I love that line. It’s a quote attributed to Anne-Solange Noble, the foreign-rights director at Gallimard in France, who was speaking about the dearth of translated works available to the American reader. The entire quote is “American publishers are depriving the American readership of the cultural diversity through translation to which they are entitled. It is what I call the poverty of the rich.” The article is from the New York Times and was published last Friday.
According to the article, large American publishers don’t shop for books to translate because they assume that Americans don’t like to read books by authors who write in languages they don’t understand. How stupidly absurd is that?!
The more I think about it, the more I believe that Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy responsible for awarding the Nobel fiction prize, was right. The US is too insular and isolated, as he said, and our writers may very well be “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” We don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature, and as Engdahl said, “That ignorance is restraining.”
But whose fault is it? Why do large American publishers choose to spend large sums on advances to mediocre writers when for a pittance they could buy the rights to a work that has already been judged good enough to be translated into more than a dozen languages—even when the foreign publisher is willing to reimburse translation expenses? The answer is simple: American publishers, for the most part, don’t trust the intelligence of the American reading public. I’m not talking ALL American publishers, but how pathetic is it that only 2% of the books published in America last year were translations? No wonder we don’t understand the rest of the world!
During the period of my life when I lived in Los Angeles, I was closely involved with the motion picture business. The same lack of faith in American intelligence permeated that industry, so it’s no wonder that, since the large American publishers are now owned by the same people who own the studios, the same mind set would become part our publishing world.
Fear rules the publishing industry just as it does the motion picture industry. But those industries create their own fear by offering advances so large that the financial success is next to impossible–they fear failure! But, is it so hard to conceive of a plan whereby instead of a large advance, the money is instead spent promoting a translation of a book that has already been deemed great by the rest of the world?
It seems like a no-brainer to me, but I’m a realist. I can’t help but believe we’ll continue to stick our head in the sand, and that we’ll continue to get kicked in the ass. And in the end, our ignorance (created through less fault of our own as readers than one might think) will render America a bystander in the new millennium. It’s all about books, folks. Books are knowledge; knowledge is might; America is being left behind.
