Chekhov’s Mistess

EOL: English as an Only Language

Alberto Manguel, author most recently of A Reading Diary, writes about “Judging the Man Booker International Prize” in the Spectator.* The article is an interesting look at how difficult it is to whittle the entire universe of living (English language) authors down to one who’s achievement is worthy of singling out. Manguel says:

“Under normal circumstances, readers have no idea how lucky they are to be able to read without comparative constraints, to be able to enjoy a book one day and another book the next without being compelled to measure Mr Pickwick against Mr Micawber, or Emma Bovary against Anna Karenina.”

Manguel writes so beautifully and earnestly that it’s tempting to just copy the entire article here, but I think what is most important is this part which puts into very real terms what we are missing in international literature:

“The only favourites dropped (for extra- literary reasons) were the writers we thought of first-rate importance but who were currently not available in English. Today, if you speak Spanish or French or Italian or German or any of a dozen other languages and walk into your local bookshop, you are likely to find a fair sampling of most of the important books written anywhere in the world. You can find out what is being imagined in China, what stories are being told in Korea, how the novel is being re-invented in Spain and in the Scandinavian countries, what literature is being written in the Balkans today. If you speak nothing but English, your choice is limited to a handful of publications brought out by a few resilient publishers still eager to make discoveries beyond the frontiers of their language, a breed much diminished since the removal of Christopher Maclehose and the gelding of Harvill. Thanks to the imposition of supermarket rules on the publishing industry, the English-speaking reader is deprived of the vast majority of good books written in languages other than English. The same decision 50 or 60 years ago would have meant, for the English reader, no Kafka, no Camus, no Calvino, no Borges. Today it means that from the list of first-rate authors we wished to propose we had to delete Peter Handke, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Michel Tournier, Rachid Boudjedra, Mohamed Choukri, Christoph Ransmayr, Fernando Vallejo, Nguyen Huy Thiep, Pascal Quignard and Christa Wolf — all of whom have either not been translated into English or were once upon a time translated but have since been allowed to fall out of print. Under such circumstances, our choice was limited to those authors who remained fortuitously available.”

“In the end,” he says “we chose the Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré.”

I’ll let you read the article for Manguel’s comments, but here is the press release from the June 2nd Man Booker International announcement with details on Kadaré, and you may want to check out James Marcus’s piece for some interesting information and a link to an article on the translation of Chronicle in Stone.

*Requires registration (no bugmenot passwords worked, but the article is worth jumping through the hoops and the the really annoying popdown-slideover-poparound ads that I ignore, but if I took long enough to determine who they were from I would be sure to never buy their products).

Read widely, think well, and write often

comments

This lack of translations in the US is a common complaint but I’m not sure other “single language” readers are any better off.  I’ve certainly never seen any try to make the case in any substantive way.

Say all you speak is German.  Sure, google says 12% of books published in Germany are translated, compared to the less than 3% in America.  A huge cultural success you might say.  (How many of those “translated” books are Star Wars novelizations and Michael Jackson trial transcripts?) Except that google also says 75% of those translations come from English and further 10% come from French.  In other words less than 2% of books published in Germany are not German, English, or French.  Is that really so much better than the American situation?

Another example: as recently as the late 1990s it was impossible to get translations of Arab literature in anything other than English, German, or French.  (With English dominating the other two.) A reader in the Balkans or Spain or Korea was left out in the cold.

So my question is: Does a Korean reader (who speaks only Korean) see how the novel is being reinvented in the Balkans or is he just as clueless as the American?  In other words: is the real complaint about lack of translations or about lack of polyglots among the reading audience?

In a series of articles in CONTEXT magazine John O’Brien suggests that the burden of responsibility falls upon foreign governments.  For a million dollars—chump change for a government like France or Spain—they could sponsor the translation of 40-60 books a year.  Would the presence of those books on the American market positively influence American politics toward those nations making it a useful expenditure?

    – Justus (06/16  at  06:28 PM)

Those are very interesting comments, only I would say…

In using percentages you left out one important fact. If your 2% of non-English, German or French books published in Germany is correct, that still may add up to a significant number of actual books. If there were 80,000 books published in the German-language market last year (not an unreasonable estimate based on past statistics), the 2% you whittle down to is still 1,600 books. That’s more than 220% more in absolute terms than published in the U.S.

According to Chad Post of Dalkey Archive Press, in the U.S. only around 0.4% of the books published are adult literature in translation.

Also, my experience has led me to believe that educated Europeans are often polyglots and have exposure to more world literature than Americans - they are most definitely more aware of other countries’ literatures than we are.

I can’t say much about Koreans. The only people I’ve known from Korea (or Japan) spoke English, so that’s at least two languages. However, I’ve never discussed literature with any of those that I have known.

Also, if another country has the same issue, does that make it any less of a problem?

But my complaint is certainly not about a “lack of polyglots.” Should we all know English, German, French, Russian, Croatian, Latin, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Portugese, etc? Of course, not.

But this is all beside the point because I’m not too interested in debating translation stats and such, my only interest is talking about books. I don’t need to be convinced of a problem when I see a list of authors who may bring a different perspective, a different memory to their writing, sensibilities that are not my own - as Manguel brought up, what if one of these people he listed were a Kafka or a similar awesome talent - isn’t that reason enough to keep bringing up this “common complaint?”

And for what it’s worth, I am in total disagreement with John O’Brien’s solution. See Michael’s rebuttal in the latest “Context.”

    – Bud Parr (06/17  at  11:52 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: June 15, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Translation

• Comments:2
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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