Last fall, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy that picks the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, created quite a stir when he called the US “too insular” because we don’t translate enough works “and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” He described our ignorance as “restraining.” Statistically, he’s correct, only about 3% of the books published in the United States are translated works. While I didn’t think much of Mr. Engdahl’s comment, I thought of it again when I was stunned by beauty of The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and wondered what I was missing. I discovered that I’m missing a lot.
On the other blog I write for, Bookstore People, we’re hosting a summer series called Translated Tuesdays. Every Tuesday we review a translated book and we’ve discovered a new world of reading. One of my favorite publishers is Archipelago Books, a non-profit press dedicated to publishing translated books. Three Percent chose Archipelago Books’ Tranquility, written by Attila Bartis and translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein, as the winner of its 2009 Best Translated Book Winner. I reviewed The Waitress is New, by Dominque Fabre and translated from the French by Jordan Stump, and felt like I carried the main character Pierre in my head for days after reading it. The Twin, by Gerbrand Bakker and translated by David Colmer, received great reviews and is rising to the top of the TBR pile. I’ve enjoyed Archipelago Books so much that I subscribed to the fall series.