An Editor in France
Stuck in traffic in the cab from the train station to our new apartment in Aix-en-provence, France last May, my wife pointed out the window, laughing. Next to us, in a diminutive, early-nineties Renault was a young man shifting from first to second as the traffic picked up, his eyes never leaving the novel he was holding with the hand that rested on the steering wheel.
I’ve now been in Aix—a small but culturally rich city about a half hour north of Marseille—for nine months, and I’ve seen three reading drivers. One of them was even packing and lighting a pipe at the same time (the French are still quite committed to smoking).
As much as San Francisco is a “wired” city, where on the sidewalks, BART, and in cafés, screens dominate, Aix is a city of books, and representative of a larger reading culture that seems much more engaged and diverse than the U.S.’s. The cafés are full of readers (and not an e-reader in sight); bookstores not only have more work in translation, they usually have small sections of literature actually in other languages.
I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time this year, and had many (many) meetings with European publishers. The dominant feeling I got from them was that the U.S., while a valuable market purely for its size, is not nearly as important for their books as sales in other parts of Europe. Sample translations were made in German or French more often than in English. Europeans read American authors, much more than Americans read European authors, but I really think that’s a symptom of the Europeans just reading more.
America’s showing at Frankfurt is abysmal compared to the lavish and beautiful displays from countries from all over the world. Some of that is because we don’t have a centralized governmental organization that is putting money and effort into disseminating our books, but some of it, I think, is just malaise.
In our small community of translators, publishers, and readers of international literature, we complain about how little translated literature is getting into the United States. It’s interesting to see, though, the relative indifference our government and larger publishing houses have in exporting American work abroad—there seems to be an assumption that American cultural dominance will continue. That “exceptionalism” is seen to the world, more and more I fear, as provincialism.
I’m not advocating that we read while we drive, certainly. But I wonder whether, if we continue to ignore the importance of this huge conversation about literature throughout the world that we’re not really a part of, we’re going to realize, perhaps too late, we are not on the inside letting those we want in, but actually on the outside without an invitation.
