The Best Books of 2015: Translations!

The timidity of the English-language book-buying public has been a byword for the last fifty years, and I’m always gratified by how much it’s belied by the breadth and variety of books-in-translation every year. Still only a fraction of the whole, I grant you, but even so: all of these, the best ten translated works of 2015, were in the marketplace to compete, and as with all translations, they opened windows to alien worlds – some more alien than others. Here are the top ten such windows:

10. Notes from a Dead House by Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf) – What had always struck me as one of Dostoevsky’s weakest and rotest efforts was here transformed by a translating duo whose own efforts usually tend to irritate me. So the year’s best translations starts off with a classic win-win. You can read my full review here.

9. The Iliad of Homer translated by Peter Green (University of California Press) – It seems like a match made on Olympus: our greatest living classicist, translating our greatest surviving work of classical literature. And I went into it with commensurate joy only to stumble a few times. My foremost thought when finishing my first reading was “It’s not a triumph” – which felt damning enough. But subsequent re-readings have deepened my understanding of some of the things Green is doing in his translation, and I look forward to learning more with a decade more of re-readings. You can read my full review here.

8. The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons by Liu Hsieh, translated by Vincent Yu-Chung Shih (NYRB) – This first and amazing work of Chinese literary criticism reads like some kind of incredibly engaging cross between Plutarch and Montaigne. It introduces the Western reader to a barrage of new authors, new works, new worlds, and it does so in such a lively way that even the alien detials work in its favor. You can read my full review here.

7. Leg Over Leg by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, translated by Humphrey Davies (New York University Press) – This one was the biggest surprise of the year for me in the world of translated literature: it’s a long and immensely detailed autobiographical novel by a towering, foundational figure in Arabic literature, and in Davies’ rendition it rollicks, shaggy-dog style, from Lebanon to Egypt to Malta to Tunis to England to France as the main character seeks, like a brainy version of Candide, his place in the world. I confess I’d never heard of the book before these two volumes came in the mail, and I spent a very happy week submerged in their stories-within-stories. NYU Press is to be congratulated for making this work available to the English-speaking world.

6. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Dennis Washburn (Norton) – I have a very active history of engaging with this enormously wonderful novel; I had notebooks full of reactions to Arthur Waley’s translation, notebooks full of reactions to Edward Seidensticker’s translation, notebooks full of reactions to Royall Tyler’s translation (and some public reactions, in the now-legendary “Summer of Genji”) – and I contine to evolve my reactions to this intensely smart new translation by Dennis Washburn. You can read my full review here.

5. Barbarian Spring by Jonas Luscher, translated by Peter Lewis (Haus) – A Swiss businessman attends a Tunisian wedding held in a Berber desert oasis, and, as if that setup didn’t make things clear enough, all Hell breaks loose. The wondefully dry narrative tone here (perfectly conveyed by Peter Lewis) virtually required a quick re-reading. You can read my full review here

4. The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi, translated by Jonathan Wright (Bloomsbury) – The person who originally recommended this book to me characterized it as “the 21^st century version of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle,” and although I can see why – Alsanousi writes very passionately and very well about the plight of immigrant workers in the Gulf States – I quickly discovered while reading it that there’s a good deal more than that going on in these pages. This is the story of the young son of a Filipino mother and a Kuwaiti father, at home in neither world and yearning to belong somewhere, and in its subtly-portrayed open emotion, it’s a very brave book in its way, one that deserves to become a classic.

3. The Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Andrew Davis (New York Review) – This one is cheating just a bit, since I don’t think it’s actually scheduled to come out in the US until just after the start of the new year and so technically belongs to 2016, but an entire long year will have passed until the next Stevereads hoe-down, and I wanted to sing the thing’s praises now, while it’s still a new book! Davis has here done a fantastic job of conveying the steely intelligence of his poet, writing from exile, half-broken by the repeated tortures he suffered at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen, and Davis’s notes are first-rate as well. I wasn’t a big fan of this poet before I read this wrenching volume – and now I may very well make up for lost time.

2. Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes, translated by Jamie Bulloch (MacLehose Press) – I missed this slim, explosive little novel (about the return of Adolf Hitler, to a world he never made) when it first appeared and only encountered it once it had been translated into English – after which I promptly fell in love and began proselytizing the book to every reader (and every critic) I knew. I shudder to think the US paperback edition may junk what is the single best book-cover design of the year, so by all means, buy a hardcover and read it.

1. The Travels of Daniel Ascher by Deborah Levy-Bertherat, translated by Adriana Hunter (Other Press) – Strange indeed that the best work-in-translation I read in 2015 was a YA novel, but there you have it – I calls ’em like I sees ’em. This story of a young woman uncovering mysteries in the life of her bestselling-author great uncle is smartly written and refreshingly folded and re-folded upon itself. Reading it, I fully understood why it was the talk of Paris for its season, with hand-held copies blossoming on the Metro like dandelions. It didn’t catch on to anything like that extent in the States, but c’est la guerre.