Making the foreign familiar

Boyd Tonkin is superbly qualified to compile this volume. As literary editor of the Independent, he revived that newspaper’s foreign fiction prize, first won by Orhan Pamuk and his translator Victoria Holbrook. Translators are routinely undervalued. As with stage-lighting technicians, one is apt consciously to notice only glaring blunders; so it is good to know that the Independent’s prize is shared between author and translator.

I nevertheless approached this book with some scepticism. I couldn’t quite see the point of it. If one has read a novel already, what would one gain from a three-page essay? If not, surely a discussion that describes the book and reveals the plot would be a terrible spoiler, ruining the ‘narrative greed’ which is one of the driving pleasures of reading.

I am still not quite sure who will buy this book; but anyone who does is undoubtedly in for a treat. It is not just the breadth of Tonkin’s cultural knowledge which is immense, though there are not many editors who can write sentences such as:

The 1973 translation by the diplomat-scholar Sir Cecil Parrott is authoritative; however, Paul Selver’s first English translation from 1930 lends a beguiling, music-hall mischief to its period patter.

It is, however, the range of Tonkin’s inclusive, infectious, though never uncritical, enthusiasm that is truly admirable. The novels sweep across continents and centuries; Tonkin’s appreciation is always fresh, unforced and illuminating.

Of course, every reader will instantly draw up a list of classics he or she thinks should have been included: Arthur Waley’s version of Monkey, perhaps; Torquemada, Man of Straw, Oblomov, The Violent Land, or whatever. (My own most heartfelt wail would be for Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian trilogy. And if one is looking to praise the most astonishingly virtuosic translations, Gilbert Adair’s version of Perec’s La Disparition surely deserves at least a footnote: like the original, A Void brilliantly avoids ever using the letter ‘e’.)