Best Translated Book (into English) You Read 2007

What is the best book/s you read in 2007 which wasn't originally written in English and why? What language was it originally written in?

Looking over my list, I think Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson is my favorite. It reads very well and it has a great sense of place. It was originally written in Norwegian.

Runners up would be Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany, and Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El-Saadawi - all Egyptian novelists, all translated into English from the Arabic.

I enjoyed Suite Francaise, translated from French. The story behind the book (i.e. Nemirovsky's life) was interesting and moving.

I read a lot of Russian literature this year, but I actually think Portuguese author Jose Saramago impressed me the most with his novel Blindness. I found his writing style completely engrossing, but even more than that, the story told is both hideous and beautiful - an extremely honest and painful commentary on the human condition, that was well worth some (extremely) uncomfortable moments.

edited to grumble about touchstones still not working...

I had picked this book from the book shelf of my used book store because I liked its title - Troll: A Love Story. It is an English translation of a novel by the Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo. The book was so much fun to read. Basically, it's about what happened after a gay man adopted a wild troll cub.

I know it sounds weird, but this book was among my favorites for this past year. Read what others thought of my book after I passed it along.

I agree with avaland, Out Stealing Horses was stellar. Astrid and Veronika, originally in Swedish, was also very well done, it had a nice flow to it.

I have to disagree re: The Yacoubian Building though, I thought it was pretty awkward language.

ETA: oops, Astrid and Veronika was written in English. So----never mind!

Fair Play by Tove Jansson.

I too loved Out Stealing Horses -- I thought it was so spare and evocative, just like the landscape.

I also loved Wizard of the Crow, translated by the author, Ngugi wa Thiong'o for its brilliant satire.

And, although this was a reread, War and Peace.

My favorite books this year were:

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami translated from Japanese

Three Bags Full : a sheep detective story by Leonie Swann, translated from German

And I did like The Yacoubian Building.

At Night Under the Stone Bridge by Leo perutz
Complete poems by Zbigniew Herbert
Nobodaddy's Children by Arno Schmidt (three novellas, a trilogy)
Selected Poems by Yehudah Amichai
Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis
The translations in Reading Rilke by William H. Gass
The new translation of Night by Elie Weisel

This topic is excluding me with this restriction to translations to English. :( Most of the books I read this year were in their original language (French, Spanish and English) but I did read a few books from Japan although, now that I look over my list, only one was translated to English (the others I read in French).

So here is that lone novel. Luckily it was extremely engrossing and wonderfully written/translated. Highly recommended on my part.
Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse

ETA: John Bester was the translator.

I don't have a problem hearing about books translated into French. Were these books that have not been translated into English?

So many good books read in translation this year: Thomas Mann, Heinrich Boll, Naguib Mahfouz, Halldor Laxness, Ismail Kadare, and Ivo Andric, just for novels, among others, to say nothing of poetry translations.

I can't say what the best book is, there are so many great ones. Probably the most memorable three for me among that crowd will be Mann's Doctor Faustus, Laxness' Under the Glacier (yes, I read Independent People as well - it is truly great, but there is something that really struck a chord in Glacier), and Kadare's Chronicle in Stone. Ask me another day, I'll give different answers.

There is something truly wonderful about the H.T. Lowe-Porter translations of Mann that really stands out. I also think Magnus Magnusson does a great job with Laxness.

vpfluke -

Most of the books I read are also translated in English but I just prefer to read in French in general. The books that are available in English that I just loved from different countries are...

France:
Romain Gary's Roots of Heaven
(although this one is difficult to find in English b/c it only had one edition come out a long time ago and has since not been republished)

ETA: vpfluke tells me there were actually 2 editions.

Peru:
Mario Vargas Llosa's Captain Pantoja and the Secret Service

Czech Republic:
Milan Kundera's Farewell Waltz

Although, I can't say anything about the English translations. But these three are just really wonderful novels. :)

I looked up The Roots of heaven in Woldcat and found three entries. It was published in the U.S. in 1958 by Simon & Shuster, then in 1964 by Time-Life Books. There was also a film version (20th Century Fox) owned by only one library in Wisconsin from 1958. I only looked at the English language Worldcat, and maybe I should have peaked at the French side, to see if the movie is actually a French film, normally cataloged under the French title, "Les Racines du ciel."

I think if I had to pick a favorite book this year it would be The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. I have to say though that there are a number of books and authors mentioned about that I think are great. Herbert's Complete poems and Nobodaddy's children for instance and then Halldor Laxness--and I'd also recommend his Iceland's bell and World Light both which are maybe even better than Independent people. For my money the best Nobel literature prize ever.

Iriley- you beat me to it. My vote is Savage Detectives and in second place is The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez.

Bert--the tango singer by Eloy Martinez is excellent too and I would recommend that one as well.

Same Sea As Every Summer by Esther Tusquets, was one of the most beautifully translated books I've ever read. Originally in Spanish, it almost reads as a poem.

#13 A_musing: Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann is one of the most marvellous books I have ever read.

This year my favourite translated book was The Emigrants byW.G. Sebald for its beautifil writing.
Others I enjoyed: The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, Out Stealing Horses, and The Yacoubian Building.

I just realized that most of the books I read this year (so far) were written in English. However, of those I read in English translation, two stand out, and they are Embers by Sandor Marai and Oriental Tales by Marguerite Yourcenar.

Two were at the top: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Book 1 of Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, with honorable mentions going to The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad and Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho.

There's still another week in the year but already I have to revise my initial entry to add Women of Algiers in their Apartment by Assia Djebar. Translated from the French.

I'll hedge--by choosing one fiction and one non-fiction.

Fiction
The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany

Non-Fiction
The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

And top TBR translations for me in 2008 will be, per the LT pundits, Out Stealing Horses and the new translation and my first reading of War and Peace.

I have recently read and enjoyed two short French novels. They are The Death of Napoleon and Ravel. Honorable mention to the translators, Patricia Clancy and the author, of the former, and Linda Coverdale of the latter.

#25
I read some time ago Jean Echenoz's Piano, and will try to get his Chopin's Move next. Thank's for reminding me of Echenoz.

Another fan of Echenoz here--Particularly I'm gone, Big Blondes, Double Jeopardy--interesting and fun to read crime fiction--reminds me in tone of Raymond Queneau. Ravel is a very short work but very enjoyable as well.

I've tried a couple of times to read The Words by Sartre and abandoned it. Looking through my books in translation, I'm going to give it another go.

I really enjoyed John Rutherford's translation of Don Quixote this year, and I really liked The Railway by Hamid Ismailov (translated by Robert Chandler) as well. I appreciated the fact that both had good introductions by the translators, talking about how they'd gone about translating the work.

As an aside, are we going to start getting pages for translators etc, now that they have an official entry in the database? Or if they have an author page, whether the books they've translated will show up?

(Touchstones on holiday)

>4 philosojerk:, I have to agree that the English translation of Blindness was pretty amazing - the language was so effective in evoking the sensation of being sightless and of living in a word in which other people were essentially faceless. Not being a reader of Portugese, I cannot obviously compare it to the original, but I thought it was a nice translation.

I also enjoyed translations of Rashid al-Daif's Passage to Dusk and Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy. al-Daif's book was so surreal and creative and involved so much language-play that I am resolved to better my Arabic so that I can read the original one day.

I have had a good reading year, but Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game was probably the one that really turned my world upside-down for a while.

#22, We is one of my top-ten all-time favourite books.
#31, it has been yonks (over 40 years!) since I read that book. Must give it a read again soon.

>31 GlebtheDancer: If I had to pick one and only one book to name as my favorite as all time, The Glass Bead Game would be the one. Fantabulous :D

The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk in Turkish translated into English by Maureen Freely. I read somewhere that this is a new English translation. With Pamuk's writing style, it couldn't have been an easy job, but as one goes along one forgets very quickly that this was not even written in english.

The works of Jose Saramago are always superbly translated into English (he uses different translators). I'm looking forward to reading them in the the original language though, now that I have a bit more grasp of portuguese.

Perhaps my favorite translation from last year has to be Life and fate by Vasily Grossman, a 20th century War and Peace

Life and Fate is one of my all-time favorites, a brilliant book with the scope of W&P but much much darker, as befits the time and place (WWII, Soviet Union & Germany).

I didn't read much fiction translated into English in 2007, but my translated poetry highlight for the year was Selected Poems by Paul Celan, originally published in German.

The Terrors of Ice and Darkness was a really great read for me this year.

I must read Life and Fate, as it is on my TBRs.

and Austerlitz by the inimitable Sebald deserves a high recommendation.

#37 Your title Touchstone goes to poetry of Rita Dove. Selected poems Celan gives a suitable title Touchstone.

I am always impressed when poetry can be translated well.

I fell in love with Haruki Murakami this past year. My favorite so far is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I also really enjoyed Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart.

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesas

#39: sorry about that - thanks for the fix.

Regards
Tim

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino