It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:
Currently Reading:
Apartment Women / Gu Byeong-mo
trans. from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim
To Read:
If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light / Kim Choyeop
trans. from the Korean by Anton Hur
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| The Seoul Letter Shop / Baek Seungyeon trans. from the Korean by Clare Richards |
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| Plant Lady / Minyoung Kang trans. from the Korean by Shanna Tan |
It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:
Currently Reading:
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| The Woman Dies / Aoko Matsuda trans. from the Japanese by Polly Barton |
To Read:
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| Five Blessings for a Wedding / Maiko Seo trans. from the Japanese by Laurel Taylor |
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| Sakura / Kanako Nishi trans. from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell |
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| How to Use 3,000 Yen / Hika Harada trans. from the Japanese by Alison Watts |
It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:
Currently Reading:
Taiwan Travelogue / Yang Shuang-Zi
trans. from the Mandarin by Lin King
To Read:
Small Comfort / Ia Genberg
trans. from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson
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| Heart Lamp / Banu Mushtaq trans. from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi |
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| A System so Magnificent it is Blinding / Amanda Svensson trans. from the Swedish by Nichola Smalley |
It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:
Currently Reading:
The Hamlet Called America / Khrystia Vengryniuk
trans. from the Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan & Dmytro Kyyan
To Read:
Take Six: Six Ukrainian Women Writers / ed. by Steve Komarnyckyj
trans. from the Ukrainian by Steve Komarnyckyj
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| Girl with a Bullet / Anna Malihon trans. from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings |
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| Women and War / ed. and trans. from the Ukrainian by Aurélie Bros |
This #WITMonth I have a pretty small stack of potential To-Reads. I currently have a couple on the go, and a few more that I've finished over the last month that I will be sharing during August.
I have many books on my own shelves to read, and have made a stack of the ones I am actively reading and/or planning on diving into this month. These are some titles that I've had for a while, almost entirely some ARCs that I never got around to reading!
I'm going to be sharing reviews this month of books I've finished over the last few weeks as well as reading some more, and of course, adding to my never-ending TBR thanks to other #WIT Month reviews -- I always find great suggestions during this month, plenty to keep my going throughout the rest of the year.
I did read and review a few books from languages other than Japanese or Korean over the last year, too! These are the handful I got reviewed. Lots more coming this month!
Somehow I've just discovered this bookish meme, Six Degrees of Separation, which has been ongoing since 2014! The idea is that the host (Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest) selects a book on the first Saturday of each month, and then readers make a chain of six more books that are linked in some way. You can then link it up at her blog. She says:
Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge.
A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the ones next to them in the chain.
This sounded fun, and I looked at a few of the other participants to get an idea of how they do it. Lots of interesting thematic, personal or quirky links, with people ending up with very different books as their final choice.
This month the initial prompt was Sandwich by Catherine Newman. So here is my chain!
Sandwich by Catherine Newman is about Rocky, a woman in her 50s who travels to the same summer cottage in Cape Cod every year - this summer it's a whole whack of family in the small cottage and Rocky is thinking about life.
The Wedding People by Alison Espach: this novel also features a middle aged woman in a bit of a life crisis, finding herself in a place by the sea - this time in a luxury hotel among strangers, rather than a cottage with lots of family, but the sense of discovery of self is similar.
This then made me think of This Summer Will Be Different by Carly Fortune. In this one a younger woman at the start of her life has to make a key romantic decision. Set in Prince Edward Island, near the sea, at a family home that the main character returns to again and again.
One of the elements of Fortune's book is an homage to Lucy Maud Montgomery, PEI's best known author. So thanks to the evocation of PEI and the Anne industry there, I'm going with Anne of Green Gables as my third link!
The inspiration writers find from Anne Shirley and LMM's writing makes me think of a biography I recently came across, Anne’s Cradle: The Life of Hanako Muraoka, by Eri Muraoka, about the Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables. It tells the story of her life and looks at how her translation created the LMM craze in Japan that's still going strong.
The Japanese focus of Anne's Cradle, plus Anne's well known friendship with Diana, and their storytelling/writing adventures, makes me think of a recent Japanese book, Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa. In this one the narrator Tomoko and her cousin Mina become bosom friends when Tomoko is sent to live with her aunt's family for a year, in Ashiya, on the coast. And Mina writes a lot of tiny stories to share only with Tomoko.
And finally that brings me to book 6, Pauline Gedge's The Hippopotamus Marsh. In Mina's Matchbox, the main character owns a pygmy hippo, Pochiko, who she rides to school - as seen on the cover. Gedge's book in the first in an excellent series about Egyptian dynastic wars and history. But it has hippos in the title!
From Cape Cod to Egypt, via PEI and Japan, this chain has taken us on quite a journey :)
It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:
Currently Reading:
All The World's A Mall / Rinny Gremaud
trans. from the French by Luise von Flotow
To Read:
Papyrus / Irene Vallejo
trans. from the Spanish by Charlotte Whittle
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| Our Others / Olesya Yaremchuk trans. from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins & Hanna Leliv |
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| A History of Women in 101 Objects / Annabelle Hirsch trans. from the German by Eleanor Updegraff |
2024 marks 10 years of WIT Month! I've been participating since its second year, so it's nine active years for me. To celebrate a full decade of promoting women in translation, I thought I would share a few of my own favourites discovered over the past ten years.
Today's favourites are some short stories -- there are not as many titles here as previous weeks, since I don't tend to read as many story collections as novels. But these were some collections that I found memorable -- some funny, some haunting, some with great writing or characters or both!
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| Your Ad Could Go Here / Oksana Zabuzhko trans. from the Ukrainian by Nina Murray, Halyna Hryn, Askold Melnyczuk, Marco Carynnyk, & Marta Horban |
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| Where the Wild Ladies Are / Aoko Matsuda trans. from the Japanese by Polly Barton |
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| The Lonesome Bodybuilder / Yukiko Motoya trans. from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda |
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| Variations on the Body / Maria Ospina trans. from the Spanish by Heather Cleary |
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| The First Prehistoric Serial Killer / Teresa Solana trans. from the Catalan by Peter Bush |
It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:
Currently Reading:
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| Tidal Waters / Velia Vidal trans. from the Spanish by Annie McDermott |
To Read:
Maria Just Maria / Sandhya Mary
trans. from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil
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| Forbidden Notebook / Alba de Céspedes trans. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein |
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| The Eighth Life / Nino Haratischvili trans. from the German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin |
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| Amatka / Karin Tidbeck trans. from the Swedish by Karin Tidbeck |
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| Core of the Sun / Johanna Sinisalo trans. from the Finnish by Lola Rogers |
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| Maresi / Maria Turtschaninoff trans. from the Finnish by Annie Prime |
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| Like Water for Chocolate / Laura Esquivel trans. from the Spanish by Thomas Christensen and Carol Christensen |
