Translated Books
Robert Musil
Three Women
Los Angeles and Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2014.
“The language in these stories is … both precise and delicate, both descriptive and expressive, both ironic and poetic. In this new translation into an American idiom, I have attempted to preserve this subtle equilibrium.” - from the translator’s foreword.
One of Green Integer’s Best Sellers
Peter Rosei
Metropolis Vienna
Los Angeles and Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2009
“Rosei’s Vienna is not at all the black and white Expressionist-like world of Carol Reed’s film, The Third Man, a world reminding everyone—characters and viewers both—of that great city’s monstrous acts and the culture’s fall from grace. Instead, Rosei’s figures—caught up in a society of avoidance—pick up existence as if the War had not occurred, attempting to ignore or outrun their terrible past in a rush for money and success.” - Douglas Messerli in The New Review of Literature
Gabriele Petricek
Out of the Skies
A Triptych
Stockholm: Writers Read Writers, 2019
“The central theme that connects the three narratives is the question about the relationship between life and art and about the strategies that bring art into life and life into art.
There are people who come out of the skies yet are not angelic or innocent, vested with talents, yes, but characterised by fateful circumstances they themselves bring about. They are afflicted by life.
Petricek’s artificial and graphic descriptions of landscapes and weather patterns are more than harmonious transparencies for the psychological precipices of the protagonists. She follows the intricate paths of her figures in poetically high-brow and charged language.”
From the publisher’s website
Jürg Laederach
The Whole of Life
Champaign / London / Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013
“Somehow, in these final pages, Laederach achieves an emotional undertow, and all of the novel’s frustrating incoherence — its hostile instability — work beautifully. ‘Laederach’s language breaks up and breaks down,’ Howes tells us in his preface. ‘It repeats itself like music does, and it teases us into the idea that if language is to account for human perception, thought, and emotion, it has to leave behind the received realm of conventional facts and how they are made.’ In The Whole of Life, there are no facts, and it’s possible, Laederach seems to say, that the same is true for the whole of life itself.” -Patrick Nathan in Full Stop
Peter Rosei
Ruthless and Other Writings
Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2003
“Howes’s translation of the sometimes arcane and difficult texts of Peter Rosei is elegant. He deftly replicates the poetic language that characterizes even the prose selections of this volume and reveals a gift for nuance and plasticity of meaning and entendre. Ruthless is a collection of Rosei’s texts originally published from the 1970s to the 1990s. It is a trove of wonderful short writings, including short stories, poetry, aphorisms from the Philosophical Notebook, and an excerpt from the novel Persona.”
- Rebecca Thomas in Modern Austrian Literature
Fahim Amir
Being and Swine. The End of Nature (As We Knew It)
Translated by Geoffrey C. Howes & Corvin Russell
Toronto: Between the Lines, 2020
“Forget everything you think you know about nature. Fahim Amir’s award-winning book takes pure delight in posing unexpected questions: Are animals victims of human domination, or heroes of resistance? Is nature pristine and defenceless, or sentient and devious? Is being human really a prerequisite for being political? … Contrarian, whip-smart, and wildly innovative, no other book will laugh at your convictions quite like this one.”
- from the publisher’s website
Rosmarie Waldrop
Ins Abstrakte treiben
Aus dem Amerikanischen von Elfriede Czurda und Geoff Howes
Vienna: Edition Korrespondenzen, 2015
A translation of Rosmarie Waldrop’s Driven to Abstraction (2010) into German.
“Perhaps English is the appropriate language for this topic, as Great Britain was the motherland of modern capitalism, perhaps language and formation have intertwined, but Elfriede Czurda and Geoff Howes, who with this volume have joined the illustrious band of Waldrop translators, have succeeded in adapting the texts to a German that proves to be a suitable language.”
Jan Kuhlbrodt in Signaturen
Gouthama Siddarthan
Zeitbyrinth
Translated into German by Geoffrey C. Howes
Chennai: Alephi, 2018
“Like every heroic epic, ‘Zeitbyrinth’ is also a war poem, and the constantly new incarnations of time depict constantly new conflicts into which Tamil mythology, Tamil history, and the personal experiences of the poetic persona flow. Contemporary and political allusions are also woven in, and we see that in this Tamil literature, the literature of a frequently marginalized people, tradition and present day, reality and imagination, humanity and inhumanity lie close together. We can celebrate our own cultural identities only if we remain open to the tragedies and catastrophes as well as the achievements and pinnacles. ‘Zeitbyrinth’ is at once lyrical, narrative, and dramatic, it is at once realistic and fantastic, it is modern yet it draws on history and legend.”
-From the translator’s foreword