First off, click here for the 2008 translation spreadsheet, and click here for the 2009 one. As in the past, I’ve only been keeping track of original translations of fiction and poetry that are available for sale in the United States. Re-translations and reprints are both excluded from this database.

These spreadsheets contain a lot of information broken down ina number of ways, including by publisher, by country, by language, by month, etc.

The 2009 data is still coming in, so comparing totals isn’t all that telling. But just as a frame of reference, in 2008 there were 361 works of fiction and poetry published in translation, and so far I’ve identified 196 coming out in 2009.

Looking at this month-by-month is a bit more telling. The 2009 database numbers drop off dramatically after May, so I’m going to assume that there are a number of books coming out in June-Dec that I haven’t come across yet.

Through May, in 2008 159 works in translation were published; in 2009 that number is down to 143. (Again, disclaimer, I could be missing some titles—if you know of any, e-mail me at chad.post at rochester dot edu.) That’s a pretty significant 10% drop. Hopefully things will even out over the year, but in a recession, I suspect a lot of publishers looking to cut costs aren’t all that thrilled with paying a translator on top of the regular book costs. (Not that Random House didn’t just make $185.5 million before taxes and interest in 2008. But that is a “down year.”)

Looking at the breakdown by language, in 2008 the top five languages translated into English were: French, Spanish, German, Arabic, and Japanese, in that order. This year’s breakdown is slightly different, with Spanish coming in on top and French, German, Arabic, and Japanese right behind.

So far in 2009, I’ve found translations coming out from 81 different publishers, which gives me hope that these numbers could suddenly jump—last year 139 different publishers did at least one work of fiction or poetry in translation.

It’s still too early to draw any grand conclusions, but it is interesting to see what’s coming out from where and by whom, and to discover titles that haven’t gotten much attention.

While my dream of making this into an editable, online database/wiki has yet to materialize, I’ve been posting updates to this on a regular basis and receiving nice feedback about missing titles, misspelled names, etc. Additions to the database have been slowing down considerably, and hopefully the updated version is 97-98% complete.

You can download the spreadsheet by clicking here and see the complete list of titles along with breakdowns by country, language, month, fiction vs. poetry, and publisher. Please, if you have any corrections (like filling in the “??” entries for some translators), please e-mail me at chad.post at rochester dot edu.

I identified 356 titles published over the course of 2008, from 137 different publishers, and more than 46 languages. That’s a pretty miniscule number, especially considering the fact that 50,000 works of fiction were published in the U.S. last year . . . But it’s a starting point, and it will be interesting to see what happens in future years.

And speaking of the future, although this is grossly incomplete, here’s the first version of the 2009 Translation Database. There are tons of catalogs yet to enter, and websites to visit, and reviews to dig through, but I’ve already found 104 titles coming out during the first eight months of 2009. Not a bad start . . . And if you’re a publisher or translator or person in the know, and have books to add to this list, please let me know.

I’ll write a longer commentary and analysis of the 2008 list after the first of the year, and will start looking at comparisons between 2008 and 2009 around the same time. In the meantime, you can start planning your “one-translation-a-day” schedule in order to read all books published in translation over the course of 2009 . . . . We’ll start highlighting these books (and reviewing them) next month . . .

In case you need a refresher of which translated books came out this year, here’s an updated spreadsheet listing all 339 titles identified so far. (I hesitate to call this a final list, since ever couple days a new title trickles in . . . But if not final, it’s very, very close.)

(Disclaimer: I only tracked new titles that had never been translated before, so no new translation of Kafka, no reprints, no paperback versions of previously published hardcovers, and no kids books or graphic novels.)

It’s gotten to the point where I’m not finding any new titles, and with our “Best Translated Book of the Year” award on the horizon, it seems like the perfect time to post the most up-to-date (and possibly final) spreadsheet of 2008 Translations.

As in the past, this file contains info on all 328 books I identified (261 fiction, 67 poetry), breaking the list down by country of origin, language of original, publishers, month published, etc.

At the start of this project, I naively predicted that there would be “420-450” titles by the end of the year. . . . Well, being off by more than 100 (or 25%) isn’t too bad . . . right?

So the number is even smaller than imagined. And assuming that for 2008 are similar to 2007, these 328 titles represent 0.6% of all the new fiction titles being published in the U.S., and 3.3% of all literature titles. (I assume I know the difference in these categories, but Bowker’s info isn’t all that clear.)

Michael Orthofer wrote a great piece on this a while back, but the growth of works of fiction and literature published in 2007 is astounding:

According to Gallagher, among the major publishing categories, the big winners last year were once again Fiction and Literature. There were 50,071 new fiction titles introduced in the U.S. last year, up 17% from 2006, and the number of new titles in the category in 2007 was almost twice what it was as recently as 2002. Similarly, there was an 19% rise in new literature books last year, to 9,796, which followed a 31% increase in new literature titles in 2006.

As I mentioned above, we’re gearing up for our “Best Translated Book of 2008” award. This year we’re going to do things a bit differently. We will be announcing a longlist of 25 works of fiction in December, announce a shortlist in January, and a winner in February. (For poetry, we’ll announce a separate shortlist, since there’s a disproportionate amount of fiction titles, and merging the two into one list would do a disservice to the great works of poetry published this year.)

In addition to our panelists, we really want to enlist your help. So, if you have any titles you’d like to recommend, please post them in the comments below, or e-mail me at chad.post at rochester dot edu. We’ll include all reader votes in deciding on the longlist. And as we did last year, we’ll allow everyone to vote on the shortlist and will announce your choice along with the panel’s as the best translation of the year.

Point of clarification: what we mean by “best translated book,” is the best overall book published in 2008 in terms of literary quality and translation. In other words, we’re not looking for just the most skillful translation from last year, but the best book that was published in translation. A translated book is only as good as its translation, so we’re not ignoring the skill of the translator, but a quality translation of a flawed novel isn’t what we’re interested in.

Enough said for now . . .

• by Antonio Lobo Antunes, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa (W.W. Norton, $18.95, 9780393329483)

Along with 2666, this was the other galley that I was thrilled to receive this past summer. Since reading The Natural Order of Things a number of years ago, I’ve read all of Antunes’s translated titles, with Act of the Damned being one of my all-time favorite titles.

is the first place I’ve seen this new book reviewed, and although Craig Seligman has his reservations, it still sounds like a book definitely worth reading:

The style is poetic stream-of-consciousness, with voices melting and melding into one another. The principal narrator is Paulo Antunes Lima, son of the transvestite showgirl and prostitute Soraia (or Carlos, when he isn’t in his blond wig) and the alcoholic teacher-turned-whore Judite—in other words, a young man screwed from the start. At the novel’s opening, he has been hospitalized in a condition of near catatonia, circumstances suggesting a debt to Benjy Compson, though Paulo is no idiot. And while Benjy’s interior monologue at the beginning of The Sound and the Fury recalls the facts of his world as he remembers them, Paulo and the other narrators are constantly drifting into might-have-beens, making it hard to distinguish memory from fantasy. Dashes set off bits of dialogue (as in Joyce), and occasional italics signal a change of time or scene (as in Faulkner), but What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?, unlike Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury, doesn’t hotdog through a variety of styles. It’s way too somber for that.

• by Celine Curiol, translated from the French by Sam Richard, introduction by Paul Auster (Seven Stories Press, $24.95, 9781583228487)

Also reviewed in the new issue of and also involving a transvestite, this seems like a good pairing with the Antunes. From the opening of the

Céline Curiol’s English-language debut, Voice Over, is a thoroughly French affair. Like much of Samuel Beckett’s work (the epigraph to this book is, quite appropriately, taken from Molloy), it chronicles, in relentless detail, an individual’s battle with a host of ontological neuroses that threaten to overwhelm her. And like Beckett’s worldview, Curiol’s is unremittingly bleak.

• by Borisav Stankovic, translated from the Serbian by Milo Yelesiyevich (Serbian Classics Press, $19.95, 9780967889344)

After finding out about Serbian Classics Press thanks to a piece in Literary Saloon about Danilo Kis’s Mansarda (which SCP also published recently, and which we will be reviewing in the near future), I corresponded a few times with Milo Yelesiyevich, the publisher of SCP and the translator of this book. Milo was kind enough to send us a review copy, which was much appreciated—I had never heard of Stankovic, but the translator’s introduction is really intriguing. Despite the success of Stankovic’s musical play Kostana, Stankovic had a tough time getting Bad Blood published:

So why did publishers unanimously reject Bad Blood?

Stankovic broke a number of taboos. His ambition was to reveal the full spectrum of a woman’s life, ranging from childhood adoration of her father through immature fantasies, marriage, childbirth, disappointment, infidelity, to the final devolution of marriage into a sado-masochistic partnership where only death can bring relief.

Stankovic’s own view of civilization is pessimistic and inclined to tragedy.

Considered the “first true modern psychological novel written in Serbian,” Bad Blood looks very interesting, and hopefully we’ll have a full review of this in the not-too-distant future.

As part of our goal to highlight as many of these titles as possible, below are capsules on a few more translations coming out this month.

• by Victor Pelevin, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield (Viking, $25.95, 9780670019885)

Similar to what I wrote last week about Slavenka Drakulic, Pelevin is one of a few contemporary Russian authors whose books always make it into English translation. (He can be contrasted with Vladimir Sorokin, who has only had a couple of titles published here—both by NYRB—although he’s published a ) And similar to a number of well-respected authors, Pelevin was first published by New Directions. Most of Pelevin’s books have fantastical set-ups, and this one is no different. Here’s how the review in opens:

In this strange, frenetic and beguiling account of a Russia plagued by werewolves and vampires of various natures, the heroine is a fox whose name (A Hu-Li) unfortunately translates in her adopted homeland as something approximating ‘what the fuck.’ A Hu-Li has the appearance of a luscious 14-year-old girl, the mind of a particularly sly Buddhist monk and an endearing habit of name-dropping all the famous people she’s met over the past 2,000 years. Originally from China, she’s now plying her vulpine trade at Moscow’s National Hotel. But A Hu-Li’s version of turning tricks is not exactly conventional. She hypnotises her willing victim, feeding off his energies with the help of her secret weapon, ‘a fluffy, flexible, fire-red’ tail.

• by Sjon, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Telegram, $12.95, 9781846590375)

Nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize, and winner of the Nordic Prize, The Blue Fox sounds like a subtle, intriguing novel. From the review on by Sarah Hesketh:

Two men dominate the book – local pastor Baldur Skuggason, who is tracking the eponymous fox through glacial fields, and Fridrik B. Fridjonsson, a returning prodigal who has abandoned Iceland for late seventeenth century Copenhagen and the company of a group called the lotus-eaters. Fridrik returns home to settle his deceased parents’ affairs, intending to burn the farm buildings and head back to a life of smoke and pleasure domes, but his discovery of a young girl, Abba, scrabbling for food in the outhouse of an old friend, prompts an act of kindness which forces him to stay, and sets him up in opposition to the reverend hunter.

The fact that Abba has Down’s Syndrome, a fact recognised by the medically well-read Fridrik, is an unsettlingly modern sleight of hand. In a book where everything else is perfectly pitched historically, it rings an odd but important note, forcing the reader to examine things more closely, and thereby realise that what we’re essentially reading is a good old-fashioned fairy tale.

• by Pawel Huelle, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Serpent’s Tail, $14.95, 9781852429454)

Built around a digression from The Magic Mountain, this novel tells the story of Hans Castorp’s time in Gdansk. The book received a ton of praise when it came out in England last year, with almost all reviewers remarking on the wealth of colorful characters depicted in the novel. Beyond good reviews, it was also shortlisted for the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (eventually won by Paul Verhaeghen for Omega Minor). Hopefully the review coverage here will be as widespread and positive, but in the meantime, here’s a with Heulle, and reviews from and

• by Peter Fogtdal, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally (Hawthorne Books, $15.95, 9780979018800)

We’re going to be running a review of this title in the near future, but instead of describing the book, I want to point out Fogtdal’s excellent blog that includes some

The Tsar’s Dwarf is the story of a Danish dwarf who is given to the Russian Tsar Peter The Great as a gift. She is brought to the Russian court where she falls in love, is humiliated, and treated like a toy. It’s a funny but gruesome story about human dignity. At least, that’s what it says on the cover, so it must be true.

Also on his blog is and a sweet rant about the Olympics that includes making fun of Americans for not getting badminton (one of the sports I wish NBC had covered better, along with table tennis and team handball) and this bit about Michael Phelps:

What’s wrong with Michael Phelps? I worry about him. Sure, he has won eight gold medals, but what’s up with the greed? Can’t you get enough, Michael? Aren’t you aware that you’ve won eight times as many medals as fucking India? India is a continent, Michael. It’s not a dump in Michigan. Have a little respect.

I wouldn’t say Ann Arbor is a dump, and I don’t think India is its own continent, but still, this gave me a chuckle.

• by Emil Hakl, translated from the Czech by Marek Tomin (Twisted Spoon Press, $15, 9788086264301)

Although their book production has changed a bit (compare one of the new titles to Unger’s The Maimed and you’ll know what I mean), Twisted Spoon Press still produces some fine looking books from some very interesting European authors. We have a couple TSP reviews coming in the near future, and this sounds like a book we should take a closer look at as well:

Taking its cue both from Joyce’s Ulysses and Hrabal’s freely associating stream of anecdote, Of Kids & Parents is about a father and son taking a walk through Prague, over the course of which, and in the pubs and bars they stop into, their personal lives are revealed as entwined with the past sixty years of upheaval in their corner of Europe.

And this Boyd Tonkin quote doesn’t hurt: “Anyone who has ever crawled from pub to pub in Prague — or anyone who wants to — should read this utterly beguiling novel of uproarious surfaces and melancholy depths.”

• by Slavenka Drakulic, translated from the Croatian by Christina Pribichevich-Zoric (Penguin, $13, 9780143114154)

Along with Dubravka Ugresic, Drakulic is one of the few female writers from the former Yugoslavia whose books are routinely published in English translation. And along with Ugresic and three other female Croatian authors, she was labeled a “witch” in the infamous 1992 Globus article that lead to at least Ugresic and Drakulic leaving Croatia to live in exile. Drakulic made a name for herself first as a journalist, but has since become a respected novelist.

The Frida in the title is Frida Kahlo, and this is a fictional book that blends Frida’s paintings and imagined interior life. The recently gave it a decent review, though admitting that the book doesn’t always succeed.

Which is unfortunate. One of the main reasons we started this website was to promote international literature and uncover great books and underpromoted authors. Besides, going through all the books coming out is really fun and helps give me personally a good sense of what’s going on in the international lit scene . . .

So anyway, I’m going to try this again starting with September books. According to the latest translation database there are 35 translations coming out in September—31 works of fiction and 4 collections of poetry. Here are short write-ups on the three titles:

• Walter Moers, translated from the German by John Brownjohn (Overlook, $22.95, 9781585678730)

I heard of Moers a few years ago during an editorial trip to Germany when the representative from Hanser started telling us about “The Little Asshole” comic books that no Americans will publish due to the title . . . It sounds like a lot of Moers cartoon works are pretty irreverent and funny. It may just be the Overlook copy, but this book (with 21 woodcuts by Gustave Doré) sounds a bit more subdued and more young adulty (if there is such a term). Overlook describes this as “the tumultuous tale of a little boy who needs to defeat Death through a series of six impossible tasks.”

• Stephane Audeguy, translated from the French by John Cullen (Harcourt, $25, 9780151013296)

Although historical fiction isn’t really my thing, this with Audeguy makes this book about Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s older brother sound pretty interesting:

How did the ideas for this unusual novel and its central character come to you?
Did you simply want to write about the 18th century or were you formulating a response to Rousseau, or playing with literary conventions by creating an imaginary autobiography?

To paraphrase Alfred Jarry, I may say I think the need for an autobiography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s brother was increasingly widely felt. Moreover, the fact that one of the most brilliant contributors to the invention of the modern individual should, in his own Confessions, show himself so blind to the existence of his own brother – this sparked off my imagination. My novel, Fils unique, was conceived in these imaginings. Incidentally, I have the greatest admiration for Rousseau (for his acute sense of comedy, for one thing) but also several reservations with regard to a particular kind of rousseauist attitude. I freely admit that my book plays something of a ‘game’ with literary conventions and with plenty of other things too; this is not, however, purely gratuitous.

• Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa Editions, $15, 9781933372600)

This book—Barbery’s second novel—won the 2007 French Booksellers Prize. And the Brive-la-Gaillarde Reader’s Prize. And the Rotary International Prize (France). And the French Librarians’ Prize for Culture. And to top it off, this is a The novel is set in a fancy French hotel and told in two voices—that of Renee, the “short, ugly, and plump” concierge who is also well versed in the arts and literature, and Paloma, a “super-smart twelve-year-old,” who lives in the hotel. There are a lot of positive reviews for this book, and I have the feeling this is going to catch on with a lot of people, even if it is “annoyingly simplistic,” like Michael Orthofer claims in There is a sample chapter available

The Excel file linked to above is a bit different from the ones I posted in the past. It still contains all the information about every original translation of adult fiction and poetry coming out this year (excluding all reprints and retranslations) and breaks this info down by publisher, language, and country.

This time I added a few spreadsheets though, sorting the data by month and genre (fiction vs. poetry), and breaking down the publishers into top publishers of fiction and top publishers of poetry.

Looking at the breakdown by month, it’s interesting to note that almost every month falls into the 25-30 title range, the major exceptions being April (38, due in part to National Poetry Month and the rush to bring out all books of poetry then), and July and August (15 and 14 respectively, hopefully because summer publishing schedules are slow and not because I missed a bunch of books). Using that 25-30 range as a basis, I’m guessing that I’m missing approximately 20 December titles and that I wouldn’t be surprised if the final count of translations published in 2008 is closer to 325 that the 400 I predicted early on.

At the moment, almost 20% of all the translations published are works of poetry (most of which are published by Green Integer, Copper Canyon, FSG, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Zephyr).

Looking at this breakdown between fiction and poetry, and the overall low number of translations being published, it seems almost possible that one could read all original translations as they come out . . . I personally couldn’t do this, but I can envision someone reading basically a book a day for a year and reading all the new translations.

As always if you see anything missing from the master list, please let me know and I’ll add it right away.