Books like The Bewitched Bourgeois

These daring and profound erotic stories (originally titled "The Carcass of Dreams") imagine various taboo fetishes as existential predicaments. Despite the dark subject matter, some of the stories have an ironic and even satirical tone. They read like fairy tales or horror stories or Kafkaesque parables. The writing style recalls Kafka, Calvino, Poe or Angela Carter. A story or two might offend the reader, but this hard-to-find collection is still worth seeking out.

I loved these intriguing, entertaining yarns about people from the quasi-past. Characters have to deal with absurd predicaments and obsessions. The title story is about a doctor investigating whether Poe had faked his own death. A WW2 lieutenant discovers a strong desire to take a vacation from fighting. A man and wife relentlessly compete with a mysterious bookseller to obtain a rare book. Most of these stories are fun (with 1 or 2 sad ones).

I studied at Tel Aviv University, where the name Gideon Toury was uttered in reverent tones. I never met Toury in person, and it was only towards my graduation that I finally got around to reading this iconic book.

To say that it is a smooth or engaging read would be a gross misrepresentation. Toury was a devout structuralist and a firm believer in the importance of scientific inquiry in the humanities. Accordingly, this is a book one reads in a staggered mode, one dense section at a time. This makes for an unusual reading experience, but there is something addictive about it, especially for contemporary readers.

We have grown so distant from this kind of extreme positivism, this undaunting belief in the possibility of unbiased scholarship, that for a brief moment, the numerous charts, formulas, and abbreviations that adorn the pages of Toury’s book seem almost amusing. But this… show more.

If I had to name one book that is almost the exact opposite of Toury’s, it is this one. Venuti’s book is the rare kind of scholarly book one reads over one or two sittings. It is angry, provocative, polemical, and just pure fun.

For Venuti, there is no separating fact from value, and whether it plans to or not, translation (and scholarship on translation) affects change in both text and world—often for the worst. If Toury’s book emulated scientific discourse, Venuti’s reads like a crossover between a political manifesto and a crime novel. Translation is a violent business, shrouded in suspicion and hidden agendas, that need to be exposed through symptomatic readings and critical analyses.

The book ends with a passionate call to action enlisting translators—despite the risks entailed therein—to develop new methodologies that will, as Venuti writes: “make a difference, not only at home [. . .] but… show more.

In 1893 the eminent scholar of Jewish studies, Moritz Steinschneider, astutely identified Jews as “Dolmetscher”— mediators between East and West, Christianity and Islam, ancient and modern languages. While early academic interest in Jewish translation primarily focused on the Middle Ages, the past two decades have seen a burgeoning fascination with translation across other periods (and spaces) of Jewish history.

Several outstanding books have emerged by literary historians such as Abigail Gillman, Aya Elyada, Tessa Rajak, and Omri Asscher, making it challenging to single out just one recommendation. But Naomi Seidman’s book had me hooked from page 1, where Seidman recounts the story of her father’s strategic mistranslation between Yiddish and French in Post-War Paris. For Seidman, whose brilliant analysis of this translation narrative offers one of the best introductions to an academic book I’ve read, such strategic mistranslations are emblematic of the complexities of Jewish-Christian dialogue and of the Jewish… show more.

Not strictly centered on translation and not exactly a conventional book, this collection of essays is often considered the birthplace of the now widely-used (though often misunderstood) concept of “cultural translation.”

Bhabha is a notoriously demanding author, and reading this book can, at times, feel like entering a conversation already in progress. Bhabha will move from Salman Rushdie, through Joseph Conrad or Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida, often within the space of a single paragraph or page. But Bhabha’s intellectual rigour justifies the effort. This challenging but rewarding book unleashes the radical potential of translation studies.

For Bhabha, translation transcends mere linguistic or even cultural exchange to become a tool for grappling with cultural transformation and difference more generally. It is a way of thinking about resistance and religion, innovation and imitation, politics and power. This book was love at first sight for me, and although I… show more.

I stumbled upon Ronit Ricci’s captivating book while finalizing my own research on early modern Jewish translation in Europe. The experience of reading this book was a little like (what I can only imagine) discovering an unknown relative on 23andme must feel like.

Ricci explores the literary networks that developed during the spread of Islam through early modern South and Southeast Asia. She shows how translators from Arabic into Javanese, Malay, and Tamil developed a remarkably creative approach to translation and how they domesticated (“localized” is her preferred term) their sources, reshaping unfamiliar concepts to resonate with their target readers.

Engaging with Ricci’s book was an uncanny experience; here, in a distant translator culture, I found fascinating parallels to the issues and concerns I encountered in my own research, often approached in surprisingly similar ways. Who would have thought that Old Yiddish and Old Javanese shared such common ground?