8 Must-Read Spring 2024 New Releases In Translation

Iman Mersal is considered by many to be Egypt’s premier poet, and I’d argue she’s one of the world’s foremost poets. So it was an immense joy to see The Threshold published last fall. It thoughtfully compiled work from Mersal’s first four collections, stretching over three decades, allowing readers to witness and experience the breadth of her immense talent. But I’ve long heard of her book Traces of Enayat, winner of the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award — making Mersal the first woman to win in the literature category — and had hoped it would find its way into English translation. In this remarkable work of creative nonfiction, Mersal retraces the mysterious life and loss of Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat, who took her life in 1963, at the age of 27, four years before the publication of her novel Love and Silence. It is a fascinating and multilayered project, intimate and complex, with captivating prose translated by Robin Moger, who I know from his jaw-droppingly beautiful translation of Slipping by Mohamed Kheir. (Transit Books, April 2)

And don’t miss The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, translated by Jordan Landsman (Transit Books, May 7).

Balsam Karam is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a child. She is an author and librarian, and The Singularity is her second novel, published in Sweden in 2021, but her English-language debut. The novel is set in an unnamed coastal city and follows the lives of two refugee women as they make their way in an unwelcoming world. Karam writes intimately of the women’s lives in prose that is compelling and complex, bracingly honest and heartrending. It is a novel of displacement and migration, of motherhood and grief and the intensity of the writing speaks to longing and possibility. (Feminist Press, January 24)

Bora Chung’s first book published in English, Cursed Bunny, was a genre-defying collection that pulled from horror, science fiction, and fantasy with a powerful feminist and anti-capitalist lens. This new collection is more firmly planted in the realm of science fiction, but like its beloved and award-winning predecessor, it contains multitudes. The stories are populated with robots, sentient vehicles, AI elevators, spaceships, and more, but are linked by Chung’s poignant meditations on loneliness, dystopia, surveillance, and the perils of technology. Acclaimed translator Anton Hur thoughtfully captures all of the collection’s dark humor and power with the immense artistry he’s become known for. (Algonquin, January 30)

In this stunning new collection, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five Chinese poets, including Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. While there’s an immense range in the poems themselves, themes of identity and longing/belonging emerge. Autumn moons and spring flowers abound, but also the power of language and poetry. I was deeply moved by Wang’s essays for each poet. “Poetry is one of my rare lifelines,” she writes in the epigraph of the book, and there is so much that is deeply personal in these essays. She includes thoughtful biographical information about the poets and discusses the fascinating art and craft of translation, but I was most struck by the way she reflects on how the poets speak to each other and speak to her. (Invisible Publishing, April 2)

“We were to be driven from the forest fells and lakes . . . now each step homeward in autumn was a departure from our lives.” Ǣdnan is Sámi-Swedish author Linnea Axelsson’s haunting and powerful award-winning debut. It follows two Sámi families over the generations, grappling with the loss of their culture and identity — forced off their migration paths, placed in nomad schools, and countless other losses. Told in verse, the story feels mythic and fittingly epic. Reindeer stalk across the landscape and the ever-changing sea is always present in Axelsson’s subtle and spare language, captured in all of its piercing beauty by translator Saskia Vogel. (Knopf, January 9)