Context N°21
the philistines have arrived
This is the fourth (fifth?) of a series on the state of translations that I began about two years ago. Or rather, it is something of an update.
Of late, and quite strangely, the subject of literary translations has been a hot topic in various American circles, small as they may be. Dalkey Archive was, for a while at least, leading some of the discussions via CONTEXT magazine. Also strangely, some of those articles and statistics produced by staff at Dalkey Archive (in particular, Ana Lucic) have been appearing in somewhat altered form elsewhere with other people’s names attached to them in terms of authorship.
What is there to update on the state of translation?
Little of substance. Instead of substance, there has been a deluge of talk and hype and sloganism and self-congratulations. Indignation takes the place of hard facts.
The National Endowment for the Arts conducted a study a few years ago in which it attempted to determine how many literary translations were being published in the United States. I know the origins of this “study” because I was called one day and asked if I knew where such statistics could be found. My blunt answer was that they couldn’t be found because no one in publishing kept track of such things, publishing being one of the most unbusinesslike businesses imaginable. Most real businesses would want to know how many, for instance, imported cars there are (or cows, or bushels of corn, or barrels of oil), but no one in publishing knows how many literary works are imported or how well they sell (except “not well”).
I said to Cliff Becker, the literature director at the NEA at the time, that he wouldn’t be able to get at real numbers and would waste a great deal of time trying to do so. There is little or no record of them. Some publishers don’t submit data to anyone, some books get announced but never published, the publishers themselves don’t even keep records (e.g., try calling a publisher to ask how many literary translations he’s published over the past three years), and no one can even agree upon what constitutes “literary” (crime fiction? Romance? Children’s books? So-called serious books and who determines what’s serious?).
I told Cliff that he might be able to get a very, very rough idea by having an NEA intern go through a year’s worth of issues of Publishers Weekly and count the translations, and then compare this number with the total number of reviews: this would be about as accurate a number that one could come up with and it might even have some general relation to reality.
The number that Cliff’s study emerged with was THREE PERCENT, that figure representing all translations, not just literary. Most people involved with translation, especially those who publish them, knew that the number is a guess and that it came out of a “methodology” that would make any statistician cringe. How far was it off? No one knows. No one knows, and yet it has now been accepted as factual in nature as the law of gravity, raising cries for change, spawning endless panels and self-promotional meetings about this sad fact, even while the participants are quite aware of how the percentage was derived. Cynicism or stupidity? That can be hard to tell at times, given that one is the step-child of the other.
Why object to any of this? Why not just see it as yet another manifestation of how Americans can take almost anything and corrupt it? The reason for objecting is that something of value gets lost as the philistines take over once again (as always in the arts), and a kind of nastiness settles in that’s directed at anyone who isn’t on board for the hype.
What exactly gets lost, or rather, how does it get lost? Translations have suddenly moved from their marginalized place in the American marketplace to now being treated by the philistines as something to be equated with “good literature.” The logic is this, twisted and silly as it may be: the United States has become more and more isolated from other countries’ cultures; this isolation has contributed to the United States’ insistence that other countries’ social and political systems should be made to be like that of the United States; understanding other cultures will cause the United States to respect differences and, on the best of days, prevent the United States from mindlessly invading other countries; literary translations are the key to reversing America’s isolationism, thereby causing universal peace, understanding, and love. Is there anyone with gray matter between ears able to believe in such a series of rhetorical leaps? If you think of Barnum, then you might assume that this nonsense is being taken seriously in some quarters.
But what gets lost—as always with the arts when the philistines arrive—is the art. There is nothing inherently good about a book because it is a translation. There are good books, there are mediocre books, and there are a great deal of awful books: translations fit all three categories. But one dares not even whisper such a thought these days. Translations, de facto, are good because they ARE translations. And among translations, some are even better than others because of their country of origin.
What am I getting at here? All of this rubbish about translations saving the world, making the United States more sensitive to the rest of the world, and ensuring that the U.S. won’t embark on another hopeless invasion of some country because it now understands its culture, all of this should be left to the dirty politicians and their corrupted rhetoric. All that matters with translations is the value of the art: if that is lost, then everything is lost. Translations should be treated like any other literary artifact: they are good books, or bad ones, as Pound would have advised. Giving them a stature above other books is to guarantee that they wind up in a ghetto and will forever be treated “only as translations.”
And yet and yet: almost everyone in this small world of translation seems delighted with the hype. No more translations may get published, but a big party at the ABA Convention appears to satisfy everyone involved, something akin to would-be revolutionaries being content with talking about a revolution rather than causing one.
* * *
In the meantime, are foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Mexico, Lithuania, and Spain. The countries that remain nearly intransigent to changing old practices are France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. The latter group continues to fail to understand that paying for the cost of the translation (or part thereof) is of little help; nor does providing funds to send unknown authors to the States to do tours help at all unless there are substantial marketing funds made available that will help to promote the authors’ books before and after such tours.
(By the way, this previous paragraph represents the kind of thing that one is not supposed to be saying in these days of camaraderie and enforced joviality, as those morale-building American publishers have rallied together in the cause of translation, that they all agree that they will do more, and that they all have a common understanding of what constitutes good literature. Dissent and criticism are signs of being anti-revolutionary.)
This past year, France and Germany co-sponsored one of those hopeless “group tours” for American editors to meet publishers. Do either of these countries ever evaluate the effects of such tours? How many books get signed on as a result? No. This too falls into the category of appearing to address a problem by having everyone back-slap each other. God only knows how much these tours costs (a lot), and one can speculate on how such money could be better spent.
Another strange practice is hosting translators in various countries for various periods of time. This might seem a necessary step in a process, but as a kind of first step? The intention is to encourage translators and to provide them with an opportunity to work with other translators. Fine. But then what? To have translators and translations without a publisher would seem to be beside the point.
* * *
So here we are, now several years past the NEA study. Has the percentage of actual number of translations increased in the United States? If so, what kind? Fiction? Poetry? Non-fiction? Is anyone counting? Has the percentage decreased? These are not matters that concern the philistines.
