NYTimes.com Article: America Yawns at Foreign Fiction

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Of course literature in the US is relatively cosmopolitan compared to the 
strange world of American sociology, where a litany of US thinkers is regarded 
as synonomous with the history of this science.

Steven Sherman

threehegemons@aol.com

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America Yawns at Foreign Fiction

July 26, 2003
 By STEPHEN KINZER 




 

When the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz won the Nobel
Prize in Literature last year, the response from many
Americans was <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="159602">"Who?"</object.title> 

Mr. Kertesz's work was virtually unknown in the United
States. Only two of his novels had been translated into
English. The more successful one, "Fateless," published by
Northwestern University Press, had sold just 3,500 copies. 

After the Nobel was announced, Northwestern quickly
printed more copies of "Fateless" and ultimately sold
40,000. Even that, however, was not enough to change the
press's decision to pull back from publishing contemporary
world fiction. 

"We were seen as a leading university press for literature
in translation, but we've decided to make it a smaller part
of our program because it just is not viable," said Donna
Shear, director of Northwestern University Press. "It's
expensive, and the sales aren't there. This is definitely a
trend in the university press world." 

This trend has spread from university presses to publishing
in general. Writers, publishers and cultural critics have
long lamented the difficulty of interesting American
readers in translated literature, and now some say the
market for these books is smaller than it has been in
generations. 

"It is not an exaggeration to refer to this as a national
crisis," said Cliff Becker, literature director at the
National Endowment for the Arts. "I am a citizen of the
most powerful country the world has known, a country that
asks me to be part of its decision-making process on a
whole range of things. If I'm not able to experience other
cultures, not even from a place that is as easy to reach as
the printed page, that is outright dangerous." 

Readers in other developed countries still have appetites
for translated literature. German publishers, for example,
bought translation rights to 3,782 American books in 2002,
while American publishers bought rights for only 150 German
books. 

"You'll find the same thing in France or Holland or most
other European countries," said Riky Stock, director of the
German Book Office in New York, who provided the figures.
"A main reason for it is simply that America dominates the
world, whether in film or literature or politics." 

The difficulty that many foreign authors face in having
their works translated into English has effects far beyond
the United States. 

"Since English is the lingua franca, translating a book
into English puts it in a position to be translated into
many different languages," said Esther Allen, a translator
who is chairwoman of the PEN translation committee. "We're
the clogged artery that prevents authors from reaching
readers anywhere outside their own country." 

"It's a great paradox of American life," Ms. Allen said,
"that on the one hand we feel very cosmopolitan, with
Mexican restaurants and cab drivers who speak Swahili, and
we feel that we inhabit a mind-boggling multicultural
universe, but at the end of the day, it breaks down to
different ways of being American." 

Some major American publishing houses still seek work by
foreign writers. "The Winter Queen," a briskly selling
murder mystery by the Russian author Boris Akunin, was
published by Random House. Alfred A. Knopf, W. W. Norton
and Farrar, Straus & Giroux also make special efforts to
publish works in translation. Many other large houses,
however, shy away from them. 

"This hasn't always been the case," said Jill Schoolman,
the founder of a new nonprofit publishing house,
Archipelago Books, that is devoted to bringing out works in
translation. "In the 40's and 50's, Helen and Kurt Wolff
stirred up quite a bit of excitement around the world with
Pantheon Books. New Directions, Knopf and Grove stirred up
more. Many large houses and university presses kept the
doors to international writing open into the 1970's. Now
the doors are virtually shut." 

She added, "I believe the publishing community is partly
responsible for nurturing this ethnocentric literary
culture drifting further and further away from the rest of
the world." 

In interviews publishers cited many reasons for their
increasing reluctance to bring out books by non-American
writers. Several said a decisive factor was the
concentration of ownership in the book industry, which is
dominated by a few conglomerates. That has produced an
intensifying fixation on profit. As publishers focus on
blockbusters, they steadily lose interest in little-known
authors from other countries. 

Some publishers said that they had no staff editors who
read foreign languages and that they hesitated to rely on
the advice of outsiders about which foreign books might
capture the imagination of Americans. Others mentioned the
high cost of translation, the local references in many
non-American books and the different approach to writing
that many foreign authors take. 

"A lot of foreign literature doesn't work in the American
context because it's less action-oriented than what we're
used to, more philosophical and reflective," said Laurie
Brown, senior vice president for marketing and sales at
Harcourt Trade Publishers. "As with foreign films,
literature in translation often has a different pace, a
different style, and it can take some getting used to. The
reader needs to see subtleties and get into the mood or
frame of mind to step into a different place. Americans
tend to want more immediate gratification. We're into
accessible information. We often look for the story, rather
than the story within the story. We'd rather read lines
than read between the lines." 

Another new reality that publishers must face is the
increasing imbalance between the United States and the rest
of the world, politically as well as culturally. 

"The U.S. is so big, and there are so many more writers
published here than in any other country," said Deborah
Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, who has made a
special effort to publish work by non-Americans. "My guess
is you'd have to lump all of Europe together as a unit to
match it. Translations are published relatively quietly
here. They go up against tough competition, partly because
so much of American literature is tailored to be meaningful
for American people - very little gets written from a truly
international perspective - and partly because the
publishing industry has an ingrained fear of translations
and doesn't always do enough to promote them. The only way
to get certain writers to find an audience is to have them
win prestigious prizes." 

A few of the world's most famous non-American novelists
have large followings in the United States, among them
Gabriel García Márquez and Günter Grass, who were both
popular even before winning the Nobel. Others, like Naguib
Mahfouz of Egypt and José Saramago of Portugal, reached
broad American audiences after they won the prize. 

Each year several translated novels do break through to
popularity in the United States. In 2002 they included
"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" by Sijie Dai,
about two teenagers surviving the Cultural Revolution in
China, and "My Name Is Red" by Orhan Pamuk, a story of love
and murder in the Ottoman court. They are rare because they
introduce American readers to distinctly non-American
characters and situations. 

"We have always been sort of monosyllabic in terms of
languages, and that extends into ignorance or wariness of
other cultures," said William Strachan, executive editor of
Hyperion Press. "People look at a work in translation and
quite often think, `These themes don't speak to me, these
situations don't speak to me.' And the hard fact is that
given the reality of the world, we simply don't have to be
concerned about Laos, but people there might well want to
be or have to be concerned about America." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/26/books/26BOOK.html?ex=1060220456&ei=1&en=7288daba056baf47


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