Bernardo Atxaga writes in Basque and Spanish. The Accordionist’s Son was published in Basque in 2003 as Soinujolearen Semea and then translated into Spanish as El hijo del acordeonista by Asun Garikano and the author. This is the version that Margaret Jull Costa, the winner of the Premio Valle Inclán, has rendered into fluent colloquial English. Reviewing the Basque edition (TLS, August 13, 2004), Amaia Gabantxo described it as a “self-referential, multilayered work” that “offers a lyrical yet harsh view of what happened in the Basque country after the Spanish Civil War”, when the men of the new generation were driven into the arms of ETA. The book is, in Gabantxo’s estimation, “the first great Basque novel”.
Earlier Peninsular history is the theme of Miguel Sousa Tavares’s novel, Equator. The book is partly set on the Portuguese island colony of São Tomé, to which the hero has been sent, in 1905, by King Dom Carlos as its new governor. [Sousa] Tavares concocts a brew of sex and colonial and slave history, in which Portugal’s “oldest ally” vies for the spoils. Reviewing the book, Toby Lichtig (TLS, November 21, 2008) described the sex in the book as “copious and mawkish”, while noting that Peter Bush’s “occasionally clotted translation” rose to the “challenge with gusto”. Bush, who until now has translated Spanish fiction, wins the biennial Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation Prize for translation from the Portuguese.
[and I can't find information about this Gulbenkian prize...]
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