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20 must-read classics in translation

20 must-read classics in translation

22 September 2026

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If literature is, to quote Ezra Pound, “news that stays news”, then literature in translation brings us news from elsewhere. With so many languages telling so many stories, the only question is where to begin, so here is a selection of some of the very best classic literature that has been translated into English.

Read on for stories spanning continents and centuries, from ancient epics to modern masterpieces.

Ancient classics translated into English

The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (c. 750 BCE)

These two epic poems have become arguably the most famous stories in western literature, and for good reason. A bloody war and the arduous journey home make up these foundation stones of western storytelling. Reading them unlocks the far-reaching influences they have had on our literature, but they’re thrilling reads in their own right, with translations for every taste.

Read it if you like: Madeline Miller, Pat Barker

The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 BCE)

The oldest known epic predates Homer by many centuries. It’s the story of a king in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), featuring all the classic elements of epic poetry. Gilgamesh battles a wild man sent to challenge his harsh rule; he rejects the demands from the goddess of love, who then sends a divine bull to destroy him. This particular translation weaves the longstanding Babylonian version of the ancient poem, together with recently deciphered fragments in Akkadian and Sumerian.

Read it if you like: Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage

Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments by Sappho (c. 600 BCE)

Sappho, who wrote songs to accompany the lyre, was one of the earliest poets to write from the personal perspective, often about other young women (hence the word sapphic). Only one of her poems remains intact; the rest are fragments. The surviving lines exemplify the importance of the reader’s imagination in finding personal meaning in poetry. Fittingly, she writes: “I declare / that later on / even in an age unlike our own / someone will remember who we are.”

Read it if you like: Anne Carson, Rumi

19th-century classics

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857)

In writing Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert essentially invented the modern realist psychological novel: it all flows from here. But the “brutal” honesty of his portrayal of middle-class adultery saw him put on trial for immorality – a blow to the man who once said, “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be wild and original in your work.” (Happily, he was acquitted.)

Read it if you like: Margaret Drabble, John Updike

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878)

Leo Tolstoy’s other great novel is widely hailed as one of the greatest love stories of all time. From the famous opening – “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” – this book gives us something to think about, long for or simply gape at on every page. It combines the story of eponymous heroine Anna – a woman who rejects her empty social status for a doomed affair – with insights on everything from duty to desire to self-deception.

Read it if you like: Jane Austen, Jonathan Franzen

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis (1881)

Brazilian writer Machado de Assis must have had access to a time machine to create this head-spinning novel that feels as modern as tomorrow. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is, ostensibly, the pessimistic memoirs of a dead man in 160 tiny sections, but the author is forever sticking his nose in. “Behold the skill,” he writes, “with which I shall carry out the most important transition in the book.”

Read it if you like: Salman Rushdie, Dave Eggers

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (1833)

A 190-year-old novel written in verse shouldn’t be as sparky and fresh as this. Alexander Pushkin doesn’t just give us a dramatic story of thwarted love, but a satire of Russian society. With pithy lines like “Earn me the fame that will induce / Skewed comments shrilling with abuse,” directly addressing the reader, we realise that the pursuit of public infamy long preceded the age of social media. Pushkin lived as boldly as he wrote: by age 37, he had been involved in 29 duels – the last of which was fatal.

Read it if you like: Vikram Seth, Vladimir Nabokov

20th-century and modern translated classics

Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka (1912-1924)

“I could never finish a novel by Kafka,” wrote Martin Amis. “But then, neither could Kafka.” Franz Kafka’s published work spans novels, short fiction, and diaries and letters, but his real brilliance lies in his stories, plangent comedies of life’s absurdity. He made a man into a bug, and invented a “hunger artist” who starves himself for others’ entertainment. There has never been a genius quite like Kafka.

Read it if you like: George Saunders, Paul Auster

Read more: Where to start reading Franz Kafka

Chéri by Colette (1920)

Adored by Marcel Proust and Andre Gide, Chéri is a witty melodrama and camp delight about a young man of “exceptional good looks” and “virtually nonexistent” character, and the chaos he causes to ripple through the lives of the women surrounding him. Colette’s vivid world – its “twin deities [of] love and money” – was matched by her life: she had an affair with Napoleon’s niece, and was the first woman in France to be given a state funeral.

Read it if you like: Angela Carter, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin

War with the Newts by Karel Čapek (1936)

This ever-relevant novel, set at “a time when […] there are no politics, and not even a European crisis”, features a breed of intelligent newts who end up at war with the human race. The story makes fun of everything from Hollywood celebrities to the modern media, and gives us social commentary, science fiction, pastiche and a cautionary tale – about everything from antisemitism in Europe to capitalism and immigrant labour.

Read it if you like: Bohumil Hrabal, Kurt Vonnegut

Segu by Maryse Condé (1984)

This modern classic, set in historical Segou (now part of Mali) between 1797 and 1860, explores the religious clashes and violence of colonisation and the slave trade that forged Africa in the 19th century. With themes still relevant today, Segu is a complicated story with dozens of characters, but Condé’s ability to keep the action gripping makes it easy to see why this novel became a bestseller in France.

Read it if you like: Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid

Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang (1944-1979)

Eileen Chang’s upbringing – traditional father, cosmopolitan mother – informed her fiction about tensions within the “political glitterati” of mid-century Shanghai: tensions between East and West, between temptation and loyalty, between women and men. Her compact stories unfold like flowers, showing us that beneath our cultural differences lie eternal human weaknesses, with flawed characters that, in Chang’s own words, “sum up this age of ours better than any hero.”

Read it if you like: Yiyun Li, Tash Aw

Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard (1985)

All those rambling interior novels – half rant, half confession – that are popular now were influenced by Thomas Bernhard, but there’s nothing like the original. This bitterly funny book about a man who “slipped into art to get away from life” creates its own genre, boiling with comic rage about Bernhard’s homeland of Austria, from its “scandalous lavatories” to other writers. “The terrible, after all,” Bernhard writes, “is always ridiculous.”

Read it if you like: Geoff Dyer, Ben Lerner

Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (1977)

In the final novel of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, a chaotic narrator tries “to write a story with a beginning, middle and ‘grand finale’ followed by silence and falling rain.” His failure to do so is our pleasure. The blend of interiority, social awareness and self-referentiality in this report of a young woman who is “incompetent for life” make Hour of the Star as innovative and startling as Lispector’s Modernist predecessors, such as Woolf and Joyce.

Read it if you like: Marguerite Duras, Leonora Carrington

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (1913)

From a cork-lined room on the Boulevard Haussmann came, piece by piece, an inescapable epic of memory brought into being. In this first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust’s masterpiece exploring time, selfhood, and the search for truth, a childhood is recreated in sentences that are nothing short of melodic and sinuous. It’s a style that demands its own reading pace, but rewards with an absorbing experience that feels like life and literature entwined.

Read it if you like: Alan Hollinghurst, W.G. Sebald

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (1966)

The conflicts of modern Africa and colonisation are dissected in the character of “heartless machine” Mustafa Sa’eed, a Sudanese man who, like the novel’s unnamed narrator, ventures to Europe for his education before returning to his small village on the Nile. What he brings back with him results in vivid calamity, described in a deceptively calm style. The Arab Literary Academy called Season of Migration to the North the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century, and it's easy to see why.

Read it if you like: Hanif Kureishi, Joseph Conrad

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2000)

This memoir brings us a turbulent political time in an accessible graphic novel format. It describes author Marjane Satrapi’s childhood in Iran as the Islamic revolution of 1979 takes hold: the rules (“you must stay within your own social class”) as well as the deeply human details that shaped her experiences: “My grandmother’s knees always ached”. Under the turbulent surface, love, pain, and all the ordinary stuff of life are laid bare, in this uniquely poignant, funny, and wise modern classic.

Read it if you like: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958)

Tomasi was the last prince of Lampedusa, and his only novel – published posthumously – is one of the great masterpieces of the 20^th century and a must-read for fans of historical fiction. Set nearly a century before it was written, The Leopard offers a stately, immersive account of upheaval in 19^th-century Sicily during the unification of Italy, from the viewpoint of the fading aristocracy helmed by the morally grey – but undeniably charismatic – Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi.

Read it if you like: Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell

Wizard of the Crow by Ngűgĩ wa Thiong’o (2006)

This novel, translated from Gĩkũyũ to English by the author himself, satirises an African country making its own way after years of white rule. In doing so, it takes in a love story, multiple characters double-crossing one another, the replacement of colonialism with capitalism, and much more. Ngűgĩ wa Thiong’o said his desire was “to sum up Africa of the 20th century in the context of 2,000 years of world history” – and he achieves it with barnstorming energy.

Read it if you like: Chinua Achebe, V.S. Naipaul

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima (1979)

“Happiness can spoil people,” wrote Yuko Tsushima – not that she gave her characters a chance to find out. But this exceptional novel about a divorced mother in Tokyo finding a new place to live shimmers with strange life – nature collides with the city, people who help her seek to control her – and reading it quickens both the heart and brain. Tsushima had the “horrible idea of becoming a novelist” after winning an essay competition in college – and readers have benefitted ever since.

Read it if you like: Osamu Dazai (Tsushima’s father), Yoko Ogawa

Frequently asked questions

What does ‘classics in translation’ mean?

‘Classics’ can mean the study of ancient civilisations such as Greece and Rome, but here we mean books from other languages that have stood the test of time, and remain as fresh, meaningful, and significant now as the period in which they were written.

What are the ten most translated books of all time?

Books that have been translated into the largest number of languages include:

The Bible

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Adventures of Pinnochio by Carlo Collodi

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

The Pilgrims’ Progress by John Bunyan

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Which author has been translated the most?

The most translated author of all time, with more than 7,000 translations according to UNESCO’s index of translations, is mystery author Agatha Christie. Of authors who have been translated into English, the most-translated include Jules Verne, Hans Christian Andersen, and the brothers Grimm.

20 must-read classics in translation

Ancient classics translated into English

19th-century classics

100 must-read classics, as chosen by our readers

A beginner’s guide to translated fiction

An essential guide to The Odyssey

20th-century and modern translated classics

Where to start reading Franz Kafka’s books

Where to start reading Clarice Lispector

The best Japanese fiction in translation

Frequently asked questions

A beginner’s guide to translated fiction

An essential guide to The Odyssey

Where to start reading Clarice Lispector

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