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Over 2020 I chose to travel from continent to continent as I read novels, partly to get a sense of travel as our movement was limited by the pandemic. and also to get a broad sense of the contemporary literature that is being read across the globe. In the last 12 months I have read a number of novels that have not been through a process of translation. These books were written by authors who are from countries that speak English as an official language; the US, Nigeria, Ireland and Australia are all English speaking. I have read numerous books that have been translated, originally penned in Spanish, Korean, French, Polish, Swedish and Norwegian, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Icelandic and Kannada.
In the course of reading this first set of novels it has been interesting to observe which languages appear to dominate in British fiction. English, Spanish and French have been languages that have recurred in my reading, it's difficult to know whether that's entirely the result of colonisation, if there is a bias in the UK towards publishing translations of those languages or if other factors are more prevalent- cultural or practical.
The novels that I have read from Europe have often been more familiar, based in countries that I have visited, and in the past I have read a lot of literature from East Asia, so I found the most unusual and revelatory books that I read in 2020 were La Bastarda, from Equatorial Guinea and Friend, from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, more commonly referred to in the UK as North Korea. The contrast between Friend, a book so focused on domestic experience in North Korea and Untold Night and Day, in which time seemed to experience a profound breakdown, was notable in both difference and similarity, the sparse allusion to most contemporary technologies in both novels, despite their distance in origin and the decades in which they were written was particularly interesting to me.
I'm looking forward to reading more novels in 2021, starting with the Japanese writer Kikuko Tsumura's There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job. Hopefully as my experience of international literature grows I will start to draw more parallels between books and also have some really diverse experiences of translations!
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