So the Society of Authors (wha?) has a list of the 50 outstanding translations of the past 50 years. Marcel Proust is at #33 (that's it? And not even the Lydia Davis translation?), Georges Pérec at #29, but not for La disparition, Marguerite Duras at #24, but for The Lover, Calvino at #18 for if on a winter's night a traveller (no questions here), Michael Hamburger's Paul Celan at #14 (sure, why not? Anyone courageous enough to tackle Celan deserves to be on this list. Even John Felstine. As long as Celan appears on the list), Yukio Mishima at #8 for Death In Midsummer (as much as I used to like Mishima, I wouldn't have put him this high; and where is Kawabata?). Number 1? Raymond Queneau for Exercices de style. 50 mille milliards de sonnets would probably have deserved a place here too.

The question of course is what was the criteria for classification. When considering the presence of Celan, Calvino, Pérec and Queneau (yes, I know, I am focusing a lot on French writers), we could think of how ingrained within the weaving of the source language they are, Duras's L'amant? Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude? I'll have to say that Gregory Rabassa makes the translation process here quite invisible: "On the day of his execution, Colonel Aureliano Buendias would remember the day his father took him to the market to witness the miracle of ice." Yes, that is from memory. Uh, Patrick Süskind? Irène Némirovsky?

Anyway, who's missing from this list?