Reading list: Best Spanish language novels of the past 25 years

In 2007, the Colombian magazine Semana ran a list of the "100 Best Spanish-Language Novels of the Past 25 Years." The list was a result of a poll of 81 writers, editors, and literary critics, among others.

El amor en los tiempos del cólera by Gabriel García Márquez got the most votes, followed by La fiesta del Chivo by Mario Vargas Llosa. Also in the top ten were two novels each by Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marías. The top 25 are listed below. English translations, if available, are indicated.

 

Top 25 of the 100 Best Novels in Spanish Language, 1981-2006


1. El amor en los tiempos del cólera by Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera, trans. by Edith Grossman)

2. La fiesta del Chivo by Mario Vargas Llosa (The Feast of the Goat, trans. Edith Grossman)

3. Los detectives salvajes by Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer)

4. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer)

5. Noticias del imperio by Fernando del Paso (News from the Empire, trans. Alfonso González & Stella T. Clark)

6. Corazón tan blanco by Javier Marías (A Heart So White, trans. Margaret Jull Costa)

7. Bartleby y Compañía by Enrique Vila-Matas (Bartleby & Co., trans. Jonathan Dunne)

8. Santa Evita by Tomás Eloy Martínez (Santa Evita, trans. Helen Lane)

9. Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí by Javier Marías (Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, trans. Margaret Jull Costa)

10. El desbarrancadero by Fernando Vallejo

11. La virgen de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo (Our Lady of the Assassins, trans. Paul Hammond)

12. El entenado by Juan José Saer (The Witness, trans. Margaret Jull Costa)

13. Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas (Soldiers of Salamis, trans. Anne McLean)

14. Estrella distante by Roberto Bolaño (Distant Star, trans. Chris Andrews)

15. Paisaje después de la batalla by Juan Goytisolo (Landscapes After the Battle, trans. Helen Lane)

16. La ciudad de los prodigios by Eduardo Mendoza (The City of Marvels, trans. Bernard Molloy)

17. El jinete polaco by Antonio Muñoz Molina

18. El testigo by Juan Villoro

19. Salón de belleza by Mario Bellatin (Beauty Salon, trans. Kurt Hollander)

20. Cuando ya no importe by Juan Carlos Onetti (Past Caring, trans. Peter Bush)

21. La tejedora de coronas by Germán Espinosa

22. El paraíso en la otra esquina by Mario Vargas Llosa (The Way to Paradise, trans. Natasha Wimmer)

23. Cae la noche tropical by Manuel Puig (Tropical Night Falling, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine)

24. Doctor Pasavento by Enrique Vila-Matas

25. Herrumbrosas lanzas by Juan Benet


Complete list of 100 best novels:
http://www.semana.com/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?idArt=101793
http://splalit.blogspot.com/2007/03/100-best-novels-written-in-spanish-in.html

Reading list: 50 outstanding translations from the last 50 years

The Committee of the Translators Association, from the Society of Authors, compiled a list of best literary translations of the past 50 years in 2008, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. According to the association, the list (in chronological order) was not meant to be definitive - only a sampler - and it was drafted to provoke thought and get people talking.

 







50 outstanding translations from the last 50 years


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gregory Rabassa, 1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28. Isabel Allende – The House of the Spirits (Magda Bogin, 1986)

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

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

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

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

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

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

35. Naguib Mahfouz – The Cairo Trilogy (William M. Hutchins, Lorne M. Kenny, Olive E. Kenny, Angele Botros Samaan, 1991-3)

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

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

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

39. Beowulf (Seamus Heaney, 1999)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Source: http://www.societyofauthors.org/50-outstanding-translations

Reading list: Winners of Man Asian Literary Prize

The Man Asian Literary Prize is awarded to the year's best novel, either in English or translated into English, by an Asian writer. It was founded in 2007 and covers 27 countries and special administrative regions in Asia.

The winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Previously, entries come from submitted manuscripts (unpublished novels), but a new format was announced this year wherein the eligible entries will only be those books published in the previous calendar year.

The prize is sponsored by Man Group plc. – the same sponsor for the Man Booker Prize, the Man Booker International Prize, and The Lost Man Booker Prize.

Prize: The author gets USD 30,000 while the translator (if any) gets USD 5,000.

Official site: http://www.manasianliteraryprize.org/

Winners of Man Asian Literary Prize

2009 The Boat to Redemption Su Tong, translated by Howard Goldblatt

2008 Ilustrado Miguel Syjuco

2007 Wolf Totem Jiang Rong, translated by Howard Goldblatt

Reading list: Winners of French-American Foundation Translation Prizes

The annual Translation Prizes (for fiction and nonfiction) are given by the French-American Foundation, with the support of the Florence Gould Foundation, for the best translation from French. It started in 1986.

The latest winner in fiction category is John Cullen for Philippe Claudel's Brodeck. (Not sure who won in the non-fiction category.)
  

 

















Winners of the Florence Gould Foundation and the French-American Foundation Translation Prizes

2009 • John Cullen for Brodeck by Philippe Claudel (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

2008 • Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays for their translation of Small Lives by Pierre Michon (Archipelago Books) • Matthew Cobb & Malcolm DeBevoise for their translation of Life Explained by Michel Morange (Yale University Press/Odile Jacob).

2007 • Linda Coverdale for her translation of Ravel by Jean Echenoz (The New Press) • Linda Asher for her translation of The Curtain by Milan Kundera (HarperCollins)

2006 • Sandra Smith for her translation of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (Alred A. Knopf Publishers) • Bruce Fink for his translation of Écrits by Jaques Lacan (Norton)

2005 • Daniel Weissbort for his translation of Missing Person by Patrick Modiano (David Godine) • Sharon Bowman for her translation of The American Enemy: the History of French Anti-Americanism by Philippe Roger (University of Chicago Press)

2004 • Helen Marx for her translation of Silbermann by Jacques de Lacretelle (Helen Marx Books) • Arthur Goldhammer for his translation of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (The Library of America)

2003 • Lydia Davis for her translation Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (Viking Press) • Janet Lloyd for her translation The Writing of Orpheus by Marcel Detienne (Johns Hopkins University Press)

2002 • Jeff Fort for his translation of Aminadab by Maurice Blanchot (University of Nebraska Press) • James Hogarth for his translation of The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo (Modern Library) • Anthony Roberts for his translation of Jihad by Gilles Kepel (Harvard University Press)

2001 • Jordan Stump for his translation of The Jardin des Plantes by Claude Simon (Northwestern University Press)

2000 • Linda Asher for her translation of The Case of Dr. Sachs by Martin Winckler (Seven Stories Press)

1999 • Richard Howard for his translation of The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal (Random House)

1998 • Madeleine Velguth for her translation of Children of Clay by Raymond Queneau (Sun & Moon Press)

1997 • Linda Coverdale for her translation of Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun (Viking Penguin) • Barbara Wright for her translation of Here by Nathalie Sarraute (George Braziller)

1996 • Arthur Goldhammer for her translation of Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1 by Pierre Nora (Columbia University Press)

1994 • Joachim Neugroschel for his translation of With Downcast Eyes by Tahar Ben Jelloun (Little Brown & Co.)

1993 • Nina Rootes for her translation of Sky Memoirs by Blaise Cendrars (Paragon House)

1992 • Lydia Davis for her translation of Rules of the Game I: Scratches by Michel Leiris (Paragon House)

1991 • Burton Raffel for his translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (Norton)

1990 • Arthur Goldhammer for his translation of A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution by François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)

1989 • Franklin Philip for his translation of The Statue Within by François Jacob (Basic Books)

1988 • David Bellos for his translation of Life, a User's Manual by Georges Perec (David Godine Publishers)

1987 • Richard Howard for his translation of William Marshal, the Flowering of Chivalry by Georges Duby (Pantheon Books)

1986 • Barbara Bray for her translation of The Writing of Stones by Roger Callois (University of Virginia Press)


Links:
Past winners
2009 finalists

Reading list: Winners of Helen and Kurt Wolff Tanslator's Prize

This is an annual prize for the best German novel translated into English and published in the US. The winning translator receives a prize of US $ 10,000 and a stay at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB). The prize, set up in 1996, is administered by the Goethe-Institut Chicago. The funding comes from the German government.

Official site: http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/chi/wis/uef/wol/enindex.htm

   


Winners of the Wolff Prize

2010 Ross Benjamin, for his translation of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, (Verso)

2009 John Hargraves, for Michael Krüger’s The Executor – A Comedy of Letters (Harcourt)

2008 David Dollenmayer, for Moses Rosenkranz’s Childhood. An Autobiographical Fragment (Syracuse University Press)

2007 Peter Constantine, for Benjamin Lebert’s novel The Bird is a Raven (Alfred Knopf)

2006 Susan Bernofsky, for Jenny Erpenbeck’s The Old Child & Other Stories (New Directions)

2005 Michael Henry Heim, for Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (Ecco/HarperCollins)

2004 Breon Mitchell, for Uwe Timm’s novel Morenga (New Directions)

2003 Margot Bettauer Dembo, for Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, later (Harper Perennial)

2002 Anthea Bell, for W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (Random House)

2001 Krishna Winston, for Günther Grass’s novel Too Far Afield (Harcourt)

2000 Michael Hofmann, for Joseph Roth’s novel Rebellion (St. Martin's Press)

1999 Joel Agee, for Heinrich von Kleist’s play Penthesilea (Michael di Capua Books / Harper Collins Publishers)

1998 John Brownjohn, for Thomas Brussig’s Heroes Like Us (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Marcel Beyer's The Karnau Tapes (Harcourt Brace & Company)

1997 Leila Vennewitz, for Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar (Arcade Publishing)

1996 John E. Woods, for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.) and Arno Schmidt's Nobodaddy's Children (Dalkey Archive Press)