On Translation and World Literature

This article in New York on some of the best books yet to be translated into English has piqued my interest in world literature. I haven't heard of any of the eleven authors. Except for a Francophone Egyptian writer, Africa has been entirely overlooked, despite outstanding work from Somalia to Senegal and from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Oceania is totally off the map, and Asia is represented only by South Korea's Jo Kyung-ran and Israel's (technically part of Asia) Gabriela Avigur-Rotem. This list of novelists includes Tayeb Salih (Sudan) and Mario Benedetti (Uruguay) ("He is not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he is considered one of Latin America's most important living writers."--Wikipedia)


A Guardian blog post about literary translation points out that "Only three per cent of books published in the UK every year are originally written in another language." (Of course, the situation is comparable in America as this chart about comparative literature indicates.) The Guardian goes on to say:

Language is identity. Across the whole world, millions of people live their whole lives in a mental space that only marginally involves English. Yet these people are not intellectual cripples. Far from it. They can often communicate internationally using English, and still have a reserve of their own - their mother tongue.

At the London Book Fair we were treated to soothing words that told us that it was quite normal that only three per cent of books published in Britain are translations. At the Leipzig Book Fair a few days later, a Ukrainian intellectual spoke about the state of his culture. Yuri Andrukhovych has written one of the few Ukrainian postmodernist novels to have been translated into English - Perverzion, translated by Michael Naydan - but he is also a blunt purveyor of home truths when it comes
to central and eastern Europe. At Leipzig, Andrukhovych suggested that Ukrainians should be afforded visa-free travel to western Europe. But are they being afforded such travel into the minds of British readers?

We do, in Britain, have a number of publishers, such as Serpents' Tail, Harvill-Secker, Arc, Peter Owen, Hesperus, [not to be confused with the music group--P.Z.] Portobello and several others that promote translations of literature. But as British
television does not have a high-prestige books programme, such as the German Literarisches Quartett with the colourful Marcel Reich-Ranicki or the French Apostrophes with Bernard Pivot, British readers never get to know that there are more than a very few non-English books worth reading.

Britain is lagging behind. I fear that the fog may not be so much in the Channel, cutting off the continentals from Britain, but in the minds of those British publishers, editors and journalists that continue to take an introverted view of "world" literature, where only that written in English counts as "real".

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17 July update: Brave New Words is a blog on translation, Words Without Borders concerns world literature, and Parnassus: Poetry in Review marked its thirtieth anniversary in March with a 600-page International Poetries Issue.