Jhumpa Lahiri called literary translation an “act of radical change”. Valeria Luiselli referred to it as “a kind of fertile contamination”. Their sentiments reflect a shared belief: more than a mere reproduction of stories in new languages, literary translation is a creative art form.
“People tend to think that translation is a one-to-one or word-to-word movement, but that is rarely the case. When we translate, we need to capture both meaning and feeling,” explains Shelly Bryant, a writer, researcher and translator based in Singapore and Shanghai.
The Singapore Literature Prize-shortlisted translator’s vast body of work spans from tennis icon Li Na’s autobiography to a pair of poetry books written by Cultural Medallion winners Lin Gao and Xi Ni Er—all three of which Bryant brought into English. “Bearing in mind that the elegance of the utterance is an important part of how feeling is created, we look to find an equally elegant expression in the new language, which might not mirror as closely the form of the original. But sometimes, this departure from form might be more faithful to the source material than direct translation.”
Shanna Tan, the Singaporean translator behind the bestselling English translation of popular Korean novel Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum, echoes Bryant’s sentiment: “Literary translators are always thinking about voice, mood and register at the word, sentence level and beyond. We have to be mindful to preserve the nuances in the source work.”
Tan’s interest in translation was sparked by a book she picked up at the age of 18. “When I read Anton Hur’s beautiful and stirring translation of The Court Dancer by Kyung-sook Shin, it made me sit up and take notice of translated fiction as a genre,”she reflects. “I realised that it allowed me a window to learn about different cultures, and helped me better appreciate the universality and differences in the issues we face and how we deal with them.”
Translated stories transcend the limits of language that shape our consciousness. They whisk us away into unencountered territories, giving voice to ideas that would otherwise remain inaccessible and unknown. In their original forms, these books may never reach an audience outside their author’s communities. In translation, we see the world through their eyes; we bask in their joy; we feel their pain. These stories expand our imagination and, more importantly, our empathy.
As the craft of literary translation continues to gain momentum, writers and translators are hard at work bringing powerful stories across borders and broadening their reach. From a heartrending Japanese novel about a homeless ghost living in a park to a searing account of Palestinian oppression lasting through history till today, take your pick from our curation of translated titles from around the world—any one of which would be a remarkable introduction to the magic that is born when the barrier of language falls away.
1 / 8
'Tokyo Ueno Station' by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles
This existential novel follows Kazu, a crestfallen ghost who haunts the grounds of a park near Ueno station in Tokyo. As Kazu narrates his daily thoughts and observations of the place where his life ended as a homeless man, Akutagawa-award-winning Zainichi author Yū Miri paints a portrait of the inextricable harms of generational poverty.
2 / 8
'Beijing Sprawl' by Xu Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang and Eric Abrahamsen
Muyu, a 17-year-old high school dropout, arrives in Beijing from his hometown in the countryside, making a living by slinging fake IDs and counterfeit papers. In a series of connected stories, him and his friends cross paths with various colourful Beijing denizens—each trying to get by through the squalor and high cost of city life,
3 / 8
'Me Migrant' by Md Mukul Hossine, translated by Fariha Imran and Farouk Ahamme and transcreated by Cyril Wong
Me Migrant features poems originally written in his native Bengali by Bangladeshi poet Md Mukul Hossine and transcreated by Singaporean poet Cyril Wong. Working in Singapore as a construction worker at the time, Hossine reveals in his meditations a strong sense of anxiety, pain and weariness, but most of all—longing for his homeland.
4 / 8
'Minor Detail' by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
In 1949, a young Arab Bedouin-Palestinian girl is raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers. Decades into the future, a Palestinian woman intent on investigating the incident finds herself a target of the Israel Defence Forces. Based on a true story, this painful but essential read rings hauntingly close to the present reality ofPalestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.
5 / 8
'Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop' by Hwang Bo-Reum, translated by Shanna Tan
This Korean bestseller about the healing power of books was translated by Singaporean literary translator Shanna Tan. Set in a bookstore in a quaint Seoul neighbourhood, the heartwarming book illustrates the difficulties and joys of daring to leave the past behind and start anew.
6 / 8
'Trust' by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri
As the third Domenico Starnone novel that Pulitzer-winning American author Jhumpa Lahiri has stunningly brought from Italian into English, Trust cuts to the core of what Starnone is best known for—sharp explorations of love, deceit and the frailness of humanity.
7 / 8
'Apple and Knife' by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J Epstein
Indonesian author and feminist academic Intan Paramaditha pens an unsettling collection of short stories based on the supernatural. Cloaked cleverly in subversive humour and gothic horror, the tales reveal themselves only at the last minute as the sharp, incisive social commentaries they truly are.
8 / 8
'Kitchen' by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Megan Backus
A deceptively simple story about love and loss spun by one of Japan’s brightest contemporary writers, the 1993 translation of Kitchen was the English-language debut of Banana Yoshimoto.Artfully bringing across her philosophy about the balance of joy and suffering in life, the book instantly achieved cult status, and for good reason.
The March ‘Dualism’ issue of Vogue Singapore is available online and in-store now.
