As a publisher that values efforts to improve the accessibility of works from all over the world through translation, ASP is excited to be joining the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in celebrating works in translation, their translators, and their publishers by participating in Read The World, an online bookfair taking place over social media from September 30 (International Translation Day) to October 7. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a reading list of just some of our favorite recently published and forthcoming translations, and are offering a 30% discount on our website through 10/7 @11:59 pm EDT using the code READTHEWORLD at checkout. We’ll also be highlighting many of these titles throughout the week on our social media platforms, so make sure to follow ASP at @ASP_Boston (Twitter), @academicstudiespress (Instagram), and @AcademicStudies (Facebook)!
Interested in supporting ALTA and independent bookstores? We also encourage you to explore ALTA’s Virtual Bookfair on Bookshop, where you can find our translations alongside other titles published by translation presses. As affiliates of Bookshop, Bookshop pays ALTA a 10% commission on every sale, and gives a matching 10% to independent bookstores.
#ReadTheWorld 2022: A Reading List
From poetry collections to novels to essay anthologies to memoirs, we’d like to highlight the below titles that bring voices of many other languages and from all over the world into English.
The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology compiled and edited by Mark Andryczyk (learn more about the individual translators here) The White Chalk of Days showcases a finely curated selection of Ukrainian poetry, fiction, and essays,. These works are products of the freedom unleashed by the Soviet Union’s disintegration. At the same time, many of these texts explore Ukraine’s post-colonial condition and the Soviet shadow’s continuing impact on efforts to define the Ukrainian identity in the twenty-first century.
Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine edited by Oksana Maksymchuk & Max Rosochinsky (learn more about the individual translators here) Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine brings together for the first time in any language a collection of Ukrainian poetry about the current war in the Donbas region of Ukraine. These poems explore the war from a variety of perspectives and voices—from the front, the home, the hospital; from women and men; from Russian and Ukrainian speakers. Artwork helps contextualize the poems and helps to represent one of the first literary mosaics of the current Ukraine-Russia war.
Farewell, Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works by Akram Aylisli; Translated by Katherine E. Young The three novellas of Farewell, Aylis explore a society in transition: a traveler is suspected of defecting to America, an actor undergoes an existential crisis, and the inhabitants of a corrupt country scheme to survive. A new essay by the author reflects on his experience as a prisoner of conscience in today’s Azerbaijan.
Night and Day by Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon; Translated and introduced by Christopher Fort Night and Day, an unfinished dilogy by Uzbek author Cho’lpon, follows the terrible fate of a young Uzbek girl condemned to marry a sexual glutton. The novel raises questions about the nature of Russian colonialism, resistance to it, and the intentions of the author, whose life was lost to Stalinist terror.
When the Menorah Fades by Zvi Preigerzon; Edited by Alex Lahav; Translated by Binyamin Shalom This novel by Zvi Preigerzon describes the life of the Jewish people in Hadiach, Ukraine, and their suffering under the Nazis, with a Kabbalistic spiritual touch: the Perpetual Flame of the Menorah at the grave of Chabad founder Rabbi Shneur Zalman Schneerson symbolizes the very spirit of Jewish life, which it is said will persist as long as the flame is burning.
Voyage into Savage Europe: A Declining Civilization by Avigdor Hameiri; Translated by Peter C. Appelbaum In 1930, Avigdor Hameiri traveled through Eastern and Central Europe. Bolshevism and Fascism threatened and Europe was poised on a knife-edge. From the growing danger and confusion surrounding inter-war Europe, in prose at once compassionate and bitingly sarcastic, comes a sweeping account of Jewish life from one of Israel’s prolific writers.
“Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul”: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry edited by Oksana Rosenblum, Lev Fridman, and Anzhelika Khyzhnya This bilingual Ukrainian-English collection for the first time makes the major works by Mykola (Nik) Bazhan, one of the most important Ukrainian Modernist poets of the twentieth century, available both to scholars and to the general reader.
Moments of Happiness by Alex Dubas; Translated by Yvonne Howell A popular Russian radio host asked his listeners to describe a moment of happiness. This book is those moments, in the voices of Dubas’s fellow countrymen from the breadth and depth of today’s Russia.
Küchlya: Decembrist Poet. A Novel by Yuri Tynianov; Translated by Anna Kurkina Rush, Peter France, & Christopher Rush Küchlya (1925), the first novel of the great Russian formalist Yuri Tynianov gives us a vividly written and moving recreation of the childhood, youth, beliefs and adventures of an eccentric and idealistic young poet and friend of Pushkin, tragically caught up in the Decembrist insurrection of 1825 against the Russian autocracy.
Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. A Bilingual English–Russian Edition by Osip Mandelstam Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader’s with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it.
Compiled, translated, and edited by Ian Probstein
Stone Dreams: A Novel-Requiem by Akram Aylisli; Translated by Katherine E. Young Set during the last years of the Soviet Union, Stone Dreams tells the story of Azerbaijani actor Sadai Sadygly, who lands in a Baku hospital while trying to protect an elderly Armenian man from a gang of young Azerbaijanis. Something of a modern-day Don Quixote, Sadai has long battled the hatred and corruption he observes in contemporary Azerbaijani society. Wandering in and out of consciousness, he revisits his hometown, the ancient village of Aylis, where Christian Armenians and Muslim Azeris once lived peacefully together, and dreams of making a pilgrimage of atonement to Armenia. Stone Dreams is a searing, painful meditation on the ability of art and artists—of individual human beings—to make change in the world.
Coming Soon
The Dreamtime: A Novel by Mstyslav Chernov; Translated by Peter Leonard and Felix Helbing Alluding to the Indigenous Australian concept of dreamtime, the novel offers a unique point of view on the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, through four intertwining narratives. The plots span in space from Ukraine’s war-torn Donbas to southern Europe and southeast Asia, tied together by themes of existential conflict and the blurred line between reality and dreams.
Tolstoy as Philosopher. Essential Short Writings: An Anthology by Leo Tolstoy; Edited & Translated by Inessa Medzhibovskaya This anthology is the fullest edition to date of the rich variety of Tolstoy’s philosophical output collected in a single volume that covers more than seven decades of his life, from 1835 to 1910. The seventy-seven texts included exemplify Tolstoy as an artistically inventive, intellectually powerful, challenging, and absorbing thinker.
Zenithism (1921–1927)—A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology edited by Aleksandar Bošković and Steven Teref This is the first-ever English language anthology of zenithism, an eclectic avant-garde movement unique to the Yugoslav region that existed 1921–1927. Reaching American readers for the first time, this anthology sheds light on an untapped chapter in European modernism ideal for the general and academic reader alike.
Dovlatov and Surroundings: A Philological Novel by Alexander Genis; Translated by Alexander Rojavin Dovlatov and Surroundings is a literary ode by one of the most consequential late 20th-century Russian writers, Alexander Genis, to another: Sergei Dovlatov. Characterized by Genis as an obituary, this book makes plain the significance of Dovlatov to Russian literature and the nuances of post-Soviet language, culture, politics, and literature.