How strange.
For some reason I have read very few English translations of foreign books. Of the thousands of books I have read only a handful have been translations. I have not read Tolstoy or Proust and would not be surprised if I had read less than a dozen ‘foreign’ books: a couple of Voltaires, a Camus and a Sartre, Borges, Nietzsche, Kafka short stories, Machiavelli, and three (!) Ismail Kadares. Only if Plato, Aeschylus, Aesop and the like count do I reach a dozen, unless I am forgetting some.
I only mention it because, having just finished a book translated from Spanish I am about to start on a book translated from Chinese. What are the chances of that eh?  A nice example of statistical clustering if nothing else.
So what am I missing out on?  What jewels of the world’s literature have I been depriving myself of? Any recommendations welcome – bearing in mind that I never could quite get into Marquez.
Well apart from Marquez (who I quite like…) there is Steig Larsson (and the rest of the Scandanavian crime cabal), Milan Kundera, E.H. Gombrich, Gunter Grass, Freud, Roberto Bolano, Isabelle Allende, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Umberto Eco. I reckon the ancient classics do count and then there are all the european philosophers……
I wasn’t sure if Levi wrote in English or not. Bought Periodic Elements many years ago but I don’t think I read it. Ditto Umberto Eco – never really got started on Name of the Rose.
I imagine that a lot of decent mainstream books don’t get translated.
There are a lot of publishers who specialise in works in translation. Hesperus and Harvill spring to mind. I think the only trouble is that, Scandi crime excepted, it is mostly classics and literary fiction. Not a bad thing in itself but I don’t think it really reflects what other countries are actually reading (in the same way that, say, the Booker Prize doesn’t often reflect what we read here).
I think I probably don’t want the equivalent of the top 10 here (ghost-written celeb autobiographies, interchangeable chick-lit and so on) nor the heavyweight classics.
If there are equivalents to, say, Brookmyre, Iain Banks, Martin Amis, David Lodge, Jonathan Coe that would be nice.
Just remembered (yet) another translation I bought and failed to read – Don Quixote. Perhaps I try and over-reach myself with foreign books.