Reading list: WLT's top 40

No, the compilation of lists isn't over yet. I'll have a couple of posts more. Bear with me.

*_*

On the occasion of their 75th anniversary, the World Literature Today magazine published their list of 40 most important works from 1927 to 2001. In terms of scope, this one appears to be a more focused list. It has a shorter time frame (75 years), for one. The coverage is also international and, thankfully, within the 20th century.

What I like about the list is that it's short. Only 40 titles, not the usual 100 best-of lists, not the 1001 that you have to scroll down before you die. Somehow, miraculously, 4 genres (poetry, fiction, drama, essays) are represented. And, so far as I can make out, more than half (23 titles) are books in translation. At least they somehow live up to the name of world literature. But how they came up with it is a mystery. It's an altogether brave, if flawed, list.

  


World Literature Today's top 40 most important works, 1927-2001

1927 To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf, England

1928 The Gypsy Ballads (Romancero gitano) - Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain

1928 The Tower - William Butler Yeats, Ireland

1929 The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner, United States

1931 The Turning Point (I strofi) - George Seferis, Greece

1933-47 Residence on Earth (Residencia en la tierra) - Pablo Neruda, Chile

1934 Independent People (Sjalfstaett folk) - Halldor Laxness, Iceland

1935-40 Requiem (Rekviem) - Anna Akhmatova, Russia

1941 Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) - Bertolt Brecht, Germany

1942 The Stranger (L'etranger) - Albert Camus, France

1943 The Four Quartets - T. S. Eliot, England/United States

1944 Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina

1945 "The Day Before Yesterday" [aka Only Yesterday] (Tmol shilshom) - S. Y. Agnon, Spain/Israel

1948 Snow Country (Yukiguni) - Yasunari Kawabata, Japan

1950 The Labyrinth of Solitude (El laberinto de la soledad) - Octavio Paz, Mexico

1952 Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot) - Samuel Beckett, Ireland

1952 Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison, United States

1952 The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway, United States

1952 In Country Sleep - Dylan Thomas, Wales

1953 The Lost Steps (Los pasos perdidos) - Alejo Carpentier, Cuba

1956 The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Grande sertao: veredas) - Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil

1956-57 The Cairo Trilogy (Al-Thulathiyya) - Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt

1957 Voss - Patrick White, England/Australia

1958 Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe, Nigeria

1958 The Guide - R. K. Narayan, India

1959 The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) - Gunter Grass, Germany

1961 A House for Mr Biswas - V. S. Naipaul, Trinidad

1961 The Book of Disquiet (Livro do desassossego) - Fernando Pessoa, Portugal

1962 The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing, Zimbabwe/England

1962 Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States

1962 The Time of the Doves (La Placa del Diamant) - Merce Rodoreda, Spain

1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha) - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russia

1964 A Personal Matter (Kojinteki-na taiken) - Kenzaburo Oe, Japan

1966 Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 - W. H. Auden, England

1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien anos de soledad) - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia

1968 House Made of Dawn - N. Scott Momaday, United States

1972 Invisible Cities (Le citta invisibili) - Italo Calvino, Italy

1974 The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer, South Africa

1978 Bells in Winter - Czeslaw Milosz, Poland

1987 Red Sorghum (Hung kao liang) - Mo Yan, China


Source: http://www.baylor.edu/english/index.php?id=45859

"Ernesto Cardenal and I" (Roberto Bolaño)

I've added the link to the poem "Ernesto Cardenal and I" to "A guide to online writings of Roberto Bolaño." I somehow missed including this poem whose translation first appeared in Poetry magazine in 2008. The translator is Laura Healy, though she wasn't credited in the Poetry Foundation site. It's also in the collection The Romantic Dogs.

Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1925) was a Catholic priest and poet from Nicaragua. Bolaño also wrote about Cardenal in a flash essay in Between Parentheses (forthcoming in translation from New Directions). He considered him "one of Latin America's greatest poets."

In Cebu

I was in Lahug, Cebu City, these past four days to attend a national workshop on coastal research and adaptive management for climate change. I was with two colleagues; each of us presented a paper. Mine was an ongoing study about a coral reef ecosystem-based model to estimate sustainable yields of live reef food fish.

At Mactan Airport before our flight back to Puerto Princesa, via a connection to Manila, I took some pictures of souvenir and delicacy shops. Guitars as colorful as jeepneys - each can cost up to 2,500 pesos inside the airport! Best to buy them in the city shops were they are cheaper. I bought half a kilo of dried ripe mangoes, of good quality and without the fluffy texture, the seller assured me. I also bought two kinds of local specialty biscuits: otap and piyaya. The seller was kind enough to tell me which brands to buy. The lechon (suckling pig) in one of the stalls was tempting too!

 

 

"Papel, Gunting, Bato" (Mark Angeles)

Rock, Paper, Scissors
by Mark Angeles

Rock, Paper, Scissors:
try for a third of throws.
Which heart is yours?
The paper that flies away,
the scissors that shears away,
or the rock that crumbles down?

Rock, Paper, Scissors:
Which heart is yours?




- from Patikim ("First Taste")
Translated from Filipino

Reading list: Winners of Best Translated Book Award

The Best Translated Book Award (BTBA) was created in 2007 by Three Percent, the international literature website of New York's University of Rochester. It is awarded in two categories: fiction and poetry. The inaugural awards in 2008 were chosen by popular vote of readers, while in the past two years the winners were chosen by a panel of judges.

All original translations published in the U.S. are qualified for the award. Re-translations and reprints are not eligible. The entries are judged for the "complete package" of the book, not only for the translation but for the work of the original writer, translator, editor, and publisher.
 
Below is the list of winners and finalists for the BTBA fiction category.

2010

Winner:

The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven (Israel, Melville House)
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu


Finalists:

Anonymous Celebrity by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Brazil, Dalkey Archive Press)
Translated from the Portuguese by Nelson Vieira

The Discoverer by Jan Kjærstad (Norway, Open Letter)
Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland

Ghosts by César Aira (Argentina, New Directions)
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Russia, New York Review Books)
Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull

Rex by José Manuel Prieto (Cuba, Grove Books)
Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen

The Tanners by Robert Walser (Switzerland, New Directions)
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker (Netherlands, Archipelago Books)
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (Austria, Ariadne Press)
Translated from the German by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S Hansen

Wonder by Hugo Claus (Belgium, Archipelago Books)
Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim


2009

Winner:

Tranquility by Attila Bartis
Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein (Archipelago)


Finalists:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño (New Directions)
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

Voice Over by Céline Curiol (Seven Stories)
Translated from the French by Sam Richard

The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans (Overlook)
Translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke

Yalo by Elias Khoury (Archipelago Books)
Translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya (New Directions)
Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge (New York Review Books)
Translated from the French by Richard Greeman

Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra (Melville House)
Translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig (New York Review Books)
Translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg


Sources:
BTBA
Wikipedia
2010 translated fiction shortlist
2010 translated poetry finalists