The Year’s 10 Best Reviewed Books in Translation
Earlier this week the National Book Foundation made the very welcome announcement that it will be adding a new category to its annual list of prestigious awards: the National Book Award for Translated Literature.
“We are a nation of immigrants, and we should never stop seeking connection and insight from the myriad cultures that consistently influence and inspire us,” said Executive Director Lisa Lucas in a statement on Wednesday.
“We want American readers to deeply value an inclusive, big-picture point of view, and the National Book Award for Translated Literature is part of a commitment to that principle. The addition of this award lends crucial visibility to works that have the power to touch us as American readers in search of broadened perspective.”
To celebrate this news, we thought we’d take a look back at the ten best reviewed works of literature in translation from the past year.
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1. Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, Trans. by Susan Bernofsky
(New Directions)
“Jenny Erpenbeck’s magnificent novel Go, Went, Gone is about ‘the central moral question of our time,’ and among its many virtues is that it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are very different from us but alive to the false consolations of telling ‘moving’ stories about people who are very different from us.”
–James Wood (The New Yorker)
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2. The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis, Trans. by Michael Lucey
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“What is most impressive about The End of Eddy is that its author turned himself into a man capable of creating such a vivid and honest self-portrait. Telling the truth about growing up gay among bigoted, bullying people requires bravery and brio; shaping that story into a memorable dramatic narrative takes not only nerve but intelligence, skill and a mysterious jolt of je ne sais quoi.”
–Rich Whitaker (The Washington Post)
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3. Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin, Trans. by Megan McDowell
(Riverhead)
“No previous book, at least, has filled me with unease the way Fever Dream did … Schweblin sustains both conversations while narrowing them toward a single question: the mysterious horror of the worms. Intertwined, these two dialogues form a shadow of an explanation—one that runs on nightmare logic, inexorable but elusive, and always just barely out of reach.”
–Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)
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4. The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet, Trans. by Sam Taylor
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“…a cunning, often hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia … Like Nabokov’s Lolita, this wonderfully clever novel can be enjoyed on multiple levels. But to fully appreciate its ingenious metafictional complexities, be prepared to do some Googling.”
–Heller McAlpin (NPR)
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5. Black Moses by Alan Mabanckou, Trans. by Helen Stevenson
(The New Press)
“Black Moses exhibits all the charm, warmth and verbal brio that have won the author of Broken Glass and African Psycho so many admirers—and the informal title of Africa’s Samuel Beckett. Helen Stevenson, his translator, again shakes Mr Mabanckou’s cocktail of sophistication and simplicity into richly idiomatic English.”
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6. I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaggy, Trans. by Gili Alhadeff
(New Directions)
“Jaeggy, a master of the short form, again creates something unforgettable with these otherworldly stories … Told in Jaeggy’s characteristically jagged prose, these dark stories of madness, loss and murder are urgent and evocative.”
–Claire Kohda Hazelton (The Guardian)
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7. Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
(Penguin Press)
“…the modest ambitions of Autumn — ‘to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap’ — add up to a phenomenological rescue mission, one the writer undertakes on behalf of his daughter, but also of himself and his reader. Day by day, radiantly, the mission succeeds.”
–Garth Risk Hallberg (The New York Times Book Review)
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8. A Girl in Exile by Ismail Kadare, Trans by John Hodgson
(Counterpoint)
“A Girl in Exile is the work of a historic talent who is still at the peak of his power. It confirms Kadare to be the best writer at work today who remembers—almost aggressively so, refusing to forget—European totalitarianism.”
–Josephine Livingstone (The New Republic)
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9. The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai, Trans. by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet, & John Batki
(New Directions)
“The stories in The World Goes On are the reading equivalent of climbing a volcano instead of sitting by the beach on your honeymoon. But the rewards — the sudden, knife-like insights so cerebral they seem the work of an alien intelligence — are worth the effort.”
–Adam Morgan (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
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10. Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, Trans by Jonathan Wright
(Penguin Books)
“What follows, in this assured and hallucinatory story, is funny and horrifying in a near-perfect admixture … You get the sense, throughout Frankenstein in Baghdad, that Saadawi’s creature, alive with malevolent intelligence, is feeding off its own destructive energy. The reader feeds off it as well. What happened in Iraq was a spiritual disaster, and this brave and ingenious novel takes that idea and uncorks all its possible meanings.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
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Check out more great books in translation here
