The Best Books of 2021: Literature in Translation!

For the third consecutive year, there was a very pleasing vibrancy to the literature-in-translation market in the US, further belying the often-repeated characterization of the American reader as incurious to the point of xenophobia. There were translations of all kinds, including plenty of new voices in contemporary fiction from around the world as well as a particularly large number of translations of older, established classics re-rendered for the sensibilities of a new reading audience. These were the best of them all, in a list dominated by those translated classics:

10 Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito (translated by Curtis Bauer) (Other Press) - A boring, purposeless man sentenced to an odd kind of community service in this slim, memorable novel by Fabio Morábito: for a year, he must read books to in-care patients of all types. During the course of this project, as seasoned readers might expect, the written word - including one particular author our main character never expected to encounter - begins to change everybody in this captivating story.

9  Meditations: The Annotated Edition by Marcus Aurelius (translated & annotated by Robin Waterfield) - The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is among the most easily accessible of all ancient classical texts in translation, and even so, seasoned translator Robin Waterfield has made it hugely more welcoming in this edition, through his extensive notes and lively, informative commentary. 

8 The Plague by Albert Camus (translated by Laura Marris) (Knopf) - This new translation of Camus’ seminal (and of course alarmingly topical) masterpiece is refreshingly crisp and eloquent, surely as close to reading the original as any English-only reader will ever come. It’s of course fundamentally unfair to La peste that the age of COVID-19 has rediscovered it as an allegory of our own doleful times - the book is more than that - but any prompting for a new English version as good as this one is welcome.

7 The Duino Elegies - Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Alfred Corn) (WW Norton) - There can naturally be weaknesses in having one poet translate the work of another, poetry being such a quivering little snowflake of a genre. But there are obvious potential strengths as well: who, after all, has a better chance of understanding a poet than another poet? Fortunately for readers, all the strengths of such an arrangement are on display in this translation of Rilke’s great work by Alfred Corn, who manages to make The Duino Elegies read more like poetry than any previous English-language translation.

6 The Landmark Xenophon's Anabasis, edited by Shane Brennan and David Thomas (Pantheon) - As with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, so too with the March Up Country by Xenophon: despite being thousands of years old, the book itself is intrinsically interesting - in this case as a personality-driven adventure story that has enthralled generations of readers. The sterling “Landmark” series of classical authors continues with this heavily-annotated and gorgeously-illustrated edition, which brings Xenophon’s great book alive for a whole new audience of readers.

5 The Impudent Ones by Marguerite Duras (translated by Kelsey L. Haskett) (New Press) - This first-ever English-language translation of the debut novel by Marguerite Duras is done by noted Duras scholar Kelsey Hackett with a great deal of self-evident love and care, and it’s a fully-realized, splendid job: not only a finely-nuanced rendition that captures every last drop of whatever talent twenty-something Duras brought to the story but also a critical apparatus that does an excellent job of introducing this book and its world to new readers.

4 Moliere: The Complete Plays (translated by Ricard Wilbur) (Library of America) - This lovely two-volume box set collects all the Moliere translations that poet Richard Wilbur made of Moliere’s works, complete with essays by both Adam Gopnik and Wilbur himself, whose keen ear more often than not captures beautifully aspects of Moliere’s word-play that have often stymied other translators. Unlike most other English-language translations, Wilbur’s versions will convey to readers who don’t have French why this author is so universally venerated.

3 Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge (translated by Jeremy Tiang)(Melville House) - Praise is due to Melville house for bringing this strange and strangely moving novel to an English-reading audience - and praise is due to translator Jeremy Tiang for making such a smooth and yet jarring reading experience out of what had to be an extremely recondite Chinese text. The plot-lines in this novel run The Island of Doctor Moreau through the hugely ambitious spectrum of so much contemporary Chinese literature - and yet, thanks to Tiang’s work here, I never felt lost or baffled, except when Yan Ge wanted me to.

2 Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by DM Low) (New DIrections) - It can’t have been any easy feat, to capture the infamous cudgel-bluntness of this famously unsparing author in a new English-language translation without making this amazing novella of fascism and its long-term traumas feel like all the things Ginzburg never is: facile, rudely cynical, and above all incomplete. Low succeeds completely in illuminating a writer who can seem notoriously opaque.

1 The Gospels (translated by Sarah Ruden) (Modern Library) - We conclude this year’s list with the works that need the least introductions: the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, here translated into bright, lively English by the great Sarah Ruden for the Modern Library. The sentiments - and many of the individual passages - from these Gospels are about as well-known to an English-speaking audience as anything ever written, which only underscores how impressive this, the best translation of the year, actually is: everything here feels freshly seen and marvelously new.