THE TRANSLATOR

In silken prose and with subtle suspense, Nina Schuyler brings us a mesmerizing novel of language and translation, memory loss and heartbreak, and the search for answers in a foreign country.

When renowned translator Hanne Schubert tumbles down a flight of stairs, she suffers a brain injury, and ends up with an unusual but real condition: the ability to speak the one language she learned later in life-Japanese. Isolated from the English-speaking world, Hanne leaves San Francisco and retreats to Japan. While Hanne is in the middle of giving a speech about translation, the Japanese novelist whose work she has recently translated storms the stage and accuses her of mangling his work. Distraught, she seeks out the inspiration for the translated novel, a Japanese Noh actor named Moto who stands at an existential crossroads. Through their contentious interactions, Moto slowly finds his way back onto stage, and Hanne begins to understand how she mistranslated not only the novel, but also her daughter, who has not spoken to Hanne in six years. With this new knowledge, she sets out to make amends.

Nina Schuyler's first novel, The Painting (which was published by Algonquin in 2004) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award, and named a Best Book by the San Francisco Chronicle. She's been nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize and recently won the Santa Clara Review's Editor's Choice Prize for Fiction. She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and review books for Rumpus.