Best Fiction in Translation

A nice longlist of the best fiction in translation.

What is appalling is how long it takes for some books to make it into English.  Le Clézio's Desert, for example, was cited by the Nobel committee as a relatively early work that changed the mode of his fiction.  Ah well.

(I think I found this link at Times Flow Stemmed--apologies for late attribution.)

Comments

  1. CathJanuary 5, 2010 at 10:38 PM

    I am always amazed at translation, since my husband had to translate a short story as part of his MFA. Such a difficult job--nice to know that there are people out there who appreciate it.

    Happy new year!

    ReplyDelete
  2. StevenJanuary 6, 2010 at 1:35 PM

    Dear Connie,

    Thank you for your comments. I find translation an infinitely challenging series of choices and decisions. You have to start with a philosophy of translation and then end up making a million choices that abrogate it in one way or another. As a result, you often end up reading quite a different work than what was in the original, and the collaboration between translator and original author can be an interesting thing to witness. I'm thinking just of the title of Imre Kertesz's book Fateless. In one translation Fateless, in another Fatelessness.

    Interesting.

    shalom

    Steven

    ReplyDelete

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