SOURCE: SCROLL

In JM Coetzee’s new book, questions of the soul become urgent as the body becomes frail

The six stories in ‘The Pole and Other Stories’ explore familiar Coetzeean themes of love, death, ageing, art and human-animal interaction.

Devotees of JM Coetzee’s writing will be delighted at the publication of The Pole and Other Stories. What may be surprising to some about this collection is that the stories have all appeared before in some form – but not always in English.

The longest, The Pole, was first published in Spanish by an Argentinian press in 2022 as a standalone novella, El Polaco. It appears here in English for the first time.

This also applies to two other stories in the collection: Hope, which was originally published in Italian in 2019, and The Dog, first published in 2018 as El Perro in a Spanish-language edition of Coetzee’s stories titled Siete Cuentos Morales (Seven Moral Tales).

This delayed publication in the anglophone world is deliberate. Coetzee has suggested he is interested in his work appearing in the Southern Hemisphere before it appears in the Global North. Allowing his writing to appear in translation first is a way of questioning the assumption that English is a dominant or “universal” language.

Access to these three stories alone makes the new publication worth reading, but this edition also includes three other stories originally published singly in English and collected here for the first time.