Subject: What are we missing?
From: PEN America
To: PEN members

What great books have never been translated into English?

Dan Bellm: Castigo divino ("Divine Punishment")--by far the best novel by Sergio Ramírez, former vice-president of Nicaragua, and one of my favorite novels, period. Set in the Nicaraguan city of León in the 1930s, and based on a true story, it concerns the case of Oliverio Castaneda, a young charmer and social climber accused of killing neighbors, patrons, and lovers by poisoning. The convoluted affair (still used as a case study in Central American law schools) was never solved, and Ramírez himself cagily leaves it open-ended. Hilarious, riveting, beautifully constructed and written.

John Oliver Simon: Sergio Ramírez, Castigo divino, Nicaragua, 1988. A companion to the author's later Margarita, Est Linda la Mar, to be published in English by Curbstone Press next year, Castigo divino is a darkly comic detective novel set in León in 1932. A stranger comes to town with all the latest fox-trot records and is welcomed into the hearts and beds of the mother and two daughters of the most respectable family in town. Soon the young wife and the paterfamilias drop dead, apparently poisoned. Justice has nothing to do with power, as the young investigative judge sent from the capital soon finds out. A ripping good read, set in the author's hometown ten years before his birth.

Tim Crouse: Two great peaks, one of fiction, the other of poetry, are still invisible to the English-speaking world, but it seems to me that once translations scatter the mist, the literary landscape will never look the same. (1) The novels of Hans Henny Jahnn (German, 1894-1959). So far as I know, only the first volume of his great "Fluss Ohne Ufer" trilogy has found its way into English: Das Holzschiff ("The Ship," trans. Catherine Hutter, Scribners, 1961). That leaves the other two volumes still to go, plus Perrudja, Ugrino und Ingrabanien, and 13 Nicht Geheren Geschichten (Thirteen Unreassuring Stories)--all treasures. I know them from the French versions (see www.jose-corti.fr/auteursetrangers/Jahnn.html). (2) The poems of David Rosenmann-Taub (Chilean, b. 1927). Cortejo y Epinicio (Cortege and Epinicion), Los despojos del sol (The Spoils of the Sun), and El cielo en la fuente (The Sky in the Fountain) are among the most original, profound, and wrenching books of poetry I've read.

Gwyneth Cravens: My vote goes to the works of David Rosenmann-Taub, recently named by El Mercurio, the leading newspaper of Chile, "the most important and profound living poet of the entire Spanish language." El cielo en la fuente is my favorite of his books; it changed the way I perceive the world. His voice is unique, fresh, timeless, and powerful. Of his writing one critic aptly says: "You feel that you are in the middle of a jungle, in the good company of invisible voices--modern, classical, archaic and revolutionary--always in lush foliage and deep terrain." According to www.davidrosenmann-taub.com, he left Chile "in the early 1980s, during the political repression there, and has since lived mostly in the United States, dedicating himself to his artistic endeavors. Working out of the spotlight of public life, he has become a mythical figure in the world of Latin American letters." I'd also like to see a better translation of João Guimarães Rosa's extraordinary novel of the backlands of Brazil, Grande Sertão: Veredas (there's a long out-of-print English version titled, wrongly, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands).

Alice Kaplan: Louis Guilloux's novella, Ok, Joe (1976), narrated by a young French interpreter for an American military tribunal in occupied Brittany in 1944. I'm struck by the way Guilloux gets across the flavor of casual American English with a few perfectly placed phrases, and I admire his clear-eyed view of the American liberators--friendly and charming, with undertones of calculated indifference and racist cruelty toward the black GIs on trial. The perceptions of a narrator who is also a translator are brilliant. I'd like to see how this story would read if English were the main language and not the exotic one.

Ariel Dorfman: Try as I may, I have been unable to get anyone to translate into English and publish any of the works of the great contemporary Mexican novelist Hector Aguilar Camin. Aguilar Camin has many major books, but his two best-known novels are Morir en el Golfo and La guerra de Galio. Without hesitation, I would call either of these a classic of Latinamerican fiction. La guerra de Galio centers on the battle over a dissident newspaper in Mexico City and shows how an idealistic generation self- destroys under the manipulation of the PRI government--it is also one of the most amazing meditations on the themes of violence and civilization in the last 20 years. Morir en el Golfo is a mystery that deals with the corrupt politics surrounding oil and trade unions. These books are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of Mexico, but also who simply wants to be thrilled by extraordinary narrative power.

Geoffrey O'Brien: (1) The Hikayat Hang Tuah, a 17th-century Malay picaresque novel. (2) La Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, a 13th-century Occitan chanson de geste on the Albigensian crusade (by a pro-Catholic poet). (3) On a similar note: Agrippa d'Aubigne's Les Tragiques, a long polemical/historical/theological poem on the Wars of Religion in France from the Huguenot perspective. (4) On another note: the putatively amazing (I haven't yet ventured into them) early 20th-century fantasy novels of Gustave Le Rouge, such as The Mysterious Doctor Cornelius, The Prisoner of the Planet Mars, and The War of the Vampires.

Harry Mathews: As far as I know, Tinyanov's novel entitled (I translate) The Death of the Vizhir Muktar has never been translated; if this is the case I would strongly recommend it for your list.

Lily Tuck: La Vie de Marianne by Marivaux has never been translated. It is the first epistolary novel.

Josh Cohen: In 1764, Rousseau wrote Lettres écrites de la montagne, in response to the condemnation of his Emile and Social Contract in Geneva. It is a substantial book, filled with interesting material about censorship, politics, toleration, and religion. So far as I know the only English translation now available was done in 1767: it is contained in a Rousseau collection published by Burt Franklin. The translation is as good as useless . . . so while it is not literally true that it has "never" been translated, it is probably the most important book by a major political theorist with a nearly useless translation (meaning: if you can't read French well enough to check the translation, then you can't rely on the translation).

Jesse Kornbluth: MOST of Alberto Moravia, as far as I can tell. I read a few of his novels when I was 14, and learned a great deal about style and sex. Now even those books are out of print . . .

Michael Kandel: A great book that has never been translated into English (there is a German translation, and a Russian one) is Summa technologiae by Stanislaw Lem, a Polish essay (quite a large volume) written in the late 1960s that reflects, with wit and subtlety, on some moral-ethical and philosophical consequences of future technology. In this work Lem was prescient: for one example, predicting virtual reality technology 30 years before it came about. His Summa makes one realize how superficial most futurologists are.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: (1) Satantango, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Hungarian novel, published in 1985, is the source of Bela Tarr's 415-minute black and white masterpiece of the same title, adapted with the author and released about a decade later--perhaps the greatest Hungarian film I've seen. We already have a subsequent novel by the same author in English, The Melancholy of Resistance, pointing to a stylistic similarity between Krasznahorkai and Thomas Bernhard, but something tells me that Satantango is even better: a ferocious piece of sarcasm, traversing the same day from various viewpoints like a Faulkner novel while recounting the last bitter gasps of a failed farm collective and everything its members do to betray one another. (2) Carl Th. Dreyer ne Nilsson, by Maurice Drouzy, published in both Danish and French, is the only full biography of the man I would call the greatest narrative filmmaker. It's as obsessive in its own way as a Dreyer film, and throws up so much fresh information as well as speculation about the man that it's an essential work for anyone who wants to understand Dreyer's films better.

Pablo Medina: El Monte by the Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera is one of the great works of literature ever produced in the Caribbean. A compilation of Afrocuban lore and practice, it is both a serious book of ethnography and an eminently readable literary text. To my knowledge it has never been translated into English. Lydia Cabrera died in penury in Miami.

Roger Greenwald: Det har ventet på deg (literally, It's Been Waiting for You), 1988, a short novel by the Norwegian Nils Johan Rud, written when the author was in his eighties. A widower returns to his home village to decide what to do with the family farm. There he encounters the woman he loved as a young man but could not marry because of her father's opposition--and the father is still alive! A story of universal appeal, economically told and beautifully written.

Matthew Stadler: Titantjes and De Uitvreter, by Nescio. These two long stories by the 20th-century Dutch writer detail the minor victories and defeats that make Dutch middle-class life so bleak and comical. The details are all tiny, exquisitely understated and dry, much like Emanuel Bove's My Friends, with the same silent undercurrent of hope.

Joan Schenkar: Most of the works of Francoise Mallet-Joris, who holds Colette's chair on the Academie Goncourt in Paris. She has written novels, biographies, memoirs, and is a highly respected writer in France.

Joanna Bankier: I have a book in mind which could be as interesting for a non-Swedish audience as the Gunnar Myrdal book in the '50s. Samhället som teater, estetik och politik i Tredje Riket by Ingemar Karlsson and Arne Ruth (in English, The Staged Society: Aesthetics & Politics in the Third Reich). Arne Ruth: one of Sweden's true intellectuals, head of the PEN Club Sweden, for many years Editor in Chief of the Cultural Section of Sweden's major newspaper. Ingemar Karlsson, writer, editor, for many years second in command, Institute for Future Studies. The book was published in the mid-'80s and has been reissued regularly since then.

Suzanne J. Levine: Some of Juan Carlos Onetti's novels have been translated but others remain to be done.

Robert Bononno: Many of Balzac's works either have not been translated into English at all or need to be retranslated.

Grace Schulman: Hebrew and Arabic poets writing primarily in the Renaissance. Also, some works that have been translated but that require new translations, such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer (from Old English), Sor Juana (Spanish).

Joan Mellen: Mario Vargas Llosa's biography of Gabriel García Márquez has never been translated into English. . . . it's a work of literature.

Rika Lesser: You ask about great books that have never been translated into English. As a poet and a translator (primarily) of poetry, I can only respond that we must talk about oeuvres, about bodies of work. If the poet is truly of "great" stature, readers are best advised to read their Complete Poems. Serious translators of poetry--whether or not time and life allow them to translate entire oeuvres--should be translating out of a deep center of familiarity with each poet's oeuvre. . . . Nowadays I translate from Swedish and have three candidates whose Complete Poems I believe should or eventually will be in English: (1) Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795), the Swedish poet and musician known chiefly for selections (that must be singable) from Fredman's Epistles (1790) and Fredman's Songs (1791); (2) Gunnar Ekelöf (1907-1968), regarded as the greatest Swedish lyric poet of the 20th century; and (3) Göran Sonnevi (b. 1939), regarded as one of Sweden's great living poets, whose increasingly meditative work can be seen as a single long poem that continues from book to book (14 to date). So far a small selection translated by Robert Bly and a longer selection translated by me have appeared in book form. Currently I am nearing the three-quarters mark of Sonnevi's nearly 200-page poem "Mozart's Third Brain," which I hope to finish next year, and for which I hope to find an American publisher committed to "great" European poetry in translation.

Other issues to consider along with your initial question include:

How to keep such translations in print
How many translations of "great books" or "great works" we need, and
How often should such works be retranslated.
michael scammell: Silver Dove, a superb example of symbolist prose by Andrei Bely that prepared the way for Bely's masterpiece, Petersburg, badly needs a new translation. Alexander Griboyedov, a friend of Pushkin, wrote a masterly satirical comedy, Woe from Wit (a better title would be 'Tis Pity to Be Wise), that rivals Onegin for wit and eloquence. It has been translated but not into anything that resembles the original.

Edna McCown: Fritz H. Landshoff's Amsterdam, Keizersgracht 333: Ouerido Verlag (Aufbau Verlag, 1991), his history of the last years of German publishing in the Weimar Republic and of the exile publishing house, Querido Verlag, he established in Amsterdam in 1933. With documents, photos and a wealth of letters exchanged between Landshoff and his exiled authors, among them Lion Feuchtwanger, Joseph Roth, Heinrich Mann, and Ernst Toller.

Joan Downs: A friend who is an expert on Eastern European literature is always bemoaning the fact that his Anglophone literati friends cannot read My Time with Gombrowicz by the Hungarian writer Istvan Eorsi.

Jennnifer Lyons: Alois Hotschnig should be translated. Peter Filkins is trying to translate and place Ludwig's Zimmer by this major Austrian writer.

Nancy Festinger: Max Aub, a Spaniard of French-German-Jewish heritage, who lived for 40 years in exile in Mexico during the Franco regime, was a novelist (as well as playwright and short story writer) whose major prose work, a five novel series on the Spanish civil war, called The Magic Labyrinth, has never been translated. Aub described it as a desire to do for Spain what Dos Passos' did in The USA Trilogy. One literary critic called it "the Spanish War and Peace." As a translator, I have many sample chapters from these works and for many years have been trying to interest a U.S. publisher in taking on the translation of at least one novel from this work.

Katherine Vaz: I have an outstanding mention for your not-in-English compilation. Before he became too infirmed to see it to a publishing resting-place, the venerable Gregory Rabassa handed me a manuscript and said that as a Portuguese-American author I might speed O Meo Mundo Não . . . Desto Reino to a fitting American home.

He waived a translation fee simply because he found it unequivocally the most stunning work to come to his attention since he did One Hundred Years of Solitude.

An excerpt of This World Is Not of My Kingdom will appear for the first time in English in The Iowa Review in fall 2001. It contains the most stunning, evocative, and unabashed passages about genuine poverty to surface anywhere in the English language.

Richard Kostelanetz: I first perused Guillermo de Torre's mammoth Historia de las literaturas de vanguardia in the guest room of my former teacher, Juan Lopez-Morillas, in the summer of 1963. His wife, Frances, who had published other translations from the Spanish had planned to translate it for a university press but the press changed its mind. As I got more interested in the subject professionally, I remembered now and then how incomparably impressive the book appeared to be and so wanted a copy for myself. When I gave a presentation in Buenos Aires in 1987, a professor in the audience wanted my audiotape, which I gave her, contingent upon her sending me a copy of the book; but it never came. Into the 1990s, I tried to find a copy, remembering a multi-volumed Portuguese translation in the house of Eduardo Kac, the Brazilian visual poet who has since become a prominent Chicago technological artist, understanding that the book was a guide to the literary avant-garde like nothing in English. Finally, in 2000 I purchased a copy from an Ohio bookstore and read it as well as I could, not wishing it could become available in English.

Celina Spiegel: There's an epic Israeli novel called Days of Ziklag by an Israeli called S. Yizhar. It's a war novel about the War for Independence, a kind of defining novel of Israeli statehood. It's extremely long, around 1000 pages, and would be longer even in English (since Hebrew is written without vowels and is economical), which is why it has never been published. Metropolitan translated another novel by him not so long ago. It might be a contender.

Harry Kuhner: I would like to recommend the work of Leonid Andreyev, the great neglected Russian author who, in my view, was Kafka's precursor. He is occasionally represented in anthologies, but not much of his prose and drama are available in English. An edition of his collected works is long overdue. Andreyev had the honor of being denigrated by Leo Tolstoy, along with Will Shakespeare.

Peter Ten Hoopen: I would like to recommend a novel by a contemporary Austrian writer Die Papierrose by Heinrich Eggerth for translation. I have translated poetry by Eggerth as well as Fallen nun die Sterne/ Will the Stars Fall, which contains poetry by Eggerth in my translation. Stars will give you an idea of what his work is like. The novel is exceptional, the finest piece of prose by an Austrian that I have read since I have been here.

As far as I know, the greatest book ever written in the Dutch language, Het verdriet van Belgie (The Sorrow of Belgium), by the aging Belgian author Hugo Claus, has as yet not been published in English. It details life in a small country town before, during and shortly after the Second World War.

Hope this gets him the wider public he so deserves. Hugo Claus is one of the three or four authors in the Dutch language area who could seriously be expected to be nominated for the Nobel Prize one day.

David Budbill: Why not add to our list: GREAT BOOKS THAT HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BUT HAVE NEVER BEEN PUBLISHED, because what good is a translation if publication doesn't follow?

And if you had it worded that way I would nominate: The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness, the Nobel Laureate from Iceland.

Lynne Lowner: I myself would like to translate Hilde Domin's collected or selected poetry, plus her memoirs (two separate books), even though I'm not an expert in translating from German, only from Italian and French. (I'm on the PEN Translation Committee.) I met her in Bavaria recently in an unusual hotel that is also a cultural center, and we became quite close. I have tried two or three short lyrics. She is a German Jewish poet, one of the most famous in the German-speaking world right now. Her adopted last name derives from fact that she and her husband, an art historian specializing in archaeology (long since deceased) found refuge during the war in Santo Domingo. She is 92 years old, swims every morning, and goes for walks in the woods! Her story is significant, and her poetry limpid and important.

Lynne Alvarez: Felipe Santander is a contemporary Mexican playwright whose play The Agronomist (El Extensionista) ran for ten years in Mexico City. Three of his plays have just been translated (by me) and will be published by Smith & Kraus this fall. There are many others though which are untranslated.

Laurie Adams: Have all the works of the Scandinavian writers--Pär Lagerkvist, Halldór Laxness, and Selma Lagerlöf been translated into English? Was in Iceland recently and have the impression that not all of Laxness is available in English.

Marilyn Gaddis Rose: Regarding your query of a few days ago about a great novel still awaiting translation into English: Adan Buenosayres (1970) by Leopoldo Marechal (1900-70). This Argentine novel was recommended by a visiting research associate at the Center for Research in Translation, Binghamton University.

>> Back