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Couch Grass
153 pages, Paperback
Published October 21, 2025
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December 21, 2025
By translating Reta’s stories, Bethlehem Attfield opens a pathway for readers outside the Amharic‑speaking world to engage with a literary tradition that is rich, complex, and seldom represented in English. Couch Grass offers glimpses of Ethiopia’s social and cultural landscape, but through intimate human stories rather than broad, exoticizing reportage.
Reta’s prose is first and foremost abstract through laboured layered and fragmentary, blending memory, imagination, and observation in a style called hitsinawinet. This creates a lyrical, almost dreamlike texture, where narrative resolution is often secondary to atmosphere and emotional resonance. The translation by B. Attfield preserves the musicality and nuance of the original, rendering cultural specificity and human intimacy accessible to English readers.
Not an easy read, nor would it be a choice for the mass of readers, but it offers a glimpse of how much still lies still hidden in African literature not known to the external world by the limitations of language barrier.
Reta’s prose is first and foremost abstract through laboured layered and fragmentary, blending memory, imagination, and observation in a style called hitsinawinet. This creates a lyrical, almost dreamlike texture, where narrative resolution is often secondary to atmosphere and emotional resonance. The translation by B. Attfield preserves the musicality and nuance of the original, rendering cultural specificity and human intimacy accessible to English readers.
Not an easy read, nor would it be a choice for the mass of readers, but it offers a glimpse of how much still lies still hidden in African literature not known to the external world by the limitations of language barrier.
Displaying 1 of 1 review