Hard to say. Although many if not most novels have been well-served in translation, negating the need to read the original, an alarming number of them are modified and edited such that they bear little resemblance to what the author wrote, and usually the publisher makes no effort to inform readers that the text has been mangled or what changes they've made, so you have to seek out the opinion of someone who has sampled both the translation and the original, assuming they exist. If you knew the full extent of the abridgments, simplifications, elaborations, and mutillations to which English translations of foreign novels are too often subjected before they're published, how they're silently watered down, domesticated, reshuffled and remoulded to conform to Anglo/American sensibilities and values, you'd have no choice but to conclude that translation as it's currently carried out must be a sadistic joke on the monolingual (for further discussion, see Lawrence Venuti's The Translator's Invisibility and The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference.) It's not an issue that many people care to comment on, as the work of translators is marginalised and derided, and reviewers are neither able nor willing to compare an English translation with the original, but I'd venture to guess that a lot of multilingual readers can tell you about a time when they've read the translation of a novel that smashed up their frozen sea and popped off the top of their head, only to be astounded by its lumbering inadequacy in English. I'm remembering the time a friend of mine got the translation of Giuseppe Berto's Anonymous Venetian so she could compare it to the Italian./ She emailed me her first impressions, which were… not kind. Among other blunders, the first two paragraphs in Italian were reduced to a sentence in English.

As for my own choices: I've seriously considered learning German so that I might become a literary translator, and be able to read Arno Schmidt (the efforts of john E. Woods, ineze Hedges, et al. are admirable and certainly worth reading for English-speaking Schmidt=heads, but apparently much of his interlingual paronomasia has been lost in translation), Marianne Fritz (she's not likely to be translated, ever), Hans Henny Jahnn (what morsels we've gotten in English are out of print or expensive), Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance, tantalisingly truncated in English (Joachim neugroschel was able to translate the first of three volumes before he went n' died on us), Hermann Broch's essays, or the mountains of Robert Musil criticism, from the first book-length introduction to his work by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser to Karl Corino's two thousand page biography.