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
A quite interesting list, just a few I've never heard of and it's a pity it stops in'87; however it's motivated me to review recently read 'The Lost Steps'!
ReplyDeleteWow, this list is so - so - plausible.
ReplyDeleteHydriotaphia - Yeah, there are big gaps at the bottom. No important works from '79 to '86 and from '88 to '01? I also notice a large proportion of books from Latin America.
ReplyDeleteAmateur Reader - Plausible, yes. That's the word. (grins)