page_title: Jaan Kross
section_title: Recognition and translation
hierarchical_section_title: Jaan Kross / Career as a writer / Recognition and translation
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of the Estonian writer Jaan Kross and the German translater Cornelius Hasselblatt, October 1985, at the campus of the University of Hamburg
context_page_description: Jaan Kross was an Estonian writer. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature during the early 1990s.
context_section_description: Kross was by far the most translated and nationally and internationally best-known Estonian writer. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature during the early 1990s, and was named a People's Writer of the Estonian SSR (1985); he received the State Prize of the Estonian SSR (1977). He also held several honorary doctorates and international decorations, including the highest Estonian order and one of the highest German orders. In 1999 he was awarded the Baltic Assembly Prize for Literature.
  In 1990 Kross won the Amnesty International Golden Flame Prize.
  Because of Kross' status and visibility as a leading Estonian author, his works have been translated into many languages, but mostly into Finnish, Swedish, Russian, German, and Latvian. This is on account of geographical proximity but also a common history (for example, Estonia was a Swedish colony in the 17th century and German was the language of the upper échelons of Estonian society for hundreds of years). As can be seen from the list below by the year 2015 there are five books of Kross' works that have been published in English translation with publishing houses in the United States and UK. But a number of shorter novels, novellas, and short-stories were published during Soviet times (i.e. 1944–1991) in English translation and published in the Soviet Union.
  Translations have mostly been from the Estonian original. Sometimes translations were however done, during Soviet times by first being translated into Russian and then from Russian into English, not infrequently by native-speakers of Russian or Estonian. Nowadays, Kross' works are translated into English either directly from the Estonian, or via the Finnish version. A reasonably complete list of translations of works by Jaan Kross into languages other than English can found on the ELIC website.
  Kross knew the German language from quite an early age as friends of the family spoke it as their mother-tongue, and Kross' mother had a good command of it. His Russian, however, was mainly learnt the hard way while working as a slave labourer out in the Gulag. But he also had some knowledge of Swedish and translated one crime novel by Christian Steen  (pseudonym of the exile Estonian novelist Karl Ristikivi) from that Swedish. He also translated works by Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Honoré de Balzac, and Paul Éluard from French, Bertolt Brecht and Rolf Hochhuth from German, Ivan Goncharov and David Samoilov from Russian, and Alice in Wonderland, Macbeth and Othello from English.
caption: Kross and German translator Cornelius Hasselblatt in Hamburg. October 1985
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