September is National Translation Month! To help bookstores and libraries celebrate, we’ve put together this roundup of 12 books in translation—six poetry collections and six novels—to spotlight all month and year-round. (We publish longer reading lists each month as well—check out our most recent reading list for National Translation Month for more ideas!)
Fiction
Nauetakuan, a silence for a noise by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine
Translated from the French by Howard Scott
Book*hug Press | 2024
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9781771668941
This novel is “a timely, riveting story of reclamation, matriarchies, and the healing power of traditional teachings.”
The Maroons by Louis Timagène Houat
Translated from the French by Aqiil Gopee with Jeffrey Diteman
Restless Books | 2024
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781632063557
The Maroons is “a fervid account of slavery and escape on nineteenth-century Réunion Island” and the only known novel by Black abolitionist and political exile Houat.
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
Dorothy, a publishing project | 2024
Distributor: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9781948980197
According to Luke Kennard, this novel is a “bizarre and beautiful psychodrama about hospitality, control, and domination” that “seems to take place half in the ‘real world’ and half in a Leonora Carrington painting.”
People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi
Translated from the Indonesian by Lara Norgaard
Archipelago Books | February 11, 2025
Distributor: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9781953861986
This novel is “both a political inquiry into how to escape cycles of violence and an inventive story of people’s surprising interconnections.”
Only Smoke by Juan José Millás
Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn
Bellevue Literary Press | May 13, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781954276444
In this novel, narrator Carlos embarks “on a journey that will bring him closer to his father and teach him how to navigate the invisible borders between reality and fantasy, sanity and madness.”
The Lady of the Mine by Sergei Lebedev
Translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis
New Vessel Press | January 7, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781954404304
In this historical novel, Lebedev “portrays a ghostly realm riven by lust and fear just as the Kremlin invades the same part of Ukraine occupied by the Wehrmacht in World War II.”
Poetry
Love Is Colder than the Lake by Liliane Giraudon
Translated from the French by Sarah Riggs and Lindsay Turner
Nightboat Books | 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781643621975
This collection “weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture.”
Translated from the Korean by Jein Han
Ugly Duckling Presse | May 1, 2025
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 9781946604354
According to Paige Aniyah Morris, the world of this collection “is indeed a haunted one, at turns dreamlike and nightmarish as each poem weighs the risks and rewards of being (not quite) human, of having a body (of sorts).”
For now I am sitting here growing transparent by Yau Ching
Translated from the Chinese by Chenxin Jiang
Zephyr Press | February 18, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781938890345
This bilingual debut collection includes “astute political poems, understated love poems, urban anti-eclogues, and prose poems.”
Concerning the Angels by Rafael Alberti
Translated from the Spanish by John Murillo
Four Way Books | March 15, 2025
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN: 9781961897427
In this translation of Spanish poems first published in 1929, Murillo “has given new life to what many consider Alberti’s magnum opus and delivered our marching orders for the resistance the future will require.”
Love and Resistance by Nizar Qabbani
Translated from the Arabic by Rana Bitar
Barclay Press/Fernwood Press | April 22, 2025
Distributor: Ingram Lightning Source
ISBN: 9781594981586
The poems in this collection have been “selected for their breadth of representation, their influence in the Arab world, and their poetic prowess.”
Theory of the Voice and Dream by Liliana Ponce
Translated from the Spanish by Michael Martin Shea
World Poetry Books | May 20, 2025
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 9781954218338
According to Michelle Gil-Montero, this collection brings together some of Ponce’s serial poems and is “a poetics of the beginning—not as an origin, but as an endless thrust of becoming and undoing.”
