If you are a book lover, kind reader, you may know that some of the books in Spanish translated into more languages are The Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and One hundred years of loneliness by Gabriel García Márquez, in addition to some more magical pseudo-realism that we are not going to mention. But reviewing the report released by the International Platform for Language Learning, two more titles come out: Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, translated into 32 languages, and Aura, by Carlos Fuentes, whom the candid author of the report names as Panamanian, with 22 versions.
The report sees the light of the National Book Day and contains not a few curiosities and confirmations, such as the fact that The little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, remains at the top of the ranking translated into 382 languages from the original French, and Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi, is second with translation into 300 languages from Italian, while Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carrol, has already reached 175.
Among the curiosities it stands out that Albert Camus is classified as Algerian (he was born in Algeria as a French territory) with Abroad translated into 60 languages and that among the broad deck of German literature is Patrick Süskind, with his best seller El perfume, the most taken to other languages with 49 while Liev Tolstoy reigned in Russia with 49 versions of Anna Karenina.
Even though the list contains a selection of great writers (and even some Nobel laureates), among them Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Rómulo Gallegos, Derek Walcott, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Roberto Bolaño, Ismaíl Kadaré , Nikos Kazantzakis and Robert Louis Stevenson, it is always disappointing to find authors of self-help books or of cults like the Brazilian Paulo Coelho with The Alchemist, number one in Brazil, and Scientologist Robert L. Hubbard, the gringo with the most translations.
Thus the most translated titles on National Book Day.
Alfredo Campos Villeda
@acvilleda
– .
