They’ve just announced the shortlist for the Independent Foreign Ficton prize:

• Voiceover by Céline Curiol, translated by Sam Richard from the French
• Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew from the Chinese
• The Siege by Ismail Kadare, translated by David Bellos from the Albanian
• The Armies by Evelio Rosero, translated by Anne McLean from the Spanish
• The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated by Anne McLean from the Spanish
• Friendly Fire by A B Yehoshua, translated by Stuart Schoffman from the Hebrew

The longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has (finally!) been announced. Here you go:

• Voice Over by Céline Curiol (trans. Sam Richard)
• A Blessed Child by Linn Ullman (trans. Sarah Death)
• The Blue Fox by Sjon (trans. Victoria Cribb)
• Friendly Fire by A.B. Yehoshua (trans. Stuart Schoffman)
• My Father’s Wives by José Eduardo Agualusa (trans. Daniel Hahn)
• The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman (trans. Paul Olchvary)
• The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (trans. Anne McLeane)
• Homesick by Eshkol Nevo (trans. Sondra Silverstein)
• Beijing Coma by Ma Jian (trans. Flora Drew)
• The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa (trans Stephen Snyder)
• Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad (trans. Sverre Lyngstad)
• The Director by Alexander Ahndoril (trans. Sarah Death)
• The Armies by Euelio Rosero (trans. Anne McLean)
• How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić‘ (trans. Anthea Bell)
• The Siege by Ismail Kadare (trans. David Bellos, from the French of Jusuf Vrioni)
• Night Work by Thomas Glavinic (trans. John Brownjohn)

There’s only two points of contact with the Best Translated Book Award longlist, Celine Curiol’s Voice Over (which made our shortlist) and perennial Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlister, and sometime prizewinner, José Eduardo Agualusa, whose Book of Chameleons we nominated—My Father’s Wives has yet to find an American publisher, I think.

Overall, it’s a strong list, and if you want more info we have reviews of a few of the books from the longlist:

• The Blue Fox
• The Diving Pool

Only two! Looks like we have some work to do.

This is the ninth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is available at the official RTW website.

At the RTW party at BEA, there were a number of booksellers and reviewers raving about this title. In fact, the fifteen free copies that FSG sent to give away were gone before the second bottle of wine was opened. (OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but this really was one of the hottest RTW titles.)

With all the attention being paid to China—the Olympics, human rights abuses, etc.—it seems like there’s been a genuine upswing in interest in reading titles by Chinese writers. Especially dissident Chinese writers such as Ma Jian, whose work was banned by the government following the publication of Stick Out Your Tongue.

Politics and foreign cultures aside for the moment, the plot of this book sounds pretty intriguing:

The novel explores how fear and ignorance generate a lethal amnesia that undercuts individual freedoms and social bonds. The story weaves together a documentary chronicle of the students in [Tiananmen] square with a nightmarish tour through the consciousness of a protester, Dai Wei, who is shot in the head during the crackdown. Throughout the novel he is in a comatose state, trying to make sense of what happened as his mother struggles to keep him alive. (from The World)

A very interesting interview with Ma Jian and his translator, Flora Drew, can be found on the World Books section of PRI’s “The World” website (a section that is becoming more and more impressive everyday).

Ma Jian’s has a few provocative comments on the Olympics:

I believe that Western leaders should not play into the ruling party’s hands and collaborate in this big propaganda show. If they do, the Olympics will be a true farce because the party will have made Beijing into the cleanest prison in the world. All the undesirables, the mentally unstable people, all the dissident writers will have been detained and arrested before the event, so the atmosphere of openness will just be a charade, a piece of theater in which Western leaders will play their part.

But also has some interesting things to say about his novel:

The World: Your novel “Beijing Coma,” which centers on the 1989 student protest in Tiananmen Square, depicts the rebellion against the government as farcical rather than heroic. By showing how much went wrong with the demonstration, the book appears to undercut the struggle for freedom in China.

Ma Jian: For me, the events in Tiananmen Square are not romantic so I don’t wish to romanticize them. I see them as a tragedy, a tragedy because these young students had no idea of their own history, they had no memory, so when they stood up for what they understood to democracy, human rights and freedom they didn’t know what these terms meant or how to effectively bring them about in reality. And because they had grown up amid political indoctrinization they had no other reference points, no other models to follow, so when they achieved a certain level of power they turned into a miniature Communist party, with all the infighting and bickering that maneuvering for power brings.

I think it’s great that Bill Marx interviews both the author and translator, giving the translator a chance to talk about some of the difficulties/joys of translation. (It was at the Goethe Institut event last week that someone related a Peter Constantine quote that “A translator is someone who is always running into problems.”)

For instance, I find Flora Drew’s comment on the “most difficult challenge of translating Beijing Coma into English” rather illuminating:

The Chinese language doesn’t have tenses, so the past, present, and future intermingle because the language makes it easy to jump about fluidly in time. But capturing that expansive experience of time becomes tricky in the English language, where you also have to maintain a solid backbone of chronology. My goal was to retain Ma Jian’s sense of ambiguity and timelessness while also making the story understandable to an English-speaking reader.