Biblioasis International Translation Series

Biblioasis a Canadian press based in Windsor, has recently launched an “International Translation Series,” the first book of which is Ryszard Kapuscinski’s I Wrote Stone. To celebrate the series and book, an event was held at the intriguingly named This Ain’t the Rosedale Library in Toronto.

All of that is fantastic, but what’s really amazing is the introductory speech Stephen Henighan, the editor of the Biblioasis International Translation Series, gave at the event, and which is available in toto here.

This is sort of preaching to the choir, but in terms of explaining the importance of translations, Henighan’s speech is eloquent and compelling, and the entire speech is worth reading. Here are a few highlights:

At the same time that Dan was thinking about translation, I was growing more and more frustrated with the sheer quantities of great writers who were translated from their own languages into other languages, often into four or five other languages, but whose work was not available in English. Because, alas, our vision of globalization is too often that globalization means that everything of importance happens in English. This attitude, in combination with certain pernicious trends in the publishing and book selling industry, means that less and less gets translated into English these days. Of the 100 best-selling paperbacks in the United Kingdom in 2004, only two were translations. Every day we hear of the importance of China, yet how many of us have read a Chinese novel? Brazilian, Indian and contemporary Arabic writing remain enigmas. [. . .]

All this means that English-language prose is less innovative than it used to be. Writers in most cultures read in several languages; their engagement with their own language is nourished by their experience of delving into the literatures of other languages. Major writers in other traditions, such as Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, or Javier Marías in Spain, or J.M. Coetzee in South Africa (now in Australia) or Haruki Murakami in Japan, are also prolific translators. This is not true in North Atlantic Anglophone culture. The monolingual writer is a postmodern, Anglo-American invention. Try to imagine Jane Urquhart or Barbara Gowdy or Douglas Coupland or Guy Vanderhaeghe undertaking a literary translation. The image is almost surreal; this simply isn’t the way in which our writers approach literature. In ages prior to ours, when all writers, by definition, were multilingual, literature’s nature as an entity whose lustre was burnished by the fretting-together of different linguistic strands was so obvious that it did not need to be stated.

Since our writers are not translators, and since no reader, in any event, can hope to learn very many languages well enough to read their literature, we need translation. [. . .]

Every act of translation connects part of the world to another part in a way we never could have expected; and this connection makes possible another connection, which makes possible another connection which in turn will make possible other connections in the future, and this web of connections is called culture, and it cannot exist without translation.

And in case you’re wondering, the next book in the translation series is the novel Good Morning Comrades by the Angolan writer Ondjaki.