It’s often said that humor can’t be translated. I’m a translator of more than thirty books, and I know that’s wrong! However, publishers rarely consider funny books for translation. I’ve made this list to point out to you all that sometruly great books that are really funny have broken through the wall protecting English-language readers from the wit and humor of the rest of the world. I’m also a literature professor, and I’m keen to get people to understand that literature does not have to be boring. If Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Kurt Vonnegut, or David Sedaris make you laugh, then so will Voltaire, Pekic, Hašek, Voinovich, and Gary!
I wrote
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
A young man brought up to believe that all is well in the world travels across the globe and encounters cruelty, idiocy, folly, and nastiness of every kind. The arguments used by his mentor in optimism to explain away the ills of the planet are devious, absurd, and yet familiar even today. In the end, Candide, sobered by experience, gives up on philosophy altogether and settles down to look after his garden. This classic work nearly 300 years old remains a treasure of wit and wisdom—and will give you a hearty dose of laughter too.
Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.
A classic work of eighteenth century literature, Candide is Voltaire's fast-paced novella of struggle and adventure that used satire as a form of social critique. Candide enlists the help of his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, to help him reunite with his estranged lover, Lady Cunegonde. But the journey welcomes many unexpected challenges, and overcoming or outwitting the…
The rollicking adventures of a dimwit recruit in the armies of World War I. A classic demonstration of why military intelligence is a contradiction in terms—and indirectly, one of the greatest anti-war novels of all time. Yet you can’t stop smiling at the poor oaf and laughing with him at the outrageous things that go on in times of conflict.
The inspiration for such works as Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Jaroslav Hasek's black satire The Good Soldier Svejk is translated with an introduction by Cecil Parrott in Penguin Classics.
Good-natured and garrulous, Svejk becomes the Austro-Hungarian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War - although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards, getting drunk and becoming a general nuisance, the resourceful Svejk uses all his natural cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the doctors, police, clergy and officers…
When sixteen-year-old Ashlee Sutton's home life falls apart, she is beset by a rare mental illness that makes her believe she's clairvoyant. While most people scoff at her, she begins demonstrating an uncanny knack for sometimes predicting the future, using what could either be pure luck or something more remarkable.…
Andrija’s a lifeguard on the river in a small town in the Balkans. During the war, he jumps in to save a man from drowning. Turns out he wasn’t a local, or even a partisan, but a high-ranking Nazi officer. Labelled a collaborator, Andrija flees at the end of the war and ends up an odd-job man in West Germany. When his employer falls into his own swimming pool, Andrija is convicted of his murder—for the man who died was the officer he’d once saved. In prison, Andrija discovers a book by Plato and he tries to write his own defense as if he were a philosopher too. The contortions he gets into as he tries to undo the tangle he’s been put in by history get funnier and funnier every time you reread this forgotten classic.
Originally published in 1975, The Apology and the Last Days is the final volume in a trilogy of novels-also including The Rise and Fall of Icarus Gubelkian and How to Quiet a Vampire-about the aftermath of World War II, by Borislav Pekic, one of the former Yugoslavia's most important postwar writers. The narrator tells his story from prison, where he is serving time for the murder of a former Nazi official. As the novel unfolds, we learn that the victim was the same person whom the narrator, while a lifeguard during the war, saved from drowning, thus making him vulnerable…
This is the first and probable the only truly comic novel to come out of the old USSR. Set in the army during World War II, it riffs unsparingly on the absurdities of Soviet life and takes digs at human follies of every kind. The most memorable chapter, which brings tears to my eyes just when I think about it, contains a recipe for homebrew vodka made from the commonest of human products. Don’t miss this one! You’ll not look at your garden the same way ever again.
Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant and passes the war peacefully tending the village postmistress's garden. Just after the German invasion, the secret police discover this mysterious soldier lurking behind the front line. Their pursuit of Chonkin and his determined resistance lead to wild skirmishes and slapstick encounters. Vladimir Voinovich's…
A fast-paced literary thriller with a strong sci-fi element and loaded with existential questions. Beyond the entertainment value, this book takes a hard look at the perilous world of publishing, which is on a crash course to meet the nascent, no-holds-barred world of AI. Could these worlds co-exist, or will…
Irresistible! Romain Gary had hoodwinked the literary world by publishing prize-winning successful novels under the false identity of Émile Ajar and was paranoid about being found out. So he wrote a confession by “Émile Ajar” to show that he hatedRomain Gary (“Uncle Bogey” in this novel) and was borderline crazy as well. Written in contorted, loopy, and killingly funny bad French, it was a challenge to get into English—but I just loved doing it! What’s more, the deception worked: nobody dared accuse Gary of being Ajar ever again. An unclassifiable masterpiece of simulated mental breakdown; a language game of an extravagant and rarefied kind.
By the early 1970s, Romain Gary had established himself as one of France's most popular and prolific novelists, journalists, and memoirists. Feeling that he had been typecast as "Romain Gary," however, he wrote his next novel under the pseudonym Emile Ajar. His second novel written as Ajar, Life Before Us, was an instant runaway success, winning the Prix Goncourt and becoming the best-selling French novel of the twentieth century.
The Prix Goncourt made people all the keener to identify the real "Emile Ajar," and stressed by the furor he had created, Gary fled to Geneva. There, Pseudo, a hoax confession…
Is That Fish in Your Ear?ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among the questions David Bellos tackles: How do you translate a joke? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only some? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? But the biggest question he asks is this: How do we ever really know that we’ve understood what anybody else says—in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how translation is another name for the human condition.
The 19th century women's rights movement and the rise of public education intertwine with one woman's story of struggle, perseverance, and love.
Alice Harris is pressed to marry a Civil War veteran twice her age when her family’s inn fails in 1882 in western North Carolina. She remakes herself by…
The day the second atomic bomb was dropped, Clabe and Leora Wilson’s postman brought a telegram to their acreage near Perry, Iowa. One son was already in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Four more sons worked with their father, tenant farmers near Minburn until, one by…
