 series or check the hashtag #BookBingoNW2023 on social media. Book Bingo is presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures.
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