Translator's Choice 2020 1
11 Translator’s choice Why does this book deserve
to be translated? Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s plays mix seriousness with humour and social criticism with a vivid imagination. They are powerful meditations on immigration, consumer society and on young people’s broken dreams. In God Times Five (2008) four drama students and their teacher each attempt to stage their own versions of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play. In The Hundred We Are (2009) a woman confronts three different sides of her life and what she sacrificed to find some peace. An investigator tries, in Apathy for Beginners (2011), to solve the strange case of why, in the mid-2000s, several immigrant children mysteriously fell ill in Sweden. And in I Call My Brothers (2013) we follow the hunt for an alleged terrorist suspected of being responsible for the December 2010 attacks in Stockholm. Finally, in ≈ [Almost Equal To] (2014) several people search for a job and a decent life, but are unsuccessful in their quest. Ambitions are juxtaposed with reality and irony with grief. Khemiri’s texts hold up a mirror to the complex times we live in. “Ambitions are juxtaposed with reality and irony with grief” Humberto Pérez Mortera Humberto Pérez Mortera is in his early stage as translator of Swedish literature. He translates into Spanish, lives in Mexico City, Mexico.