The Best Books of 2025: Literature in Translation

Another book culture indicator I tend to use when looking back at the year in books is to look at how interesting and energetic was the year’s literature in translation. Readers tend to be adventurous folk, and it’s always encouraging to see publishers serving up a broad variety of literary adventures. These were the best of them:

10 Velleius Paterculus, translated by AJ Woodman (Loeb Classical Library)

It’s long since time Velleius Paterculus got a brushed-up and folded-down new translation. He was an actual Roman commander under Tiberius, and a great deal of his book survives and is here lovingly translated by AJ Woodman, detailing the rule of both Augustus and Tiberius from the vantage of a man who personally knew them both.

9 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, translated from the German by Kurt Beals

In the near century since Remarque’s book was first published, it’s had one main tent-pole English-language translation and has been just that long in need of another. Here, Kurt Beals provides a sharp, fluid rendition that manages the minor miracle of making this schoolroom standard feel fresh and new.

8 900 Conclusions by Pico Della Mirandola, translated by Brian Copenhaver (I Tatti Renaissance Library)

New from I Tatti Renaissance Library comes a thoroughly excellent translation that’s surely one of the most impenetrable books anywhere on this year’s lists. Translator Brian Copenhaver does a superb job of rendering in English (and supporting with notes) these vigorous, involved, often baffling theses in which one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance grapples with the intricacies of Christian and Jewish mysticism. Not exactly a stocking stuffer for Uncle Ed, but one of the most impressive releases of the year.

7 The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Lawrence Ellsworth (Pegasus)

Nothing at all impenetrable about this new translation of the beloved classic by Dumas! Lawrence Ellsworth continues his long string of superb editions of Dumas for Pegasus Books with this final adventure of the famous musketeers. Ellsworth once again captures more of the dimensions of Dumas than any previous English-language translator.

6 The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, translated by Tom Holland (Penguin Classics)

This hardcover Penguin Classic brings together two very known qualities in the publishing world: the evergreen scandal-appeal of the Roman historian Suetonius and a translation by the popular historian Tom Holland. The result is a solid, enjoyable Suetonius for a new century.

5 Dream of the Jaguar by Miguel Bonnefoy, translated by Ruth Diver (Other Press)

This powerful, sometimes dreamlike novel stars a young woman named Venezuela as she attempts to forge her own identity away from her namesake country, but this author steadily broadens the scope of the narrative to include that namesake country as well, here rendered in dozens of aspects and moods and walks of life. It’s a low-key, wonderfully lovely translation job done on a very strong novel.

4 Apparent Breviary by Gastón Fernández, translated by KM Cascia (World Poetry Books)

This is the only volume of poetry on the list this time around, an incredibly valuable new English-language rendition of the extremely recondite poetry of the iconic Peruvian poet Gastón Fernández, here presented in marvelous sinuous English by KM Cascia.

3 Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories by Yukio Mishima (Vintage)

This well-produced volume features a whole gaggle of translators, all working on a selection of Mishima stories from very late in his career, most of them never before translated into English. The stories here bristle with intelligence by wear a great deal of wisdom in their minimal brush strokes.

2 Private Notebooks 1914-1916 by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Marjorie Perloff (Liveright)

The young soldier making furtive, coded entries in these private notebooks would of course go on to become the famously impenetrable wind-bag philosopher, but here, captured perfectly in Marjorie Perloff’s jumpy, hyper-observational translation, readers meet the young man instead of the old bore, and what a fascinating difference that makes. The Tractatus might be just so much pumped bilge-water, but the young man in these notebooks is immediately real.

1 The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom (University of Chicago Press)

This volume, the second translation of a philosopher’s private notebooks on this list and the best work in translation this year, looks at Albert Camus through multiple layers of artificiality, from the preening self-consciousness of the original entries in these notebooks to the sneaky and sometimes fundamental re-writes done by an older Camus to the various interpretations done by secretaries, friends, commentators, and finally translator Ryan Bloom. And yet somehow it feels mostly spontaneous, a mass of scattered thoughts and ruminations that works a deep spell of fascination.