My New Year's Resolution, for three years running, is to read a book a week. I managed to keep up with that goal until the first week of March, and was then impeded by midterms. Now that the term is over, however, I've started the arduous process of catching up, and have been pleasantly surprised by Words Without Borders. This anthology, compiled by a group of authors from around the globe, collects their favourite works previously unpublished in English, and translates them for the first time. Those who suggest stories include Jonathan Safran Foer, Naguib Mahfouz, and Jose Saramago, among others.
My favourite selections so far have been Meteorite Mountain, a moving, surreal piece by Can Xue, and the social critique Children of the Sky by the Indonesian author, Seno Gumira Ajidarma. I'm just starting the section with selections from the MidEast, and though halfway through an Iraqi response to Borges, translated from the Spanish. The author, Jabbar Yassin Hussin, has lived in France for much of his life, and apparently that's the only place I'll be able to grab his latest collection of stories (The Reader of Baghdad), written following his return to Iraq post-US invasion.
Le Lecteur de Bagdad
Once I've had more time to reflect on the pieces I've read so far, I'll probably have something of substance to say about them. For now, all I can say is that it's a worthwhile read. No matter how much I learn about regions in history and polisci courses, they'll never be able to utterly transport me or lend me an alternative perspective in the way that stories can. Literature is transformative and empathetic by nature.
I'm not trying to impose guilt on you because of Eurocentrism or Anglophilism. All I mean to say is this -- think of how much astounding literature we're missing out on.
To quote the introduction: "50 percent of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated from English, but only 6 percent are translated into English." Think about it.
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