The Best Translated Book Award
It’s always silly to declare a single book to be the “best,” but it’s often productive (and fun) to consider the idea. It’s all the more so when the process involves a diverse range of writers and their writing that actually represents parts of the world we Anglophones don’t usually hear about.
That’s what the Best Translated Book Award, first conferred in 2008, sets out to do. It was the brainchild of the good folk at Three Percent, an online forum dedicated to international literature, and it comes with a $10,000 prize, split equally between the author and the translator of the winning book. Any full-length fiction written in a language other than English that gets published for the first time in the U.S. during the prior calendar year is eligible. There were over 500 such titles that appeared in 2014, which is both a big pile to sort through and a drop in the bucket when compared to the tens of thousands of American books made available in the same time frame.
The number of translations is growing every year, though, mostly thanks to people at small presses who see the value of listening to the conversation that the majority of the globe is trying to have with us. The ten finalists below are the books that had the most to say and said it best.
- The Author and Me by Eric Chevillard (translated by Jordan Stump): A comic monologue in which the narrator, who is definitely not the author, let’s make that perfectly clear so there’s no misunderstanding, expresses his loathing for cauliflower gratin, which exceeds his distaste for murder. (France)
- Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christina MacSweeney): The debut novel by a young, globe-trotting author, it braids together the experiences of a new mother in Mexico City, a poetry-obsessed translator in Harlem, and a dying writer in Philadelphia. (Mexico)
- Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires by Julio Cortázar (translated by David Kurnick): A mixed-media masterpiece that includes comics and charts, facts and fiction, and uses them all to indict the excesses of contemporary capitalism. (Argentina)
- Harlequin’s Millions by Bohumil Hrabal (translated by Stacey Knecht): A novel filled with gorgeous, corkscrewing sentences that depict an elderly woman’s experiences in a castle-turned-old-age-home. (Czech Republic)
It’s an eclectic bunch without a clear favorite, which just means that every book on the list is equally worth your time. The winner will be announced on May 27th at BookExpo America, so there’s still time to place your bets.
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