Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Quarterly Conversation, Book Riot, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Rumpus and other online publications. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram

Ìęby Sinan Antoon, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright (Yale University Press)

The protagonist of Sinan Antoon’s novel, The Book of Collateral Damage, is an Iraqi expat who returns to Baghdad as a translator. Nameer is hired by a pair of Americans filming a documentary. It’s his first time back since his family emigrated to the United States when he was a child.

While in Iraq he decides to visit the bookshops on al-Mutanabbi Street. There he meets a bookseller named Wadood who is working on an unusual project: a kind of catalog of the objects destroyed in the bombings. It includes commonplace items like a handmade kashan, a stamp album and a stone wall. But also a fetus, a Ziziphus (or Christ’s Thorn) tree, and a pair of twins. His stories are often told from the point of view, and in the voice, of the anthropomorphized objects. Structured as colloquies, or “conversations,” they call to mind the Aesop’s fables and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales. Nameer, intrigued, tries to convince Wadood to let him translate the writings into English. And Wadood, considering the offer, leaves a copy of his manuscript at Nameer’s hotel in an envelope. Nameer takes it back to America with him.

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, another book on this year’s longlist, is also concerned with the disappearance of everyday things. Particularly the items we most take for granted. In both Ogawa’s and Antoon’s writing the empty spaces left behind are imbued with emotional and cultural significance. In The Memory Police, each disappearance is a loss to the community, but one which most of the community accepts in silence. There is a gentleness to her descriptions, and a tangible sadness. Even if they don’t remember what they’ve forgotten, they remain aware of the act of forgetting. In The Book of Collateral Damage the colloquies are more violent, but no less haunting. Each loss is a complete erasure and the human component, as perpetrators and victims, is surprisingly powerful—even when described by an inanimate object without contextual awareness.

I say “my mother” because I claim that she loved me as if I were her son. I remember how her son used to cry in her arms when she fed me. He and his three brothers. But he’s grown up now. But even so she told him off when he tried to persuade her to get rid of me and replace me. “But this oven is older than you. It has fed you and your brothers since your father died and it has helped pay your university fees. I won’t let it go till I die,” she said. She used to swear by me, saying, “By this oven!”

After returning to the United States, Nameer takes a job at Harvard, and then NYU, teaching Arabic language and literature. He keeps the manuscript. Years pass. He completes his dissertation, falls in love, and remains in contact with Wadood—though the ongoing war and Wadood’s personal situation make it difficult at times to stay in touch. Nameer remains obsessed with translating Wadood’s stories, despite Wadood asking him not to. Nameer has also begun collecting articles and pictures from newspapers about the continuing war in Iraq. He hangs them on his apartment walls in hope they will provide him with the inspiration he needs to write a novel of his own.

The Book of Collateral Damage reads as semi-autobiographical. At one point, Nameer talks about an idea he has for a novel about a young man who washes the corpses of the dead in Iraq—pretty much the plot of Antoon’s 2013 novel, The Corpse Washer. His protagonist identifies with Iraq as his home country, but as an American he is far removed from the actual fighting. The truth is that other than a few insensitive colleagues, and family members who still reside in Iraq but with whom he doesn’t seem particularly close, the war barely impacts his day-to-day life. And, yet, he struggles and cries out in his sleep. He’s often angry and unhappy. He carries the war inside him and his girlfriend believes he suffers from P.T.S.D. As the book goes on we see that the occupation of Iraq has affected Nameer and Wadood differently, but both men carry emotional and psychological damage because of it.

I was going to ask him whether he knew that in Arabic the words for hope and pain were almost the same, with just the two consonants transposed—amal and alam.

Most of what I’ve written so far is plot summary, barely touching on the overarching themes or the translation or how strange it was to be reading this book while I, like other non-essential workers, sit at home in obeyance of stay-at-home orders issued in response to a global pandemic. Antoon is very good at capturing the strangeness (and frustration) of living tangential to, yet still affected by, historical events. Years from now, when someone asks what it was like during COVID-19, what do we say? We stayed at home, took long walks, sewed masks and worried about how to pay our bills. While the men and women in hospitals and grocery stores, distribution centers and manufacturing, public service and food delivery, still went to work every day. Nameer wants to do something, to have some positive impact on what is happening in Iraq, when in reality he is both helpless and irrelevant. He is also aware of the hypocrisy of his position. It’s not all that hard to relate.

Should this book win The Best Translated Book Award? Maybe. If I’m being honest . . . I don’t know. Its chances seem slim, when you consider that I’m writing about it rather than one of this year’s judges. My recommendation is read it anyway. Jonathan Wright’s translation is keen and light. He wisely lets the plot bear the weight, not the prose. It’s a good book. And a good reminder that our present situation is just another blip in the history of civilization. Antoon writes about the Iraq war from a different perspective than we’re used to seeing. Nameer is both Iraqi and American. He is aware that he is in a privileged situation—working for an elite university and living comfortably in one of the most expensive cities in the world. His family remains safe. In one sense, the bookseller Wadood is a thread that stretches between Baghdad and Manhattan, allowing Nameer a connection to a country and a war he feels increasingly removed from. As I said, Antoon writes best about ordinary people caught on the periphery of battle. He does so honestly, without shying away from the truth about his characters or their situations, even when those truths are sometimes unattractive and those situations far outside our ability to control.

Heavy stuff—as one might expect from a title like Melancholy.

Yet readers looking for insight into their own or others’ feelings have often been drawn to such works. Admirers of Robert Burton’s magisterial 1621 volume The Anatomy of Melancholy may find themselves pleased to be introduced here to the fifteenth-century Three Books on Life by the Italian Renaissance writer Marcilio Ficino, which, according to FöldĂ©nyi, “alongside Burton’s massive tome, is the other most important work on melancholia.” For fans of books such as Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, however, FöldĂ©nyi’s old-school approach, with monolithic paragraphs built upon copious footnotes and a bibliography of fourteen and a half single-spaced pages of sources, could easily appear scholarly to the point of impenetrability.

No fault lies with the translation from Hungarian, a Herculean labor executed with deceptive ease throughout by Tim Wilkinson, rendering the most opaque of FöldĂ©nyi’s passages with remarkable clarity of diction. The question is whether readers will discover enough value in this dense text to feel their efforts have been rewarded. One of the most memorable and accessible points FöldĂ©nyi provides in the opening chapter is that in antiquity, melancholia was honored as a hallmark of people gifted with the capacity for extraordinary achievements: though they always faced the risk of succumbing to harmful despair and madness, their drive to overcome those dangers with great accomplishments could be helpful to everyone. In a later chapter, FöldĂ©nyi examines how the stargazers of the Middle Ages came to view melancholics as “Saturn’s children,” subject to the patterns and influence of the heavenly spheres. A reader hoping to better understand the melancholic setting and lives of the characters in LĂĄszlĂł Krasznahorkai’s terrific Hungarian novel The Melancholy of Resistance can glean some useful insights from FöldĂ©nyi partway through the last chapter, “Trembling from Freedom.” Yet the poetry of these notions is not FöldĂ©nyi’s priority. His focus is comparative, the way different eras of related societies regarded, understood, and reacted to essentially the same condition.

Of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, FöldĂ©nyi asserts that “even after reading the more than one thousand pages of that work, one finds it impossible to define melancholia precisely—but having fought one’s way through the labyrinths of the melancholic interpretation of life, one is nonetheless left richer in experience, if not in knowledge.” FöldĂ©nyi’s book originally appeared in 1984. In a 1986-88 essay entitled “Melancholy” (collected in Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays), the Hungarian novelist PĂ©ter NĂĄdas, author of Parallel Stories and A Book of Memories, says much the same is true of FöldĂ©nyi’s Melancholy: “When one reads this book, the image arises of being in a dead space but besieged by a desire to know. . . . Whoever reads this book will feel more precisely what melancholy is but will understand it less.” (Like FöldĂ©nyi, NĂĄdas examines melancholy in Homeric myth and through close analysis of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.) As a reader, though, I would tend to say just the opposite: reading the three hundred twenty-five pages of FöldĂ©nyi’s Melancholy may leave one feeling more knowledgeable about how and what melancholia has been considered in the past but neither more enriched nor precise in experiencing the feeling of melancholy life itself.

The nonfiction book is divided into what Quignard terms 10 treatises, but it often reads like a collection of connected fragments from the author’s journal. Entries are separated by a small bullet point, and the book feels in sections like a prose poem, or really, at times a riddle. As The New Yorker has noted, Quignard is a writer with “an oblique, aphoristic bent.” In an interesting and detailed Translator’s Note at the end of the book, the author is quoted as saying the work falls into a category called “speculative rhetoric,” and it’s a type of writing, he says, that dates back to the invention of philosophy. Readers schooled not only in the classics but in the classics in their original language (Greek, Latin, French, et al) will be in good stead since the superb translators, Matthew Amos and Fredrik RönnbĂ€ck, preserve the richness of the original text by including snippets of the original languages.

Quignard, a noted novelist, music aficionado, and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is adept at illuminating the overlooked role that our sense of hearing plays in all things and all thoughts. One of the most poignant examples is St. Peter, the Catholic Apostle who is considered the religion’s first Pope. According to the Christian Bible, Peter thrice denied Jesus as he was being led off to slaughter, only to hear the sound of a cock crowing, as his master had warned. Quignard tells us in the book’s first treatise, called “The Tears of Saint Peter,” “It is said that as Peter grew older he could no longer bear cocks.” Indeed, he had any kind of animal of flight in and around his home killed. As I read this, I found myself grieving, if you will, for St. Peter, across the centuries. How he must have regretted his denial, how he must have been hemmed in by his mistake, which was marked forevermore in an inescapable shorthand by the sound of a bird’s call. None of that ever occurred to me before reading Quignard’s book.

In the book’s eponymous, seventh treatise, he also makes the painfully astute observation that music was the only art to have been an instrument in the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. The Germans used marches and other songs to reinforce discipline and compliance. Quignard quotes none other than Primo Levi as saying that the music heard in the camps “will be the last thing from the Lager we will forget” because it is “the voice of the Lager.”

Yet as dense and erudite as the book is, “The Hatred of Music” abounds with short, pithy thoughts that cause the reader to wonder why these ideas aren’t routinely bandied about in everyday conversation. In the second treatise, Quignard writes, “To hear is to be touched from afar.” Oh, yes, c’est vrai! A page later, he writes, “Before birth, until the final moment of death, men and women hear without a moment’s respite. There is no sleep for hearing.” Well, now that you mention it. In another section, a fragment reads simply, “Not knowing the name of what haunts us in sound.” Yes, that. These ideas are collected in the chapter called, “It So Happens That Ears Have No Eyelids.”

All of these straightforward yet profound statements build a case for hearing as perhaps the most powerful of the five senses, a hidden motor of activity that can be blamed for all manner of problems and conditions and predilections that travel with us from birth to death. It’s as if he’s peering into our thoughts.
In one especially evocative section, he speaks of the continuity of sound, even within our heads when nothing external could potentially reach our ears. He uses the term “surging hums,” which strike us as we walk, modulating “according to the rhythm of our gait.” What are these “surging hums”? Hymns, he says. Old songs. “Childish and protective refrains. Lullabies and nursery rhymes. Polkas and waltzes. Singalong tunes.” He’s probing an internal soundtrack of which we are often dimly aware even as it’s broadcast inside of our heads.

Indeed, he’s often writing about things we sense but cannot articulate. He’s writing about sound in a way that’s arguably rare for the common reader in America to come upon, including this reviewer, but which nonetheless is germane and perceived on some level by every single person alive. That’s because he’s approaching sound as a primordial force within us, that is common to all of us, whether we routinely read the work of French essayists or not. To wit, he writes, “Nonvisual sounds, forever withdrawn from sight, roam within us. Ancient sounds tormented us. We did not yet see. We did not yet breathe. We did not yet scream. We heard.” The thought is so true and essential that, though it appears only on page 9, one could put the book down, having already grasped something vital about the connection between sound and consciousness.

Yet a reviewer should issue this warning: Abandon all hope—ye who read this book—of traditional structure or tight narrative weave. As the journal Quarterly Conversation has noted about Quignard’s oeuvre, “One is struck by the feeling that they are witnessing someone transcribing his thoughts, pure and fresh as they form in the mind, or to use a fitting mythological connection, Athena springing from the head of Zeus.” Indeed, in the translators’ notes at the end of the book, they say Quignard strives to “make language an endeavor of disorientation,” which often gives his prose a “refined coarseness.”

Some of the sentences in the book are almost prohibitively arcane, including this gem: “There is a fragment by Pacuvius that formulates what interrupts the plurimillennial hammering march.” This sentence is followed first by a sentence in French that is translated only in the footnotes and then by the same thought in Latin, which is untranslated. Which is not to suggest the translators, Amos and RönnbĂ€ck, phoned this job in. On top of writing a comprehensive afterword, they have been careful to insert footnotes throughout the text, even indicating at one point where the popular definition of a word (formidable) deviates from Quignard’s usage in the text. (Oh and, if ever a book needed a team of translators, it’s this one.)

Here and there in the early sections of the text, Quignard signals how sound in the form of music has become his own personal torture device. For example, he writes, without elaboration, “The recent religion of happiness turns my stomach.” Then in the book’s ninth treatise, which is tellingly called “To Disenchant,” he writes by way of explanation that music is now so ubiquitous in modern life that “it has become incessant, aggressing night and day, in the commercial streets of city centers, in shopping centers, in arcades, in departments stores . . . even at the beach . . .” In the translators’ afterword, we learn that in 1994 Quignard suddenly retreated from all of his professional activities—including his senior roles at the Gallimard publishing house and the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theater at Versailles. He resolved only to write in solitude.

One hopes Quignard will find the solitude he needs to write because this reviewer believes he could recount the entire history of literature through the lens of sound. And here’s hoping he does just that.

When I came up with the idea for today’s list—the funniest translations of 2015—I thought this would be easy. I was certain that I’d read a lot of humorous books over the past year, like . . . well, parts of Bellatin are funny, I guess, but I wouldn’t call his books funny. Maybe Vila-Matas? But not really. Those have a humorous tone at times, but are much more than that.

Looking through the list of everything published in 2015, I realized that most of us doing translations love to focus on the heavy, the important, the serious. Sure, there are things like The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, which seems funny in a goofy sit-com sort of way, and there are dozens of Dalkey backlist titles that contain “darkly funny” on the back cover. But looking at just the past year, I had a difficult time coming up with books that I would read when I just wanted to laugh and enjoy myself. (If I do this again in 2016, Volodine’s Bardo or Not Bardo will definitely be on here.) I’m probably being too strict with this—not duplicating books from earlier lists, leaving off story collections that aren’t entirely funny, trying to figure out what most people would find funny instead of sticking with my own sick sense of humor—but I was able to find four that I could include for various reasons. So here goes.

by JĂłn Gnarr, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Deep Vellum)

Not all that surprising given that Gnarr made his name as a comedian, but of the people I asked about this, no one actually mentioned this book. But I can guarantee it would be at the top of my daughter’s list.

She read this before meeting JĂłn and his lovely family when they were in Rochester last spring and couldn’t stop talking about it. Every post-it note in ChloĂ«’s copy of the book marks a passage that she thought was funny.

There’s a lot of juvenile humor in here (I mean, it is about a troubled kid with a proclivity for goofing off), so if you’re not into that, you might focus more on the awful way in which JĂłn was treated, but still, the overall tone of the book is really fun and enjoyable.

by MĂĄirtĂ­n O Cadhain, translated from the Irish by Alan Titley (Yale University Press)

This is my personal pick for the funniest translation of 2015. Taking place in an Irish graveyard, in which all of the buried never shut up and never stop insulting everyone, it’s a vocal tour-de-force that washes over you, rant by rant.

Don’t know if I am in the Pound grave, or the Fifteen Shilling grave? Fuck them anyway if they plonked me in the Ten Shilling plot after all the warnings I gave them. The morning I died I calls Patrick in from the kitchen, “I’m begging you Patrick, I’m begging you, put me in the Pound grave, the Pound grave! I know some of us are buried in the Ten Shilling grave, but all the same . . . “

That’s how it opens, with Caitriona Paudeen flipping her shit about how everyone treated her in life and death—a rant that goes on and on, despite being interrupted by any number of other dead souls. This book is hysterical and definitely worth reading. Also, I highly recommend to the translator read a few chapters.

As a side note, there’s a second translation of it coming out from Yale next year. I haven’t seen it yet, but from the description is sounds a bit more academic and footnoted. Should be interesting to compare the two . . .

by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, translated from the Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad (New Directions)

I don’t know too much about this book, but I saw Patrick Smith reference it in a tweet about how pleased he was to finally be reading a funny book. This was a book I had set aside, mostly because I hate the cover. Eyes are kind of gross when they’re disembodied, and dozens of them floating on a red background like a teenager’s photoshop project? Nope.

But after hearing about it from Patrick, I picked it up, and based on the few bits that I’ve read, it does have that sort of rambling, digressive humor that I really respond to. There are crazy section titles like “Wow! You Can’t Praise Enough This New Earthen Jar!” and “The Bad Fortunes of the Station, Lumber Market, and Red-Light District.”

I’m not finding any great quotes to illuminate the sort of joyous sense of humor that seems to underpin this book, but there is a quote on the back of the book from Wired (which is apparently a good source for information about literature?) referring to Yousufi’s “singularly elastic wit.” And Time Out New Delhi stated “Rarely have I encountered a book which made me laugh so freely.” So there’s that!

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I’m sure I’ve skipped over a number of really funny, truly worthy books. So if you have any suggestions, please send them my way and maybe I’ll update this. I could use some more humor in my life, so I think I’m going on a personal quest to find more funny books to read . . .

Thanks again to the support of Amazon.com’s giving programs, the winning authors and translators will each receive $5,000.

“I’m so excited,” Can Xue said when she was reached for a comment, “I think it’s the most beautiful thing that has happened in my whole life. I always think of the BTBA as a very prestigious prize rewarding writers who have the great courage to achieve their literary ambitions.”

According to the jury, Can Xue’s (“tsan shway”) The Last Lover (published by Yale University Press) was the most radical and uncompromising of this year’s finalists, pushing the novel form into bold new territory. Journeying through a dreamworld as strange yet disquietingly familiar as Kafka’s Amerika, The Last Lover proves radiantly original. If Orientalists describe an East that exists only in the Western imagination, Can Xue describes its shadow, offering a beguiling dream of a Chinese West. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen’s translation succeeds in crafting a powerful English voice for a writer of singular imagination and insight.

The judges also named three runners-up in fiction: Harlequin’s Millions by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Stacey Knecht and published by Archipelago Books, for the wonderful lyricism of its winding sentences; Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and published by Coffee House Press, for the exceptional promise it demonstrates as a debut novel; and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions, for its vibrant characters and sweeping narrative power.

On the poetry side of things, David Shook, the co-founder and editorial director of Phoneme Media “congratulates translator Anna Rosenwong for her masterful translation of RocĂ­o CerĂłn’s Diorama, our first book of poetry and one of the most fascinating and important books to have been published in Mexico this century. Phoneme Media is incredibly grateful for the support of the BTBA’s judges and organizers, to Three Percent and its indefatigable director Chad Post, to our fellow shortlisted publishing houses, translators, and authors, and to our readers around the world. Congratulations, Anna and RocĂ­o, on receiving this much deserved award!”

Past winners of the fiction award include: Seiobo There Below and Satantango, both by László Krasznahorkai (recent recipient of the Man Booker International Prize) and translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet and George Szirtes respectively; Stone Upon Stone by WiesƂaw Myƛliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston; and, The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal. (Jansson and Teal are the only author and translator on this year’s fiction shortlist who have previously won the award.)

In terms of the poetry award, past winners include: The Guest in the Wood by Elisa Biagini, translated from the Italian by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky; Wheel with a Single Spoke by Nichita Stănescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter; and Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander.

This year’s fiction jury is made up of: George Carroll, North-North-West and Shelf Awareness; Monica Carter, Salonica; James Crossley, Island Books; Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading and Center for the Art of Translation; Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books; Katrine Øgaard Jensen, Asymptote; Madeleine LaRue, Music & Literature; Daniel Medin, American University of Paris, Cahiers Series, Quarterly Conversation, and the White Review; and Michael Orthofer, Complete Review.

The poetry jury includes: Biswamit Dwibedy, poet; Bill Martin, translator, critic, organizer of The Bridge; Dawn Lundy Martin, poet; Erica Mena, poet and translator; and Stefan Tobler, And Other Stories and translator.

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For more information, visit the official Best Translated Book Award site and the official and follow the award on

– Pierre Michon, Translated from the French by Ann Jefferson, France
Yale University Press