The Best Books of 2023: Literature in Translation!

In many ways, translated literature from the mainstream presses is as good an indicator of the health of a publishing world as is the breadth of annual reprints. Translated literature not only feeds the tastes of the more adventurous members of the reading public but expands and informs them — these books can add some very welcome spice to American publishing lists that are otherwise choked with navel-gazing auto fiction and shallow Twitter posturing masquerading as social commentary. This year once again showed wonderful life under this heading, with a whole bookcase of interesting titles. These were the best of them:

10 The Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (translated by Kurt Beals) (WW Norton)

Hermann Hesse's cult classic story of aimless, oddly compelling Harry Haller has had a couple of English-language translations, but none has been as energetic or nuanced as this by Kurt Beals, which captures the, for want of a better word, trippiness of the original.

9 Daodejing by Laozi (translated by Brook Ziporyn) (Liveright)

It might seem like the safest gig in the world to take on the task of translating a book that's not only famous but honored for being incomprehensible, but in producing this lively new edition of Lao Tzu's weirdly cryptic classic, translator Brook Ziporyn has done an exceptional job filling all this nonsense with vivid energy.

8 Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree (translated by Daisy Rockwell) (HarperVia)

Daisy Rockwell takes on the daunting task of translating Shree's epic winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, and she produces a tremendously involving English-language version of this vast and thrillingly complex generational saga.

7 Three Treatises: The Annotated Luther by Martin Luther, edited by Timothy Wengert, Erik Herrmann, James Estes, and Paul Robinson (Fortress Press)

This volume is shaved off from the massive Annotated Luther series from Fortress Press the three treatises Martin Luther wrote in 1520, three years after his notorious ninety-five theses, and it's not only very readable but generously supplied with annotations.

6 Theoderic the Great: King of the Goths, Ruler of the Romans by Hans-Ulrich Weimer (translated by John Noel Dillon) (Yale University Press)

This big, omnivorously curious biography of the 5th-century Gothic leader, so assuredly comprehensive, is conveyed in smooth, stately prose by John Noel Dillon into both one of the year's best translations and its best biographies to appear in English.

5 The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought by Wang Hui (translated by Michael Gibbs Hill) (Harvard University Press)

The mind boggles at the sheer enormity facing Michael Gibbs Hill in translating this massive and fiercely complex contemporary classic into English without doubling or even tripling the length of the resulting manuscript. This is the long story of modern Chinese intellectual and philosophical scholarship, with a cast of thousands and an array of conceptual categories that puts it on par with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy – and yet somehow Hill makes it all inviting reading.

4 The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (translated by Michael Katz) (Liveright)

Michael Katz follows up his wonderful translation of Crime and Punishment by tackling an even more complex Dostoevsky novel, and he once again succeeds as no previous English-language translation has ever done at capturing the whole range of the author's leaden obsessions and quicksilver mood-shifts.

3 Togani by Ji-Young Gong (translated by Bruce & Ju Chan Fulton)(University of Hawaii Press)

At last Gong Ji-young's wildly popular angrily panoramic novel has been translated with fantastic fluidity by Bruce and Ju Chan Fulton, so that an entire Western readership can experience the big, bursting novel that's been the talk of Korean readers since 2009.

2 Oblivion and Other Stories by Gopinath Mohanty (translated by Sudeshna Mohanty & Sudhansu Mohanty) (Ebury Press)

This anthology, translated from Oriya into English for the first time, contains stories spanning the whole length of Gopinath Mohanty's career of chronicling the lives of ordinary or despised marginal people in 20th-century India with the kind of edge and insight that should solidify this author's status in the English-reading world.

1 No One Prayed Over Their Graves by Khaled Khalifa (translated by Leri Price) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The opening premise of this harrowing novel, now translated into English by Leri Price and the year's best work of literature in translation, is starkly simple: two friends return to their village near Aleppo and find it entirely washed away by a flood. Khalifa evolves this into an incredible story, and Price translates it beautifully.