Brave New Reads

Brave New Reads is a great summer reading program run by Writers’ Centre Norwich. It encourages people to take a chance on books that they wouldn’t necessarily ordinarily read. Although the activities (including reader workshops that I run) are solely in the East Anglia region, the book suggestions are for anyone. I especially appreciate how at least one book each year is a translation!

New Translation Statistics

Here are some fascinating new translation stats.

“How many translations are published in English and how accurate is the often quoted figure of 3%? Which are the most translated languages and which literatures are we missing out on? A new report from Literature Across Frontiers (LAF), Publishing translated literature in the United Kingdom and Ireland: 1990 – 2012, finally answers many questions surrounding translation statistics. The report, prepared by Alexandra Büchler and Giulia Trentacosti, is a welcome addition to the translation reports and surveys published on LAF’s website and will be launched in electronic format on Monday 13th April, on the occasion of the London International Book Fair 2015.

The key findings presented by the report are based on analysis of two distinct data sets: raw data extracted from the British National Bibliography for the period 1990 – 2012 and processed data for the period 2000 – 2012. The raw data make it possible to produce statistics comparable to those published by other book markets, while the manually processed data provide an annual list of literary translations comprising fiction, poetry, drama, children’s books and creative non-fiction, so far for the period 2000 - 2012. The processed data sets have been further analysed with respect to genre and source language.

LAF director Alexandra Büchler said: “The report brings us, for the first time, reliable data and statistics on the publishing of translations in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Our analysis shows that the often quoted 3% estimate indeed corresponds to the established average of all translations recorded in the British National Bibliography over the past two decades. This is embarrassingly low, compared to the percentages recorded in other European countries, including large book markets with healthy domestic book production such as Germany, France, Italy or Poland. Literary translations represent a slightly higher share, consistently exceeding 4% with a peak of 5.23% in 2011. The statistics show a steady growth of literary translations over the past two decades in absolute numbers and this is very encouraging. General translations grew by 53% between 1990 and 2012 and literary translations by 66%. This is of course reflected in only marginal percentage growth due to the growth in the overall publishing output. Also encouraging is the diversity of source languages with small European languages like Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch among the top ten translated languages alongside two non-European languages, Arabic and Japanese. On the other hand, most Eastern European languages are seriously underrepresented and we are clearly missing out on entire swaths of literary landscapes in our immediate neighbourhood.”

The next step LAF plans to take will be to publish the long awaited database of literary translations for the period 2000 – 2012 and to conduct further analysis which will tell us more about the trends and patterns of publishing translations beyond the basic quantitative information brought by the present report. Another task will be to process the raw data for the earlier period and subject them to a similar analysis.”

Tony’s Reading List

This blog is all about reading in translation and it has lots of great reading suggestions.

Missing Translators

I really like this visual guide to translations that will be published in English in 2015, but one thing I noticed is that very few of the books list the translator’s name on the cover, or otherwise give any indication that that these books are translations. So while it’s pleasing to see the increased numbers of translations coming out in English, it’s all still rather frustrating. Why can’t we honor the translators and promote the fact that these books are translations?

Market Research

Check out this journal. It accepts work translated to English, as long as it hasn’t previously been published in English, and is on Jewish themes.

Crowdfunding Translations

Crowdfunding and sponsoring are major trends these days. They seem to be ways of avoiding big companies, or minimizing stress, or trying out more unusual or avant-garde projects, or to help pay for things that otherwise wouldn’t get paid for. I’ve helped sponsor a book, for example, and I’ve heard of crowdfunding for clothing lines, films, performance art, and even funerals.

I was recently told about sponsoring translations. What do you think of that idea?

Here’s the information I was given about this particular project:

“Haute Culture Books, publisher of limited edition volumes is about to begin its first Book Angel project with the first ever English translation of 'Truth & Justice' by Anton Hansen Tammsaare.

With the support of the Tammsaare Museum, National Library of Estonia, Tartu University Library and Stanford University Library the project allows Book Angels to sponsor the publication of this classic piece of Estonian culture opening it up to the English-speaking world after a 70 year wait.

By sponsoring a hardback print version of the book, Book Angels support the distribution of free e-books of the text allowing a global audience to discover literary treasures seldom seen in the English language.

More information can be found at www.hauteculturebooks.com and www.hauteculturepress.com and if you have any further questions don't hesitate to contact me.”

A Round-Up of Articles

Here’s a load of reading/viewing for the holiday season. It’ll keep you busy if you get tired of all the eating and shopping and spending time with relatives!

TED talks can be quite interesting. Here’s a TED blog post about learning languages.

This infographic is on second languages.

Here’s an article about translating Ibsen. The book I edited most recently also has an article on that. 

A piece on translating Chekhov has the headline “Any English-language version of Chekhov is doomed. The nature of translation means that to think otherwise is folly.” What do you think?

This review of a new book by translator and writer Tim Parks refers to translation.

How many words for death are there?

It’s impressive how one actor does accents of the British Isles.

Finally, an article on constructed languages.

Translation and the Publishing Industry

A few months ago, I was asked some questions by email by a student writing an MA thesis on translation. They are the kinds of questions that come up a lot in regard to the publishing industry, so I thought they’d be worth posting here. I just gave my own opinions – what do you think?

What do you think are the main reasons foreign authors get translated into English?

Frankly, it’s often the bottom line. An author (often of thrillers or other genre fiction) sells well in their native country, and publishers here see that and want to cash in on it. That’s one reason why we don’t see as many literary works translated, unfortunately. Another reason is the topic/genre/style – if one text does well, publishers jump on any similar ones.

Do you think the setting of the novel a deciding factor in publication?

Yes, it can be. There are trends in translation, as hinted at above. For the past few years, Nordic, especially Scandinavian, thrillers have been popular. Publishers have been publishing all sorts of Nordic thrillers (and there has been a lot of Nordic crime on TV too), some of which is of dubious quality. In research that I carried out, I found that most readers didn’t differentiate between, say, Iceland and Sweden, and didn’t really care where the book came from. In some cases, they didn’t even know they were reading translations. They felt that all those countries were the same, but they liked the fact that the isolated, often cold settings seemed to reflect the crimes and the criminal mentality. Such readers were willing to read any Nordic noir, whether the books were set in Helsinki or Oslo. So I think the setting matters in a general sense, but that readers may not care quite as much as publishers think they do.

Do you think foreign authors are marketed in a different way to domestic authors?

They can be. The covers often attest to that, showing that these books are from a particular country (i.e. Nordic thrillers often have snowy, barren settings on their covers). But I also think publishers try to hide the fact of translation to a certain extent. Publishers underestimate readers and think the general public can’t handle translated lit, so they might compare X foreign author to Y domestic author in order to make the work seem more palatable. Or they might keep the translator’s name in small letters.

How important a factor is the author’s nationality?

Clearly, certain countries/ethnicities are more accepted than others, and some languages are much more translated than others (French, German, and Spanish come to mind). I keep referring to Nordic lit and that seems much more acceptable to us in English-speaking countries, perhaps because Nordic people aren’t seen as too different or too foreign. Publishers seem to feel that readers might have a harder time connecting to characters in, for instance, China or Latvia or Venezuela. Again, I think the public is underestimated here.

No More 2%?

This article in the Guardian suggests that British readers are reading more translations these days. Do you think that’s true? What about in other English-speaking countries? (And yes, I’m quoted in the piece.)

Twilight of the Eastern Gods

This originally appeared in the Wales Arts Review

Twilight of the Eastern Gods

by Ismail Kadare

193 pp., Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014.

translation by David Bellos from the French translation by Jusuf Vrioni

Reviewer: B.J. Epstein

Twilight of the Eastern Gods is, at its heart, a novel about words and writing. It’s about telling stories, and the importance of literature. It is also an ominous tale about politics, history, and geography, exploring the Soviet era and its concomitant political beliefs. Since the time and place frequently are depicted as rather creepy here, writing, too, can seem to be a suspicious activity.

The main character is a young foreign writer who has gone to study in a literary institute in the Soviet Union. All the students are well-known writers from their own regions, but despite their drinking and partying, they are not typical students. “At long last, after overcoming their adversaries, having accused them of Stalinism, liberalism, bourgeois nationalism, Russophobia, petty nationalism, Zionism, modernism, folklorism, etc., having crushed their literary careers and banned the publication of their works, having hounded them into alcoholism or suicide, or, more simply, having had them deported, that is to say, after having done what had had to be done, they had been inspired to come to the Gorky Institute to complete their literary education.” (pp. 43-4) Completing their literary education, it seems, involves dedicating themselves to Socialist Realism, which doesn’t quite work for our protagonist, who sometimes thinks about and employs the folklore of his native country in his writing and his everyday life.

In other words, though the Institute and the harsh political situation seem to conspire to disenchant the students in regard to literature (and also in regard to other aspects of their lives, such as romance), the protagonist still retains his passion for the written word, even if he just barely does so.

From a translation angle, an interesting aspect of this book is that it is a relay translation, albeit one that was delayed by thirty-three years. Jusuf Vrioni translated Kadare’s novel from Albanian to French, and preeminent translator David Bellos used Vrioni’s text to make the novel available in English (rather than translating from Albanian to English, in other words).

Bellos includes a helpful introduction to the novel, explaining some of the context behind it. He notes that the work “re-creates Kadare’s experience of this strange ‘factory of the intellect’ [i.e. the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow], set up to produce new generations of socialist poets, novelists and playwrights.” (p. v) Kadare apparently wrote and rewrote chapters of Twilight of the Eastern Gods over fifteen years, and the novel wasn’t first published until 1978 (the French version by Jusuf Vrioni appearing three years later, and it included sections that Kadare felt he had to take out of the Albanian original). Some aspects of the novel would be hard, or harder, to follow without Bellos’s information, or even without larger knowledge of the historical period (for example, Antaeus the Greek’s situation, pp. 74 fwd.).

While the novel is about the general themes mentioned above, it is based on an actual event: Boris Pasternak being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, much to the displeasure of the Soviet powers-that-be. Bellos discusses how “[t]he account of the Pasternak campaign given in Twilight of the Eastern Gods has nothing fictional about it: the discovery of a part of the typescript in the Writers’ Union residence, the co-ordination of the press, radio and television campaign, the roles of specific individuals, right down to the inexplicably sudden halt – all these things really happened…it is also clear from this account of the persecution of Pasternak that Kadare could imagine finding himself in the same situation.” (p. ix) Indeed, Kadare did face similar charges and complaints to Pasternak, “but in the end his real response to the constraints of living as an international writer under a paranoid, isolationist Communist regime was the write a novel that is also a declaration of fidelity to Albania and its ancient folk culture.” (p. x) This duality – loyalty to both a place and to freedom of ideas – comes through very clearly in the novel.

In short, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a fictionalised account of Ismail Kadare’s own experiences, and it sheds light – even if only twilight – on a challenging historical, cultural, and political period, while also encouraging the reader to recognise and admire the power of literature.

The Typical Lament

On recent evening, I got in the bath and picked up a novel that had been recommended to me. I was ready to relax and enjoy some pleasure reading. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it past the page of epigraphs. The reason was because the author quoted several sentences from a variety of other novels, none originally written in English, but of course didn’t mention the name of the translator.

In other words, the author quoted Proust and Dante and some other writers in English, but failed to show any awareness of the fact that these writers had been translated to English, and that the quoted words had been written by someone else.

How can we educate people even more?

Translated Literature for Children

Listen to this brief radio program on translating for children by translator, writer, and chair of Society of Authors (and my former colleague) Daniel Hahn.

I have said much of what he says, but I suspect he says it better!

More on the Nobel Prize in Literature

If you can read Swedish, this article on the Nobel Prize gives a bit more insight. Thank you to Duncan Large, now the head of the BCLT, for sending me the link.

Hispabooks

I’ve recently learned about a new publisher based in Madrid, Hispabooks. I’m currently reading some of their first publications and hope to report back on them soon, but for now I thought I’d just give some information about the publisher.

Hispabooks aims to translate Spanish literature to English and to promote it abroad. Here is some information I was sent:

“Here in Spain around 30% of what's published every year is in translation, very specially from English, but as you may well know, the English book market has a much lower rate of books in translation, with their infamous 3% rate. Within that, books from Spain are only in the fifth place, behind titles from German, French or Italian. With our deep knowledge of our own literature we were dismayed to see how very few of our literary fiction writers managed to get a translation into English of their work and how sometimes English or American publishers seem to make a somewhat strange selection of the Spanish titles to translate, taking on some minor works/authors and leaving out others, to us, more distinctive of what contemporary Spanish fiction from Spain has to offer nowadays. We have also seen a trend from publishers abroad to translate more Latinamerican authors than Spanish ones. All that gave us the feel there was some work to do there, and we decided to go ahead with Hispabooks!

We released our first titles last summer and have published 10 so far. All books are by the best literary fiction writers in Spain (most of them multi-awarded authors such as Marcos Giralt Torrente) and our translations are by the best native English-speaking translators (Margaret Jull Costa, Peter Bush, Nick Caistor, Thomas Bunstead, Jonathan Dunne, Rosalind Harvey and so on) and thoroughly copyedited, if I may say, to great effect. Anyway, I hope you like how all this sounds and I invite you to visit our web (www.hispabooks.com) and facebook page (www.facebook.com/Hispabooks), where you may get a first hand feel of what we do. In our web there are samples of the first pages of all the books and in our facebook page a somewhat messy track record of our past events and collaborations, namely taking our authors abroad to literary festivals.

Also, here is the direct link to our catalog: http://www.hispabooks.com/Catalog.html.”

Frustrating

Not long ago, a journalist phoned me. She was writing an article about translated literature and she wanted some quotes from me. So far, no problem.

She brought up the infamous 2% number – i.e., only 2% of the books published each year in English are translations. Yes, I agreed, we aren’t great at publishing translated literature and we should try to learn from other countries/cultures. However, I also pointed out that that figure does seem to be going up, and I mentioned some of the publishers, literary magazines, and other organizations (such as the British Centre for Literary Translation) that are working hard to get translations out in English. The journalist muttered a bit, then cut me off.

A few days later, I saw the final article. I wasn’t quoted, which was fine, but what was irritating and frustrating was that she ignored all the positive things I told her. Instead, she wrote that just 1% of the books published each year in English are translations! She didn’t refer to any of the new translation-centered publishers or anything else. Instead she just lamented how sad this state of affairs is.

Sad, yes, but not for the reasons she claimed!

Market Research

You might be interested in this journal. Here’s the info I’ve received:

Asymptote's Summer issue was launched this week. Our Latin American Feature includes heavyweights César Aira, Sergio Chejfec, Rául Zurita, and Cristina Perri Rossi alongside new and heretofore untranslated voices; there’s also:
● an interview with Amit Chaudhuri on the Nobel winner Rabindranath Tagore
● an excerpt from Violette Leduc’s now-uncensored 1954 novel, championed by Simone de Beauvoir
● fiction by the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature Winner Faruk Šehić, accompanied by a video of the author reading the text.
● Japanese surrealist poetry newly translated by Yuki Tanaka & Mary Jo Bang (who recently translated Dante’s Inferno)
● a survey of contemporary Thai fiction, and much much more.

The edition, beautifully illustrated by Singaporean guest artist Robert Zhao Renhui, is available for free at http://asymptotejournal.com.

The Translator Writes Back

In my last post, I mentioned scholar and Chinese-to-English translator Lucas Klein. Lucas told me about The Translator Writes Back, a new blog where translators can respond to reviews/reviewers. There isn’t yet too much action on this blog, but it looks promising and I hope more people contribute.

Lucas Klein and Chinese Lit

In June, there was an East Asian translation studies conference held at my university. While attending some of the interesting sessions, I got a chance to catch up with Lucas Klein. Lucas and I went to high school and worked on the literary magazine together in Chicago and he subsequently went on to become a translator from Chinese to English. He lives, teaches, and translates in Hong Kong.

Lucas told me about an event he participated in, which involved a fascinating series of translations. You can read about it in this article. You might also want to check out Lucas’s blog on translation and Chinese literature.

Market Research

Check out Verse Junkies, “an international journal dedicated to the study and practise of inter-semiotic translation - put simply translation across mediums”.

Gulf Coast Translation Prize

Here is some information about a new translation prize you might be interested in submitting work for. Also see https://gulfcoastmag.org/contests/prize-in-translation for more details.

We Are Now Accepting Entries

For the Inaugural Gulf Coast Translation Prize!

Deadline: August 31, 2014

Gulf Coast is now accepting entries for the inaugural Gulf Coast Translation Prize. In 2014, the contest is open to poetry in translation. The winner receives $1,000 and publication in the journal. Two honorable mentions will also appear in issue 27.2, due out in April 2015. All entries will be considered for paid publication on our website as Online Exclusives.

This year’s contest will be judged by Jen Hofer, a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder with John Pluecker of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena. Her recent translations include the homemade chapbook En las maravillas/In Wonder (Libros Antena/Antena Books, 2012); Ivory Black, a translation of Myriam Moscona’s Negro marfil (Les Figues Press, 2011, winner of translation prizes from the Academy of American Poets and PEN); and two books from Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2008). Her essays, translations and poetry are available or forthcoming from numerous small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, Counterpath Press, Kenning Editions, Insert Press, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press, LRL Textile Editions, Palm Press, Subpress, Ugly Duckling Presse, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. She teaches bookmaking, poetics, and translation at CalArts and at Otis College.

Guidelines

Poetry: Send up to 5 pages of poetry translated into English. Preference will be given to contemporary work published within the last fifty years.

As part of your submission, include the text in its original language, provide a brief synopsis (no more than 200 words) of the author you are translating, and indicate whether you have, and can grant us, permission to publish the original work and the translation. If you have rights to reprint the original text in the U.S., please let us know that as well.

Demonstrations of Permission

We will not consider submissions without permissions. In your submission, please provide one of the following:

            --A document stating that the original text is in the public domain.

--From the copyright holder: Written permission granting you right to translate the work in your contest submission. Permission should name the work being translated, date consent was given, and identify the copyright holder.

--Please let us know if you have rights to reprint the original text in the U.S.

Contest Guidelines for Online Submissions

-       Submissions accepted via Gulf Coast’s online submissions manager.

-       Submit up to five translated poems, including the original text, single .doc, .docx,

.rtf, or .pdf file.

-       Only previously unpublished work will be considered.

-       The contest will be judged blindly, so please do not include your cover letter, your name, or any contact information in the uploaded document. This information should only be pasted in the “Comments” field.

Contest Guidelines for Postal Mail Submissions

-       Only previously unpublished work will be considered.

-       Please address postal mail entries to:

ATTN: Translation Prize

Department of English

University of Houston

Houston, TX 77204-3013

-       The contest will be judged blindly, so your contact information should appear only on your cover letter.

-       Please include your $17 reading fee, payable in U.S. dollars to “Gulf Coast.”