eMusic Bookshelf

International Bookshelf

Jess Sauer

The idea that diverse languages are a form of divine punishment, serving only to separate us, is a popular one in numerous mythologies and religious traditions. In Genesis, humanity is unified by a common tongue until God, concerned that the people are becoming too powerful and proud, scatters them and creates different languages. Invented systems such as Esperanto have sought to remove this curse through the reinstatement of a common tongue. In an era when language death is increasingly common, however, we'd like to take a moment to celebrate language's heterogeneity — as well as the translators who ensure that language barriers don't prevent us from sharing our literature across cultures.

Here's a sampling of works that have achieved international success in translation. Turkish novelist Orhan Pahmuk and Portuguese author Jose Saramago's works have earned them both Nobel prizes. Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist holds the Guinness World record for the most-translated book. Norwegian Wood is often cited as the book that made Japanese author Haruki Murakami a national superstar, a fame that has since evolved into international celebrity. Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which mirrors the writer's own experience in Maoist China before emigrating to France, was an international bestseller. Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina has not only endured in the century-plus since its publication, but continues to earn top billing in lists of history's greatest literary works.

The Alchemist

Available in 67 languages, the Guinness record-holder for the world's most translated book, The Alchemist is often championed by fans of — for lack of a better term — self-help fiction. A self-proclaimed fable about an Andalusian shepherd literally following his dreams, The Alchemist distinguishes itself from the pack by being first and foremost a story, as opposed to a moral with a tacked-on tale. Compared with the dogma-in-disguise company it keeps on bestseller lists, The Alchemist is refreshingly agenda-free. It may be low on subtlety, high in moral fiber, and earnest enough to make the squeamish among us squirm, but this is a seeker's book in the best sense, barefaced and genuine as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince — if a little less dazzling. Jeremy Irons' reading keeps the cutesy dialed down.
Anna Karenina

More than a hundred years after its publication, Anna Karenina has stayed secure in its status as one of the greatest novels of all time. Married aristocrat Anna's destructive obsession with bachelor Count Vronsky forms the core of the novel, but Tolstoy branches far beyond this central story, painting intensely psychological portraits of characters struggling both romantically and financially. Though the story's aristocratic concerns might appear at first glance to bear little resemblance to the modern world, its themes remain relevant, and Tolstoy's unrivaled sensitivity to the subtleties of human experience lends the story a timelessness that most authors aspire toward, but only few achieve. "Important" and "enjoyable" aren't always synonymous when it comes to classics, but Tolstoy's masterpiece remains immensely engrossing.
Blindness

In Jose Saramago's land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a woman, and uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Inexplicably immune to the sudden "white blindness" afflicting her city's population, a doctor's wife feigns blindness in order to follow her husband to a make-do quarantine colony. As the infected population grows, the city becomes a police state, and the colony degenerates into an anarchic ghetto ruled by brutal and rapacious gangs. Forced to conceal her sightedness from those who might take advantage of it, the doctor's wife must help a band of inmates escape the atrocious conditions of the colony. Saramago's vertiginous prose captures the panic of pandemic, making Blindness an immensely affective meditation on the fragility of the social structures on whose soundness we depend.

Norwegian Wood

Set in a 1960s Tokyo roiling with student unrest, Norwegian Wood is, by Murakami's own estimate, his only realistic novel, and it's an experiment he doesn't plan on repeating. Temporarily abandoning the strange and seedy underworlds of his longer novels, Murakami confines himself to a more human scale, focusing on the precarious bonds formed in the wake of tragedy. College students Toru and Naoko are connected through the late Kizuki, Toru's best friend and Naoko's first boyfriend. Three years after Kizuki's suicide, the two become entangled in a mutual mourning that sometimes resembles love. When Naoko's grief drives her to a sanatorium, Toru is torn by his attraction to Midori, a full-blooded foil to the vaporous Naoko. Murakami's ability to describe labyrinthine realities with Carveresque simplicity has made him one of the world's most celebrated novelists, but this, his most earthbound book, just might be his best.
My Name Is Red

To call Nobel laureate Orhan Pahmuk's My Name Is Red a whodunit would be a gross oversimplification. Set in the Ottoman Empire during the 16th century, the book begins with the murder of a miniaturist, but those expecting a straightforward mystery would do best to look elsewhere. Pahmuk discusses romantic and philosophical themes through numerous narrators who change with each chapter. One of these is a de facto detective, one is the murderer, and others are fellow miniaturists, but Pahmuk is an equal-opportunity author, and being alive — or even animate — isn't a strict qualification for taking a turn as storyteller. In addition to numerous human voices, we also hear less expected voices, such as that of a coin, a severed head, and the color crimson.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Dai Sijie's semiautobiographical novel explores two types of taming. In 1970s China, teenagers Ma and Luo are sent to a remote mountain village of former opium growers, recast in the Maoist mold as miners and farmers. This mountain exile is part of the massive "reeducation" program in which children of the educated classes are sent to rural communities to be broken of their worldly ways. Ma and Luo are meant to be unlearning their city habits through manual labor, but they soon become locally renowned as film reenactors, a reputation that earns them an excuse from work and an invitation from the daughter of the mountain's most sought-after tailor. When Luo and the little seamstress fall in love, he launches his own reeducation campaign, hoping that contraband Western novels will make her more sophisticated. Sijie's anecdotal style allows Balzac and the Little Seamstress to expose the problematic nature of attempting to transform a people — or just one person — without becoming overly ponderous.