After weeks of reading, researching, voting, taking recommendations, discussing, and passionately defending, we’ve finally come up with our 25-title fiction longlist for the “Best Translated Book of 2008:”
- The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (Simon & Schuster)
- What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by António Lobo Antunes, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa (W. W. Norton)
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa Editions)
- Tranquility by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein (Archipelago)
- 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions)
- Voice Over by Céline Curiol, translated from the French by Sam Richard (Seven Stories)
- The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Archipelago)
- The Taker and Other Stories by Rubem Fonseca, translated from the Portuguese by Clifford Landers (Open Letter)
- The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans, translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke (Overlook)
- Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique by Gert Jonke, translated from the German by Jean Snook (Dalkey Archive)
- Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes (Telegram)
- Detective Story by Imre Kertesz, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (Knopf)
- Yalo by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux (Archipelago)
- The Great Weaver from Kashmir by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton (Archipelago)
- I’d Like by Amanda Michalopoulou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Dalkey Archive)
- The Enormity of the Tragedy by Quim Monzo, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush (Peter Owen)
- Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions)
- The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (Melville House)
- Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge, translated from the French by Richard Greeman (New York Review Books)
- Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated from the French by Matthew Smith (Dalkey Archive)
- Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck (Ibis Editions)
- Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis (Melville House)
- The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (New York Review Books)
We will be announcing the 10 finalists on January 27th, with the winning titles announced on February 19th at a party at the Melville House offices. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be highlighting each of these titles one-by-one leading up to the announcement of the finalists.
In terms of criteria, we only considered original titles published (or released) in the U.S. in 2008. No retranslations, no reprints, no paperbacks of previously published hardcovers were eligible. And what we’re looking for is the best translated book, not just the best translation. Speaking for all the judges, we believe that a great translated book is a combination of a great original and a great translation, and as such, we’d like to honor the book as a book, as a collaborative effort between author, translator, editor, and publisher.
This year’s panelists included Monica Carter, bookseller at Skylight Books and editor of Salonica ; Steve Dolph, editor of CALQUE ; Scott Esposito, editor of Conversational Reading and The Quarterly Conversation ; Brandon Kennedy, bookseller at Spoonbill & Sugartown ; Michael Orthofer, editor of the Literary Saloon and Complete Review ; Chad W. Post, director of Open Letter Books and this blog ; E.J. Van Lanen, senior editor of Open Letter Books and Three Percent; and Jeff Waxman, bookseller at the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and editor of The Front Table.
(And just so everyone knows this is on the up-and-up, E.J. and I were excluded from voting on Open Letter books, and won’t vote on Taker in choosing the finalists.)
For some additional information, click here for an official press release.
(Sorry there’s no link to the Saramago book. Apparently, in addition to freezing acquisitions, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s innovative new business model includes not listing individual books on their website. Brilliant!)
Comments
Granted, we don’t have any Russian or Asian writers on the list (this seriously wasn’t intentional, the panel just didn’t factor in geography in selecting the books they thought were the best of the year—next year’s list could be weighted in a totally different way), but we do have a number of South American writers. Moya, Bolano, Fonseca, and Zambra are all from Central and South America.
I figured that in addition to pointing out the lack of Russian and Asian writers, I thought the next most common comment would be about the high number of Hungarian writers on the list . . .
These lists are supposed to cause discussion, so please feel free to flood this comments page with recommendations of books you feel were unfairly left off.
While Bolano’s epic may be the literary highlight at the moment, I’m so very pleased to see that Dominique Fabre’s beautifully told tale “The Waitress Was New” made the long list. I echo other reviewers that there is something incredibly simple, yet magical about this small text, something very subtle yet sustaining that stays with the reader long after you put it back on the bookshelf. Of the plethora or so books I’ve managed to read this past year, Fabre’s short novel refuses to leave my mind. I implore all to give it a go. Cheers.
I am slightly confused as to the point of this prize. Is it a prize for the best translated novel, or for the best novel not written in English? Below is what I had written under the assumption that it has at least a bit to do with the translation aspect:
I am very interested to understand how one critiques a translation if one does not understand the original language. I can understand, for example, a prize for “Best Translation into English from the Portuguese” with a panel of judges who know the two languages and have read both the originals and the translations.
How do you go about judging translations if you don’t know the original language?
What jumps to my mind as a sort of pit-trap is “fluidity” as a case in point. A flowing translation does not necessarily reflect the original writing just as conversely a stilted translation does not shed light on the original. At both times the translator is at fault.
Now, I’m not saying this out of condescension, but genuinely wish to understand how one judges this, as after all – I, like everyone else, read most of the above list in English translation.
To respond to Gadi, I gather that this is a prize for a novel that has been translated into English and thereby become accessible to a broader range of readers than the original language would have made possible, and then the book is judged on its merits as a novel read in the English language. If that is the case, I applaud it, since I for one am interested in a guide such as this as to what good writers there are out there writing in languages other than English.
I think a prize for literary translation, while certainly worthwhile, would be of interest perhaps only to specialists in the field. Those of us who seek out foreign literature know some of the names – Edith Grossman, Anne Born, as well as some of the esteemed names on this list – but it is the book we are hoping to ingest, not the translation. This is not an academic prize, but a literary one that celebrates the diversity of interesting literataure. It is all about the book that made it in the world as a piece of literary fiction!
I lament the absence of Sasa Stanisic’s “How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone”! But then I would, since I’m the editor. There’s a smidge of consolation in the fact that the LA Times chose it as a Best Book of 08 (in spite of the author’s unpronounceable name, and the fact that he’s a Bosnian who writes in German!!! score for the good guys!)—-but the omission from your otherwise fabulous list does smart! Sigh….I will survive this blow, and remain, as ever, a big fan of the good work you guys are doing.
“I lament the absence of Sasa Stanisic’s “How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone”!”
I was surprised, too, given that I fully expect to see it on next month’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist in the UK, along with a few others. (Fingers crossed for them, anyway.) Perhaps the panelists haven’t read it: I certainly haven’t seen any indication that they have amongst their blogs and reviews.
I tried it earlier this year, and admittedly didn’t get all the way through it. I’ve since seen Sasa twice, once in Edinburgh, once in Glasgow, and he’s one of the more entertaining writers I’ve seen. I’m encouraged to give the book another shot, but not before having read Andric’s The Bridge On The Drina.
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Every month Three Percent features an independent bookstore. This month’s featured bookstore is Brazos Bookstore.
- 23 November 09: Ferguson lecture on Knut Hamsun
- 30 November 09: Saugestad lecture on Knut Hamsun
- 1 December 09: European Book Club: To Siberia
- 3 December 09: Javier Marias in conversation with Paul Holdengräber
- 5 March 10: Babel Series: Azar Nafisi
My afternoon has been one big drum roll building up to this. I’m happy to say I’ve read a few of them (Metropole, Bonsai, and The Enormity of the Tragedy) and have another six of them sitting on my shelves waiting for the right moment, although Metropole is the most memorable.
Given the hype, and then the praise, I can’t see anything but 2666 eventually scooping it. But it’s great to see a diverse bunch of titles bundled together on one lengthy list.