Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Ten top bilingual books

Yara Rodrigues Fowler's first novel, Stubborn Archivist, is out now in the UK and forthcoming (July 2019) in the USA. One of her ten favorite tales told in multiple languages, as shared at the Guardian:
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

This book is very special to me. Written in vignettes and fragments, it’s a coming-of-age book about a young Chicana woman from Chicago with many untranslated, but italicised, Spanish words and phrases in the text. The ending (which I use as my epigraph) offers a take on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the protagonist finally finding “a house as quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem”.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue