The Best Books We Read in 2023
WWB staff members share their favorite translated books of the year and the titles they’re most looking forward to in 2024.
Joaquim Arena’s Under Our Skin, translated from the Portuguese by Jethro Soutar, an investigation into the remarkable lives of João de Sá Panasco, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, Andresa do Nascimento, and Marcelino Manuel da Graça, to name just a few of the historical figures profiled in this stunning book on the African diaspora in Portugal, could not have come at a better time—just as I have been reading about Juan Latino, Charles Graves, Mary Wilhelmina Lancaster, and Priscilla Henry, equally impressive figures of the diaspora in Spain and the United States. In addition to leading me through the lives of these key figures as they intersected with the course of History and came to be represented in the arts, Arena, whose book begins with his return to Portugal from his home in Cabo Verde after the death of his adoptive father, also grounded me by creating a striking sense of place. Consider his description of Alcácer do Sal: “But there’s something alluring and hospitable about the place too, as if its shadowy streets guard ancient secrets. The castle on the hill, the al-qasr (‘the castle’ in Arabic) that gives the town its name (along with sal, the Portuguese word for ‘salt’), watches over the floodplains, vast and lushly green, and looks down on the white town that climbs the slope from the river. The place has been the scene of historical battles, invasions, clashes between great empires and civilizations, and this knowledge undercuts the sleepiness with a sense of import.” Passages like this one, wonderfully mediated by Soutar, keep me returning to Arena’s book and contemplating the various groups of people that carried their languages, customs, and chattel atop a hill in the Iberian Peninsula and made something happen. Arena’s book reminds us that what was made can be unmade if we, like his friend Leopoldina (also profiled in this book), understand how things came to be. In that regard, I think that Louis Timagène Houat’s The Maroons, which tells the story of Frême and Marie’s escape from slavery and introduction into a maroon community in a forest on Réunion Island—translated by Aqiil Gopee and Jeffrey Diteman—is a good harbinger for 2024.
