The Best Books of 2022: Literature in Translation

The Best Books of 2022: Literature in Translation!

As I tend to mention at this point, the health of a year’s lists of translated literature tends to be an interesting indicator of the health of the publication year just in general. The idea that the American reading public is timidly monocultural is persistent, but every year the lists of translated works gives me a bit more hope. This year saw quite a few outstanding titles, including some of my favorite reading experiences of the entire year. These were the best of them:

10 The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez (translated by Georgia de Chamberet)(Verso) – Our list this year begins as it will end, with an extremely talented author deeply researching a full-fledged monster from history and infusing them with an understandability that comes right up to the edge of sympathy without ever fully crossing over. This is a tricky bit of alchemy (and woefully understandable, given our deplorable historical moment), and Guez manages it perfectly. And as an added bonus, the author also adds a layer of almost thriller-esque narrative tension as virtually everybody involved, including Mengele and especially including the reader, becomes increasingly aware on some level that his capture is inevitable. 

9 The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories by Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Michael Favala Goldman) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – The more I’ve reflected on this author’s universally-celebrated Copenhagen Trilogy, the less I’ve liked it. So this new collection of Ditlevsen’s stories in English, written half a century ago and never before translated, was both a pleasure and a relief: I loved it, although that made me wonder about the reason. Was it the change of translators, even though Tina Nunnally is one of the best translators working today? Or was it that I like this author better when she’s working in a shorter and less self-indulgent form? Whichever, these stories kept me gripped throughout

8 Red and the Black by Stendhal, translated by Raymond MacKenzie (University of Minnesota Press) – Although the principal joy of translated literature is always exploration, there’s also the happiness of encountering old friends in new clothes. I’ve loved and re-read Stendhal’s brilliant, absorbing story of Julien Sorel’s damned grappling with society for the whole of my reading life, and I was delighted with this new translation, which captures so well the curious buzzing speed of Stendhal’s narrative. And this edition goes further, providing readers with all the critical underpinnings they might need in order to understand the book’s nuances – all without ever clogging up its incredibly powerful momentum.

7 Swanfolk by Kristin Omarsdottir (translated by Vala Thorodds) (Harpervia) – Another benefit of reading translated literature is the access it gives even an adventurous reader to the kinds of strange flights of fancy that are increasingly absent from American writing, for one glaringly obvious reason (if you’re writing about what you did last Monday, and I can factually verify that you’re being 100% accurate, and what you did last Monday was boring, the result is pre-ordained). This odd, elegant novel by Kristin Omarsdottir is a very good example, the story of a conflicted spy who encounters a weird species of half-human half-swan bird-people who offer her both commentary on the mess of her current life and a possible escape from it. The author just goes about the surreal business of telling her story, and it’s fascinating and weirdly assured.

6 Trinity, Trinity, Trinity by Erika Kobayashi (translated by Brian Bergstrom)(Astra House) – Cinema-infused surreality comes back with double force in this strange, beautiful novel from Erika Kobayashi (courtesy of translator Brian Bergstrom), which braids a vast number of narrative threads into a whole that manages to be both obscure and tremendously moving. At the heart of the novel, weirdly anchoring all of its threads and digressions, is the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster of 2011, but another compelling element is “Trinity,” a strange disease spreading through the country, speaking in tones of quiet insanity directly into the minds of the elderly. I was never quite sure what was going on in Kobayashi’s book, but I was always certain of some great and coherent design just out of reach.

5 Cheri and the Last of Cheri by Colette (translated by Rachel Careau) (WW Norton) – Translator Rachel Careau here perfectly captures the breathy desperation of Colette’s devastating two-part love story of a high-profile courtesan and the oddly alluring younger man who makes her feel emotions she’d long since considered dead inside her – and then a whole new slate of emotions when the pitiless passage of time is added in the second half. In any translation of these two works, it’s “The Last of Cheri” that will test the skills of the translator, and Careau succeeds amazingly. Colette doesn’t lack for translators, but this volume from WW Norton is outstanding.

4 Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell)(Viking) – My winning streak with this author continues, thankfully, with this story of, among other things, a poetry-drunk man named Vicente and his father Gonzalo, furtive and filled with conflicting melancholies. Zambra has always crafted a kind of prose that’s completely distinctive even in English-language translation, full of strange, looping trains of thought and turns of phrase that refract back on each other even when separated by a hundred pages; it must be a daunting thing to translate, and Megan McDowell does a quietly astounding job – one of the many examples on this list of translators really doing their craft proud. 

3 Mr President by Miguel Angel Asturias (translated by David Unger) (Penguin Classics) – It’s always a delight to see a Penguin Classic turn up on the Literature in Translation list, this time David Unger’s new rendition of one of Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan author Miguel Angel Asturias’ most powerful novels. Asturias is at his most bitingly brilliant in this book (and Hombres de maiz, which we can only hope comes out from Penguin in due time), which hasn’t been translated into English in decades and here takes its place in the Penguin Classics line, with a foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa. “Mr. President” makes uncomfortably pointed reading in the aforementioned deplorable historical moment, but then, it was designed to do just that.

2 The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (translated Jennifer Croft) (Riverhead Books) – One of the most memorable fiction reading experiences I had in 2022 was a work in translation, this big, deceptively challenging novel that’s about, on one level, an 18th-century messiah figure as he’s seen through the eyes of all the people whose lives he disrupts. I initially read the book as a very rich but straightforward historical novel about societies and religions in two sprawling extinct polyglot empires. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized was boiling and bubbling beneath that surface, so that re-reading it was a revelation – and my admiration for Jennifer Croft’s ability to translate all of this bewildering profusion so smoothly only increased every time I revisited the book.

1 M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati (translated by Anne Milano Appel) (Harper) – This fat historical novel about what we can only call the formative years of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was the best work of literature in translation that I read in 2022, and it was also the best fiction-reading experience I had in 2022. That combination – where the novel I loved most wasn’t written in English and therefore won’t be found on my Best Fiction list – is very rare in my reading experience, but from very early on in the year there was little doubt in my mind that it would be true. Like Olivier Guez with Josef Mengele, Antonio Scurati amasses a huge amount of research in order to humanize Mussolini completely – the scathing intelligence, the brutality, the sentimental womanizing, the weird moral fervor – without ever trying to elicit sympathy. The result is a gripping and often sordid reading experience but also a toweringly magnificent one.