Description:
Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
In this provocative dialogue, a Nobel laureate novelist and a leading translator investigate the nature of language and the challenges of translation.
"An intelligent, moving, and supremely humane act of criticism that reveals just how difficult and wondrous it can be to inhabit a language that is not your own." -- Merve Emre
Brief description: Born in Cape Town, South Africa, J. M. Coetzee is the author of more than twenty books, including The Pole; Waiting for the Barbarians; Life and Times of Michael K, for which Coetzee was awarded the Booker Prize; Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life; and several essay collections. With his novel Disgrace, Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. In 2003, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Review Quotes: What happens when we consider translation not as a solitary act of perception but as a negotiation--one shaped by institutional constraints imposed from without or even by unequal relationships of global power? Speaking in Tongues, a dialogue between J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, repeatedly shifts the focus from individual choices to the structural forces that shape translation.--Kwame Anthony Appiah "New York Review of Books"