The Best Books of 2020: Literature in Translation!
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2020 was an enormous bonanza of translated literature, more in one year than I’ve seen in any previous year; it gave a very positive international flavor to a year otherwise characterized exclusively by very negative international flavor. Translated literature is always an excellent chance to go exploring in the world of reading, and the opportunities in 2020 were nearly endless. These were the best of them:
10 The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala, translated by Anna Kushner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
This intricate story of a haunted preacher on an impossible quest to build the world’s most improbable cathedral is a beautifully daunting polyphony of voices, a terrifying prospect for any translator, and Anna Kushner handles it with complete assurance.
9 The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, translated by David Hinton (New Directions)
This great poet is legendary for being deceptively subtle, with worlds of meaning rippling just under the surface of often simple-seeming verses, and this has always made him extra-tricky for English-language translators. David Hinton in these pages does a superlative job.
8 The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini, translated by Richard Dixon (Metropolitan)
Richard Dixon here does a fantastic job rendering into English Massini’s gnarled and fiercely intelligent saga of the immigrant experience, giving perfect balance to the combined narrative of American Jewish life and American business life.
7 The Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated Michael Nyland (WW Norton)
This slim volume of famously impenetrable apothegms about warfare has always mostly daunted translators, since it’s both very simply written and very intentionally incomprehensible, but Michael Nyland launches into his task with clear-eyed energy, making an Art of War for the century.
6 Pigeons on the Grass by Wolfgang Koeppen, translated by Michael Hoffmann (New Directions)
This novel follows an unpredictable cast of characters through one day in 1948 Munich and takes in the breadth of an entire vanished world, a world that was itself in transit, being built on the still-fresh rubble of the past, and Michael Hoffmann captures it all perfectly.
5 Fifty-Two Stories by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf)
This celebrated translating duo can sometimes be hit-or-miss with their new productions, but this edition of Chekhov’s great stories makes those stories - even the most familiar of them - feel glittering and new.
4 And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu, translated by William Rodarmor (Other Press)
This sinuous, seedy tale of disaffected youth is marvelously smart and deadpan, and William Rodarmor captures perfectly its muscular disillusionment and its odd, off-kilter beauty. This book won the 2018 Prix Goncourt, and it’s wonderful to see it in English.
3 Miscellanies by Poliziano, translated by Andrew R. Dyck and Alan Cottrell (I Tatti Renaissance Library)
These piercing literary deconstructions of the great Renaissance scholar Angelo Poliziano have never been fully available in English before now, and these translators do a job that will need no subsequent attempts.
2 Serenade for Nadia by Zülfü Livaneli, translated by Brendan Freely (Other)
An actual historical incident - the sinking of a refugee ship during World War II - forms the nucleus of this incredibly effective novel here brought into English by Brendan Freely with a remarkable amount of grace and narrative flexibility.
1 Impostures by al-Hariri, translated by Michael Cooperson (NYU Press)
The author’s 12th-century Arabic masterpiece, the Maqamat, is a feast of stories, told in a bewildering variety of voice and registers, and in this, the best translated work of 2020, Michael Cooperson somehow uncannily manages to go all that rhetorical virtuosity one better. The result is simply astonishing, and almost embarrassingly entertaining.