7 Books in Translation to Read for Pride Month 2021
Celebrate Pride Month with this list of books by LGBTQ writers in translation.
It’s June, which means it’s Pride Month again. It feels more urgent than ever to reconnect with each other and the world and to celebrate literature in translation.
We’re thrilled to share a new list of LGBTQ+ books in translation. We’ve celebrated the month for the past few years with recommendations, including this 2019 list of 7 books in translation, our 2018 list, and the original 2017 list. Check out the 2021 list of LGBTQ+ books in translation for you to read this month and, hopefully, the rest of the year!
1. The Tree and the Vine(opens in a new tab) by Dola de Jong, translated from Dutch by Kristen Gehrman
First published in 1954 in the Netherlands, Dola de Jong’s The Tree and the Vine was a groundbreaking work in its time for its frank and sensitive depiction of the love between two women, now available in a new translation.
Dola de Jong was born in Amsterdam to a Jewish father and a German mother, and worked as a dancer and a reporter before she fled the country in 1940, eventually immigrating to the United States. Her book The Field won the City of Amsterdam Literature Prize in 1947.
2. 77(opens in a new tab) by Guillermo Saccomanno, translated from Spanish by Andrea Labinger
Buenos Aires, 1977. In the darkest days of the Videla dictatorship, Gómez, a gay high-school literature teacher, tries to keep a low profile as, one-by-one, his friends and students begin to disappear. When Esteban, one of Gómez’s favorite students, is taken away in a classroom raid, Gómez realizes that no one is safe anymore, and that asking too many questions can have lethal consequences.
Told mostly in flashbacks thirty years later, 77 is rich in descriptive detail, dream sequences, and even elements of the occult, which build into a haunting novel about absence and the clash between morality and survival when living under a dictatorship.
3. (opens in a new tab)Bolla(opens in a new tab) by Patjim Statovci, translated from Finnish by David Hackston
Patjim Statovci was born in Kosovo to Albanian parents in 1990. His family fled the Yugoslav wars and moved to Finland when he was two years old. His previous book, Crossings, was a National Book Award finalist for Translated Literature.
Translated from Finnish, Statovci’s third novel is a wrenching story of star-crossed lovers set in mid-90s Kosovo. Arsim, an Albanian, meets Miloš, a Serb, at a cafe and the two begin a life-altering affair. Bolla arrives with the quick explosiveness of a bullet, but its intensity lingers, swelling into a poignant elegy of intimacy and displacement.
4. In Concrete(opens in a new tab) by Anne Garréta, translated from French by Emma Ramadan
The newest novel by Prix Médicis-winner Anne Garréta, In Concrete is a feminist inversion of a domestic drama crossed with Oulipian nursery rhyme. In Concrete follows the mania that descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sibling is subsumed by concrete.
Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication.
5. Written in Invisible Ink(opens in a new tab): Selected Stories by Herve Guibert, translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Hervé Guibert published twenty-five books before dying of AIDS in 1991 at age 36. An originator of French “autofiction” of the 1990s, Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction.
Written in Invisible Ink maps the writer’s artistic development, from his earliest texts—fragmented stories of queer desire—to the unnervingly photorealistic descriptions in Vice and the autobiographical sojourns of Singular Adventures. Propaganda Death, his harsh, visceral debut, is included in its entirety.
6. Foucault in Warsaw (opens in a new tab)by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from Polish by Sean Gasper Bye
In 1958, Michel Foucault arrived in Poland to work on his thesis—a work that eventually came to be published as The History of Madness. While he was there, he became involved with a number of members of the gay community, including a certain “Jurek,” who eventually led the secret police directly to Foucault’s hotel room, causing his subsequent exit from Poland.
Nominated for the Nike Literary Award, Foucault in Warsaw reconstructs a vibrant, engaging picture of gay life in Poland under communism—from the joys found in secret nightclubs, to the fears of not knowing who was a secret informant.
7. Amora: Stories(opens in a new tab) by Natalia Borges Polesso, translated from Portuguese by Julia Sanches
Sweeping nearly every major Brazilian literary prize in 2016―including the Prêmio Jabuti and Prêmio Açorianos de Literatura―Amora propelled Natalia Borges Polesso to the forefront of the international literary world.
This story collection explores the way women love each other―the atrophy and healing of the female spirit in response to sexual desire and identity. These thirty-three short stories and poems, crafted with a deliberate delicacy, each capture the candid, private moments of women in love.
We can’t resist adding the four Two Lines Press books by celebrated Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll to this list: Quiet Creature on the Corner (tr. Adam Morris), Atlantic Hotel (tr. Adam Morris), Lord (tr. Edgar Garbelotto)—which won the prestigious 2020 Jabuti Prize for Brazilian literature published abroad—and Harmada (tr. Edgar Garbelotto).
And don’t forget Bjørn Rasmussen’s The Skin is the Elastic Covering that Encases the Entire Body, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken. It’s a powerful coming of age story that Book Riot called “darkly beautiful and fearless.”
Also of note:
The 2021 Words Without Borders Queer Issue is live! Check out work in translation(opens in a new tab) from Spanish, Chinese, Malay, Kaaps, and more.
And while not strictly a translation, the 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner for Gay Poetry, Guillotine: Poems(opens in a new tab) by Eduardo C. Corral, interweaves Spanish and English.
Book Riot has a list of 40 of the Best Queer Books(opens in a new tab).
You can order the Two Lines Press Pride, Worldwide collection, featuring three novels—translated from Danish, Portuguese, and Czech—that encompass nearly 100 years of gay literature in translation.
Now’s the time to reserve your copy of Cuíer, the new Two Lines Press collection of queer writing from Brazil and the fourth title in the Calico series. Available in September 2021, this far-reaching, bilingual assortment of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and photography—erotic and personal, revolutionary, hopeful, joyous, and bitter—continues the legacy of defiant queer expression in Brazil and demands its prolific, unapologetic future.
