Why I'm Reading My Way Around the World

I'm circling the globe by reading 84 books in translation. I hope you'll join me.

My father died in January of 2020, in Budapest. Because of the timing, my sister and I weren’t able to get there for his funeral, or to hold a memorial here. He was, among other things, a literary translator. I’ve read far too little in translation—especially lately, when my reading is often dictated by my career (judging prizes, reviewing, interviewing)—plus, I’ve been reading almost all contemporary fiction.

SO: I decided to circle the globe (figuratively) by reading 84 books in translation, one for every year of my father’s life.

I’m five books in—I started in Hungary, as he did, and will end there too, as he did—and have been sharing my reading list and my thoughts on social media. I’ve been thrilled and honored by the number of people joining in, whether it’s just for the occasional book or for the whole ride.

The green is what we’ve read so far; the rust is coming next.

I’ve been posting on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, with the hashtag #AroundTheWorldIn84Books… but it’s been hard putting all my thoughts into small bites and posting all those places. One of the main reasons I started this newsletter was to get more of a thorough conversation going, and to record my thoughts better.

(Speaking of which: If you’re seeing this and haven’t subscribed but want to, that’d be amazing. This is only my second letter, and we’re going to have fun.)

The reason I’m not great at Instagram is I have terrible carpeting.

The list so far has been:

*The Door by Magda Szabó, translated from Hungarian by Len Rix
(read my thoughts here)
*You With Hands More Innocent, the Selected Poems of Vesna Parun, translated from Croatian by Dasha C. Nisula
(read my thoughts here)
*My Heart by Semezdin Mehmedinović, translated from Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth
(read my thoughts here)
*The Piano Teacher by the Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek, translated from German by Joachim Neugroschel
(read my thoughts here)

And right now, I’m finishing this book:

The File on H., by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. It’s very funny—the first really funny book I’ve read for the project.

I’m going to Substack the hell out of this one on Tuesday, but without any spoilers… I hope I can convince you to read it, either really-really-fast-right-now, or after I tell you how great it is.

Meanwhile, some more about my fascinating and difficult father and why he’d probably hate this project.

Wasn’t he adorable, though? This is Budapest, likely 1938. That’s not his mother behind him; it’s his German nanny. He accidentally learned German before Hungarian.

The briefest version I can muster: He was born in Budapest in 1935, to an actress/novelist mother* and a journalist/politician father; he became bookish while bedridden with polio as a child; he participated in the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution as a college student; he escaped the country later that year, on his second attempt; he wound up as a refugee at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey; he worked the dumbwaiter in the basement of the Boston Ritz until he somehow talked his way into Harvard, where they let him in as a Russian major. (The Russians were, uh, not his favorites.)

He got a PhD in linguistics and wound up speaking about sixteen languages.** He taught linguistics, lived all over the world, published poetry (mostly in Hungarian) and did a lot of literary translation.

Throughout the 1980s, he was addicted to Falcon Crest, Knots Landing, and Dallas. Go figure.

*A lot more on her later. She wrote around forty books. Forty! Books!
**You might be picking up on the fact that I’m the family slacker.

His name was Makkai Ádám. (Hungarian names are surname-first.)

I have no idea what he’d think about this project. Honestly, he’d probably say something nice but condescending, and then something completely dismissive, and then make a list of things I should read and then go pull out a book in a language I cannot actually read.

The loveliest thing that’s happened so far in this adventure is that when I posted about it on Instagram, someone responded with lines from a poem I didn’t know, but that seemed appropriate. I Googled the poem, and it was one by my father—a poem I’d never seen, about expatriation and reading in translation.

It also seems to refute my whole project… but that’s okay. I still love it.

It was originally published here, in The Hungarian Review.

Okay, so what are we reading NEXT?

This one’s SHORT! The Murderess, by Alexandros Papadiamantis, translated from Greek by Peter Levi. According to New York Review Books, “The Murderess is a bone-chilling tale of crime and punishment with the dark beauty of a backwoods ballad.”

Please join me!

I’ll leave you with this picture of my father with his mother, the novelist Ignácz Rózsa. Look at his SHOES!