Fiction in translation: Harrowing aftermath of terrorist attack, and an eloquent threnody

Three days before Ramadan. A text alert. Terrorist attacks at multiple places of worship in a remote town. Flicking on the television, you discover your youngest sister is among the dead. But not a victim, since she and her husband were the suicide bombers. This gut-punch is the opening to Night of a Thousand Hells by Intan Paramaditha (Europa Editions, 304pp, £18.99).

In other hands, this might be a thriller, but Paramaditha creates a gothic tapestry from Indonesian folklore and Islamic mysticism, dark humour and vivid compassion, even as she toys with the parallels to King Lear and Cinderella.

This is the story of three sisters (“Isn’t it always,” one remarks bitterly): Mutiara, Maya and little Annisa, their fates decreed by their grandmother Victoria who dubbed them the Caretaker, the Traveller and the Bride.

Mutiara stayed at home, nursed her dying mother and now her terminally ill father; Maya escaped to New York, shrugging off responsibilities for a life of books, adventure and illicit affairs. Pretty Annisa was happy to be a young bride swathed in white, to bear two children. And later is wedded to something dark but familiar, since “… building a bomb requires great care and forethought – like planning a wedding”. She who has exploded their lives, their family, their sense of who they are.

From different cities Mutiara and Maya make panicked journeys to Kotawijaya to try to understand how their little sister, their father’s favourite, could commit such an atrocity, struggling with shame and guilt at what they might have done. When Annisa’s diary appears, her voice joins the polyphony of women’s voices, which is completed by Rosalinda, the child of a servant brought up as their sibling, now a trans woman, and grandmother Victoria and her stories of weretigers and shapeshifters.

Translators Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao bring a blazing clarity to the many voices, and the shifting registers of magic, myth and brute reality. There are horrors here – real and imagined – in an Indonesia that is recognisable but strange, yet Night of a Thousand Hells is teeming with life, humanity and hope.

In Dario Voltolini’s harrowing, haunting novella Invernale (New Cross Press, 144pp, £12) death is everywhere. It is swift and brutal, or slow and insidious.

Gino is a butcher with a concession at Porta Palazzo market in 1970s Turin. He is skilled and sharp: cleaving, skinning, carving and boning for the milling customers. Gino is a man who transforms flesh into meat, but does so with an extraordinary reverence: “The butcher knows with certainty that, if there is a boundary between animals and humans, he stands on the beasts’ side.”

One day, jostled by a collision of other workers, his cleaver misses its mark and buries itself in his thumb. At the hospital the digit is sewn back, though it will never have the strength and movement is once had. But the blood from the meat has left him with an infection that will take years to diagnose. This is the story of his long, slow death.

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All this happens before the birth of Dario – and this novella, part memoir, part fiction, is a paean to his father. What follows is a slow return to work, endless visits to doctors and later to specialists in France as Dario grows up and the two spend time hunting or watching Gino’s beloved football. This is a life condensed and compacted – here, every sound, every movement is clearly delineated.

Voltolini’s pen is sometimes a cleaver bringing the noisy clamour and the stench of the market alive, sometimes a scalpel dissecting the silences between his parents with searing intensity made possible only by the translator, Brian Shannon, who brilliantly captures both the ordinary and the numinous.

Rarely have I so often paused to wonder at the startling yet restrained beauty of a text. Invernale is an eloquent threnody, and a harrowing account of death and loss.

My Dreadful Body (Linden Press, 144pp, £12.99) by the Russian poet Egana Djabbarova is a testament to resistance against the forces of patriarchy and tradition, otherness and illness. As a girl, Djabbarova is caught between worlds – Azeri by birth, she is sent to school in Russia where her looks, her accent and her clothing make her an object of ridicule. She feels no more at home visiting her father’s family in Azerbaijan or her mother’s in an unnamed village in Georgia.

Even her own body betrays her: she suffers from dystonia, a disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions and makes movement and speech difficult.

Djabbarova’s lyrical, often devastating memoir dismembers her body into parts: eyebrows, hair, mouth, belly, each a sign of otherness. Azeri tradition forbids girls to pluck their bushy eyebrows before marriage, and Djabbarova’s first act of resistance is tweezing unruly hairs.

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While Azeri women treasure their long dark hair, which conserves the memory of their ancestors, she longs to cut hers short. Her dream is granted when, to implant a deep brain stimulator, her head is shaved: “That was it. My past, the past of all the women in my family, the memory of my ancestors, the history of a single body – all that now lay on the cold floor.”

The memoir is a transgressive act: an Azeri woman’s mouth, she tells us, is not meant for speaking and (to quote the original Russian title) “the hands of the women in my family were not made for writing”. Lisa Hayden’s translation exquisitely captures her extraordinary voice: by turns impassioned and lyrical, yet capable of quiet, seething anger at the forces ranged against her, and against all women.

Bosnian writer Miljenko Jergovic first gained international fame with Sarajevo Marlboro, a sharp collection of short stories set during the 1990s war. His latest collection, Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah (Archipelago Books, 480p, £25), continues to explore the violence and madness of the Balkans, but in a very different way.

These stories are “remixes” of folk songs, Bosnian sevdalinka and Dalmatian klapa, tragic ballads that, in a few verses, encapsulate a life and, all too often, a death. Each begins with a lyric, but from here Jergovic feels free to embroider, diverge or “sample”, braiding elements of folk history and dreamlike melancholy.

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In Charm, tango singer Carlos Gardel travels to Bosnia to have a gypsy curse lifted, but finds only ambiguity. In Halal, young Salko lies, watching the world, desperately trying not to forget his own name as he waits to be found. But Salko is dead, executed by firing squad after he converted to Islam and his family are not allowed to know where he is buried.

In Ellen Elias-Bursać and Mirza Puric’s exhilarating translation, music thrums and pulses though every sentence, every image of these mesmerising stories which recapture and refashion songs of peoples accustomed to pain and grief, where “the good Allah made us all different except for one thing. We die easily without seeking reasons; the reasons come on their own.”