This year American readers were scrambling when Herta Müller received the Nobel Prize for Literature: very little of her work was available in English translation. The same thing happened in 2008 when Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio got the nod – no books available in English so how important can he really be as a writer? The truth is, just three percent of the literature published in the United States is translated from another language. In part, this is due to the parochial taste of the American reading public. But publishers, too, are to blame for not taking a chance on translated lit. We know from the success of writers such as Bernhard Schlink, Umberto Eco and Haruki Murakami that there is potentially a huge audience here for translated lit.
The good folks at the Quarterly Conversation decided to deal with this sad state of affairs head-on by asking some top translators which books are crying out for translation into English. The list they came up with is fascinating and, to say the least, eclectic. One drawback, however, is that there is only one German title on the list – Franz Hessel’s 1913 novel Der Kramladen des Glücks. Surely there are more German novels to consider! So Katy Derbyshire, a professional translator in Berlin, is soliciting suggestions for other German titles on her blog love german books. I have already made my recommendations; please do the same either here or at Katy's blog.
