A Bibliography of Cormac McCarthy’s Works in Translation

A few months ago, I started working on an essay titled “Translation and International Reception of Cormac McCarthy” for Steven Frye’s upcoming Cambridge collection of essays Cormac McCarthy in Context. As a French scholar who—back in 1997 for the Official Web Site of the Cormac McCarthy Society—had compiled a bibliography of the French translations, reviews, and essays, later defended a PhD on McCarthy in 1999 in France, and gone on to publish papers on his novels, I felt I had already a clear picture of the history of his reception in France and in a few other countries.

This project was an opportunity to deepen my understanding of the multiple factors that had led McCarthy’s works in translation to the shelves of readers around the world: it involved peeping at the world of translation rights agents, publishers, editors, translators. It also meant building, on the side, a bibliography of the first published translations of McCarthy’s works in any language—which is easier said than done, as there is really no such thing as a catalog of titles across all languages. Amazon is far from being totally reliable or comprehensive: the indication of the format or edition can be sketchy, and the date of the first publication and the translators are often not given—and as a translator myself, I definitely wanted those names to be part of this bibliography. Giving the ISBN soon felt necessary in order for any user of this compilation to be able to track the first translation down, as ISBNs change with book editions or formats.

I will not go into all the different ways and places you need to dig to get and double-check any information you think you have secured—I will just let you imagine how big a maze it can turn into. Not to mention that you also want to make sure your findings in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, or Persian, to name just a few languages, are correctly spelled as well as given in a transliterated alphabet for those—among whom myself—unable to pronounce a title in languages they can’t speak or read.

Those were busy, finicky weeks, to say the least. But I hope they have in the end produced an enlightening tool. It is still in the process of growing, as McCarthy is currently being translated yet in more languages as you read this. I know for a fact that his first book that will be published in Malayalam is Blood Meridian, a book that, by the way, landed just a few months ago on Bulgarian bookshelves. If it is not surprising that The Road is McCarthy’s most translated work—into more than forty languages, half of which by 2008, just two years after its publication—it might be more unexpected to discover that, among his early Appalachian novels, Child of God is the most translated. That novel has been translated into thirteen languages—that is, it exists in nearly twice as many versions as his first two novels, which have been translated into seven languages each. It is also intriguing to find out that Norwegians first got to read Child of God years before any other McCarthy novel—I wonder what the story behind that simple, little fact might be. A tool like this also helps getting an overall view of the order in which countries each published McCarthy, perhaps giving insight or ideas for future research on his international reception.

Bibliography

Compiled in 2018 and ordered by titles, dates of first translation—with re-translations sometimes mentioned—and language, with the name of the translator(s) and ISBN. Special thanks to Li Bifang (Chinese), Emmanuelle Ertel (Hebrew), Luka Grigolia (Georgian), Elham Karimi (Persian), Soojin Lee (Korean), Khaled Osman (Arabic), Marek Paryż (Polish), Karine Reignier-Guerre (Russian), Dominique Vitalyos (Marathi), Michel Volkovitch (Greek), Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (Japanese) for double-checking spelling and/or information.

“A Wake For Susan” (1959)

2018 in French (magazine)
Veiller Susan. America n°5/16, Printemps 2018, 141–148. Jacques Mailhos. ISBN13: 9791097365004.

The Orchard Keeper (1965)

1968 in...