Your Top 10 works from "immensely important and influential non-English literatures"

Just so we can't be accused of being too fond of the English language. Who'd like to go first? Existanai?

I'm not really taking much of a role in the construction of this list, but I am watching with interest. I don't have 10 suggestions, but any list of great books people should read simply must include Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy. An epic story about three generations of a family in Egypt.

It is, of course, impossible to limit it to ten, but, in no particular order:

The Iliad and The Odyssey must top the list.

The Bible, of course, and the Qu'ran.

The first novel - Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, and the poetry of Matsuo Basho.

Dante's Divine Comedy.

The Chinese classic, Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin

The One Thousand and One Nights

Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther

Oh, this is pointless. It's really impossible.

Very small selection of the non-English books that feeded me in different periods of my life and to which I am still very much attached:

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis

Martin Buber, Ich und Du

Odysséas Elýtis, To Axion Estí

R. Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque

Homeros, Odysseia

Herodotos, Iestoriies apódeksies

Søren Kierkegaard, Frygt og Bæven

Gabriel García Márquez, Cieno aňos de soledad

K.H. Miskotte, Edda en Thora

J. Presser, Ondergang

Of course I read most of them in Dutch or English translation.

I think these are mostly on my Top 25 list already, but here goes:

The Bible
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Le Petit Prince
The Oresteia
Sophocles' Theban Plays
The Republic
The Arabian Nights
The Communist Manifesto

A Thig Na Tit Orm, Maidhc Dainin O'Se
The Odyssey
Lig Sin i gCathu, Breandan O'hEithir
Peig, Peig Sayers
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
Fiche Bliain ag Fas, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Oiche Nollaig na mBan, Sean O'Riordain
Divine Comedy, Dante

A few more, some were mentioned above, without touchstones: Don Quixote; Gargantua and Pantagruel; Candide by Voltaire; Hunger; Simplicius Simplicissimus; History of the Peloponnesian War; The Histories by Herodutus; The Mabinogion; The Brothers Karamazov; Pensees; Ficciones; If On A Winter's Night a Traveler; Runaway Horses; The Count of Monte Cristo.

The Brothers Karamazov certainly, it would be No. 1 on my list of the 100 best novels.

Start with some Epics:

Mahabharata
Gilgamesh
Odyssey

Then some major poetic anthologies:

Manyoshu
Shi Jing
Greek Anthology
Mu'allaqat

Then some religious texts:

The Vedas
The Bible
The Avesta

All written before the Shahnama or Tale of Genji, works that have to end up on any list. Indeed, there may be a few poems in The Greek Anthology written after the emergence of Anglo-Saxon, but most of these wonderful works come before much of any semblance of English is on the scene.

Can I do a separate list of 10 by Thomas Mann?

Ficciones by Borges
Glas by Derrida
Steppenwolfand Beneath the Wheel by Hesse
Le Petite Prince by Saint-Exupery
The castle by Kafka
Lais of Marie de France
parzival by Eschenbach
Tao te ching
any Sufi poetry by Rabia as well as by Rumi
Mahabarata

I so agree with lilithcat; this is a very daunting task. I think the previous 10 messages covers things fairly well. Maybe add the sprawling The Ramayana, maybe The Dream of the Red Chamber. I bet the Bishop of Hippo didn't write in English, how about The Confessions? The Russians still seem a bit unrepresented. Perhaps Crime and Punishment and War and Peace and maybe some Chekhov short stories. I'd add Madame Bovary and The Stranger or The Plague.

Hey, my flip comment about Augustine reminds me about how most people in USA!USA!USA! think the Bible was written by some guy named King James. I remember watching TV news about Beirut fighting and Lebanese Christians, in the 1980s, with Dad. He said, "Christians? But they're not speaking English." I almost wet my pants.