New Books in Language and Translation

The Red Wind Howls (Columbia UP, 2025) is an unsettling, gripping, and darkly funny novel by Tsering Döndrup, one of modern Tibet’s most celebrated writers. First self-published in 2006 after no publisher was willing to take the political risk, the novel traces Tibetan experiences under Mao Zedong’s rule, from the 1958 Amdo uprising and the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Through a nonsequential narrative that moves back and forth between characters and events, The Red Wind Howls weaves together experiences of labor camps, unrelenting hunger, environmental devastation, and the destruction of language into a powerful exploration of twentieth-century Tibetan history.

In this episode, I speak with the novel’s translator, Christopher Peacock, about the challenges of translating a work that weaves together oral storytelling and history. We discuss the recurring character Alak Drong, the novel’s striking use of dark humor, the ways its characters navigate famine, labor camps, political campaigns, and shifting systems of survival, and above all the importance of reading literature by Tibetan authors.

Listeners should also seek out Chris’s translation of Tsering Döndrup’s short story collection, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories, and his article on the use of language in Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, here.
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The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Holocaust, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish, Hannah Pollin-Galay uses cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation to explore Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Pollin-Galay about this new book, led by historian Samuel Kassow.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on December 2, 2024.
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Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Returns to Marrakesh, co-translated by Claudia Esposito and Laura Reeck and published by Syracuse University Press in 2026, chronicles Meddeb’s successive visits to the Red City from 1968 through the 1990s, tracing both his personal journey and Marrakesh’s transformation across three pivotal decades. Through his distinctive blend of poetic prose and attentive observation, Meddeb portrays the city as a historical crossroads shaped by Jewish and Muslim communities, different social classes, Sufi mystics, merchants, and travelers—a richly layered urban space in which cultures, histories, and spiritual traditions continually intersect. Presented in a bilingual edition featuring the original French alongside the English translation, the book introduces a wider readership to the work of one of North Africa’s most significant literary and intellectual voices.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Esposito and Reeck to discuss Meddeb’s distinctive literary and intellectual presence, his movement across languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions, and his intimate portrayal of Marrakesh. They also explore the collaborative process of translating his multilingual, layered prose and consider how translation can extend—and even renew—a writer’s literary afterlife.

Claudia Esposito is associate professor of French at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is author of The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb.Laura Reeck is an independent translator and scholar. She is the author of Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond and coeditor of Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France.

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026).
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Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms
(Palgrave Macillan, 2026) by Dr. Galina Bogatova unpacks the hidden
imperial logic behind Russia’s dominance over its neighbors,
revealing how the Kremlin weaponizes "familial system" myths to justify
control, including its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From the Tsarist
empire to Putin’s digital propaganda, Dr. Bogatova examines how Russia
portrays itself as a disciplining “father,” a self-sacrificing “mother,”
or an “elder brother” to post-Soviet states, protecting, subjugating,
and manipulating them in the name of unity. 

Blending
psychology, discourse analysis, and historical inquiry, this
groundbreaking book exposes how language sanitizes oppression,
legitimizes conquest, and sustains imperial ambitions. A
thought-provoking exploration of power, ideology, and resistance, it
offers a fresh perspective on Russia’s enduring influence over its
former empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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A psychological Arabic novel in English translation, The War by Mohamed Alyahyai follows a man who begins to question whether he is truly the one who returned from war.

On a winter night, Issa Saleh prepares a small gathering at his home. By the end of the evening, they are gone—and he is no longer certain they were ever there.

As memory fractures, the war resurfaces not as event but as instability, where identity itself begins to slip and the narratives that sustain survival unravel.
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