The New Role of Translation in International Publishing

The current TLS has a very interesting article by Tim Parks on the increasing role of translation in international publishing. The whole essay needs to be read, but essentially his argument is that for writers from smaller countries to become known as writers, they are reliant on crafting a product that will sell on the international markets, a product that ipso facto requires translation to exist.

It's a well-considered ake, and I like this part where Parks chides those who zealously follow the Nobel Prize proceedings and ignore the fact that without translation a prize like the Nobel would be impossible.

At one level it is generally agreed that literary prizes are largely a lottery, and international prizes even more so. It will be evident that what happens when judges get together to discuss a winner is infinitely less complex and interesting than what happens when a creative translator sets to work on the text of a fine writer, at once deconstructing it and reformulating it in the entirely different context of his own tongue and culture. But it is the prizes that get talked about. Indeed, the larger and more improbable the prize, the more the talk and the more the credit extended to them.

Parks' remarks on what a writer needs to do to be an international success are also interesting (though a little overstated, in my opinion):

Today’s international space, then, as Casanova sees it, is created on the one hand through a rivalry between the growing number of nations eager to establish a literary prestige, promoting their poets and novelists internationally with the help of government institutions: literature here is understood as expressing the genius of a people – one thinks of the magical realist novels from South America, or indeed a book such as Midnight’s Children – but its productions are only properly consecrated when translated worldwide, or, paradoxically in the case of Rushdie, when written in English. This literature is not, that is, addressed to the people whose genius it supposedly expresses and celebrates. If such a phenomenon can be traced back to Herder, it is hardly what Herder would have wanted.

I agree that market forces tend to promote this kind of a literature, but I don't quite agree that htings are quite as blatant as Parks says. Certainly the last few Nobel laureates (Vargas Llosa, Müller, Le Clezio) give the lie to the idea of internationally recognized authors who did not write primarily for a national audience. And I can think of plenty of authors being promoted by government subsidies like the French voices series that essentially write for a national audience.

Lastly, I completely disagree with Parks' pessimistic attitude about what is lost in translation, or what simply can't (or won't) be translated to begin with. Certainly the amazing people translating books into English in the U.S. right now prove such an attitude wrong:

Imagine: a writer, strongly identified with a particular country precisely because he or she is in conflict with its repressive authorities, produces a colourful, non-realist account of life there. The daringly deviant language of early modernism, its aggressive subversion of received values, so difficult to translate, is substituted by the lingua franca of literary special effects: intellectual tropes and extravagant extended metaphors, a foregrounded literariness, oneiric elements of fantasy and fable, a shift of the narrative into the threatening future or the mysterious past: these strategies allow the now magically rather than realistically national to be available internationally. Above all, anything that would require a profound, insider’s cultural knowledge to be understood is avoided, or shifted away from the centre of the book. The spark of social recognition that animates the language of a Jane Austen or a Barbara Pym is gone.

Still, though, I think he does have a definite point, and the whole essay is well worth thinking about.