Not that it\u2019s easy for anyone \u2014 psychic or not \u2014 to identify what\u2019s going to take off. One of the reasons imitations don\u2019t work is because audiences tend to be fickle. Trends are trends because they aren\u2019t permanent.<\/p>\n
But what might be worse from a culture standpoint is if readers do come to believe that all translations are equal.<\/p>\n
Let me digress for a minute: I\u2019m not going to go into it too much here, but I do want to say that one of my beliefs is that publishing \u2014 or media creation of any sort\u2014is a special sort of industry. Sure, it\u2019s an industry based on profit and loss and catering to needs and purchasing power, but it also has a larger import. What\u2019s published affects culture as a whole. Ideas circulate thanks to books. Visions of the world at large are crafted by what we read and see. So treating publishing as solely a money game is missing the fact that most of this are in this because we know that books have power and that we are hopefully contributing to the greater good via our jobs. Or most probably. Maybe it\u2019s just me and I\u2019m deluded. But still.<\/p>\n
A while ago, I came up with the idea of the \u201cone country, one author\u201d problem. For example: people found out about Jose Saramago, fell in love with Blindness<\/em>, and didn\u2019t bother reading other Portuguese writers because they had already read the best. And Garcia Marquez equals Colombia. Tolstoy was Russia.<\/p>\n OK, that last one is debatable and maybe the whole idea is a pile of crap, but let me tell a little story about what happened to us recently. Open Letter runs a subscription series whereby for $100 you receive 10 books over the next year. After we were featured in the New York Times, hundreds, literally hundreds of people signed up, not really knowing what kind of books they\u2019d be getting, except that they were \u201ctranslations.\u201d One of the first books sent out to these new subscribers was Ilf & Petrov\u2019s Russian classic The Golden Calf<\/em>. This book is hysterical, readable, great fun. A couple weeks after sending it out, however, I received a letter in the mail from a new subscriber asking for a full refund, since \u201cnothing I have ever read could prepare me for this. I don\u2019t read a lot of translations and this was nothing like The Elegance of the Hedgehog<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The Non-Beach Reading Audience<\/b><\/p>\n Running parallel to the beach readers is a smaller, yet very devoted, group of literary readers. These are people who get geeked about the Man Booker Longlist. These are people who made David Mitchell\u2019s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet<\/em> a New York Times bestseller. Who made Roberto Bolano\u2019s 2666<\/em> a bestseller. Who made Per Petterson\u2019s Out Stealing Horses<\/em> a bestseller. These are the people who might read Steig Larsson, but may well crave Mathias Enard\u2019s aforementioned Zone<\/em>. These are readers who have always been around, always been on the fringes supporting the artists. This group is not half a tenth as large as publishers would like, but these are the readers who help mold literary tastes for years well into the future. And for the first time in history, it\u2019s suddenly become much easier to reach and interact with these readers.<\/p>\n Everyone knows we live in a culture of mass markets. At any point in time it seems like everyone is reading the same twelve books. And this is comforting to publishers. If you can produce one of the twelve, you can capitalize on that shit. It\u2019ll be stacked at Barnes & Noble. People will be reading it on the subway. Sure, there are those other readers who aren\u2019t interested in these types of books, but man, they\u2019re much harder to identify and reach. This is true, but for the readership for literature in translation to take off, I think you have to.<\/p>\n This is why publishing houses with strong brands \u2014 Archipelago, Europa Editions, New Directions \u2014 do better with literature than some of the major commercial houses. They may not have the distributing power, but they draw this other group of readers to them. In some ways, they\u2019re in a better position to successfully publish a \u201cnon-commercial\u201d translation than a Random House.<\/p>\n Multiple Approaches to the Readership Issue<\/b><\/p>\n I\u2019m not trying to say independents are better publishers, or that we shouldn\u2019t try and publish translated \u201cbeach books\u201d in order to increase the audience for literature in translation \u2014 just that we need to take a multi-pronged approach to this situation.<\/p>\n On one hand, you have the presses identifying and marketing the hell out of translations that have the potential to become very, very popular. This is what a number of the major houses are really good at. And it makes them money and it helps them believe that there is an audience for these \u201cforeign\u201d books, and it leads them to publish more of these titles. All very positive.<\/p>\n And on the other side, you have the small presses who tend to focus on the books with a more diffuse readership. Books that \u201caren\u2019t for everyone.\u201d There\u2019s nothing wrong with that. Some people like to rail against the culture-at-large for not appreciating this particular aesthetic. Which is kind of stupid. There is an audience for these books \u2014 it\u2019s just up to the publisher (and any other organizations who\u2019d like to help with money, ideas, or manpower) to find creative new ways to connect with these readers. We live in a digital age where social networks rule our time online and we\u2019re more tuned in to one another\u2019s lives than we\u2019ve ever been. Whereas in the past there was that small group of readers who bonded over an obscure Grove publication, nowadays this same handful of readers can broadcast their love to similar groups across the country. And these numbers add up, and the influence these readers have can be monumental.<\/p>\n If different publishers, funders, reader-oriented organizations approach sides of this readership coin in different, yet equally innovative ways, (and yes, I realize that it\u2019s sometimes really hard to distinguish what\u2019s mass and what\u2019s cult), some real change might come about. Hell, maybe a highly literary translation will be the beach book of summer 2011.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/images\/544.jpg\")
<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"