As we approach the end of the year, the editors at Words Without Borders would like to celebrate the wealth and variety of literary translations published in English in 2005.

To this end, we approached our advisory board for their thoughts, and we have featured their praise here, including recommendations for non-fiction, noir thrillers, seafaring tales, adventures, and love stories, among many other kinds of literature, from around the world.

From Nicole Aragi

The Yacoubian Building
by Alaa Al Aswany
Translated by Humphrey Davies
American University of Cairo Press

“Simply the funniest, sharpest and most engaging novel I’ve read in ages. It covers sex, politics, religion, power, poverty and corruption, all the juicy stuff of life. Anyone who takes the time to read the first couple of pages is sure to be reading until they’ve reached the 245th page.”

From Barbara Grossman

Children of the New World
by Assia Djebar
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager
Feminist Press

“An Algerian by birth, and now a member of the French Academy, Djebar has been on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Djebar worked closely with the translator Marjolijn de Jager to render accurately this novel which portrays an Arab insurgency against foreign occupation. By following the fates of multiple characters from all strata of Algerian society, Djebar dramatically shows how the desperate conflict transforms women’s experience drawing them inexorably from the private world of their home into a war for their community’s liberation.”

From Norman Manea

An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania
by Marta Petreu
Translated by Bogdan Aldea
Ivan R. Dee, Publisher

“Marta Petreu’s book is not only an excellent sholarly book but a briilliant analysis of the contradictions of a paradoxical, nihilist modern thinker and of a bleak period in Romanian and European history. The work of the French-Romanian philosopher E.M.Cioran is read in the context of the broader tragedy of the intellectuals atracted by extreme, frivolous and violent ideologies.”

From Christopher Merrill

Master of the Sea
by Jose Sarney
Translated by Gregory Rabassa
Aliform Publishers

“Master of the Sea by Jose Sarney, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa, is a magical novel by Brazil’s first civilian president—‘a maritime epic,’ in the words of Claude Levi-Strauss. Indeed Sarney’s love of the sea is everywhere on display in the pages of his first novel, and in the myths and legends and fishing lore of life along the Maranhense Gulf in northern Brazil he charts the contours of a marvelous and mysterious world.”

From Ilan Stavans

Distant Star
by Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions

“Bolaño is by far the most exciting ‘new voice’ to emerge from Latin America since the so-called literary boom of the seventies. This magisterial short novel approaches the Pinochet years from an ingenious perspective.”

And

Memories of My Melancholy Whores
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translated by Edith Grossman
Alfred A. Knopf

“Almost eighty, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude is still in top form. This novella establishes an inspiring dialogue with Russian and Japanese literature.”

From Gioia Timpanelli

A Dream in Polar Fog
by Yuri Rytkheu
Translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse
Archipelago Books

“This adventure story of the Chukchi people, from the Chukotka region of Siberia, is a love song to human survival, both physical and metaphysical, a true story about change, endurance, and an essential way to live in the world. This well written novel and fine translation transcends borders.”

From Lawrence Venuti

Have Mercy on Us All
by Fred Vargas
Translated by David Bellos
Simon & Schuster

“This year I have been reading translations of foreign thrillers, partly because I am translating Italian noir and I am keen to see how other translators deal with a genre that has been stamped by a decades-long tradition in the UK and the US. Among the translations that have most impressed me is David Bellos’s version of Fred Vargas’s Have Mercy on Us All. A French murder mystery featuring an eccentric yet brilliantly insightful detective, Vargas’s novel draws on the early modern history of the plague to drive the plot. Bellos, meanwhile, creates a British style that is rich in colloquialisms and slang, at once evoking writers like Agatha Christie and–because Vargas’s unique narrative is so rooted in Paris–casting them into a strange new shape. Not only does this translation send the reader to a foreign place, but it makes home look different.”