Hello and welcome back!
Today’s category is Best Translation. Since I’m not able to read all of these books in their original language, I’m unable to actually speak to how accurate the translation into English is. Instead, when I say “best translation” what I mean is the best work I read that was translated into English from some other language. In this category I’m particularly looking to something that speaks to me, maybe something that I learned that I wouldn’t have otherwise if I didn’t have access to translated works.
I haven’t yet crunched the final numbers but I think I read more translated works this year than I ever have before. I read books translated from Arabic, German, French, and Cantonese, among others. I read cozy Japanese fiction, a Russian tome, and a weird Dutch book about a woman who falls in love with a printer. (Also a weird Norwegian book about…I’m still not entirely sure).
I really appreciated the translated works I read but it’s hard to say that I loved many of them. In Horsefly I learned about a part of Canadian history I hadn’t known. In Palace Walk I got to be immersed in an Egyptian family in the early 20th century. In Perfection I followed digital travellers in Western Europe. With a lot of the translated works I read, I had to work hard to get through them. Sometimes this was the content (Gulag Archipelago), sometimes it just wasn’t a story I was super interested in (The Passengers on the Hankyu Line). I’m glad I read them all but it does make this category hard to choose from.
In the end, I narrowed it down to 3 titles that I feel like I can genuinely recommend.
The runners-up are:
A Guardian Angel Recalls – Willem Frederik Hermans
This was a weird, chunky book that was told from the perspective of a guardian angel, told over a few days as Holland is invaded by German. While this wasn’t a new part of history to me, the precise time and place were not one I’d read about much before and that angelic perspective certainly added an interesting dimension.
Heart Lamp – Banu Mushtaq
This short story collection earns it place for being both heartbreakingly sad and very funny in turns. I initially struggled with this translation because I lot of names and terms were left in the original Kannada language. But the more I read, the more I understood and by the end, I truly appreciated that the translator chose to treat her readers with such intelligence.
And the winner is…
Abigail – Magda Szabo
What clinched this decision for me was first that I genuinely enjoyed my experience of reading Abigail, translated from Hungarian, but secondly that I felt like reading this book gave me a new perspective on a familiar story. I’ve read World War Two books and I’ve read books set in boarding schools and I’ve probably read books that have combined the two. But reading something from the perspective of a young Austrian girl during the war really drew my attention to the fact that so many of our experiences around the world and throughout time, really are shared.
Karissa Reads Books 
Wait, what is the book in which a woman falls in love with a printer?? Did you review it? If you did, I read the review.I think the translated books I’ve read in recent years have all been from Argentina, where they have a pretty beefy horror movement going on. It makes me wonder what’s happening in that country that the fiction coming out of it is so brutal in places. None of what I’ve read is cliched, either. It’s all new ground.
It was called Hard Copy. I did review it. One of my favourite things about reading more translated works is noticing trends in certain languages and wondering what it might say about that culture or even how people express themselves in that language. I don’t know if I’ve read much specifically from Argentina but I know I’ve noticed some dark trends from Spanish translations and specifically in South America. How interesting!