Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! The end of the calendar year is nigh, and that means one thing: there are no more new releases (or—there are less of them, as you’ll see in next week’s New in Translation post), and there are a whole lot of year-end lists. Impressively, the New York Times’ famous top 10 includes three whole books (!) in translation (Magda Szabo’s The Door, translated by Len Rix, Elena Ferrante‘s The Story of the Lost Child, translated by Ann Goldstein, and Asne Seierstad’s One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre of Norway, translated by Sarah Death). If you’d like the scope to zoom out a bit, look at the Times’ notable 100 in 2015, thirteen percent of which is composed of literature in translation (given sad stats of the past, this is actually pretty darn good!—though the translation statistics of the past two years, available at Three Percent, make us less giddily optimistic). Finally, take a look at another English-language publication across the pond: the Guardian asks famous writers what their favorite reads of the year proved to be.
We’re perhaps a bit unfairly skewed toward English-language translation over here at Asymptote (though we’ve certainly got our fair share of crowdsourced, multilingual translation projects of time past), but that doesn’t mean we should get away with forgetting translators into other languages: on making Latin American literature available in Thai. And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s super-inspirational We Should All Be Feminists has been translated to Swedish for those who need it most: every 16-year-old student in the Scandinavian country will receive a copy. And sometimes translation is surprising: at the New Yorker, writer Jhumpa Lahiri writes about literature and translation, and is translated (from the Italian) by translator-having-the-best-year-ever Ann Goldstein.
If you’re familiar with the old-guard Russian canon (like Joseph Brodsky, for example), join the club. But do you know any of the new guard? Here’s a briefer to the country’s contemporary scene. Did you know about any of Slate‘s 27 overlooked books of 2015 (y compris: beaucoup de translation)? Finally, “make it hurt” this weekend, and read up on Polish poet Tadeusz Rózewicz at Jacket2.