The Best Translated Book Award jury announced its longlist yesterday, creating the possibility of a two-peat for author Laszlo Krasznahorkai, although not offering the same opportunity for translator Ottilie Mulzet, as George Szirtes translated last year's winning Satantango.
This year the submissions exceeded 500 for the first time, and came from more than 140 publishers worldwide, many of them small presses like Frisch & Co., Hispabooks Publishing, New Vessel Press, Sylph Editions, Nightboat Books, Ugly Duckling Presse and Tam Tam Books. Books from 23 presses made the longlist.
The honorees range in length from the 36-page cahier Her Not All Her to the two-volume 854-page, slipcased A True Novel. Two books, both from Archipelago Books, are from series: Blinding is the first of a trilogy and My Struggle, Book Two, second of a hexology. Both are striking new works of autobiographical fiction.
Books translated from Spanish, with four submissions, edged out French, Hungarian, Norwegian, Japanese, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish, Arabic, German, Czech, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Hebrew and Icelandic.
The great thing about this award, the great thing about literature in translation in general, is that the books won't find their way to the end of an algorithm and several wouldn't work at all as e-books. (For example, in Her Not All Her, 11 sentences in the original German are written between the lines in a different color--red--and full-bleed color illustrations facing the text. Leg over Leg has the original Arabic on the facing pages. A True Novel is a two-volume slipcase. You could read it on a device but that just wouldn't be any fun.) And they, of course, all look really nice next to each other. These books are made for handselling. You'll soon be able to download shelf talkers.
It's crunch time for the BTBA jury, who are required to read all of the longlist titles. That's 24 books in 35 days. The finalists will be announced on April 15, the winner on April 24. --George Carroll
The 25 selections, in random order:
Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet (New Directions, originally published in Hungary)
My Struggle: Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett (Archipelago Books, Norway)
The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated by Jeffrey Gray (Yale University Press, Guatemala)
A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters (Other Press, Japan)
Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter (Archipelago Books, Romania)
Tirza by Arnon Grunberg, translated by Sam Garrett (Open Letter, Netherlands)
Sleet by Stig Dagerman, translated by Steven Hartman (David R. Godine, Sweden)
Through the Night by Stig Sæterbakken, translated by Seán Kinsella (Dalkey Archive Press, Norway)
Leg over Leg Vol. 1 by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, translated by Humphrey Davies (Library of Arabic Literature, NYU Press, Lebanon)
City of Angels or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf, translated by Damion Searls (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, Germany)
The Infatuations by Javier Marias, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Knopf, Spain)
Commentary by Marcelle Sauvageot, translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley and Anna Moschovakis (Ugly Duckling Presse, France)
Her Not All Her by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Damion Searls (Sylph Editions, Austria)
Red Grass by Boris Vian, translated by Paul Knobloch (Tam Tam Books, France)
The Forbidden Kingdom by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, translated by Paul Vincent (Pushkin Press, Netherlands)
The Whispering Muse by Sjón, translated by Victoria Cribb (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Iceland)
The Devil's Workshop by Jachym Topol, translated by Alex Zucker (Portobello Books, Czech Republic)
Horses of God by Mahi Binebine, translated by Lulu Norman (Tin House Books, Morocco)
In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated by Edith Grossman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Spain)
Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov (New York Review Books, Ukraine)
The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente, translated by Katharine Silver (McSweeney's Books, Spain)
Sandalwood Death by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt (University of Oklahoma Press, China)
Textile by Orly Castel-Bloom, translated by Dalya Bilu (Feminist Press, Israel)
The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, Italy)
The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, translated by Nick Caistor (New Vessel Press, Argentina)