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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe 100 Best Novels in Translation by Boyd Tonkin (view source)
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Consider, if you will, translated fiction. Some say it's impossible – that if a book was so good in one tongue it could never survive being put into another. Samuel Beckett must have laboured over ever syllable and ''Breath'', but he could translate his own works, and other equally complex pieces can cross borders. It's a market that has actually doubled in sales volume between 2000 and 2016 (thanks, ''Millennium Trilogy"''). Novels, in particular, in translation, are – as the introduction here so smartly puts it – "a privileged means of passing border posts, a sort of universal passport issued by that Utopian state, the Republic of Letters''. We here at the 'Bag regularly try and give equal credit to the translator, without whom we wouldn't be reading what we have in our hands. But all that said, do we really need one of those list books about the subject? I got given a book the other year detailing 1001 places to go to before I die, and I might even then have missed out a zero. It would take as long as a fortnight's holiday to wade through, and even though this is not as long as your typical Bolano housebrick, it's not a short thing. Should it take our time?
Well, I can't give a definitive answer. I can start by defining what we get, beyond that introduction – a hundred two-page essays of what my uneducated guess suggests are about a thousand words each, a single sentence every time about which translation is the one to go for and why, a list of further reading from within these pages as a suggestion of thematically linked exploration, and a few other highlights from each author's output. Such are only really needed to remind the forgetful that Goethe also wrote ''Faust'' – as it's not quite a novel, his entry here has to be something else. The essays themselves are so concise – ''a few words do the work that in other hands takes pages" as he says of Georges Simenon – that you fear too many crucial spoilers at times.
