Hu Feng is an example. He became a revolutionary at Beijing University in the 1920s, secretly joined the Japanese Communist Party in Tokyo, worked for the resistance in wartime China, and led movements of leftwing writers in cities controlled by Chiang Kai-shek. He was one of China’s best-known leftwing editors before 1949 and a pupil of Lu Xun, the giant of China’s twentieth-century literature and its George Orwell. After Mao’s victory in 1949, Hu Feng worked for a while on the fringes of the Beijing regime, but after a couple of years he got into trouble with the literary and political establishment. This was partly because he belonged to a wrong faction, but mainly because of his liberal view of literature. He implicitly criticized Mao’s proposal that creative writing should serve the party, by extolling the masses and reflecting the ‘bright side’ of life rather than ‘exposing the darkness’. So he was denounced for ‘subjectivism’, i.e., exaggerating the role played by what he called the inner energy of the active subject. He was also a belligerent man. His short fuse made enemies, and he was not a party member, unlike his opponents. He had joined its youth section in 1923, lost touch during the civil war, and tried to rejoin after returning from Japan, but failed.

Hu Feng spent twenty-five years as a political prisoner starting in 1955, a record surpassed only by the Chinese Trotskyists’ thirty-odd years in gaol. After his death in 1985, his wife Mei Zhi wrote her memoir of the prison years she shared with him. Mei Zhi too was a revolutionary, but by profession she was a children’s author, so her writing is clear and jargon-free. Initially gaoled as Hu Feng’s accomplice, she was freed under supervision in 1961. The nuances of Hu Feng’s literary theory didn’t really interest her, but she stayed true to him despite the troubles he brought on her and their children and despite her milder views. She returned to prison voluntarily after her release, to care for him in his sickness and old age.

Mei Zhi was engagingly honest about her feelings. She was a stoic, capable of astonishing self-sacrifice for her family, but unlike Hu Feng she could be cynical about politics. Hers is one of China’s best prison-memoirs. It is a gripping story, climaxing in Hu’s madness and a redemption of sorts. It differs from similar accounts in that despite their calvary, Mei and Hu remained supporters of the revolution. It is also a love story – of her love for him, even in the years of his madness.

The book was first published in instalments, starting with Past Events Disperse like Smoke. I picked this up in Beijing in 1987 for Wang Fanxi, the exiled elderly Trotskyist leader who shared my house for several years. On my trips to China, I used to buy books I thought he’d like. It turned out he and Hu Feng had been class-mates at Beijing University, along with Wang Shiwei, Chinese communism’s first real dissident, murdered by the party near Yan’an in 1947 after arguing publicly that writing should be free to criticise party abuses and to talk about the soul. So one literature class harboured three of the party’s best-known future trouble-makers. Wang Fanxi pressed me to translate Past Events and told me some interesting facts about Hu Feng, which might have got him into trouble even sooner had his inquisitors known about them.

They concerned Hu Feng’s relations with Lu Xun and Lu Xun’s affinity with Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s exiled rival. As a literary liberal, Trotsky had attacked ‘proletarian literature’, a futurist Soviet style, in his book Literature and Revolution, arguing that the arts should be a sphere unto themselves rather than a product of official decrees. This was also more or less Lu Xun’s view.

In notes written after 1979, Hu Feng recalled a postscript Lu Xun had written in 1926 for a translation of Alexander Blok’s enigmatic poem The Twelve. According to Hu, reading the postscript freed him ‘from a vulgar sociological understanding of the creative process.’ In it, Lu Xun had used Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution to illuminate the literary genius of the ‘bourgeois’ Blok. He also sponsored a Chinese translation of Trotsky’s book. He stopped referring to Trotsky after 1929, probably for diplomatic reasons. After reading Lu Xun’s postscript, Hu Feng realised that not all Marxists believed that everything in the creative process had a ‘material’ or ‘economic’ base. So Trotsky’s style of literary appreciation was a wellspring of Hu Feng’s fateful opposition to party-decreed ‘mechanicalism’, though he never said so directly.

Stalin’s demonizing of Trotsky was copied by the Chinese communists in their attacks on Chen Duxiu, the independent-minded founder of Chinese communism, expelled as an oppositionist in 1929. Similarly, Stalin’s posthumous cult of Maxim Gorki was mirrored by the cult of Lu Xun, hailed as ‘China’s Gorki’, also after his politically convenient death in 1936 (the same year Gorki died). Like Gorki, Lu Xun was made into a cult so the party could cloak itself in his reputation for integrity. But first they had to expurgate his embarrassing antecedents, especially the fact that he was influenced by Trotsky, for the link made his enshrinement laughable. So the affinity between Trotsky, demonized in both China and Russia, and Lu Xun was richly ironic. And so was the fact that Hu Feng’s ‘thought crimes’ were in reality a faithful echo of Lu Xun, who had persuaded him that revolutionary writing did not have to be clichéd and uniform or to toe a party line and should be free to treat questions of the human spirit.

About the Author

Gregor Benton is professor emeritus at Cardiff University. He has published books on Chinese Communism, dissent in China, and Chinese communities outside China. His Mountain Fires (University of California Press, 1992) and New Fourth Army (University of California Press, 1999) won several awards, including the Association of Asian Studies’ best book on modern China. He has translated scholarly books from German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, and Chinese. He has taught Chinese Studies in Leeds, Amsterdam, Cardiff, Kuala Lumpur, and Barcelona.

F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years by Mei Zhi, translated by Gregor Benton received a Writers in Translation award for 2013 and will be published by Verso in April 2013.

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I would like to mention four translated works of fiction to be published in 2013, all by authors we have published before. In the case of Carofiglio this will be our fifth novel by him. These are examples of our policy to introduce, and then support authors over the long run. The Crack in the Wall by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Miranda France. Our third novel by this author. Contemporary Buenos Aires is the setting for this story, a city whose lovely neighbourhoods are being scarred by ruthless property development. Piñeiro, as always, has dressed up her social criticism and scathing analysis of what is happening to her country today in an elegant psychological thriller. And again, for Piñeiro, no one is free of evil, not the protagonist of the novel, not even the victim of the crime.

Baksheesh, is by a young Istanbul woman writer called Esmahan Aykol and translated by Ruth Whitehouse. Like its predecessor Hotel Bosphorus, it is a literary crime novel set in her beloved city. Sharp observation and wry, sexy humour expose Western prejudices about Turkey as well as Turkish stereotyping of Europeans. The Turkish way of life, including politics and womanising, is vividly evoked. This time the focus, as evident from the title, is on the corruption pervasive in Stanbouli life.

The Sound of One Hand Killing by Teresa Solana, translated by Peter Bush. In this, the third in her satirical murder mystery series about Barcelona, Catalan novelist Teresa Solana mercilessly punctures the pretensions of New Age quacks who promote pseudo-science and pseudo-spirituality.

The Silence of the Wave by Gianrico Carofiglio, translated by Howard Curtis. This will be our fifth title by this bestselling author, but the first with a new hero, carabiniere Roberto Marias. Every Monday and Thursday, Roberto Marías crosses Rome on foot to arrive at his psychiatrist’s office. There, he often sits in silence, stumped by the ritual. He remembers when, as a child, he used to surf with his father. He remembers the years he spent working as an under-cover agent. He has lived an intoxicating and crushing life, but now his psychiatrist’s words, the hypnotic strolls through Rome, and a meeting with a woman named Emma—who like Roberto is ravaged by a profound guilt—are beginning to revive him. And when eleven-year-old Giacomo asks Roberto to help him conquer his nightmares, Roberto at last achieves a true rebirth. This is not a crime novel like the others by Carofiglio we’ve published, but an aching story about human faults, frailties, and fathers and sons.

Clerkenwell Press – Goeff Mulligan, Publisher

1913 by Florian Illies is a dazzling portrait of a year that changed everything, told by interweaving the stories of artists, writers and even the occasional dictator.  It is currently number 1 in the German bestseller lists.

Dedalus – Eric Lane, Publisher

The Mussolini Canal by Antonio Pennacchi, translated by Judith Landry is one of the great achievements of contemporary Italian fiction. It gives 100 years of Italian history as seen through the eyes of a family of northern peasants, the Peruzzi. At the heart of the book is the draining of the Pontine Marshes outside Rome in the 1930s by Mussolini and his decision to settle the reclaimed land with 30,000 peasants sent from Northern Italy. In Italy it won the Strega Prize in 2010 and has sold more than 400,000 copies in hardcover.

Before and During by Vladimir Sharov, translated by Oliver Ready from Russian. This is one of the most unusual books Dedalus has published, and we are known for unusual books. Sharov has been described as an amalgam of Tolstoy, Dostoievski and Soljenitsyn and one Russian critic coined the term magic historiography to describe Sharov’s work.

Barbara by Jorgen-Frantz Jacobsen, translated by W. Glyn Jones. Set in the Faroes at the end of the 18th century this Danish language novel tells the story of Barbara, a Moll Flanders-type character who marries three clergyman and has uncontrollable lust for life and men. Written in the 1930s it is now a Danish classic  and the subject of a highly successful Danish feature film.

My Little Husband
by Pascal Bruckner, translated by Mike Mitchell. A short novel from one of France’s most controversial philosophers which has an Amazonian beauty over 6-feet tall marrying a 5 feet 6 inch dentist. The marriage is very happy but every time they have a child the husband shrinks.

The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature
edited by Almantas Samalavicius with five translators. Dedalus is committed to bringing more fiction from small linguistic areas of Europe into English. Having done an anthology from Estonian we celebrate Lithuanian’s very varied literature before moving on to an anthology of Slovakian Literature.

Gallic Press – Jane Aitken, Managing Director

All our titles are translations from French and we have eight titles to publish this year, including two more noir novels from the late Pascal Garnier, written in his wonderfully spare but powerful prose.

In April we will be publishing The President’s Hat by Antoine Laurain (translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie and Gallic), a wonderfully witty fable and rich portrait of political and cultural life in France during the Mitterrand years. From the moment company accountant, Daniel Mercier, takes President Mitterrand’s hat from a brasserie in Paris, its transformative powers capture the reader’s imagination in this highly original, inventive and magical novel.In a complete change of pace for September, Monsieur Le Commandant by Romain Slocombe (translated by Jesse Browner) is an epistolary novel set in 1942. French Academician and Nazi sympathiser Paul-Jean Husson writes to his local SS Officer. Tormented by an illicit passion for Ilse his German daughter-in-law, Husson confesses to taking a terrible decision that will devastate several lives including his own. The book was inspired by the author’s discovery that his mother had been concealing her Jewish heritage from her new family her whole married life. It is gripping and shocking in the same measure.

The final novel we would like to mention and which we are honoured to be publishing is a modern classic of French fiction, by celebrated author Michel Déon. The Stripling Boy, translated by Julian Evans, which we will publish in December, is the story of Jean Arnaud, growing up in the troubled inter-war years in France. In this picaresque novel, Michel Déon’s sharp sense of comedy and insight into social hypocrisy, and his concern for sexual happiness as well as moral goodness, combine to make an irresistible entertainment.

Little Brown – Rowan Cope, Commissioning Editor

We have a fantastic year for fiction in translation ahead of us in 2013 across our LB/Abacus, Virago and Trapdoor imprints.We have an especially strong selection of clever, gripping crime and thriller titles this year.

Salvation of a Saint by the Japanese superstar writer Keigo Higashino comes out in February and reprises some characters from his brilliant The Devotion of Suspect X.

Also on our Abacus imprint in June we launch a celebrated and bestselling Italian author, Maurizio de Giovanni, whose chilling novel The Crocodile transports the reader to modern-day Naples. We will have a new Inspector Ferrara novel from Michele Giuttari in July, entitled The Dark Heart of Florence.

And in March on our Trapdoor imprint we’ll publish Swedish bestselling author Marie Hermanson’s The Devil’s Sanctuary, a heart-stopping psychological thriller.Parinoush Saniee is another international bestselling author whom we are proud to be publishing, especially as she suffered years of censorship in her native Iran. The banned novel that became a huge bestseller in her home country, Saniee’s The Book of Fate is the story of Iran during the second half of the twentieth-century, told through the life of an Iranian woman. We will publish as a Little, Brown hardback in April.

An ordinary woman’s experience of war and revolution is also the substance of Mercè Rodoreda’s classic In Diamond Square – vivid and poignant, it’s an unforgettable portrait of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona and has been championed by Gabriel García Márquez and Diana Athill. It will be a Virago hardback in March.We will also bring out handsome new Abacus editions of our Primo Levi classics If This is a Man / The Truce, The Wrench and The Mirror Maker, in April and July.

MacLehose Press – Katharina Bielenberg, Associate Publisher

MacLehose Press celebrates its Fifth Anniversary in 2013, with twenty-three books being published in translation.Dany Laferrière’s autobiographical The Enigma of the Return is a haunting blend of prose and poetry (translated from French by David Homel). Windsor Laferrière, a writer with a block, returns to Haiti from Canada and faces the grim truth of life in his homeland – but it is there that he finds his words again. Beautiful, full of insight, and hugely compelling.

Outsiders is a bold collection of stories by Italian writers including Roberto Saviano, the Wu Ming Collective, Carlo Lucarelli and Simona Vinci. Their protagonists find themselves on society’s perimeters, but Vinci’s piece, “Another Kind of Solitude”, suggests that this is not such a bad place to be. Each of the six has a different translator, showcasing new and established talent.

Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything is Daniela Krien’s impressive first novel (translated from German by Jamie Bulloch) set the sleepy East German countryside in the summer of 1990. It’s the story of an extraordinary intense love affair between a sixteen-old-girl and an older man, at the same time a delicately poised account of Germany’s transition to reunification. Krien has managed to produce a powerful, poetic narrative and some brilliant Zola-esque characters with a remarkable economy of language.

Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s essential, elemental novel The Sorrow of Angels (translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton) continues the trilogy that began with Heaven and Hell  (2010). Stefánsson’s universe is harsh and yet unbelievably beautiful; he sends his two protagonists on an incredible journey, dangling them over abysses both metaphorical and actual. Rarely has a writer got so close to the core of what it is to be human in an inhospitable world.In late 1961, months after Vasily Grossman’s epic Life and Fate was “arrested” by the Soviet authorities, he took off to Armenia to rewrite a poor translation of another writer’s novel.

An Armenian Sketchbook (translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) is remarkably candid memoir, discursive about the country he finds himself in, reflective about himself, and ultimately foreshadowing his death in 1964.

A second posthumous translation from MacLehose Press this year is of Joan Sales’ Uncertain Glory (from the Catalan by Peter Bush), the first novel to tell the story of the Spanish Civil War from the loser’s – the Catalan – perspective. Written in 1956, it is an epic tale of lost ideals, lost love and lost youth. In Spain it has been recognised as the masterpiece of the Spanish Civil War in that it succeeds in capturing the war in all its complexity.

Off Press – Marek Kazmierski, founding publisher and translator

Dark Flashes by Irit Amiel – a book of poems on the theme of the Holocaust from a Jewish writer who survived the War hiding in a ghetto in Poland.

Boys and Girls in Poland by Przemek Gulda – a collection of short stories covering themes of adolescence and alienation in Central Europe.

Notes from an Island by Wioletta Grzegorzewska – short stories on the theme of modern migration from an upcoming Polish writer who lives on the Isle of Wight.

Istros Books – Susan Curtis-Kojkovic, Founding Director

This year, we have split our titles into two new series: Best Balkan Books
and Books from the Edge. 

By grouping the Balkan books together, we want to profile them as phenomena in their own right, capitalising on the wild and exciting elements associated with the region in order to attract readers to these original and rewarding group of writers from Romania, Montenegro and Serbia.

The Fairground Magician is one of these titles: a beautifully crafted selection of short stories which won its author – Jelena Lengold – the European Prize for Literature, 2011. It is translated by Celia Hawkesworth.

And continuing with female authors from the region, we have a highly original tale of betrayal and mystery told through the eyes of a twelve year old boy falling in love for the first time, in Cecilia Stefanescu’s Sun Alley, translated by Alexandra Coliban.Books from the Edge are those countries which lie partly outside the Balkans and partly in: the fruitful borderland of ‘the Edge’.

This year’s titles come from Croatia and – for the first time– from Turkey. We are planning to present both books and their authors at the London Book Fair 2013, where Turkey will be the country of focus, and Croatia will have a national stand for the first time. The Aziz Bey Incident is a novella that follows the life of a melancholic Tambur player from Istanbul, written by one of Turkey’s most respected and accomplished writers, Ayfer Tunc, and it will be translated by Stephanie Ateş. And  in the same series A Handful of Sand by Marinko Koscec was published last week, and is ”a love story and an ode to lost opportunity” translated by Will Firth.

Peirene Press – Meike Ziervogel, Publisher

Peirene Press curates its books in series. Each year we publish three world-class contemporary European novellas linked by a common theme. I am very excited about our 2013 series ‘Turning Point: Revolutionary Moments’. Our new series will feature three impressive stories written by internationally renowned female authors about important historically moments described from within a domestic setting. The first title, The Mussel Feast by German Birgit Vanderbeke (translated by Jamie Bulloch) will be published in February. The German modern classic was inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall but operates as a family drama. In June we will bring out Mr Darwin’s Gardener
by Finnish Kristina Carlson (translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah), a postmodern Victorian novel about faith versus knowledge. And in September Hanna Krall’s Chasing the King of Hearts (translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm) will follow. The beautiful love story spanning 60 years from the Warsaw Ghetto to Israel is bound to bring tears to the readers’ eye.

Stork Press – Joanna Zgadzaj, Publishing Director

This year we’re are trying something new, with our 2013 country focus on Poland. We are also launching our new Stork Crime line so it will be an exciting time for us.In March we’re publishing Tadeusz Różewicz’s Mother Departs  (translated by Barbara Bogoczek, edited and introduced by Tony Howard). Różewicz is widely seen as the greatest living Polish writer. His memoir Mother Departs
is a unique mix of prose and poetry, of the joy of life and the agony of loss, a portrait of the author’s mother Stefania and of her indelible influence on her family. No collection of Różewicz’s prose has ever been published in English so we’re deeply honoured to be releasing his latest masterpiece.

In April our Stork Crime line kicks off with Mariusz Czubaj’s 21:37 (translated by Anna Hyde). When we first read this book, it was Czubaj’s hero Rudolf Heinz that convinced us that we wanted to publish his story. Heinz is at once a successful criminologist renowned for his skill at profiling serial killers, and a deeply flawed and extremely human hero. It’s an electrifying, twisted story kicking off with the discovery of the mutilated bodies of two young priests, and bringing Heinz head-to-head with a killer who likes to play games.Joanna Jodełka’s debut novel Polychrome (translated by Danusia Stok), publishing in June, will be our second crime novel of the year, but makes for a lighter read than 21:37. Two bodies are found, one of an art restorer, the other of man who runs a homeless shelter. Maciej Bartol is on the case, but, as usual, his mother is not too happy.A real treat comes in November with our final publication of the year, award winning journalist Witold Szabłowski’s The Assassin from Apricot City (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones). Szabłowski makes his way to the most remote Turkish villages and towns to meet young girls who run away from honour killings, wives forced by their husbands into prostitution, immigrants from Africa who dream of a better life, and Kurdish journalists and freedom fighters. It’s a multi-voiced and mesmerising portrait of contemporary Turkey, which lingers in the mind long after you finish reading.

Oneworld Publications – Juliet Mabey, Publisher

We publish a few translations every year, and in 2013 we are particularly excited about publishing Revolution Street by the Iranian novelist Amir Cheheltan (September), translated by Paul Sprachman. Cheheltan has enjoyed critical success in Iran and his novels have been published in ten languages, but this is his first to be published in English. Set in the 1980s against the roiling aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, it offers a rather dark tale of power, corruption, and love. A young woman is loved by two men who have something else in common: they are both torturers in one of Tehran’s most notorious prisons. When one becomes dangerously infatuated with the other’s fiancé, he sets out to win her, by fair means or foul, taking him deep into Tehran’s underworld of criminals and provocateurs and ultimately unleashing the powers of the state. This tragicomic novel is the first in a marvelous trilogy about everyday lives in contemporary Iran.In May we are also releasing the mass market paperback edition of Things We Left Unsaid, the prize-winning debut by one of Iran’s most prominent writers, the brilliant Zoya Pirzad, translated from the Persian by Franklin Lewis. Focusing on the dreams and discontent of a young housewife, it was a massive bestseller in Iran and winner of four prestigious awards. We are already at work translating Pirzad’s next book, which follows a man at three stages in his life, as a young boy, as a father and as an old man, each exploring issues of love and friendship across community and traditional boundaries, and the conflicts they bring within the family.

Verso – Leo Hollis, Editor

Verso is committed to publishing the best work in every language. In 2013 we are planning to translate work from Chinese, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Portuguese and German across a complete range of subjects including literary fiction, philosophy, politics and memoir. Here are a few highlights:

Altai: A Novel by Wu Ming (Italy) and translated by Shaun Whiteside, the sequal to the international best seller Q, Altai is a gripping historical novel of identity, danger and betrayal set in 16th century Venice and Constantinople.

Che Wants to See You by Ciro Bustos (Argentina) the searing memoir of Che Guevara’s Argentinian right hand man, who was with him in his last days in the jungle in Bolivia. Translated by Ann Wright.

The Girl Who Stole my Holocaust by Noam Chayut (Hebrew) a brilliant account by an Israeli officer of life in the IDF, and how a chance meeting with a Palestinian girl changed his life. Translated by Tal Haran.

Aisthesis by Jacque Ranciere (France) The major work of aesthetic philosophy of one of the most important thinker in France today.   Translater by Zakir Paul.

The Lives of Things by Jose Saramago (Portugal) published for the first time, the early stories from the Nobel Prize winning novelist. Tanslated by Giovanni Pontiero.

F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years by Mei Zhi (China). A true life account of one of China’s most famous dissidents and life in the camps under Mao. Translated by Gregor Benton.

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