Last March I published an article here about the 2010 Best Translated Book Award, hosted by Three Percent, an organization for modern and contemporary international literature. Three Percent has since announced the winners of this year’s awards. In the category for best translated book of fiction, the award goes to The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu and published by Melville House. The winner in the poetry category was the book The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler and published by Ugly Duckling Presse.

While the celebration of the year’s best foreign fiction and poetry may seem well commemorated, advocates for literary translation still comprise only a quiet voice in a big room. Because only about 3% of all literature currently being published in The United States is translated work, the market for international fiction and poetry is relatively small. The Argentine writer and translator César Aira, whose short novel Ghosts was included on the shortlist for the 2010 Best Translated Book Award, has pointed out in a interview that “any pragmatic translator would prefer to translate bestsellers, because they sell more and the prose is so bad that they’re much easier to translate.” This is a sad truth, which only inhibits the introduction of world literature to the general reader.

Grossman

Edith Grossman shed some light on this subject in her book Why Translation Matters, published by Yale University Press this past March. Born and raised in a middle-class neighborhood of Philadelphia, Grossman attended Girls High School, the city’s best public school for girls at the time, and was granted a scholarship to study Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her B.A. and M.A. She then went on to do graduate work at UC Berkeley, and received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from New York University.

Grossman may arguably be the foremost translator of current Spanish-language literature. Since her first professional translation job at the end of the 60’s, Grossman has translated into English more than 30 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Some of the authors she has translated include Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Álvaro Mutis, to name a few. However, her biggest project to date may be her translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s 400-year-old classic Don Quixote, published in 2003 by Ecco Press, and considered to be one of the finest translations of the Spanish masterpiece in the English language, earning acclaim from writers and critics such as Fuentes and Harold Bloom.

In Why Translation Matters, Grossman reveals her personal experience with publishing houses and their common attitudes regarding translated literature. The recurring perspective held by the larger presses is, as expected, driven by their profit motive exclusive of other considerations:

For most houses, translated works are not of compelling interest regardless of the wider significance readers and writers may find in them. Frequently, in fact, translations are actively discouraged. They can be commercially successful (think of the cachet enjoyed in this country by The Name of the Rose; Beowulf; Don Quixote; anything by Roberto Bolaño), and still the majority of American and British publishers resist the very idea of translation and persistently hold the line against the presence of too many translated works in their catalogues. Some years ago, to my most profound consternation, I was told by a senior editor at a prestigious house that he could not even consider taking on another translation since he already had two on his list.

The profit-driven nature of our country’s major publishing houses is far from secret, even to those with little interest in the internal workings of the publishing industry. Chad Post, director of Open Letter Books, a small press that publishes only translated fiction, points out that the commonly cited 3% statistic includes all translated books published each year in America. That percentage is drastically lowered when looking specifically at the amount of literary fiction and poetry published each year. Post also shares that, “Approximately 85% of the fiction and poetry published in translation every year is from the small houses—the indie presses, the nonprofits, the university publishers. These presses tend not to have much marketplace power, tend to be undercapitalized, and tend to ‘take risks’ on books they love and feel are good for culture, if not for business.”

The resounding conundrum is whether the big presses should take on more translated fiction projects, or whether readers and book-buyers should just try to care more. The equation looks bleak on both ends. What (or who) could convince big presses to publish more translated work? Surely, the only entity with that influence is the book-consuming body as a whole (though we all know it’s not these readers’ tastes that the big presses pander to, but to their wallets). And likewise, how can you make someone simply just care more? Readers won’t just start frothing at the mouths for the latest book of Bulgarian short stories—and how easily can they if they don’t know what books exists because publishers don’t publish them?

Aleksander Hemon, whose 2008 novel The Lazarus Project was chosen as a National Book Award finalist, has been living and writing in America since he left his native Bosnia in 1992. Last year he edited the collection Best European Fiction 2010, published by Dalkey Archive Press (generally regarded as America’s foremost publisher of translated fiction), and which showcased short fiction from writers of various European countries. Hemon claims in interviews that the American short story is marked by its ability to entertain the reader. While Hemon holds that this quality in fiction is not inherently bad, he advocates the importance of the type of fiction coming from other countries, which concerns itself less with entertainment and more with the avant-garde. The literature from Europe, as well as from other places in the world, is often free from the capital quotas and expectations imposed by our profit-driven publishing industry, and therefore can afford to be more innovative or unfamiliar and stand as works of art as much or more than as entertainment vehicles.

So, for readers and enthusiasts of foreign fiction, the challenge may lie on our shoulders. It would be a futile attempt to convince the big presses to trade their assurance of top-selling titles for the potential gambles they may take with lesser-known authors of the world. It would also be pointless to expect the common reader to demand more translated titles from the publishers, especially if they don’t know what they want because they haven’t encountered it yet. It is up to the readers who love translated works to spread awareness of it, to talk, to share, and to push our passion out into the world, or rather, from the world and into our own homes.

Michael Filippone is a senior at Drexel University, majoring in Music Industry. He splits his time between words (both writing them and reading them) and music (both making it and listening to it).

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