New Books in Translation: 2023 (with a look back to 2022)
Romanian literature has so far had a hard time conquering the English speaking world. The (in)famous 3-4%, referring to the share of translations of the total annual publications in the US and UK, has become an obsession among translators, authors, agents, and literary promoters. The percentage is similar on the two sides of the Atlantic and has moved, albeit very slightly, upwards in recent years. But it remains a source of immense frustration, all the more so when one considers that it represents all translations published each year, from all fields and all languages.
It is therefore not at all surprising that the number of literary translations from Romanian into English continues to be small. However, 2023 can be seen as a good year for Romanian literature in English translation, and this is mainly due to the fantastic reception the newly published books received and the prestigious prizes awarded to their authors and translators as well as to the books themselves.
The biggest success of the year was Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (brilliantly translated by Sean Cotter and accompanied by the impressive The Solenoid Reader, Deep Vellum), which, although published in the fall of 2022, continued to garner awards and high accolades in the American press throughout 2023. In addition to rave reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekley, the novel had a spectacular echo in the blogosphere, being widely reviewed by influential bloggers such as Chris Via a.k.a. Leaf by Leaf, WASTE Mailing List and Travel Through Stories.
Cărtărescu’s post-modernist masterpiece is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction 2023, one of America’s most coveted literary awards, presented annually to the best fiction book published, in original or in translation, in the US. Recently, it has been long-listed for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. The novel was named one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Financial Times, and Words Without Borders.
The English version of Solenoid brought American translator Sean Cotter The Romanian Cultural Institute Award for the best translation of a book from Romanian in 2022.
Solenoid … is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. Kleist’s cosmic ambiguity, the bureaucratic terror of Kafka, the enchantments of García Márquez and Bruno Schulz’s labyrinths are all recognizable in Cărtărescu’s anecdotes, dreams and journal entries. That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel’s sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. Although the narrator himself is largely critical of literature … he also affirms the possibility inherent in the ‘bitter and incomprehensible books’ he idolizes. In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself. — Dustin Illingworth, New York Times
Instead of delivering a sharp, succinct punch, Solenoid goes the way of the oceanic—rejecting brevity because the author, a Romanian Daedalus, is laying the foundation for a narrative labyrinth … The writing itself is hypnotic and gorgeously captures the oneiric quality of Cărtărescu’s Bucharest … Cotter’s translation is attentive to the efficiency of Cărtărescu’s ornate but surprisingly approachable prose, gliding from sentence to sentence and calling little attention to itself. The sheer immensity of Cotter’s undertaking combined with the unfailing evenness of the translation’s quality is nothing short of remarkable. — Ben Hooyman, Los Angeles Review of Books
The great fun of this teeming hodge-podge is the way that Mr. Cărtărescu tweaks the material of daily life, transmuting the banal into the fantastical. — Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
Cărtărescu weaves a monumental antinovel of metaphysical longing and fabulist constructions … This scabrous epic thrums with monstrous life. — Publishers Weekly
A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written. — Kirkus Reviews
… a masterpiece in a league of its own. — James Webster, Full Stop
Read more about the book and about Mircea Cărtărescu’s breakthrough promotional tour in the US here.
The year’s major release was the much anticipated English version of Exiled Shadow (translation by Carla Baricz, Yale University Press), the latest novel by celebrated Romanian-American writer Norman Manea, one of the most internationally known Romanian authors. The work of a master of Central European style mixing irony and satire with bitter meditation on history, Exiled Shadow crossed the ocean after having already enjoyed considerable critical and public acclaim in Romania, Spain and Germany, and was greeted with equally glowing reviews in the author’s country of exile. It was recommended by Mosaic Magazine and The Arts Fuse as one of the best books of 2023.
Manea reveals himself as one of the last great witnesses to twentieth-century barbarity. — Costica Bradatan, Times Literary Supplement
One of the most eloquent living witnesses of the European 20th century, Norman Manea, at 87, has brought out Exiled Shadow, a contemplative work of fiction … [in] a strong, clarion translation into English by Carla Baricz. … A fitting summarization of a rich and deeply honorable career. — Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
An accomplished work … an approachable read even as there is so much depth to it, in its many layers. … Well done and engaging—an impressive and significant chapter in Manea’s considerable body of work. — M.A. Orthofer, Complete Review
… an extended meditation on the experience of exile and an exquisite game of mirrors that reflects the narrator’s present and past lives as well as his literary soulmates. — Tess Lewis, The Arts Fuse
Exiled Shadow is saturated in reflections, dualities, and shadows, starting with the parallels between Manea and the novel’s unnamed narrator, referred to as the wanderer, the exile, the nomad, the walking stick, Suitcase, the Misanthrope, and the Nomadic Misanthrope. Throughout the novel, exile is posited and probed as the cure for that ‘wound that won’t heal’ identified by the younger Manea newly seeking refuge in ‘the country of all possibilities.’ … Baricz does a tremendous job differentiating the tones across various parts of Manea’s consistently thought-provoking and studiously intellectual latest work. … In its best moments, her translation even evokes another great exiled author in Nabokov. — Cory Oldweiler, Los Angeles Review of Books
Freed from the dreary, nauseating oppression of Ceausescu’s communist surveillance state, the great Romanian author is thrown back on himself, books, and the Jews. — David Mikics, Tablet Magazine
Discover more about the book and its author here.
Also on the list of last year’s must-read Romanian books in translation are Liliana Corobca’s novel, Kinderland, a heart-wrenching exploration of a phenomenon that has taken hold in Eastern Europe in the past decades: the fate of children left behind by parents who go abroad to work; a revised version of Where the Sky Begins by Carmen Firan, a beautiful collection of travel essays infused with philosophical reflection; the compelling Vitaly: A Ukrainian-Russian American Story by Adrian Sângeorzan, arguably the author’s best novel to date, telling the story of a Russian-born, Jewish Ukrainian boy who tries to find his identity while struggling to make sense of his new life as an immigrant in the US; and Dinner with Marx, a “[f]unny, painful, absurd, fantastic, satirical, often theatrical” collection of poetry by Romanian-French playwright and poet Matei Vișniec.
Liliana Corobca, Kinderland (translated by Monica Cure, Seven Stories Press)
The second novel by Moldovan novelist Liliana Corobca to be translated into English and the second to be published by Seven Stories Press after The Censor’s Notebook (2022), which brought Monica Cure the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2023.
Kinderland is not just an extraordinary look at life in Europe’s edgelands (‘our poor and unhappy country’)–it’s also a powerful novel, full of surprising imagery and beautiful writing. — Alex Preston, The Guardian
… a heartbreaking account of a childhood abruptly curtailed. — Lucy Popescu, Financial Times
A disturbing portrait of social chaos leavened with charm and hope. — Kirkus Reviews
Adrian Sângeorzan, Vitaly: A Ukrainian–Russian American Story (translated by James Ryan, New Meridian Arts)
Carmen Firan, Where the Sky Begins (New Meridian Arts, translated by Alexandra Carides)
Matei Vișniec, Dinner with Marx (translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu, New Meridian Arts)
