I’m a sucker for books like Boyd Tonkin’s fascinating The 100 Best Novels in Translation. I’ve read a fair number of novels in translation and sometimes they read well…and sometimes they don’t. Boyd Tonkin introduces each novel, writes about the author, and then makes observations about the various translations available. Finally, Tonkin explains why the translation he’s selected is better than the others.

If you’re looking for a guide to novels in translation, Boyd Tonkin’s book checks all the boxes: well written, knowledgeable, and useful.

How many of these novels in translation have you read? Are there any here you would like to read? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION — 11

Works Cited — 25

A Note on the Entries –26

Acknowledgements — 27

THE ENTRIES: — 29

1. Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes. Translated by Edith Grossman — 29
2. The Princesse de Cleves (1678) by Madame de Lafayette. Translated by Robin Buss –32
3. Candide, or Optimism (1759) by Voltaire. Translated by Theo Cuffe — 34
4. Dangerous Liaisons (1782) by Choderlos de Laclos. Translated by Douglas Parmee — 37
5. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — 40
6. Dream of the Red Chamber (1792) by Cao Xuequin. Translated by David Hawkes & John Minford — 43
7. Jacque the Fatalist (1796) by Denis Diderot. Translated by David Coward — 46
8. Corinne, or Italy (1807) by Madame de Stael. Translated by Sylvia Raphael — 48
9. Michael Kohlhaas (1810) by Heinrich von Kleist. Translated by David Luke — 51
10. The Betrothed (1827; revised 1842) by Alexandre Manzoni. Translated by Bruce Penman — 54
11. The Red and the Black (1830) by Stendhal. Translated by Roger Gard — 57
12. IndianaT (1832) by George Sand. Translated by Sylvia Raphael — 60
13. Old Goriot (1835) by Honore de Balzac. Translated by Olivia McCannon — 62
14. A Hero of Our Time (1840) by Mikhail Lermonlov. Translated by Natasha Randall — 63
15. Dead Souls (1842/1855) by Nikola Gogol. Translated by Donald Rayfield — 68
16. Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert. Translated by Adam Thorpe — 71
17. Les Miserables (1862) by Victor Hugo. Translated by Julie Rose — 74
18. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. Translated by Peter Carson — 77
19. War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy. Translated by Anthony Briggs — 79
20. The Crime of Father Amaro: Scenes From the Religious Life (1875; revised 1880) by Era de Quieroz. Translated by Margaret Hull Costa. — 83
21. Epitaph of a Small Winner (1880) by Machado de Assis. Translated by William L. Grossman –85
22. Niels Lyhne (1880) by Jens Peter Jacobsen. Translated by Tiina Nunnally — 88
23. The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Translated by Richard Paver & Larissa Volokhonsky — 90
24. Germinal (1885) by Emile Zola. Translated by Roger Pearson — 93
25. Hunger (1890) by Knut Hamsun. Translated by Sverre Lyngstad –96
26. The Duel (1891) by Anton Chekhov. Translated by Richard Paver & Larissa Volokhonsky — 98
27. The Murderess (1903) by Alexandros Papadiamatis. Translated by Peter Levi — 101
28. The Gate (1910) by Natsume Soseki. Translated by William F. Sibley — 103
29. The Notebooks of Malte Laurrids Brigge (1910) by Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Michael Hulse — 106
30. In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) by Marcel Proust. Translated by CK Scott Moncrieff, Andreas Mayor, and Terence Kilmartin, revised by DJ Enright –108
31. Reeds in the Wind (1913) by Grazia Deledda. Translated by Martha King — 112
32. Petersburg (1916; revised 1922) by Andrei Bely. Translated by John Elsworth –114
33. Home and the World (1916) by Rabindranath Tagore. Translated by Sreejata Guha — 117
34. Kristin Lavransdatter (The Wreath; The Wife; The Cross) (1920-1922) by Sigrid Undset. Translated by Tiina Nunnally — 119
35. Cheri/The Last of Cheri (1920; 1926) by Colette. Translated by Roger Senhouse –122
36. Zeno’s Conscience (1923) by Italo Svevo. Translated by William Weaver — 125
37. The Good Soldier Svejk (1923) by Jaroslave Hasek. Translated by Cecil Parrott — 127
38. The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann. Translated by John E. Woods –130
39. The Trial (1914-1915; published 1925) by Franz Kafka. Translated by Mike Mitchell –133
40. Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Doblin. Translated by Michael Hoffman — 136
41. The Seven Madmen (1929) by Roberto Arit. Translated by Nick Caistor — 138
42. The Man Without Qualities (1930-1933) By Robert Musil. Translated by Sophie Wilkins & Burton Pike — 141
43. The Foundation Pit (1930; published 1973) by Anthony Platonov. Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson — 144
44. Journey to the End of the Night (1932) by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Translated by Ralph Manheim — 147
45. The Radetzky March (1932) by Joseph Roth. Translated by Michael Hofmann — 149
46. Independent People (1934-1935) by Halidor Laxness. Translated by JA Thompson — 152
47. Journey By Moonlight (1937) by Antal Szerb. Translated by Len Rix — 155
48. The Gift (1938; 1952) by Vladimir Nabokov. Translated by Michael Scammell, Dmitri Nabokov, and Vladimir Nabokov — 157
49. Nausea (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by Robert Baldick — 160
50. The Invention of Morel (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Translated by Ruth L. C. Simms — 163
51. The Tartar Steppe (1940) by Dino Buzzati. Translated by Stuart Hood — 165
52. The Master and Margarita (1928-1940; published in full 1973) by Mikhail Bulgakov. Translated by Hugh Aplin — 168
53. The Outsider (1942) by Albert Camus. Translated by Sandra Smith — 171
54. Suite Franchise (1942; published 2004) by Irene Nemirovsky. Translated by Sandra Smith — 173
55. Near to the Wild Heart (1943) by Clarice Lispector. Translated by Alison Entrekin — 176
56. The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric. Translated by Lovett F. Edwards –179
57. Only Yesterday (1945) by SY Agnon. Translated by Barbara Harshav — 181
58. The Makioka Sisters (1946-1948) by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker– 174
59. Fortress Besieged (1947) by Qian Zhongshu. Translated by Jeanne Kelly & Nathan K. Mao –187
60. Dirty Snow (1948) by Georges Simenon. Translated by Marc Romano & Louise Varese — 190
61. The Moon and the Bonfires (1950) by Cesare Pavese. Translated by RW Flint — 192
62. Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (1951-1953) by Samuel Beckett. Translated by Samuel Beckett & Patrick Bowles — 195
63. The Hive (1946; published 1951) by Camilo Jose Cela. Translated by JM Cohen — 197
64. Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) by Marguerite Yourcenar. Translated by Grace Frick — 200
65. Pedro Paramo (1955) by Juan Rulfo. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden — 203
66. The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) (1956-1957) Naguib Mahfouz. Translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lorne A Kenny & Angele Boors Samaan –205
67. That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana (1946- 1957) by Carol Emilio Gadda. Translated by William Weaver — 208
68. The Leopard (1948) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun — 210
69. The Tin Drum (1959) by Gunter Grass. Translated by Breon Mitchell — 213
70. Life and Fate (1959; published 1980) by Vasily Grossman. Translated by Robert Chandler — 216
71. Solaris (1961) by Stanisław Lem. Translated by Bill Johnston –219
72. The Time Regulation Institute (1962) by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. Translated by Maureen Freely & Alexander Dawe — 222
73. The Garden of the Finzi-Contints (1962) by Giorgio Bassani. Translated by Jamie McKendrick — 225
74. The Slave (1962) by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Translated by Isaac Bashevis Singer & Cecil Hemley — 227
75. The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) by Carlos Fuentes. Translated by Alfred McAdam –230
76. Hopscotch (1963) by Julio Cortazar. Translated by Gregory Rabassa — 233
77. Three Trapped Tigers (1965) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine & Donald Gardner — 235
78. Season of Migration to the North (1960) by Tayeb Salih. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies — 238
79. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated by Gregory Rabassa –241
80. The Quest for Christa T. (1968) by Christa Wolf. Translated by Christopher Middleton –244
81. I Served the King of England (1971) by Bohumil Hrabal. Translated by Paul Wilson –246
82. Chronicle in Stone (1971; revised 1997) by Ismail Kadare. Translated by Arshi Pipa– 249
83. The Bridge of Beyond ( 1972) by Simon Schwartz-Bart. Translated by Barbara Bray — 251
84. Correction (1975) by Thomas Bernhard. Translated by Sophie Wilkins — 254
85. Life: A user’s Manual (1978) by Georges Perec. Translated by David Bellos –257
86. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) by Milan Kundera. Translated by Michael Henry Helm –260
87. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) by Italo Calvino. Translated by William Weaver — 262
88. Basti (1979) by Intizar Husain. Translated by Frances W. Pritchett –265
89. So Long a Letter ((1979) by Mariama Ba. Translated by Modupe Bode-Thomas — 267
90. Buru Quartet (This Earth of Mankind; Child of All Nations; Footsteps; House of Glass) (1980-1988) by Pramodeya Ananda Toer. Translated by Max Lane — 270
91. The True Deceiver (1982) by Tove Jansson. Translated by Thomas Teal — 273
92. The Lover (1984) by Marguerite Duras. Translated by Barbara Bray — 276
93. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) by Jose Saramago. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero — 278
94. Hard-boiled Wonderland and The End of the World (1985) by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum — 281
95. See Under: LOVE (1986) by David Grossman. Translated by Betsy Rosenberg — 284
96. The Black Book (1990) by Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Maureen Freely — 287
97. The Emigrants (1992) by WG Seabald. Translated by Michael Hulse — 289
98. The Land of Green Plums (1993) by Herta Muller. Translated by Michael Hoffmann –292
99. A Dictionary of Maqiao (1996) by Han Shaogong. Translated by Julia Lovell — 295
100. The Feast of the Goat (2000) by Mario Vargas Liosa. Translated by Edith Grossman — 297

INDEX OF AUTHORS — 301

For the first time in 40 years, the Buffalo Bills drafted a Tight End in the First Round of the NFL Draft. Dalton Kincaid has “elite” catching ability–something that appealed to the Bills after coming in second to Green Bay with the most dropped passes last season. The Bills then added to Josh Allen’s protection by picking O’Cyrus Torrence (aka, “Cyborg”)–a 6’5″ 330 lb. offensive lineman who had the rare talent not to have given up a sack last year…and did not have any penalties, either!

How did your favorite NFL do in the 2023 Draft?

Buffalo Bills Draft Picks by Round in 2023

• Round 1, Pick 25 (From NYG via JAX) Dalton Kincaid, TE, Utah.
• Round 2, Pick 59. O’Cyrus Torrence, G, Florida.
• Round 3, Pick 91. Dorian Williams, LB, Tulane.
• Round 5, Pick 150 (from ARI) Justin Shorter, WR, Florida.
• Round 7, Pick 230. Nick Broeker, OG, Ole Miss.
• Round 7, Pick 252, Alex Austin, CB, Oregon St.

M. R. Carey’s Infinity Gate begins with an Artificial Intelligence describing how it came into sentience: the combination of Hadiz Tambuwal (a scientist), Essien Nikanika (a rogue), and Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills (a rabbit).

Carey creates a Universe where Step technology allows travel between parallel worlds. But the multiverse is threatened by two colossal empires: The Pandominion made up of thousands of worlds of living species and the Ansurrection made up of hundreds of thousands of worlds of machines. A war is brewing and worlds will be destroyed by unstoppable weapons.

After 500 pages, Carey leaves us this message: “The story continues in Book Two of The Pandominion.” I’m eager to find out where Carey is going with this multiverse in deep trouble plot. GRADE: B

Hundreds of vintage Science Fiction paperback and SF magazine covers! Plenty of eye-popping covers by Ed Valigursky, Chesley Bonestell, Ed Emshwiller, Richard Powers, and dozens of other artists from the 1940s and 1950s. I was surprised that Josh Kirby’s artwork showed up on so many SF paperbacks and SF magazine covers from that era.

Much of the focus of Rayguns & Spaceships is on SF in post World War II England. However, many of the covers will look familiar since those covers also showed up on American SF paperbacks and magazines.

Are you a fan of SF artwork? Do you have a favorite SF artist? GRADE: A

https://youtu.be/Y6obJfkCSCk

Featuring Norah Jones is a compilation album by American singer Norah Jones that was released on November 16, 2010, by Blue Note Records.  The album includes songs by other artists on which Jones is featured, including songs by her side bands The Little Willies and El Madmo. The album includes “Here We Go Again”, a duet with Ray Charles, which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 2005. The song “Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John” by Belle & Sebastian had only been released one month prior to the release of this album on the group’s October 2010 album Belle and Sebastian Write About Love.

I was a big fan of Norah Jones when I listened to her first two CDs: Come Away With Me (2002) and Fells Like Home (2004). In later years, I drifted away as Norah Jones tried different singing styles and different songs…not to my tastes. But, this compilation CD includes plenty of excellent songs. The only dud is “Baby It’s Cold Outside” where Willie Nelson sounds unenthused.

With the variety of songs on this CD, I’m sure you’ll hear something you like…perhaps a lot! Are you a Norah Jones fan? GRADE: B+

Track listing:

I’m a big fan of Mick Herron’s Slough House series about failed spies. Jackson Lamb, the canny head of Slough House, shows up in “The Last Dead Letter” about a British spy in Berlin having an affair with a woman who may or may not be a Soviet spy.

My favorite stories in Dolphin Junction are “Proof of Love” and “Mirror Images” where a struggling private detective named Joe Silverman and his much smarter wife Zoe solve some tricky cases. “Proof of Love” centers around the delivery of money from a rich man–with Joe Silverman being the courier–in exchange for a porno-video starring his wife. “Mirror Images” features a writer who is seeing a ghost and wants Joe and Zoe to make the ghost go away.

Mick Herron, talented and equipped with the kind of thought processes necessary to write realistically about spies and intelligent criminals, delivers a batch suspenseful and clever short stories in Dolphin Junction. Don’t miss it! GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Proof of love — 1

Remote control — 35

Lost luggage — 51

Mirror images — 61

Dolphin junction — 89

An American fridge — 145

The other half — 153

All the livelong day — 171

The last dead letter — 217

The usual Santas –251

What we do — 267

Acknowledgments — 297

Disaster! is a jukebox musical comedy created by Seth Rudetsky, and written by Seth Rudetsky and Jack Plotnick as a spoof of 1970s disaster films. Earthquakes, tidal waves, piranhas, infernos, and the songs of the ’70s take center stage in this comedic homage to The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.

Most of the action takes place aboard a floating casino outside of New York City. My favorite character was Sister Mary, a nun who wants to stop the evils of gambling (and worse!) on this Ship of Sleaze, but we find out Sister Mary also has a serious problem.

The music from the 1970s both brought back memories and injected plenty of humor into the wacky situations as the boat begins to sink. If you’re looking for a silly musical that will make you laugh and tap your toes, don’t miss Disaster! if it comes to your neighborhood! Do you remember these songs? Any favorites? GRADE: A

“There were four albums in the first three or four years of Prince’s twenties. He got a lot of good reviews for the third album, Dirty Mind–in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau gave it an A rating and said that ‘Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.'” (p. 42-43)

Nick Hornby–novelist whose High Fidelity, About a Boy, and Juliet, Naked are favorites of mine–loves Charles Dickens’s novels and Prince’s music. In Dickens and Prince Hornby compares the two geniuses, there are a lot of similarities, and shows why their work will endure.

Both Dickens and Prince were workaholics. Hornby estimates that Dickens wrote over 4 million words and Prince wrote over a thousand songs. But, despite their productivity, both Dickens and Prince had money problems. “Prince and Dickens both earned a lot, but they had a lot of commitments, too. Paisley Park, Prince’s private estates, with its studios and its soundstage, its wardrobe department and its vegan chef, cost him $2.5 million a month…” (p. 113)

“Dickens had his 10 children, a mistress and her family as well as a wife, and a feckless father who aways needed bailing out. His brothers could never support themselves. He had orphaned nieces and nephews. His sons were hopeless, and his sister-in-law looked after his household after his marital separation. He gave money to friends, and dependents of friends, and supported over forty different charities, with time or work or straightforward gifts of money.” (p. 113-114). Both men were Big Spenders.

Both men had complicated relationships with women. Hornby estimates Prince dated over 2000 women–and married two (neither marriage worked out). Prince also produced albums of songs for his current girlfriends…some good, some bad. Dickens separated from Catherine after 22 years of marriage (and who was the mother of his 10 children) after meeting 18-year-old Nelly Ternan. Dickens was in his 40s when this went down.

I found Dickens and Prince to be a fascinating book about two incredible artists. Are you a fan of Dickens and Prince? GRADE: A

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction 1

Childhood 17

Their Twenties 29

The Movies 55

The Working Life 71

The Business 93

Women 117

The End 135

Acknowledgments 163

Select Bibliography 165

Permissions 167

Credits 169

“Once, in college, you might have studied Mansfield Park by looking closely at its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius—the way Vladimir Nabokov famously taught the novel, and an intensification of the way a reader on the subway experiences the book. Now you might write a paper about how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape. What does this have to do with how most humans read? “

“The Death of the English Major” by Nathan Heller (you can read the entire article here) was published in The New Yorker February 27, 2023 issue. I read it and have considered Heller’s analysis–and there’s a lot of it!–for six weeks. Heller cites plenty of statistics to support his case that English departments face a death-spiral as students chose STEM majors instead of humanities majors. Right now, only 7% of college students chose to be English majors.

I graduated as an English Major (and a Political Science and Philosophy Major; Journalism and Education minors) in 1971. When I started working on my PhD. in English in 1991, I realized a lot of change had occurred in the focus of English Departments in 20 years. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the founder of “deconstruction,” a way of criticizing not only both literary and philosophical texts but society dominated the approach to teaching…and learning. Other literary theorists like de Man, Foucault, John Searle, Willard Van Orman Quine, Peter Kreeft, and Jürgen Habermas changed  the analysis of literary texts to applications of conceptual apparatus.

Here’s a sample of Derrida’s prose: “The enterprise of returning ‘strategically’, ‘ideally’, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent.”  My eyes glaze over quickly when reading this style of writing.

Back in the 1970s, my English courses required term papers that centered on the novel or poem or essay with a large dollop of the concerns of the author mixed in. The intent was to help the students learn to write better and explore aspects of the literary work. In the 1990s, the term papers now danced with notions of gender identity, power relationships, and political/legal entanglements.

Most of the students in my Business Administration classes had one goal: learn skills and knowledge that would lead to a well paying job. I suspect most students view the contemporary English Departments with their abstract view of literature and writing to be a non-starter in their job search. Were you an English Major? Did you enjoy your English classes? GRADE: A

If you’re in the mood for something completely different, you might want to catch an episode of Mrs. Davis on Peacock. Imagine blending The Flying Nun with James Bond!  Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez’s 8-episode series Mrs. Davis, starring Betty Gilpin as an action-hero nun, is the rare TV series that feels confusing at first but makes sense as the twisty plot untangles with plenty of surprises.

Betty Gilpin (aka, Lizzie) is now Sister Simone. We first meet Simone as she rides into a situation on a white horse! We soon learn the world is now run by an Artificial Intelligence called Mrs. Davis who Simone wants to kill because she blames Mrs. Davis for her father’s death.

What chance has a nun with few resources have against an all-powerful AI? A better chance than you think. Four of the eight episodes are available now. I’m intrigued by the innovative aspects of Mrs. Davis. GRADE: INCOMPLETE but trending towards a B+