SOURCE: Hensher, Philip. “The Finest of the Foreign.” Spectator 287, no. 9 (4 August 2001): 29-30.

In the following review, Hensher discusses the lack of interest among British readers in foreign literature in translation, noting that My Name Is Red is a “dreamy, passionate,” and “wonderful novel.”

The English are terrific translators, when they get the opportunity. The national literature is full of brilliant, idiosyncratic renderings of great foreign classics. If you want to consider the English epic a snark which was never quite hunted down you have to look at Pope's Iliad (the Odyssey is the work of multiple hands, and inferior), Dryden's Virgil and Harrington's Orlando Furioso as well as at Milton and Spenser. No one has really read Victorian literature who has not fallen for those shameful purple pleasures, Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Sir Richard Burton's dementedly fanciful Arabian Nights. And the tradition has continued with such...