"What great books have never been translated into English?" we asked, and received about eighty responses. If you're a PEN member who didn't receive our query and you'd like to participate in future forums, please send your e-mail address to PEN America.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: (1) Satantango, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Hungarian novel, published in 1985, is the source of Bela Tarr's 415-minute black and white masterpiece of the same title, adapted with the author and released about a decade later--perhaps the greatest Hungarian film I've seen. We already have a subsequent novel by the same author in English, The Melancholy of Resistance, pointing to a stylistic similarity between Krasznahorkai and Thomas Bernhard, but something tells me that Satantango is even better: a ferocious piece of sarcasm, traversing the same day from various viewpoints like a Faulkner novel while recounting the last bitter gasps of a failed farm collective and everything its members do to betray one another. (2) Carl Th. Dreyer ne Nilsson, by Maurice Drouzy, published in both Danish and French, is the only full biography of the man I would call the greatest narrative filmmaker. It's as obsessive in its own way as a Dreyer film, and throws up so much fresh information as well as speculation about the man that it's an essential work for anyone who wants to understand Dreyer's films better.