Context
Selective Xenophobia and Literary Translation in Britain
Eric Dickens
Serious literature is hard to define. With
the increase of, for instance, performance art and rap poetry, the
borders between theatre and literature for reading purposes become ever
cloudier. But I shall here be talking about novels, short stories,
poetry, and essays, the last of which is a borderline genre, verging on
the academic. The other three are, or should be, read for pleasure and
enlightenment. They are still to be found, allowing for technological
advances, between covers, slightly firmer than the pages on which the
text itself is printed. 2. For hundreds of years, works in the above genres have been
translated regularly so that people can enjoy literary fruits
originally published in another country and language. This situation
strikes me as normal. If you want to know what is going on in the rest
of the world, learning even only a few of the principal languages well
would be an insuperable burden. We therefore resort to translations.
And translations of literary works, as defined above, would seem part
and parcel of this willingness to learn from beyond one’s national
borders. 3. Over the past decades, however, there seems to be an
increasing tendency in the English-speaking world as a whole, and Great
Britain in particular, to turn in on oneself. While there is no
shortage of literary traffic within this monolingual world,
bringing in texts from the outside (or from the language minorities
within) has become ever harder. Britain, my country of origin, appears
to be infected by such selective xenophobia. By selective xenophobia I
mean that Britain appears indeed to be quite happy to take onboard
literature from all over the world—as long as it has been written in
English. Since this is baneful with regard to literary translation and
any meaningful comparison of literatures, please allow me to outline my
fears and hopes, even though my search for a remedy may prove Quixotic.
The situation has gone on far too long for one individual to be able to
make any significant inroads. But it does no harm, in a climate of
democracy, to air one’s views. Xenophobia as I apply the notion to the
problem of translation here is, I feel, an accurate description of the
complaint, since it is “fear,” rather than “hatred,” of things and
individuals of foreign provenance which is the problem. It is a brand
of fear caused by sheer ignorance. Recently, I published a short
comment on literary translation and its status in Great Britain in an
issue of the British Council publication Literature Matters (Dickens 2001). It is ironic that some of my best allies in my charges
against the windmills of linguistic indifference are connected to the
British Council, whose principal task it is to promote Britain abroad.
But the British Council fosters an idealism based on Britons’ actually
having to rub shoulders on equal terms with foreigners in their own
countries while some British Council workers, teachers, and quasi
diplomats are talented linguists and philanthropists and do their bit
to smuggle shards of The World Out There under the portcullis of
Blighty Castle. 4. I would love to trump abroad such optimistic cries as:
“things can’t go on like this!” But of course they can. Britain does
not appear to need things that happen in foreign languages,
politically, economically, or culturally. One reason is that foreign
people are all too eager to practice their English on Britons (or
Americans and Canadians). Britons then proceed to turn to their
advantage their own helplessness in other languages by allowing the
rest of the world to do all communications on their terms, i.e., on
English-language terms, in both spoken and written form. It is, of
course, vastly preferable to negotiate something subtle and complicated
in one’s mother tongue, rather than being forced to express oneself
inelegantly in someone else’s language. But it is ultimately a question
of courtesy and mutual respect. Britons allow foreigners to make the
attempt, and these poor foreigners, often well-educated academics or
members of the business community, are then rewarded for their pains by
guffaws of laughter or snide sniggers should they make the slightest
slip of the tongue. I am sure that a Briton, when attempting to explain
the workings of a currency or banking system, the narrative structure
of a novel, or the metrics of a poem in, say, French or German, would
also cause native speakers of these languages to have to restrain
themselves from exhibiting impolite hilarity. But the crafty Briton
never exposes himself or herself to ridicule. I mortally insulted an
Englishman once by suggesting that his accent—when he had said several
words in Russian—was, as I so subtly put it, “lousy.” He left the pub
forthwith in a considerable huff. A sadistic streak in me tells me that
I am not unpleased at the result. . . . 5. But in all fairness, nor are many Europeans in fact the
linguists they are cracked up to be. There is an awful lot of
myth-making about the language knowledge of the inhabitants of the many
countries that make up continental Europe, including the Scandinavian
countries. Nowadays, and under commercial pressure, many young people
there seem to feel that learning English is quite enough. English is a
handy Esperanto when it comes to selling someone a cup of coffee or a
shirt. But that does not necessarily mean you can tackle complex
subjects in that language.Yet these poor foreigners will rarely find a
Briton willing to do things conversational on their, foreign, terms,
let alone discuss difficult topics. That level playing field, so
familiar from depictions of the English gentleman and his arcane games
of cricket and soccer, is sorely lacking here. 6. In many bookshops throughout Europe, even in smaller
towns, one will find that a significant proportion of the books on
display have been translated from other languages. If a comparison were
made with British bookshops, especially ones outside the university
cities, the difference would immediately become apparent. What I am
objecting to, therefore, is not so much the fact that my compatriots
are, on the whole, lamentably inadequate as linguists—there are good
historical reasons for this—but to the fact that they are not open to
prose, poetry, and essays that are being written now (i.e., not fifty
years ago, and thus reified and deified into classics) in neighboring
countries, even in translation. This handicaps a Briton’s understanding
of the world at large. You can always read guide books and tomes of
history, but literature, even in translation, brings you closer to the
soul of any given country or ethnic group. 7. Publishers’ lists and backlists reveal a similar story.
While there are plenty of reprints or simultaneous issues involving the
United States, Canada, Australia, and authors from other
English-speaking countries, translations from European languages (here
I again mean the continent, not the politico-economic construct) tend,
for a large part, to be restricted to gardening books, travel guides,
and other nonfiction. There is, sadly, little prose fiction or poetry
translated in book form from European languages, especially from those
languages with relatively few nativespeakers, or those of what is
termed “lesser currency,” i.e., minority languages within sovereign
states. British publishers, on the whole, also appear not to invest
very much money or energy in finding out what kind of literature is
being written now in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, let alone
other languages. A glance at a few random publisher’s catalogs from one
or two European countries can lend support to my basic point. I have,
on my shelves, copies of several such recent catalogs from the
Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, thus from affluent, north
European countries, somewhat akin to Britain. Each of these countries
naturally gives prominence to authors writing in its respective
language. But what comes next in these catalogs? Without wishing to go
into a complex statistical analysis of data, I can with few means
arrive at some simple conclusions. I think anyone examining the lists
of authors’ names and book titles cannot fail to notice the difference
in attitude between the four north European countries on the one hand
and Great Britain on the other. 8. British publishers, usually themselves incapable of
reading books in foreign languages, get around this serious cultural
handicap by employing what are termed “publisher’s readers.” In theory,
this means that the publisher consults a well-informed adviser to tell
him or her what is being published in the world at large. But there are
drawbacks. First, there seems to be no clear process whereby a
publisher’s reader is chosen. This could be anyone from a family friend
who did his year abroad in France to someone the publisher met at a
cocktail party and swore blind she was an “expert” on, say, Ruritanian
literature. The publisher has no way of checking their credentials and
language knowledge, and their choice of authors could be one-sided or
even quirky. The publisher, having few insights into how Ruritania
works and who is respected there as an author, relies totally on the
publisher’s reader. The publisher’s only check is the occasional chat
with one or two European publishers over drinks in the evenings at the
Frankfurt Book Fair. Since these foreign publishers do speak English
and are on occasion Anglophiles, the conversation, and ultimate
trading, tends to swing in the other direction, with the foreigner
buying British or United States literature—but almost never vice-versa. 9. As I already suggested above, in my experience within
Britain itself this somewhat patronizing attitude toward foreigners and
their cultural produce affects the professional field of literary
translation by creating an overconcentration on a number of matters
that do not themselves further an insight into what is being written in
Europe right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. There
is, I would suggest, an overconcentration on translation theory, on
Bible translation, on dabblings in Greek and Roman classics, now that
those languages have long since been scrapped from the average school
curriculum. But translating a few slightly bawdy poems by Catullus is
no substitute for the deeper linguistic and cultural insights that
schoolchildren used to get into the workings of the Greek and Roman
civilizations, insights that can be useful when trying to find a
yardstick by which to measure our times. And while the translation of
the Bible is a fascinating subject in itself, how many scholars
actually possess a good enough knowledge of ancient Greek and Hebrew
and Aramaic to be able to make meaningful comparisons and corrections?
If they fail in this respect, the whole exercise becomes one of
translating from, and analyzing, translations, rather than examining
original texts with a view to introducing improve-ments in the
translations of these. 10. Translation in general hardly ever becomes “tainted” by
those languages actually spoken now, throughout the continent of
Europe, let alone further afield. It is quite true that languages tend
to be taught rather half-heartedly in many British schools. And, for
understandable reasons, these languages tend to be French, German,
Spanish, Italian and, on occasions, Russian, leaving other languages
out of the picture. Not until college can young people encounter
smaller, rarer languages, and only the tiniest fraction of young people
in Great Britain learn these to any degree of competence. Even then,
there is little motivation to study these as anything more than minor
subjects. Translation is talked about a great deal, yet when it comes
down to actually doing any, many of those theoretically inclined try to
change the subject. The kind of theorizing that I favor at this point
in time when Britain has a great shortage of published texts to compare
is the kind that covers such areas as reception and other synchronic
considerations. This, I feel, is more important for general knowledge
than a full-blown diachronic or evolutionary examination. Important are
literary orientation and present-day tastes compared with the same in
several other comparable European countries. The statistical groundwork
for such comparisons is, alas, still at a basic stage. As are
sociological comparisons across the continent of Europe, plus North
America, to put British attitudes to translation in a meaningful and
current context. Workshops are fine, but again, given the fact that
Britons tend to translate from one hard-learned language only, those
translating from something a little rarer never join up with those
whose main language is French, Spanish, Italian, or German, and are
left on the sidelines. And those studying Germanic languages tend to
ignore Romance ones, and vice-versa, so workshops where texts from
both, say, French and German are afforded close consideration by the
same translators are few and far between. 11. There is a curious overemphasis on poetry, as opposed to
prose. Poetry, as anyone who has ever tried to translate it will know,
is one of the most tricky things to salvage for another culture, given
rhyme schemes, idiomatic usage, and the sheer succinctness of thought
involved. And Britons are treated every year to umpteen retranslations
of poems by, for example, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mandelstam, sometimes
published in literary magazines, more seldom appearing as collections.
There is nothing wrong with bringing more accurate and more up-to-date
versions of these authors to a British audience, but one is inclined to
wonder why what is being written in European countries now is, in the
vast majority of cases, simply ignored. Prose, mostly on account of its
sheer length, is worse off. Since many publishers claim that “short
stories don’t sell,” these too do not appear in sufficient quantities
in translation. Novels in translation do, on rare occasions, make a
breakthrough. But I wonder how many novels such as Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow,
which was a great success in Britain as I have understood, are destined
to be so lucky. Contemporary Scandinavian literature is almost unknown
in Britain and one of the small presses that is keen to promote it,
i.e., the Norvik Press, is unfortunately not as visible in British
bookshops as one would wish. 12. Nor indeed does Slovenian literature end with Slavoj
Zizek, or that from Brazil with Paulo Coelho and Clarice Lispector. In
Britain, a dangerous tokenism holds sway, where a whole national
literature is written off after the publishers “do” a couple of its
writers in translation—in the same way that a tourist “does” a country
city by city, then ticks it off a list, never more to return. Large
prizes, e.g., the Nobel Prize for Literature, can also increase
tokenism. Especially for such a monolingual culture as the British one,
where such prizes increase the danger that the country and literary
culture from where the winning author comes from remains peripheral.
Britain’s Booker Prize already restricts its entrants to those writing
in English, but the dangers with the Nobel are, for the British reader,
slightly different. 13. When the Nobel is, on occasion, won by someone writing in
a small language, the individual concerned will immediately have some
of his or her work translated (often in indecent haste!) into English,
but what his/her compatriots are producing will hardly enjoy any more
readers. Maybe there will be a token skim to make a ritual
acknowledgement that the country in question possesses more writers,
but by the year after, this will all be forgotten (although the
laureates themselves tend to enjoy a measure of continued visibility).
When Camilo José Cela (1989 Laureate) died in early 2002, this was
mentioned in the press worldwide. But how often do the lives or deaths
of Spanish-writing authors in general make the British press?
(Incidentally, Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson, who were themselves
members of the Swedish Nobel Committee and were joint laureates in
1974, are, as far as I know, not as well remembered.) How many Britons
can name, off the cuff, a Polish writer except for Szymborska (1996
Laureate), Milosz (1980 Laureate), and Sienkiewicz (1905 Laureate),
and, maybe, Reymont (1924 Laureate)? Is Gide so copiously translated
into English because he won the Nobel, ditto Sartre? I fear that the
million of whatever currency it is dazzles the British literary world
to such an extent that the rest of the laureate’s author-compatriots
often remain quasi-invisible. 14. Near our shores, there are, for instance, over twenty
million native speakers of the Dutch language living in the Netherlands
and Flanders, which are some of the first countries you come to when
you cross the English Channel and the North Sea. This is, very roughly,
about one third of the population of the British Isles. It should not
surprise anyone that the culture of both the Netherlands and that of
the northern half of Belgium where they speak Dutch also includes
literary efforts. But apart from a handful of contemporary Dutch
writers, mostly translated and published with heavy subsidies from
their country of origin, there is hardly anything from the Dutch
available in university bookshops, let alone ones in small provincial
towns. Since no Dutch or Flemish writer has yet won the Nobel Prize,
even that window of opportunity regarding visibility has been lacking
hitherto. (Note: in current usage, there is no such thing as “the
Flemish language.” Both Dutch authors, i.e. from the Netherlands, and
Flemish ones, i.e. from the northern half of Belgium, write in more or
less standard Dutch, whatever dialect or patois they may speak at home
and among friends.) If you wander around a Dutch bookshop, even a small
one with a rather poor selection, you will find umpteen translations of
British, but mostly U.S., authors. The sheer might of “American
English” means that British literature too can cash in on the
popularity of the English language. But not all translation projects
into Dutch meet with success. This may be caused by the opposite
situation to that prevalent in the United Kingdom: a surfeit of
translations. These translations remain in the bookshops for a year at
the most and are then remaindered. Accomplished British novelist
Anthony Powell has had good luck and bad luck. The good luck is that he
has had four of the twelve volumes of the duodecalogy A Dance to the Music of Time translated into Dutch. The bad luck is that this has now happened twice
over. On each occasion, the publisher has given up after the fourth
hurdle, so to speak. So now the late Anthony Powell is in the absurd
situation that four of his novels have been translated twice into
Dutch, while none of the other eight have been translated at all into
that language. 15. Who, in the English-speaking world, remembers Simon
Vestdijk and Louis Paul Boon? Both have a couple of novels that did at
one time appear in English translation, but most have been out of print
for a couple of decades, leaving available only one work from each
author. The former author, a Dutchman, wrote fifty-two novels
(including, no doubt, a dozen or more pot-boilers, but still). These
include a suite of eight novels, termed the Anton Wachter novels
(Vestdijk 1939, 1948, 1934, 1949, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960—the slightly
unchronological order reflects the order within the suite), in
Proustian mode describing the childhood, teenage, and adulthood of a
young man, Vestdijk’s alter ego, growing up in the fictional town of
Lahringen, based on the Frisian coastal town of Harlingen where the
author grew up. Louis Paul Boon wrote two innovative Flemish metanovels
in 1953 and 1956, respectively, which possess all the traits of
intertextuality, social commitment, narrative unreliability, and
uncertainty and so forth, which in English-speaking academic circles
are all the rage. But these two gents had the misfortune to write in a
“language of no great importance” from a British point of view, and
thus only a very few of their works remain extant in Britain, and those
on the shelves of a handful of university libraries. It took some while
before the two Vestdijk novels and the one by Boon appeared in English.
Why these particular works were chosen for translation and how the
recommendation process went remains a mystery, although these are
indeed widely regarded as some of the best work by the two authors. In
their time, both authors were tipped for the Nobel Prize. Would they
now be household names in Britain if they had won it? 16. Some Britons would say, with all the naïveté that comes
with ignorance in the matter, that the bold presence of Englishlanguage
literature worldwide is proof of the innate invincibility of English as
a medium for literary production. As one Englishman put it to me in an
e-mail: “English is superior to all other languages in terms of
literary expression since it has a larger vocabulary, more malleable
grammar, and a literary heritage second to none” (January 2002). Apart
from expressing himself with a good dose of cultural nationalism, my
question is: would a scientist not make himself the laughingstock of
the laboratory were he to claim that a particular process or product
were “superior” to its rivals without ever having compared it to
anything else? One ambassador accredited to a northern European country
recently started a campaign to have translated into English a factual
book about that tiny country’s accession to the European Union, a book
he himself had edited. He was the prime mover behind the project, but
this was neither the British nor the American ambassador in the capital
in question. It was the chap from the Quai d’Orsay, a man who writes
e-mail in excellent English. The book has already appeared in French,
and now the French Ambassador, recognizing the power English has for
the dissemination of knowledge, has taken it upon himself to have the
book appear in English too. 17. English is, as I see it, a very fine lingua franca for world communication, as Latin once was. But what I miss among its
native speakers is reciprocity and respect for those whose mother
tongues are different. The fact that English is used as a convenient
Esperanto does not mean that the whole of the world should adopt it as
a language of home and office or risk being regarded as out of date and
marginal. Nor should it lead to a scramble to write only in that
language in order to be able to market one’s book. As I suggested
above, United States power and prestige prop up the English language
internationally; and yet English is only the mother tongue of a
relatively modest number of people worldwide. Translation obviates the
necessity of people having to write badly in English when they can be
writing well in their respective mother tongues. 18. Every country likes to promote its literature abroad.
Some do this as a matter of national pride, some as a way of boosting
export sales by indirect means, such as by fostering goodwill and
understanding. Most countries that have a budget for the promotion of
national literature tend to adopt the “push” strategy—pushing out
information to others. This means they set up an office that then sends
out glossy brochures and magazines free all over the world, or,
nowadays, they create a website, all informing those interested of what
is being written. Instances of this approach are Norway, Sweden,
Belgium (both communities), the Netherlands, Estonia, and Finland.
There are many others. Sometimes these bureaus are separate to the
governmental national promotion office, sometimes part and parcel of
it. But one thing is clear. In all these instances, the “push” approach
dominates. What I feel should become much more developed, especially in
such a country as Great Britain, which has little need to push its own
literature, is the “pull” approach. By this approach, well-informed
British translators who are intimately acquainted with particular
countries and their literatures “pull” this literature into, in this
case, Britain. This approach would mean you have people who are already
well-versed in the problems encountered in their home country, Britain
in this case, and can act as negotiators between perhaps overkeen
foreign bureaus—who think all the literature their country produces is
of world standard—and the overapathetic British publishers. These need
to be prodded a little before they will embark upon the nightmarishly
huge and insurmountable risks of having a book translated and then
trying to sell it to a largely indifferent audience of British readers.
Otherwise, only books written in English will come in from abroad. 19. To leave Europe and North America for a moment and to
examine literature coming from distant parts, the Indian subcontinent
provides a curious instance. There, where an elite does indeed write
its novels in English, only about thirty thousand out of a billion or
so people speak it as their mother tongue (correct me if I am wrong).
But because of the sheer mesmerism of English, a minority of Indian and
Pakistani writers, writing in what is, in effect, a second language,
are almost the only ones we hear about in Britain, in continental
Europe, and in North America, despite the popularity of postcolonial
studies. Those writing in, for instance, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Gujurati,
Bengali, or Kannada have a much tougher time obtaining recognition and
shelf room in British bookshops. This is not only because translation
involves extra costs; it is a manifestation of a deep-seated attitude
that “if it’s written in English, it must be good.” 20. While fighting an admirable battle against gender
prejudice and racism, postcolonialists all over the world seem
astoundingly blind to the fact that the English language—introduced by
the colonists—plays so powerful a role in their subject. And so the
colonization of many European and extra-European countries is vastly
ignored. Nor is the subject particularly historical, extra-polations
being made using experience with “the Brits and their follies” as the
norm. In cultural and literary studies, little is said in
(post)colonialism about, for instance, the Spanish conquest of much of
Central and South America, about Russian and later Soviet colonialism
in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, Swedish colonialism
in northern Germany, Poland, and the Baltic States, about German
colonialism in east and southwest Africa, Turkish colonialism in the
Middle East and north Africa, etc., etc. Source materials for research
into such fields are, of course, mainly written in languages other than
English, and Britons are thus deprived of deeper insights into how
colonialism worked in those parts of the colonized world that were not
once marked in red on the map. For me, therefore, postcolonial studies
is a curious mixture of a way of smuggling English literature in by the
back door, coupled with a kind of British Empire-bashing. This bashing
is masochistic on the part of Britons, often the descendants of the
colonizers, and disingenuous on the part of those academics who enjoy
status in the metro-politan countries, plus a good salary paid to them
by the very nation they are criticizing. Postcolonialism as a subject
was cooked up in the corridors of English departments worldwide,
including some in the United Kingdom, and if you look at most
postcolonial reading lists for university use, you will find that the
vast majority of books listed were written in English. In my reading,
one happy example of a book about colonialism in literature that breaks
the mold is Ewa Thompson’s Imperial Knowledge (2000) whose subtitle is Russian Literature and Colonialism. Thompson’s book sets out to identify the blind spots in Russian literature, including a one-chapter examination of War and Peace,
where Russian writers, otherwise dissident and against the system and
so forth, turn a blind eye when Caucasians or Balts try to assert their
national identities and are suppressed by the centralized authority,
first that of the Russian Czar, latterly by the Soviet Union.
Nationalism in the emerging states of Africa and Asia is, on the whole,
regarded as something positive, to be set against the atavistic
tendencies of tribal affiliations. And yet this positive attitude
toward national identity has been thrown into doubt of late in Europe.
When, for instance, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania exhibit similar
aspirations, these are labelled “nationalist.” What is good for one set
of colonized peoples seems evil for another. This whole systemic
distortion of what should be an examination of colonialism worldwide
and its aftermath becomes a cozy exercise in the examination of English
literature written all over the world, at the expense of anything
written in any other language. Postcolonial studies run the risk of
becoming, to paraphrase Malthus, “Eng Lit by other means.” 21. I am suspicious of pat solutions, ones that would claim
that hundreds of translated works of literature could be on the British
market within a few years. But I have some ideas as to how people could
be made more aware, how the situation could be improved: 21.2 The weekly reviews: I would also hope that the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books,
and similarly high-visibility publications could open up much more to
foreign literature in translation. Their remit does not include the
publication of large quantities of original work, but in the books they
review they could encourage translators by including several reviews
every week of literary works originally written in “foreign” and now
appearing in English translation. Such is done by the Friday book
supplement to Le Monde. As translation studies scholar Lawrence
Venuti says in an interview with M. Asaduddin in the Translators’
Association (London) quarterly In Other Words: “When I review for a periodical like The New York Times,
I tend to have no more than a brief concluding paragraph to discuss the
translation. But this can be enough. I try to pick a few striking
examples that draw attention to the quality of the translator’s
choices.” It is such civil treatment of translations (not least
pointing out the fact the book is actually translated by someone) that
I miss in British literary weekly and monthlies. In Britain, the
reviewer, usually having no knowledge of the source language
whatsoever, fights shy of having to say anything about the quality of
the translation. Such an utterance would, in any case, be absurd, given
the fact that he or she does not really know whether the translator has
even conveyed the basic meaning of the original, let alone nuance,
idiom, register and so forth. This accounts for the usual and rather
glib, “the translator has rendered the meaning of the text in fluent
English” and similar patronizing platitudes. 21.3 The Book Publishers: I would also hope that more genuine
and informed enthusiasm could be generated among British publishers and
literary agents with regard to what is being written now in other
countries, not least in Britain’s neighboring countries in western and
central and eastern Europe. But again, we run into the basic problems
of willing but ignorant people in a rather too cozy, even stuffy,
monolithicmonolingual culture. Those retranslations of French, German,
and Russian poetry are all very well, but there are people writing now,
and in many languages, and Britons are being deprived of the
opportunity of reading such contemporaries, both from Europe and from
farther afield. The publishers should, on a regular basis, try to
identify potential “publisher’s readers” while they are still studying
at undergraduate or post-graduate level at the various universities
that teach a literary component alongside foreign languages. This piece first appeared in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.1 (2002):21.1 More visible translations in
periodicals: what I would like to see is several serious and visible
periodicals with translated literature in bookshops such as
Waterstone’s, Ottokar’s, and W. H. Smith’s, so that Britons can slowly
become convinced that there is literary life Out There Where the
Foreigners Live. And literary life now, not that of anno 1925.
Periodicals should regard translated literature as the norm, rather
than something exotically amateur. And should be willing to take on
board plenty of it.
22. It is no wonder there are so many Euroskeptics in
Britain, people who fear the advent of the euro as an alien currency
encroaching on their sovereignty. As I have pointed out above, much
fear is generated by ignorance. Many Britons lack deeper insights into
how people live in Europe and beyond, into their aspirations and fears
and, most especially in this context, into their literature. What
foreign people are writing and reading would provide valuable clues to
“what makes them tick,” apart from being a pleasurable activity in
itself. Whatever specific problems European and other translators may
suffer, I fear that the old joke about “fog in the Channel, the
Continent cut off” applies just as much today with regard to literature
in translation as it once did with regard to other matters. Ballet,
music, mime, and fine art can be enjoyed without a knowledge of foreign
languages; but literature has to be translated, preferably by people
who enjoy a corresponding amount of respect as professionals.
Translation means more work for publishers, and costs more, but is
worth it in the long run. Knowing what, and how, your neighbors and
others think helps mutual understanding and diminishes the risk of
serious conflict based on prejudice, rather than genuine grievance.
Literary translators play an important part in this mechanism of
reciprocity and should, in the United Kingdom, be treated as
professionals and paid at a decent rate, not reduced to becoming
practitioners in a marginalized field where dilettantes hold sway.
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http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu.
