The Private Library in Translation

Book fairs and book towns, covered in our two most recent posts, present your average American with a bit of a problem:

• many of the best book fairs and book towns are in "foreign" nations
• most Americans are monolingual

While citizens of other nations commonly learn two or even three languages from birth, English is about as far as most Americans get.  Which means that a large percentage of the world's great literature is forever a blank slate to them, unless a foreign author has become known well enough internationally to have had his or her work translated into English:

This is not a problem if you don't intend to actually read any of the works you're adding to the shelves of your private library. But if reading is in your plans, and you have no plans to learn any additional languages, the following resources may prove useful.  Each affords the private collector an opportunity to obtain some really great literature in English translation:

• The Clay Sanskrit Library
• The I Tatti Renaissance Library
• Kurodahan Press Translation Prize
• The Loeb Classical Library
• PEN Translation Prize
• The Robert Fagles Translation Prize
• Rossica Translation Prize
• The Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation
• The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation
• Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
• One World Classics

The above list is not comprehensive.  A little Internet research will unveil many more such resources....