Meet the judges: 'Reading translated fiction makes you sexy'

Tell us about your reading habits away from judging the International Booker Prize. What kinds of books are you drawn to, and what’s currently on your to-be-read list – besides the many books you’re considering for the IBP?  

Max Porter: I’m usually fairly undisciplined in my reading, at any one time I’ll have a poetry book or two on the go, a political book, some work research, a novel for bedtime, unpublished manuscripts by mentees, maybe a graphic novel. But this judging process has meant I’ve dropped all that and I’m only reading translated fiction. It’s wonderful, but intense. It’s made me very self-conscious about how I read. I’m looking forward to reading slowly again, dawdling through a book. Right now the only non-Booker reading I’m doing is poetry. I’m reading Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola, and the collected poems of Dionne Brand. Poetry feels like a quiet room to escape to after the beautiful noise of the Booker books in my head.  

Sana Goyal: In my day job, I edit a 40-year-old magazine for new international writing, so I have to be open to the world. I try to fill in the lacunae in my own reading: I try to challenge myself, I try to un-read as I read. I try to pay attention to the underdogs: to the writers who don’t win, to the writers who don’t make it to bestseller lists. I think indie and small presses world-wide have been doing the heavy weight-lifting, taking a chance on some of the most risk-taking, trailblazing work of our times.  

I’ve discovered so many writers and translators in these months. I’m looking forward to reading their backlists and following their careers for years to come. I have a soft spot for poetry – something I share with my partner – and I’m excited to return to reading poems as spring sets in. 

Anton Hur: This is a bit of a tall order, but I don’t want to read a book that does something I’ve seen done elsewhere and better. I want to be taken out of what I know. At the very least, if a work is doing something that’s been done before – nothing new under the sun and all that – I want to be invigorated by the energy with which it has been written or translated. Which is why my favourite kind of writing is poetry and literary fiction, especially translated works, because I love the spirit of experimentation and the care put into writing a magnetic sentence. As soon as I’m done with the IBP pile, I have to dive into a bunch of books about painters because I am trying to write a book about painting: notes by Agnes Martin, Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour, Chun Kyung-ja’s writing, if I can find any that’s not out of print, that sort of thing. It’s fun when writing is an excuse to just read a bunch of books. 

Beth Orton: I have gravitated to memoirs and essays in the last few years, more than fiction. Maggie Nelson’ s On Freedom and Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger are a couple that come to mind as being life-altering reading. In terms of memoir, I was deeply moved by Abi Morgan’s honesty, humility and humour, and the dignity with which she wrote This is Not a Pity Memoir. I am drawn to Rachel Cusk for her exactness and anything that Zadie Smith writes, maybe because she is such a brilliant essayist as well as novelist. All Fours by Miranda July is masterful in its raw, unschooled brilliance. I also loved Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart for its insight into lives I came to realise I knew very little of, but also for a beautiful portrait of a love between a daughter and her mother. In the couple of years leading up to being asked to be a judge for the International Booker Prize I was making a point to only read female authors and writers as an experiment. When Max Porter asked me to be on the panel, I revisited his book Grief is the Thing with Feathers and it was a beautiful gateway back to reading other sorts of fiction. Now that I’ve sharpened my fiction-reading skills I want to go back and read all the classics I’ve missed or have read but want to re-read, from the Brontës to Virginia Woolf. I’m also forever taking notes in the meetings with my fellow judges about books they are passionate about and I’m excited to dig ever deeper into translated fiction. 

Tell us about your favourite work of fiction in translation.   

Max Porter: That’s very difficult. Many of my favourite books are in translation. But because it is probably my favourite novel I would say The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan. The translation has always intrigued me. It was one of the books I most felt a kind of spell being cast over me where I was aware I wasn’t reading the original book. I was in a different place, caught between the Norwegian strangeness and English strangeness, a place only I could access, bespoke to my relationship with language, and that uncanny revelation fed into the atmosphere of the book and added to its already potent effects. It was one of the books that made me fall in love with translated literature.  

Sana Goyal: I’m conscious that, as judges, we’re putting books in competition with one another – choosing winners and losers – when in fact books should be in conversation. So, in an attempt not to pick favourites, I offer you a small slice, a starting point.  

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag, translated by Srinath Perur — for making me crave crispy dosas on a winter’s day in London.  

Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry — for making me want to bite my fingernails again.  

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell — for making me afraid to turn off the lights at 3am.  

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright — for giving me goosebumps over 300-odd pages.  

Where The Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko, translated by Polly Barton — for altering my understanding of ghosts — and ghost stories. 

Anton Hur: My favourite works in translation tend to be from non-Korean languages into Korean, because Korea has such a long and storied tradition of author-translators, a tradition that more English writers ought to make it a point to emulate. Trust me, it’ll help your writing a lot, and you’ll be making a real contribution into the literary world. That said, if I am to limit myself to into-English translations of fiction that are not my own, my favourite or most influential would be a text I read for the International Baccalaureate in high school, which is Stuart Gilbert’s translation of The Plague by Albert Camus. I remember this book, along with Beloved by Toni Morrison and Possession by A.S. Byatt, demonstrating to me as an impressionable high schooler what literature can do. Very large swathes of my brain are shaped like these books. 

Beth Orton: Swann’s Way [the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time] is a book I want to revisit once I go back to my life, and that it will be Lydia Davis’s translation. I have been told by reliable sources that hers is the most true to Proust’s original. With my newfound understanding of how important a true translation is, how utterly at the mercy of the translator we are, I want to experience that for myself and feel how I never find the edges of where the writer begins and the translator ends. 

Should people read more translated fiction, and if so why?  

Max Porter: Always and forever. In translation, not just literary activity but all discourse around the movement of ideas and stories between languages, we find our most progressive, open, empathetic and collaborative selves. I feel a profound urgency to this in our polarised times. Misinformation, propoganda, oligarch-owned news sources, these are powerful enemies of nuanced internationalist thought. Translated literature is a crucial tool in understanding one another better. It is the global consciousness at its most open, vulnerable and insightful. It’s where we might truly meet one another. It’s a shared nutrient base.  

Translated literature needn’t be specialist, on its own bookshop table, for the translation community or rarefied enthusiasts – it’s just books. It’s crime, fantasy, romance, sci-fi. It’s anything you can possibly imagine. It’s a way of moving around, widening the horizon, it’s a borderless world. In these days of crisis it seems to me vitally important that we find ways to travel and communicate over the hateful borders, literal and imaginary, imposed by those who would seek to curtail freedoms. 

Sana Goyal: A thousand times yes! We experience the world around us in translation. To read only English-original books is to have an incomplete, partial relationship with literature, with humanity. What can I say? Check your privilege, fix your ignorance.  

This past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about dominant, hegemonic narratives – and about erasures – how they are disseminated, drip-fed into our consciousness, and at what cost. As readers, we must demand more, demand better from the publishing industry — beyond buzzwords such as ‘diversity’, ‘inclusivity’, and ‘decolonisation’. So yes, read more translated fiction, but also acknowledge, champion, and fight for the rights of translators – their labour, praxis, and art as writers who break down walls in a world increasingly closing in on itself. 

Anton Hur: Yes, because reading translated fiction makes you sexy. Don’t you want to be sexy? If yes, like, read a Proust. Let’s not get into a discussion about which translation of Proust is the best – that is not a sexy discussion, stop that – but just read a Proust, any Proust. You don’t even have to understand everything about it or get anxious about whether the French has been rendered ‘faithfully’ or whatever; you will become instantly sexy. It doesn’t have to be Proust, there are so many authors from so many countries! Just go to a bookshop, pick up a translation, read the blurb, stare at the cover, and revel for a moment at the sexiness that is about to wash over you, emanate from you, take over your whole personality, your whole life. Men will love you, women will love you, enbys will love you – they will spread azaleas at your feet. Tread softly, because you tread on their dreams! 

Beth Orton: We live in a world where we believe we have access to every known and unknown corner of the earth, and yet we are ever more divided. I believe books will only become more important toward bridging the gaps in our understanding of one another. Fiction in translation is a very particular window that allows us to transcend our notions of cultures that seem utterly other to us otherwise. We find our common humanity and love in shared experience. The less isolated we feel, the more generous we become. Fiction is a community and fiction in translation is a global community, and that’s a hopeful and helpful prospect.