Language: German

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Seven Seconds of Air by Luca Mael Milsch

December 16, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Han Smith

When I hear the keys, I have to be quick.

Do you remember your childhood fondly? Selah doesn’t. In this week’s Translation Tuesday, the nonbinary protagonist of Luca Mael Milsch’s novel Seven Seconds of Air reflects on their childhood, on the inadequacy and guilt fostered by their constant separation from their working-class mother, on their inability to communicate with a parent whose ability to care for them is limited as much by the economic necessity of constant work as it is by moments of plausibly deniable cruelty.  Brilliantly translated from the German by Han Smith, these sections, written only in the present tense, capture the mind of a child forced to grow up too quickly yet nevertheless committed to a sense of optimism. Writes Han Smith, “The word that I feel is central to Selah’s voice in this section is eigentlich, or actually / really, as in: ‘everything’s actually quite okay’ – it is an attempt at self-reassurance that surely things are fine, with the ‘but’ that follows often only implied.” Read on.

1995

She’s almost never there when I get home: she’s nearly always working late. So today I heated up a frozen lasagna and I sat with my apple juice and watched TV. The little bottles are really only for going on trips, and I’m not supposed to drink them at home. But still, I just like those bottles, and it means I don’t have to wash an extra glass. I sink right into the sofa sometimes. My mother says: melt into it. If I’m still hungry I go and check in the kitchen to see what else we have to eat, and today there was an open pack of crisps and ice-cream too, but my mother can always tell if something’s missing so it’s better to wait and see what she says. In the fridge there was a yoghurt, and I thought she might be fine with that. That was what I hoped, that it wouldn’t be too bad. Then I headed back to the living room.

Sometimes I like to touch the screen with my fingers, even if I know it isn’t allowed. I’m really not meant to go near it at all, because it isn’t safe and I might also somehow break it. But when I touch the surface, when it’s on, that is, it crackles out and I jump back with the shock. Even though I know it’s going to happen – somehow I just forget every time. I’ve actually thought quite a lot about falling through time or even disappearing completely, and I wish something could maybe pull me into the TV, into the programme I’m watching, and then I’d just be gone.

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What’s New in Translation: December 2025

December 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Dan Shurley, Hilary Ilkay, Kaelie Giffel, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Japan, Peru, Germany, Austria, Czechia, South Korea, Brazil, and Hungary!

In our final round-up of the year, we present a thrilling novel capturing the margins of Germany as the nation begins to veer into fascism, a collection gathering the voices of powerful Hungarian women poets, a Brazilian novel testifying to the colonial erasure of indigenous language and being, a series of essays considering the act of reading as an oppositional force against capitalism, and more!

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Kappa by Ryonosuke Akutagawa, translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Bownas, Pushkin Press, 2025

Review by Kaelie Giffel

Even if one is unfamiliar with his work, English readers will recognize the name Ryonosuke Akutagawa from the prestigious Japanese literary prize, named after him posthumously by a friend. Kappa is a novella published in the final year of the author’s life. Pushkin Press’s reissue of Geoffrey Bownas’s 1970 translation comes on the heels of a 2023 retranslation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell, published by New Directions in 2023. Multiple, competing translations indicate the continued importance of Akutagawa’s work, which has a renewed urgency in our time.

Kappa is a philosophical meditation on whether difference can be encountered without violence and how we might meet others in the strange in-between spaces. Structured as a frame narrative, its inciting incident is the testimony of a patient in an unnamed mental institution. The patient speaks about meeting strange creatures with tummy pouches called Kappas. The Kappas have their own cultural, historical, and philosophical institutions and orientations to life, and the narrator lives among them for a while, alternately admiring, baffled, or repulsed as he learns more about their existence. They oppose birth control for silly reasons; sacrifice workers who have been laid off by literally eating them; prohibit artistic performance because they believe the general public to be hopelessly stupid; and are generally misogynist—female Kappas are cast as libidinous huntresses that oppress male Kappas. The narrator is bewildered by the similarities and differences between himself (Japanese) and the Kappanese. Hence, the mental institution.  READ MORE…

Fall 2025: Highlights from the Team

November 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our very own team members have to say about our bountiful Fall issue!

I found that Nay Thit’s “The Language I Don’t Speak,” translated from the Burmese by Thiri Zune, was the perfect way to begin exploring the new edition. Like it, the rest of the poetry section is provocative and urgently alive—especially Olivia Elias’s verse about Gaza in Jérémy Victor Robert’s translation from the French. Moving from her work to that of Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović, in “Who Came Back,” takes us from the action of war to the scars of postwar life. Then on to prison, with Başak Çandar and David Gramling’s translation from the Turkish of Kemal Varol’s “Dark Mist.” I found this piece unexpectedly amusing. Jen Calleja’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear), is a delight, full of thought-provoking reflections on what we do as translators. There are so many other translations shining in this issue—I wish I could list them all.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

Pablo Palacio’s “The Cannibal” (tr. José Darío Martínez from the Spanish) is my favorite piece from the new issue—fast-paced, vividly written, and replete with gruesome physical detail and haunting character psychology. As someone who likes to write about cannibalism, I found it both a wonderful point of reference and an object lesson in how obscene desire can be rendered in literature.

In “Vassal of the Sun” (tr. Tobias Ryan from the French), I was overjoyed by Patrick Autréaux’s descriptions of the natural world and his evident love for Melville.

Faruk Šehić’s “Who Came Back” (tr. Ena Selimović from the Bosnian) demonstrates how repetition, properly employed, can become a devastating poetic device. The scarcely varied refrain of “came back” hammers the losses of the Yugoslav Wars into the reader’s mind, while the sparse yet vivid language—“dandelions-cum-parachutes,” “white bark of birch saplings in living rooms”—emphasizes what war takes away, even from those who escape its bullets. It is essential reading for a world drunk on fantasies of righteous violence.

Palacio returns in “The Double and the Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor from the Spanish), a story that most cheap “twin horror” tales wish they were—though it’s not a horror story at all. Instead, it’s a superbly eerie study of difference and intimacy: how intricately a writer can render lives utterly unlike their own, and how such acts of imagination approach the question of what it means to write across unbridgeable experience. Using the extreme example of twins conjoined for their entire lives, Palacio transforms “monstrosity” into empathy. What a relief, in a world that so often wields that word against the oppressed, to encounter a story that refuses to dehumanize.

Finally, Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation” remains, to my mind, the best framework for thinking about the phenomenon of Trump and other authoritarian figures turned cult icons. It is supremely bleak, but in an era when the democratic counteroffensive has so spectacularly failed, we need such correctives to naïve optimism. Reading Drucker’s essay, I felt a kind of cruel joy—the shock of recognition that comes when one is reminded of the essential brokenness of human beings, their eagerness to become both recipients and agents of predatory attention.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

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Our Fall 2025 Issue Is Here!

October 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Nay Thit, Jen Calleja, Patrick Autréaux, and Johanna Drucker in our Special Feature on Attention

The world rewrites itself daily, unable to leave the past alone. As Trump’s relentless theatre once more monopolizes our gaze—proof, perhaps, of what Johanna Drucker, in her timely essay “Attention as Predation,” diagnoses as a civilization that is consumed even as it consumes—the question becomes what still endures beneath the smudged text of the present. Palimpsest, our Fall 2025 issue illustrated hauntingly by UK-based visual artist Jayoon Choi, turns to those deeper inscriptions: the faint, resistant traces that refuse to fade, the ghosts of meaning that survive the next rewrite.

In Amanda Michalopoulou’s “Desert,” Athens emerges as a manuscript of light and stone, its ruins glowing like marginalia of time. Carla Mühlhaus overlays the Black Dahlia murder and Andersen’s mermaid over Venice’s 2019 acqua alta, letting myth and crime shimmer beneath the rising waterline. Likewise, Barbara Köhler gives Homer’s Penelope her overdue monologue—both weaver and mermaid surfacing from the sediment of male authorship to reclaim their narratives. From Kazakhstan, Marat Uali laments the vanishing of minority tongues, an anxiety echoed in Tim Brookes’s interview on his Endangered Alphabets Project, where each carved script becomes an act of remembrance. In William Heath’s sparkling update, Herodas gives us drama composed on papyri—reminding us that even the most fragile art can defy oblivion.

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This issue’s wildcard Special Feature, “On Attention,” brings together thinkers and storytellers who resist the culture of erasure. Monika Vrečar asks whether poetry can still exist amid the static while Farah Ahamed, in an astute piece of film criticism on the Bollywood classic “Lagaan,” notes that the monsoon is also a season in the body. Elsewhere, Korean artists Koi and Hyungmee Shin—hailing from opposite sides of the 38th parallel—make masterful use of fabric to create radiant topographies of encounter, while Ecuadorian master Pablo Palacio’s “The Double and Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor) anatomizes the fractured identity of a pair of conjoined twins with a proto-modernist precision that feels radical in our own fragmented age. To read these works together is to experience literature’s own layered materiality.

If this issue has a thesis, it is that world literature does not replace; it accrues. Help us write the next layer: submit to the second installment of our “On Attention” Special Feature (as well as to our regular categories) and apply to join the team (deadline: November 1st)—we especially welcome applicants to the Assistant Editor (Fiction) role. A final note for the record: László Krasznahorkai, this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, appeared in our pages twice—long before Stockholm called. If this kind of early, global advocacy matters to you, please become a sustaining or masthead member today—the vital margin note that keeps this palimpsest legible, and gloriously alive.

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What’s New in Translation: October 2025

October 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, Sofija Popovska, and Timothy Berge

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Six Poems by Liesl Ujvary

September 16, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie

Yes, it’s true that we are free people. We are free people because we know that we are free people.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a trenchant sequence of six poems by Austrian poet Liesl Ujvary, translated from the German by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie. In our current information-saturated age, the very nature of truth has become the central battleground, and Ujvary’s poems lucidly illustrate this. Each poem uses the deceptively plain language of logical exercises to dissect the mechanisms of modern discourse—where topics such as art, human relationships, and science are often filtered through the lenses of capitalism and politics. They expose how a passionately held conviction can be systematically inverted, and how the dialectical process is routinely weaponized into pure propaganda. The result is an ominous portrait of “doublethink,” where contradictory narratives coexist and simplicity masks manipulation. Entertaining yet chilling, this collection of poems distills the essence of the “fake news” era.

this is better

democracy is better than dictatorship
butter is better than margarine
schools are better than military training camps
sex is better than booze
humans are better than computers
houses are better than barracks
poems are better than advertisements
students are better than cops
truth is better than lies

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Notes on the Erotic: German Intimacies from Cold War to Reunification

September 4, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Moumita Ghosh

[T]here existed an idea of a certain socialist morality which . . . labelled itself as more evolved in the realm of intimacy.

The fall of the Berlin Wall catalysed a monumental case of political integration in the West, heralding a necessary conciliation of disparate politics, economics, psychologies, values, and socialities. Of this time, the grand dialogues and negotiations between international governmental bodies are well-documented and enshrined in textbooks, but the stories of ordinary lives swept up in this extraordinary fusion are still in the middle of being told, processed, and understood. One of the most subtle—yet enduring—issues is the distinct views of sexuality and intimacy in the two Germanies, which reflects the greater ideological differences in both unpredictable and surprising ways. In the following essay, Moumita Ghosh takes a look at two contemporary novels that feature romantic relationships under the political influence, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos and Ralf Rothmann’s Fire Doesn’t Burn, illustrating how the quakes of national movements send their aftershocks into our most private spheres.

Still, there is one thing they still do that hasn’t changed: when they leave a place together, he holds out her coat, she slips into it frontwise, briefly holds him in her arms, then slips it off and puts it on the right way around. But probably, even these habits, in which they took pleasure and pride, and which confirmed their intimacy, are nothing more than a hollow-bellied Trojan horse.

—Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, winner of the International Booker Prize in 2024, sketches a tumultuous romance between Katharina, a young woman, and Hans, a married man thirty-four years her senior. Translated by Michael Hofmann and set in 80s Germany, the text intertwines the couple’s intimate narrative with national history. Hans, his childhood overcast by the Hitler Youth and his father’s Nazi sympathies, is eventually revealed to be a Stasi informant, having ‘decided in favour of that part of Germany that had Anti-Fascism written on its red banners.’ Katharina, in contrast, was born after the war and is characterised by a certain political apathy despite her youth; rather, she comes across as a citizen of the imminent reunification. When she travels to the West for an internship in Frankfurt and gets romantically involved with a colleague, this fluidity of her character becomes even more apparent. As her interactions with Vadim, her colleague, progresses slowly and spontaneously, her relationship with Hans becomes even more stifling and unnatural—and what comes across as the modern sexual mores of East Germany soon reveal themselves to have sinister tones. Intimacies begin to mirror political realities as Hans becomes more controlling with Katharina—a danger that has subtly existed since the beginning of their acquaintance. Eventually, their relationship becomes a surrogate of East Germany, where sexual liberation sat uncomfortably with repressive surveillance, while their devolving affinity also collaterally communicates the decaying of the present and the transition towards reunification.

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from the Stain, the Jacket, the Rooms, the Pain by Wilhelm Genazino

August 26, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Charlie N. Zaharoff

A look delivers the quickest verdict; its production requires no more than a second’s time.

“What do you do when you can’t manage to write a book? I’ll tell you: You make little notes, observations, anecdotes, sketch individual scenes. And then? You piece them together indiscriminately.” Thus wrote one irate critic of the Stain, the Jacket, the Rooms, the Pain—but they were wrong.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Wilhelm Genazino‘s mid-career masterpiece, translated from the German by Charlie N. Zaharoff. Here, the superficially aimless wanderings of our unnamed protagonist give way to a complex pattern of references and emotional resonances, his catalogue of observations accumulating into a vivid psychological portrait. What results is not a traditional dramatic novel, but rather, a powerful meditation on memory and loss. On the process of choosing an excerpt, the translator writes: “I had to make peace with the fact that I was doing a sort of violence to the text by snipping threads—visible or invisible—where they were not meant to be snipped. It felt worth it to give readers a sample of Genazino’s work, which with the exception of one novel remains untranslated into English.” Read on!

I step into the Rialto, the second-largest Italian café in town, and take a spot at the long counter, which reaches from the depths of the room up to the glass doors in front. I ask for an espresso and the telephone and dial Gesa’s number, although I’ll hardly say a word to her. The call is just a pretense. Gesa picks up. I say: I’m in the Rialto, do you want to hear Italy? She says: Yes. Then I am silent and hold the receiver towards the counter. From time to time, when she is sitting alone in her room, Gesa wants to be interrupted by the sounds of an Italian bar. She loves the quick setting of espresso dishes on the glass counter, the clacking of cups on the saucers, the laying of spoons beside the full cups, the snapping of the ice-cream scoop, the light sputter of the fruit press, the skating back-and-forth of metal ice-cream bowls on the counter, the pressure of freshly uncapped bottles, the opening and closing of heavy fridge doors, the clicking of ice cubes in slender glasses, the impact of a bottle opener on a marble slab, the hissing of the espresso machine, the dumping of coffee grounds into wooden trash bins. This is what she wants to hear: the sound of a more distant life that infiltrates her own for one minute, like a promise. After a while I ask: Is it good? Yes, it is good. Gesa laughs, and from her laugh you can tell that her life has rotated once around itself. I say: See you later. We hang up, I give back the telephone, pay and go.

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To Keep the Shimmer Alive: A Review of The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern

August 18, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Silversmith

To read The Gallows Songs now is to reclaim vision from algorithmic sameness, to practice freedom . . . as an event within language.

The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern, translated from the German by Max Knight, introduction by Samuel Titan, New York Review Books, 2025

Christian Morgenstern’s name itself opens a door. The significance of his first name is clear enough, but it is his last—German for “morning star”—that bears the promise of light before knowledge, of awareness before the world hardens into habit. In The Gallows Songs, newly reissued by NYRB Poets in Max Knight’s classic 1963 translation, Morgenstern uses that dawn brightness to keep language—and thus perception—from calcifying, with a celebrated nonsense that is less escapist whimsy than a disciplined refusal of routine. At the heart of The Gallows Songs lies a paradox: it is the crimson thread holding the hanged man to the gallows pole, at once constraining and liberating, that gave Morgenstern permission to see the world as a new thing, with the freshness of something that will not be seen again. Laughing on the edge of death, Morgenstern turns the gallows itself into a perch to witness the world anew. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2025

August 11, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eric Bies, Justin Goodman, Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

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Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

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Summer 2025: Highlights from the Team

August 4, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Our bountiful Summer 2025 edition is filled with gems—as these highlights from our team show!

I have complicated feelings about Carolina Brown’s “Anthropocene” (tr. Jessica Powell). The brevity it accords its narrator’s transness is alternately touching and maddening, the fatphobia is at once completely spot-on for such a self-loathing narrator and at the same time it is pretty dehumanizing‚ but, ultimately, all that falls away in the ravaged face of a one-armed zombie jogging across the post climate-change Antarctic wasteland. A wonderful sci-fi tale.

I’d love Syaman Rapongan’s Eyes of an Ocean (tr. Darryl Sterk) for the title alone, but fortunately, Rapongan seems like a strong contender for the title of the actual most-interesting-man-in-the-world. His play with words, his treatment of colonization and indigeneity, the kindness with which he talks about younger generations. I really needed to read something like this, after all the ugliness that’s been going on in my own country.

I love the gender-bender secret agent in Valentinas Klimašauskas’s Polygon (tr. Erika Lastovskytė) so freaking much. The concluding discussion of airplane spotters is a particular stand-out for its treatment of how individuals become conscious of their political power.

Refugees are human beings. Where Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’ “La Venezolana” (tr. Shaina Brassard) shines is in its steadfast refusal either to vilify or idealize them, to present them in all their messy humanity, and in its willingness to show how shameful the narrator’s behavior towards them.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

Emmanuelle Sapin’s story “A Child Is Stolen” (tr. Michelle Kiefer) starts off with a swift, telling punch to the gut and builds from there.

Ahmad Shamlou’s poems in Niloufar Talebi’s lilting translation hover in waves of emotion and radiance: “Give me mirrors and eager moths, / light and wine…”

With playfulness and insight, Katia Grubisic sharpens the discussion about AI and translation by focusing on error in her piece “The Authority of Error”: “My argument is that AI makes the wrong kind of mistakes.  Mistakes breed resilience, and, most importantly, humility.”

Fawwaz Taboulsi, in Yasmine Zohdi’s translation, steers us directly into the sadness of Lebanon, 1982, and the time of the Siege of Beirut. His grief speaks with lucidity: “And, ever so slowly, the departing fighters peel away from the grasping, waving hands and from the embracing arms. Like skin peeling off its own flesh. They peel away from the farewells. From the prayers. From the promises.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers build characters. Jana Putrle Srdić’s poem “End of the world, beginning” in Katia Zakrajšek’s translation, does this in striking ways: ” Sitting on a warm rock, scratching in the wind, / you are a monkey, a branch with ants filing along it, debris in the air, / spots of flickering light”

—Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2025

July 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Jason Gordy Walker, Jordan Silversmith, and Kaelie Giffel

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

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Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

Unhappy Ending: An Interview with Franziska Gänsler and Imogen Taylor

June 26, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

I wanted to connect my area with a more urgent threat of climate crisis.

A sweltering combination of domestic turmoil, existential ennui, and an increasingly threatening final disaster, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer presents the portrait of fractures both geographic and internal, translated with a natural erudition by Imogen Taylor. Set in a German spa town on the verge of being consumed by wildfire, the novel tells of a young woman who receives a pair of surprising visitors, and in this disruption of her melancholy routine, a spark of desire is awakened—something that could prove to be illuminating, or all-consuming. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Rachel Stanyon: Franziska, you’ve had a lot of success with this debut novel in Germany; translations and film rights have been sold, and it’s received some glowing reviews in the English-language press. And Imogen, you’ve got twenty translations under your belt. How did you each get where you are now?

Franziska Gänsler (FG): I always wrote. It was my main interest even as a child, but I never felt that it could be a profession—it’s so uncertain. I’m not from an artistic family, so I didn’t know how to get there. I ended up studying to become a teacher of art and English, and had stopped writing for a few years; I was painting and doing other things creatively, then somehow I took it up again. Then writing just took over all of my time. I was lucky because I was supposed to be painting, but my professor at university allowed me to write instead. She was from the French-speaking part of Switzerland and couldn’t even read what I wrote, but she always signed off on everything. I started entering competitions, and from there my agent saw my work.

I actually wrote one book prior to this one, but nobody wanted to publish it. And then with Eternal Summer we came to Kein & Aber, which is my publishing house in German, and I’m still with them.

Imogen Taylor (IT): I think for me, it was a coincidence. I studied French and German, and then moved to Berlin after my BA in England. People started asking me to translate because they knew I could speak German and English, so I took odd jobs on for neighbours and friends. I was paid in bottles of wine for one of my first jobs. It wasn’t really very serious, and I carried on studying, with a master’s and a PhD. I was still doing some translation on the side, but not very much or seriously. And then I gradually realized that was what I really wanted to do, more than academic work. READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler

May 29, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Gänsler compellingly blurs the lines between heroine and villain, as well as between compassion and self-preservation. . .

The still-young genre of climate fiction—or ‘cli-fi’—dreams of inspiring change, yet critics have pointed out that its overwhelmingly dystopian narratives are more likely to trigger paralysis or apathy; if we’re doomed, what’s the point? Within this contemporary affliction of passivity, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer juxtaposes its burning world with a potent human story of choice, stasis, and compassions, cementing its varied cast in an unmistakably contemporary mode, yet with the same ethical conundrums that have confounded us since time immemorial. The sheer breadth of our current problems can wither us into an insular complacency, but Gänsler powerfully points us towards the matter of our freedom. We’re delighted to present this timely novel as our Book Club selection for the month of May—it’s a hot one.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler, translated from the German by Imogen Taylor, Other Press, 2025

Once upon a time, the promise of an eternal summer may have seemed idyllic. In the popular imagination, the season has so often signified carefree vacations, sandy shores and glittering waters, balmy nights and languid mornings, the well-deserved time-out from a life of hard work or study. But it’s 2025. Summers have become increasingly hot. And long. And dry. I can vividly remember the eerie smog and the smell of smoke in the air as the 2019-20 bushfires raged across the southeast of Australia; even though I was hundreds of kilometres from any active fires, I had my first, pre-COVID experience of donning a mask for daily activities. Holidays were cancelled. New Year’s celebrations abandoned. Beach towns evacuated. This is the summer of our times—and sometimes even winter, too; just this January, southern California saw wildfires spreading into urban areas, decimating homes and taking lives and livelihoods, while less well-publicised infernos have also blazed through parts of South Korea and South Africa.

Somewhere in what seems to be Bavaria, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer is sweltering a few years from now, in a future where the climate target of a 1.5°C threshold is no longer a goal even for activists. It’s October, and an empty spa resort is being threatened by the fires raging through the nearby conifer forests for the fifth or sixth year in a row. It all seems hard to keep track for Iris, who is living out her own lonely summer days in this hotel that she inherited, sunbathing and checking the latest weather warnings—but only when the situation isn’t so dire that they’re played over roaming loudspeakers: ‘Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home.’ Although she’s aware of the danger and trusts the climate science, her physical and economic precarity—hotel bookings are no longer allowed, even if anyone actually wanted to take the waters in this water-restricted spa town—are not enough for Iris to leave. She has no one and nowhere to go to. READ MORE…