Books In Foreign
Humiliated and embarrassed by Ruediger Wischenbart’s distress at the Anglophone bias of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Books of All Time Ever In The History of the World And All The Ones Wot I Have Read, I humbly present a list (dredged from memory) of some of the fiction, plays, verse and and romance books I have read in translation, i.e. where English was not the original language. It is embarrassing in its brevity, but it does demonstrate what a wonderful, massive, flexible language English is, that it can keep we monoglot millions so occupied and inward-looking.
Key: Original language (Latin = Italian) / Title / Author / Marks out of five, as I felt when I first read the book:
1. CH / Selected Stories / Robert Walser / **
2. CYM / One Moonlit Night / Caradog Prichard / ****
3. CZ / Tales from Two Pockets / Karel Capek / *
4. CZ / The Good Soldier Svejk / Jaroslav Hasek / ***
5. DE / Death in Venice / Thomas Mann / ***
6. DE / Diaries / Thomas Mann / **
7. DE / Emil and the Detectives / Erich Kastner / ***
8. DE / How German Is It / Walter Abish / **
9. DE / Italian Journey / Goethe / **
10. DE / La Ronde / Arthur Schnitzler / **
11. DE / Perfume / Patrick Süsskind / ****
12. DE / Steppenwolf / Herman Hesse / ***
13. DE / The Castle / Franz Kafka / ***
14. DE / The Flying Classroom / Erich Kastner / **
15. DE / The Glass Bead Game / Herman Hesse / *
16. DE / The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke / Rainer Maria Rilke / **
17. DE / The Never-Ending Story / Michael Ende / ****
18. DE / The Tin Drum / Günther Grass / ***
19. DE / The Trial / Franz Kafka / ***
20. DK / Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow / Peter Hoeg / *
21. EG / Palace of Desire / Naguib Mahfouz / ****
22. EG / Palace Walk / Naguib Mahfouz / ****
23. ES / Don Quixote / Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra / ****
24. ES / Love in the Time of Cholera / Gabriel Garcia Marquez / ***
25. ES / One Hundred Years of Solitude / Gabriel Garcia Marquez / ***
26. ES / The City of the Beasts / Isabel Allende / *
27. FR / 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea / Jules Verne / ***
28. FR / A Certain Smile / Françoise Sagan / **
29. FR / Around The World in Eighty Days / Jules Verne / ***
30. FR / Asterix passim / ****
31. FR / Bonjour Tristesse / François Sagan / **
32. FR / Claudine à Paris / Colette / ***
33. FR / Delirius / Philippe Druillet / *
34. FR / From the Earth to the Moon / Jules Verne / ***
35. FR / Gargantua & Pantagruel / Rabelais / ****
36. FR / Journey to the Centre of the Earth / Jules Verne / **
37. FR / Le Grand Meaulnes / Alain-Fournier / ****
38. FR / Lucky Luke passim / **
39. FR / Madame Bovary / Gustave Flaubert / **
40. FR / Montaillou / Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie / **
41. FR / Papillon / Henri Charriere / ***
42. FR / Remembrance of Things Past / Marcel Proust / ****
43. FR / Story of O / Pauline Réage / *
44. FR / The Knot of Vipers / François Mauriac / **
45. FR / The Little Prince / Antoine De Saint-Exupery / ****
46. FR / Three Tales / Gustave Flaubert / **
47. GR / Republic / Plato / ***
48. GR / Satirical Sketches / Lucian / **
49. GR / The Iliad / Homer / ***
50. GR / The Odyssey / Homer / ***
51. IR / Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam / ****
52. IT / 100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed / Melissa P / *
53. IT / Accidental Death of an Anarchist / Dario Fo
54. IT / Foucault’s Pendulum / Umberto Eco / *
55. IT / If on a winter’s night a traveller / Italo Calvino / ***
56. IT / Jerusalem Delivered / Tasso / **
57. IT / The Aeneid / Virgil / **
58. IT / The Divine Comedy / Dante Alighieri / ***
59. IT / The Garden of the Finzi-Continis / Giorgio Bassani / ****
60. IT / The Georgics / Virgil / *
61. IT / The Leopard / Giuseppe di Lampedusa / ****
62. IT / The Name of the Rose / Umberto Eco / ****
63. IT / The Woman of Rome / Alberto Moravia / ***
64. IT / Thyestes / Seneca / **
65. NO / Four Plays / Hendrik Ibsen / **
66. NO / Hunger / Knut Hamsen / ***
67. NO / Sophie’s World / Jostein Gaarder / *
68. RU / Blind Beauty / Boris Pasternak / *
69. RU / Lolita / Boris Pasternak / ****
70. RU / Nine Stories / Leo Tolstoy / **
71. RU / One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich / Alexander Solzhenitsyn / *
72. RU / The First Circle / Alexander Solzhenitsyn / *
73. RU / The Master & Margarita / Mikhail Bulgakov / ****
74. RU / The White Guard / Mikhail Bulgakov / ***
75. TR / Felidae / Akif Pirincci / *
I don’t do five stars. I’ve stopped at 75 because I’m dredging the bottom of the barrel. I’ve read more, but I’ve obviously forgotten them and you probably won’t have heard of them.
Sorry, Ruediger!
March 6th, 2009 at 20:56
How humbling, and yet how funny! Thank you – and I start thinking of my own translation list. And there will be those overlaps, starting with Asterix and, for me in German, Mickey! Many thanks for your sense of pride & humour!
March 16th, 2009 at 09:15
No. 69 (suspiscious number in my books anyway) must be a typo. I think you’ll find what’s-his-name is the author of Lolita.
Some tips re German: (but perhaps not available in translation) Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich and Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz. oh, and why not Buddenbrooks.
I don’t see any Dutch titles, and I would say don’t bother for as far as I know none of the good ones have been translated – oh, perhaps Bordewijk’s Karakter (Character) might be. Willem Elsschot is simply the best (but he’s Flemish), and then we have F.B. Hotz who died just a few years ago. Short stories. I bet 99 in a hundred Dutch haven’t heard of him (surely 499 out of 500, or 999 out of one thousand), so why should anyone.
March 16th, 2009 at 10:43
Oh no, yet more embarrassment. Yes, Lolita was written by Vladimir Nabokov, not Boris Pasternak (what was I thinking?) and I now find that he actually wrote it in English first, then translated it into Russian.
Why not Buddenbooks indeed. I will give it a go. And I’ll look out Green Henry and Anton Reiser too.
I’ll be the best read autodidact in Harlech.
August 15th, 2009 at 19:03
“. . . it is with a great relief and pleasure that we are hereby dutifully reporting that Book Two and Book(s) Three&Four of our new translation of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War are available for sale as paperbacks at http://zenny.com.
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More information on the Svejk phenomenon at http://SvejkCentral.com
Also, Svejk is on FaceBook now: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Good-Soldier-Svejk/133349009873?ref=nf