A Year in Reading: Damion Searls
As a translator, I write books I’ve also read, so in a way you’d have to say that the books at the center of my year in reading were the ones I started or finished translating: Thomas Mann, New Selected Stories; Victoria Kielland, My Men; Ariane Koch, Overstaying; Anna Stern, all this here, now.; Jon Fosse, A Shining and How It Was; Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha; Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Uwe Johnson, Cresspahl’s Daughter:; , . won the Nobel Prize this year, and I started on a bunch of future translations of his early novels, children’s books, and poems, while waiting to see what kind of novel he’ll come up with next. But reading as a translator is different from just reading—this is on my mind because it’s the central argument of the one book I finished writing that isn’t a translation: out next year—so I feel like the books I’ve read-as-a-translator don’t really count.
