Boyd Tonkin on the IFFP Shortlist

Boyd Tonkin’s summary of the IFFP Shortlist appeared in today’s Independent and is a great overview of these six titles:

Four works from Latin American writers appeared on the long-list; three still figure here. If the Southern Cone ever went away as a heartland and hotbed of excellence in modern fiction (which I doubt), it has returned in triumph. Yet this trio – Alberto Barrera Tyszka from Venezuela; Santiago Roncagliolo from Peru; Marcelo Figueras from Argentina – defies all generalisation. From hard-boiled political thriller to eerie family fable to child’s-eye recollection of a risky adult world, they traverse an Andean range of forms. Almost half a century after the original “boom” of the 1960s began to reverberate around the literary world, it makes no more sense to issue glib edicts about the nature of the continent’s fiction than it would for Europe or North America. Prosperity means complexity, in art as in life. [. . .]

This prize rewards the double-act of author and translator. In the other half of that equation, our shortlist is graced by some of the most talented practioners at work today. One of them, Edith Grossman, recently published her own robust, even combative, defence of her metier in a manifesto entitled Why Translation Matters (Yale, £10.99). Read it for a sinew-stiffening call to arms. Grossman will leave you in no doubt that a culture that neglects translation will starve for want of nourishment – yes, even one that speaks English. A cut-down, creolised version of our language may now help the world to do business. It does not (and no one language ever could) begin to tell us the full story behind the planet’s other lives.

That’s why translation matters. This shortlist delivers a sample of those stories, and those lives, in the most pleasurable of ways. For these books all speak fluent human.

Check out the “full article”: for more on the Prize, and for short write-ups of all six books.