SF in translation, as a phenomenon, is nothing new, of course. (Amazing) translated literature is as old as the literature itself, and SF is no exception. What’s new, however, is a few ongoing initiatives that are now putting non-English speculative fiction under a well-deserved spotlight. As the co-editor of a bilingual English-Spanish steampunk anthology (nominated for the BSFA Awards 2017) and a trilingual speaker myself, I’m naturally drawn to the translation world.
I’m going to write about it in the course of the following months, interviewing some of the people working in the field and presenting works worth attention. I’ll start this week with SINOSFERA, Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction Anthology (Chinese-Italian) edited by Francesco Verso. Among the others, these are the stories included in the book:
Wang Jinkang – “The reincarnated Giant”: A billionaire struggles by every means to be still considered himself, even when his body, transformed by genetic engineering, has become unrecognizable, metaphor of an identity that – once lost – is difficult to recover.
Bao Shu – “Preserve her memory”: the investigation into the death of the actress Ye Lun – thanks to a device capable of reading the memory of the corpses – reveals a morbid event in which victims and culprits are only the two faces of the same phenomenon: the fandom.
Han Song – “Security Check”: when the need for security becomes grotesque, up to the point of neutralizing any object from a possible threat, reality can only transform itself in a daily dystopia that turns against the citizens.
Yilun Fan – “Speechless love”: The colonization of the Earth’s stratosphere has resulted in the elimination of human contacts and contributed to the rarefaction of all feelings but this doesn’t prevent Shuangshuang from seeking the love and the poetry of the past where few people would expect it.
Tang Fei – “The person who saw Cetus”: The incredible performance of an artist – unable to communicate with anyone, even with his own daughter – turns into his greatest legacy, beyond any possible explanation of his mysterious disappearance.
For more about Francesco Verso and his own work (he also publishes the magazine Future Fiction), see my interview with the writer here.
The only non-English sci fi I’m familiar with is Russian, and mostly because of Andrei Tarkovsky filming some of it. Thanks for opening the door to other countries’ sci fi writers here!
My pleasure! I’ll post more in the following months. 🙂
The stories you listed all share a very intriguing core concept, so I might take a look at this anthology in the future. Thanks for sharing! 🙂