Next up in our annual series of translators on their favourite reads of the year is Lucy Jones.
Elias Hirschl: Content
Hirschl’s humour is the driest kind. After Salonfähig, a grisly satire, he has now written a dystopian novel centred on young people who work for the Smile Smile content farm. Set in a ghost town that once thrived from coal production, Hirschl’s book is a caustic critique of the precarious and pointless nature of producing content. Daily tasks at Smile Smile consist of shredding old Nokias for AMSR videos, or producing endless listicles as clickbait. Early on, you get the sense that Hirschl might be drawing on his own experience: his empathy shines through for these wannabe artists who have put their ambitions on hold out of financial necessity. By the end, he suggests, people will be working for the internet, and not the other way round. Unless they are first swallowed up by manholes and AI starts running their lives. Shortlisted for the Austrian Book Prize in 2024.
Paula Fürstenberg: Weltalltage (Everyday Life, Suspended)
Lists appear too in Paula Fürstenberg’s novel about friendship and chronic illness, but with a very different intention. In her warm and witty prose, which was a pleasure to translate, lists are a structuring device. Through the lens of a friendship spanning from childhood to the fall of the Wall and up to the present day, Max and the female first-person narrator try to provide each other with the kind of love and care normally reserved for nuclear families. In doing so, Paula Fürstenberg takes up a very important debate about the role of care, how modern society requires our bodies to function, single parenthood, families of choice, depression and responsibility. I was caught up in their story right through to the end.
Lucy Jones is a translator from the German to English, mostly of fiction, and has lived in Berlin since the late 1990s where she founded the translators’ collective Transfiction in 2008. She has translated the works of Brigitte Reimann (Diaries 1955-1963 and Siblings), Theresia Enzensberger (Blueprint), and Anke Stelling (Higher Ground), among others. Check out some of her work at Words Without Borders!