The White Review — January 2016 Translation Issue

The third annual January translation online issue, edited by Daniel Medin, opens with an interview with the foremost Afrikaans writer of her generation, the novelist, poet, critic and scholar Marlene van Niekerk, whose ‘work casts an unflinching, penetrating regard on post-apartheid South African society, registering beauty and frailty alongside almost unbearable cruelty’. Alongside her, Russian poet Galina Rymbu contributes a long poem, ‘Sex Is a Desert’. We also have new short stories by Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, a rising star in Latin American fiction; and Indonesian novelist Eka Kurniawan, whose novels BEAUTY IS A WOUND and MAN TIGER were published last year in English to great critical acclaim. Also representing Asia we’re excited to publish Li Er’s story about Chang’e, goddess of the moon. Unrelated but similarly themed, we have an excerpt from Wioletta Greg’s forthcoming novel, ‘The Bees’, and new translations of Monika Rinck’s poems , ‘Three Honey Protocols’. The German language is also represented by Esther Kinsky’s ‘By the River’, a meditative excerpt from her eponymous novel; and Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s astute elegy to Renata Adler’s SPEEDBOAT. Elsewhere we have new Ukraine-themed poems by Elena Fanailova; an excerpt from Israeli novelist Nir Baram’s forthcoming GOOD PEOPLE, about the NKVD in pre-war Berlin; and a short story by Bulgarian Georgi Gospodinov on the last ever sunset. Representing the French language, finally, we’re excited to run a long conversation between Congolese writer and jazz fan Fiston Mwanza Mujila and his translator, Roland Glasser, and Pierre Senges’ manifesto ‘Suite’, a ‘droll demonstration of its author’s daringly agile imagination’.