I assume since the asker is following Finn that they have at least somewhat similar taste, so here are some translated recs:
Elia Barceló, Natural Consequences (tr. from Spanish by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell): alien contact sci-fi story about gender and communication, by way of aliens in the middle of a demographic crisis who discover they can get human men pregnant.
Djuna, Counterweight (tr. from Korean by Anton Hur): a dizzying, fast-paced cyberpunk thriller musing on epistemology and consciousness. very dialogue- and monologue-heavy — the form might not work for everyone but I enjoyed it.
Sergey and Marina Dyachenko, The Scar (tr. from Russian by Elinor Huntington): dark and dreamy fantasy of manners about a once-carefree (and awful) duelist cursed by a debilitating/disabling cowardice as he tries to reconstruct his life and identity.
Angélica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial (tr. from Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin): novel-in-stories about the longue durée of the titular empire as it is created and recreated over time, thinking about the contingency of history and the accumulation of power.
Kim Sung-il’s Bleeding Empire trilogy (tr. from Korean by Anton Hur; first book Blood of the Old Kings): good, sharp high fantasy about empire and resistance thereto. putting the necro- in necropolitics.
Tanaka Yoshiki, Legend of the Galactic Heroes series (tr. from Japanese, first book Dawn): really good anti-war military sci-fi. unfortunately books 4-6 are very poorly translated by Tyran Grillo, but books 1-3 and 7-10 (translated by Daniel Huddleston (1-3, 7) and Matt Treyvaud (8-10)) more than make up for it imo.
Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (tr. from Russian by John French): a sweeping, pensive sci-fi novel about an Aral Sea Kazakh community, the discovery of alien life, and the promise and failures of the Soviet project.
Daniela Catrileo, Chilco (tr. from Spanish by Jacob Edelstein): a speculative novel of uprising, Indigenous survival, and gendered violence in an alternate not-quite-Chile, by a Mapuche writer and activist.
Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days (tr. from Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies): as the title suggests, a play on the Thousand and One Nights, both beginning in the aftermath of Shahrayar’s decision to marry Shahrazad and also cycling back through some of the most prominent stories in the Nights. very dark but very good.
Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad (tr. from Arabic by Jonathan Wright): an unscrupulous scavenger in US-occupied Baghdad creates a composite of corpses that comes alive and begins to wander through the city, seeking justice — or at least revenge — for its component parts. told in a kaleidoscope of perspectives, rightly an International Booker finalist.
non-SFF novels (or novel-ish things)
Fatma Aliye, Scenes of Life (tr. from Ottoman Turkish by the Translation Attached collective): a short feminist epistolary novel-ish by the first Turkish woman novelist, analyzing the status of women in the late 19th-c Ottoman Empire.
Radwa Ashour, Granada (tr. from Arabic; I read the translation by William Granara but there’s also a new one of the full trilogy of which this is book one by Kay Heikkinen): a short, gripping family saga following several generations of a Muslim family in Granada in the years surrounding the conquest of the Emirate of Granada by Castile and Aragon in 1492.
Stella Gaitano, Edo’s Souls (tr. from Arabic by Sawad Hussain): family saga centered on a South Sudanese woman from ca. the ’60s to the mid-’80s, using ’80s Sudanese politics as a mirror for post-independence South Sudan and now with new resonance in light of the renewed Sudanese Civil War.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Padmarag (tr. from Bengali by Barnita Bagchi): an early 20th-c short feminist novel about a community of women in Bengal, responding to the tropes of romance. some cool formal stuff going on. it’s often published with Hossain’s English-language feminist utopian short story “Sultana’s Dream”.
Niviaq Korneliussen, Last Night in Nuuk aka Crimson (tr. from Korneliussen’s Danish translation by Anna Halager): really good novel about five young queer people coming of age in contemporary Greenland.
Markoosie Patsauq, Hunter with Harpoon (tr. from Inuktitut by Valerie Henitiuk and Marc-Antoine Mahieu): the first published novel(-ish) in Inuktitut, a gripping, short narrative about a community devastated by a polar bear.
Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile (tr. from Chinese by Bonnie Huie): really good novel of queer love (and obsession) and alienation in ’90s Taiwan, by a groundbreaking Taiwanese lesbian writer.
Hassain Blasim (ed.), Iraq + 100 (some stories originally in English, some tr. from Arabic): anthologies are always a mixed bag but there’s some really good stuff here, by Iraqi writers imagining Iraq in 2103, a century after the US invasion. this was the first in Comma Press’s Futures Past series, which now has comparable volumes for Palestine, Kurdistan, Egypt, and Iran.
Ken Liu (ed.), Invisible Planets (tr. from Chinese by Liu): a solid, wide-ranging anthology of contemporary Chinese short science fiction.
Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park (ed.), Readymade Bodhisattva (tr. from Korean): similar to Invisible Planets but for South Korea, and extending back to include work from the ’70s and ’80s, though the majority of the stories are contemporary.
Mayi Pelot, Memories of Tomorrow (tr. from Basque by Arrate Hidalgo): sci-fi short stories ranging from near-future climate dystopia to space opera Nibelungenlied.
Suzuki Izumi, Terminal Boredom (tr. from Japanese): clever, biting sci-fi short stories by a groundbreaking Japanese feminist writer and avant-garde artist.
I didn’t love every story in Xia Jia’s A Summer Beyond Your Reach (tr. from Chinese), but the ones I did like (taking up the majority of the page count) I really liked.
Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (tr. from Japanese by Nobuyuki Yuasa): classic of Japanese prose and poetry, Basho’s narrations of some of his travels paired with poems written along the way.
C.P. Cavafy, The Collected Poems (tr. from Greek by Evangelos Sachperoglou): Cavafy has a lot of name-recognition but not enough poem-recognition! you want queer desire? you want archaeological musings? you want Homer? you want Hellenistic Alexandria? Cavafy has it for you. Cavafy literally has it for you.
I just read and loved Sophus Helle’s Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author, which collects Sumerian poetry attributed to Enheduana with some excellent accompanying contextual and critical essays.
Hussain Haddawy (ed.), The Arabian Nights (tr. from Arabic by Haddawy): everyone should read Haddawy’s translation of the oldest manuscript of the (shorter, older) Syrian recension of the Thousand and One Nights imo. shapeshifting wizard battles, comedies of errors, early detective fiction, people who can transmit entire poems simply by blinking their eyes — the Nights have it all.
Aqqaluk Lynge, The Veins of the Heart to the Pinnacle of the Mind (tr. from Greenlandic by Ken Norris and Marianne Stenbæk): really good poetry by a major 20th-c Greenlandic writer, by turns funny and sarcastic and bitterly cynical.
anything you can find by Sorley MacLean, the greatest Scottish Gaelic poet of the 20th century.
D.T. Niane (ed.), Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (tr. from Mandinka by Niane, tr. from French by G.D. Pickett): I believe the earliest version of the Sunjata epic to circulate in English, in a prose version that Niane ostensibly translated from Guinean griot Mamadou Kouyaté’s telling, though I suspect it may be more of an adaptation than a translation as such. either way, it’s extremely good.
dededos
stormborns
kaledo-art
origamiaround
dailybridgerton
2087
