Friday, September 6, 2024

Five of the best books translated from Polish

Antonia Lloyd-Jones graduated from Oxford University in 1983 with a degree in Russian and Ancient Greek, and has been teaching herself Polish ever since. She has translated works by many of Poland's leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children's books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators' Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

Lloyd-Jones is the translator of Warsaw Tales, a short-story anthology.

At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books translated from Polish, including:
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Jennifer Croft

The Nobel laureate’s historical epic fictionalises the life of Jacob Frank, the bizarre but influential self-proclaimed messiah whose dedicated worshippers followed him around 18th-century Europe. This visionary novel re-creates his world in vivid, sensual detail, and can be read on many levels: as a history book exploring the development of Europe’s religions and philosophies, as a scrapbook of esoteric arcana such as alchemy and the Kabbalah, or the story of a rebel and his bewitched associates.
Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue