The P&V translations (Russian to English) of both Crime and Punishment and Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Both these books have made me fall in love with Dostoevsky’s writing. I also liked the Hapgood translation (French to English) of Le Miserables by Victor Hugo.
I own it but haven’t read it yet, but apparently Edith Grossman’s translation of is supposed to be great. Also I just learned she died a couple of weeks ago, RIP.
The Lunar Trilogy by Jerzy Zulawski. And it’s a terrible translation (as far as I can tell without being able to read the original Polish). It’s very rough, sloppy english, and filled with trivial errors. However, the original story still shines through, and it seems like the translator mostly stuck with the original phrasing, resulting in awkward english, but an interesting view of the original. So… fine. (It’s the basis for my favorite movie, and it was a long wait to get any translation at all.)
I’ve read the Vietnamese classic Tale of Kieu in two translations, one trying to stick to the original language closer than the other, and it’s an interesting comparison.
Other favorites:
The Obscene Bird of Night, The Baron in The Trees, Collected stories of Bruno Schulz, Collected stories of Daniil Kharms
The Baron in the Trees is so good! (I disagree with the title translation to English, because the Italian title is less precise and can be interpreted as “the out of control baron” too)
The accursed kings by Maurice Druon, translated by Humphrey Hare Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald In a Dark Wood Wandering by Hella S. Haasse, translated by Lewis C. Kaplan Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney …among others
La Disparition by George Perec in French, translated to English as A Void. Neither version uses the letter ‘e’. I think the French original is better since the translator had to cheat a bit with the numbers (5 and 26 appear frequently for self-referential reasons, and when spelled in French don’t use e, but are translated as numerals.) but was still impressed. I read the side-by-side translated version, although I’m only marginally literate in French.
The Best of World SF anthologies 1 & 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar have stories from all around the world, often translated into English. Some of those are fantastic, and often have a really different “flavour” to a lot of western sci fi
From English to French: the Discworld series, translated by Patrick Couton. They’re what made me want to become a translator in the first place.
From Tamil to English, Women Dreaming by Salma. From Chinese to English, Strange Beasts of China. Pretty much all of Tilted Axis Press’s works, actually, and Charco Press for LATAM has some wonderful stuff too.
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
“Very well. Let’s have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.”
“Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?” Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi
That’s not the whole story; along with this epic translated poem, there’s this whole saga of (among other things) the two inventors trying to work on a thinking machine. This thing that makes the poem is one of the prototypes; one of them starts saying 2+2=7 and gets mad when one inventor starts yelling at it that it isn’t, and chases them both up the hills and into a cave trying to kill them… it’s just great. It’s fantastic. The whole thing is great, and it’s translated into English flawlessly.
I feel like whoever translated Lem’s sillier works definitely deserves a massive hand because oh my god there is so much wordplay like this and it all carries over to english really well. Like all the drug names and made up words and Tarantoga’s entire three page long ramble about ‘futuology’/predictive etymology which I guess had to be entirely rewritten in order to work in English in The Futurlogical Congress
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