Mad About Translation

What’s on Dexter Filkins’ bookshelf? What about David Carr’s? The answer: works of translation. The National Book Critics Circle recently polled its members for their favorite works of translation, and while the works were diverse, there were some common threads: everyone—especially Carr—loved Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Also on the top of the list were Albert Camus and Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time author Daniel Dyer called “the greatest literary works ever written by a human being.”