Fifty outstanding literary translations from the last fifty years
The Translators Association of the Society of Authors celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. To mark the occasion they have compiled a list of 50 outstanding translations of the last half century. I shortlisted below the top ten (in chronological order):
- Raymond Queneau - Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright, 1958)
- Primo Levi - If This is a Man (Stuart Woolf, 1959)
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - The Leopard (Archibald Colquhoun, 1961)
- Günter Grass - The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim, 1962)
- Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths (Donald Yates, James Irby, 1962)
- Leonardo Sciascia - Day of the Owl (Archibald Colquhoun, 1963)
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker, 1963)
- Yukio Mishima - Death in Midsummer (Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent, 1965)
- Heinrich Böll - The Clown (Leila Vennewitz, 1965)
- Octavio Paz - Labyrinth of Solitude (Lysander Kemp, 1967)
The complete list is available at Times online.
