To get a better sense of the popularity of translated fiction over time, we turned to the NYT bestseller list, which has tracked bestsellers in the US since 1931. We drew from an existing dataset by Jordan Pruett comprising all hardcover NYT bestsellers in fiction. Bestseller lists like that of the NYT, Pruett explains, are heavily curated based on editorial preferences rather than pure sales metrics.2 Nevertheless, these lists significantly determine the perception of what constitutes a “bestseller,” and they provide a consistent data source on popular fiction.
We wanted to know how often US bestsellers were originally written in languages other than English. To find out, we compiled information on all 7,431 fiction bestsellers from 1931 to 2020, identifying author nationality, original publication language, and country of publisher for each title. Sorting out those novels originally written in languages other than English enabled us to arrive at a subset of 176 instances in which translated titles hit the NYT bestseller lists. Collectively, they provide a broad overview of trends related to the history of translated bestsellers.
We can gloss these results as such: From 1931 to 2020, just 2.4 percent of the NYT bestseller lists in fiction were in translation, that is, titles originally written in languages other than English. On the surface, that number seems low. In fact, it’s larger than the national average of total works of fiction translated into English, which is less than 1 percent.3
A closer look reveals three distinct waves in which the popularity of translated works suddenly rises. Each wave leads to a blossoming of linguistic and generic trends within the market before dissipating rapidly. Between these waves, in the trenches, bestsellers in translation fall to nearly zero.
The first wave began before World War II and crested in the prosperous postwar years. These bestsellers were mainly European titles, especially novels originally written in German, French, Finnish, and Italian, as well as several in Russian. The second wave begins in the 1970s with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (translated by Gregory Rabassa). This wave largely aligns with what scholars refer to as the “Latin American Boom,” accompanied by several postmodern conspiracy novels by Italian semiotician Umberto Eco (all translated by William Weaver). The second wave is notably diminished compared to the first. Finally, we see the phenomenon described above, in which Nordic noir accounts for part, but not all, of a more recent surge. This third wave still pales in comparison to the first, but it gains more density than the second and in a shorter amount of time. The chart below visualizes these trends.
US culture is not understood as being particularly cosmopolitan. Other data studies by Matthew Wilkens and Nora Shaalan have documented the “insularity” of US fiction and print culture.4 Nevertheless, the three waves of translated bestsellers suggest that, despite the persistently low share of published translations in the US, when available resources come together to bring international works to market, readers are eagerly standing by. So what accounts for the dips and dives? Why do translations nearly disappear from NYT lists only to proliferate later?