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July 11, 2008

The 50 outstanding literary translations from the last 50 years

The Translators Association of the Society of Authors celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion they have compiled a list of 50 outstanding translations of the last half century

1. Raymond Queneau – Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright, 1958) Buy the book

2. Primo Levi – If This is a Man (Stuart Woolf, 1959) Buy the book

3. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – The Leopard (Archibald Colquhoun, 1961) Buy the book

4. Günter Grass – The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim, 1962) Buy the book

5. Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths (Donald Yates, James Irby, 1962) Buy the book

6. Leonardo Sciascia – Day of the Owl (Archibald Colquhoun, 1963)

7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker, 1963) Buy the book

8. Yukio Mishima – Death in Midsummer (Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent, 1965)

9. Heinrich Böll – The Clown (Leila Vennewitz, 1965) Buy the book

10. Octavio Paz – Labyrinth of Solitude (Lysander Kemp, 1967)

11. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (Michael Glenny, 1969) Buy the book

12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude (Gregory Rabassa, 1970) Buy the book

13. Walter Benjamin – Illuminations (Harry Zohn, 1970) Buy the book

14. Paul Celan – Poems (Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, 1972) Buy the book

15. Bertolt Brecht – Poems (John Willett, Ralph Manheim, Erich Fried, et al 1976)

16. Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish (Alan Sheridan, 1977) Buy the book

17. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - Montaillou (Barbara Bray, 1978) Buy the book

18. Italo Calvino – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (William Weaver, 1981) Buy the book

19. Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida (Richard Howard, 1981) Buy the book

20. Christa Wolf – A Model Childhood (Ursule Molinaro, Hedwig Rappolt, 1982) Buy the book

21. Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose (William Weaver, 1983) Buy the book

22. Mario Vargas Llosa – Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Helen R. Lane, 1983) Buy the book

23. Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Michael Henry Heim, 1984) Buy the book

24. Marguerite Duras – The Lover (Barbara Bray, 1985) Buy the book

25. Josef Skvorecky – The Engineer of Human Souls (Paul Wilson, 1985)

26. Per Olov Enquist – The March of the Musicians (Joan Tate, 1985) Buy the book

27. Patrick Süskind – Perfume (John E. Woods, 1986) Buy the book

28. Isabel Allende – The House of the Spirits (Magda Bodin, 1986) Buy the book

29. Georges Perec – Life A User’s Manual (David Bellos, 1987) Buy the book

30. Thomas Bernhard – Cutting Timber (Ewald Osers, 1988)

31. Czeslaw Milosz – Poems (Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass, 1988) Buy the book

32. José Saramago – Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Giovanni Pontiero, 1992) Buy the book

33. Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (Terence Kilmartin, 1992) Buy the book

34. Roberto Calasso – The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Tim Parks, 1993) Buy the book

35. Naguib Mahfouz – Cairo Trilogy (Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, Angela Botros Samaan, 1991-3) Buy the book

36. Laura Esquivel – Like Water for Chocolate (Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, 1993) Buy the book

37. Bao Ninh – The Sorrow of War (Frank Palmos, Phan Thanh Hao, 1994) Buy the book

38. Victor Klemperer – I Shall Bear Witness (Martin Chalmers, 1998) Buy the book

39. Beowulf (Seamus Heaney, 1999) Buy the book

40. Josef Brodsky – Collected Poems (Anthony Hecht et al, 2000)

41. Xingjian Gao – Soul Mountain (Mabel Lee, 2001) Buy the book

42. Tahar Ben Jelloun – This Blinding Absence of Light (Linda Coverdale, 2002) Buy the book

43. W.G. Sebald – Austerlitz (Anthea Bell, 2002) Buy the book

44. Orhan Pamuk – Snow (Maureen Freely, 2004) Buy the book

45. Amos Oz – A Tale of Love and Darkness (Nicholas de Lange, 2004) Buy the book

46. Per Petterson – Out Stealing Horses (Ann Born, 2005) Buy the book

47. Irène Némirovsky – Suite Française (Sandra Smith, 2006) Buy the book

48. Vassily Grossman – Life and Fate (Robert Chandler, 2006) Buy the book

49. Alaa Al Aswany – The Yacoubian Building (Humphrey Davies, 2007) Buy the book

50. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace (Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, 2007) Buy the book


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