A Simple Question

Why are there so few literary translations published each year in the United States, and what can be done about this cultural travesty?

First, how many translations are there, and of what? My intent here is not to argue whether there should be more translations. My intent is to try to determine why there are so few.

Since we are here talking about the book industry that is notoriously bad at record-keeping, one has a hard time determining how many translations there are. In a brave attempt to come up with an answer, the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts undertook a study a few years ago and came up with a figure: fewer than 3% of all books published in the U.S. the previous year were translations. But this figure included anything and everything (economics, philosophy, travel guides, biographies, and yes, fiction and poetry); the figure also included new translations of previously translated masters (e.g., if there were a new translation of Goethe, that counted).

If we try to zero in on the question of how many “literary” works (any kind of novel, poetry, play) were translated, the NEA study isn’t much help, but my guess is that, including everything that comes from the smallest of presses and not paying attention to quality or genre, the figure is about 150 works of literature out of the 150,000 books published in the United States the year of the NEA study. Even if we eliminate textbooks, how-to books, et al. from this 150,000 figure, we still are looking at an infinitesimally small percentage of books that come from the 200 or so countries that exist beyond our borders. In a quick check of catalogs from Knopf, Norton, Viking, Harcourt, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for approximately the past two seasons, there were thirty-one translations of contemporary foreign fiction and poetry. Thirty-one! From the New York houses forever championed as carrying on the noble tradition of serious literary publishing.

We can compare, as the NEA did, this 3% figure to that in other countries, though a lot of guesswork is involved here as well. In Western European countries, the percentage of translations is about 40-50% each year. Many of these are from the United States, but a significant number are from a wide range of other countries.

So, why so few? I’ll limit myself to three reasons

1. Americans are generally not interested in what is happening in other countries unless what is happening directly impacts their lives, or more accurately, the life of their country. If we are at war with Iraq, we suddenly start finding out all kinds of things about their religion, politics, economics, and even art. Americans are particularly disinterested in the literature from foreign countries, for much the same reasons they are not very interested in their own literature (in a country of 250 million people, a literary novel that sells 15,000 copies is a walloping success). This disinterest is registered from book review editors who don’t give coverage to such books, to the bookstores that don’t display them, to the readers who don’t want to put much effort into figuring out how to pronounce difficult names or read about places and cultures that are different from theirs. (Since my intent here is only to determine why there are not more translations, I will surrender the temptation to say that no one knows what effect might be achieved if book review editors, popular media, and even politicians paid more attention to books from elsewhere and gave them frequent public attention.)

Taking all of the above into account, one reason for there not being more translations is that they do not sell very well (this is, of course, an understatement), and commercial publishers don’t exist as a public service to provide cultural riches at the exclusion of financial gain. Thirty years ago, almost all commercial houses had distinguished lines of translations (Avon, Dutton, Vintage, Penguin, McGraw-Hill, and a large number of smaller houses that no longer exist). The books sold better in those days, the reviewers covered more of them, and perhaps people read more; or everybody just embraced the idea that translations mattered and therefore paid attention. But those days are long gone in commercial publishing.

2. Let’s assume that literary translations are an art form that has an appeal to no greater or smaller a group than opera or ballet. I don’t think this is the case, but let’s assume it is. For diverse reasons (and usually not very noble ones), philanthropy in the United States (let’s limit philanthropy to foundations for the moment) supports opera and ballet but, with the exception of one foundation, does not support literary translations. Is this a result of the disinterest I described in #1? I believe so. Foundations reflect the country and its biases. Try talking sometime to foundation officers about the need for translations and experience the thrill of seeing their eyes rolling around in their heads. Foundations, with a rather modest investment, could significantly increase the number of translations published here. If the MacArthur Foundation decided that books from other countries were important for Americans to have access to and read, nonprofit publishers in the United States would publish more translations. Or, if the Mellon Foundation gave to translations what it gives to some of the nitwit, self-serving programs it supports year in and year out, the number of translations in this country would triple or quadruple in three years. Americans might even find out where certain countries are located (or that they exist!) before we go to war with them (but this once again is getting into why there should be more translations, a subject I will try not to mention again).

3. The greatest reason, though, for so few translations are the foreign countries themselves. Almost every editor in trade publishing in the United States has had to endure lectures from foreign editors and rights people who, shocked and hurt, say that they do not understand why their countries translate so many American novels but that the U.S. does not do the same in return. When they say such things, you do not know whether to sympathize with or hit them. Do they really not understand? Their publishing of American literature is not a charitable gesture towards promoting culture; American books sell far better in foreign countries than foreign literature sells here. But these same publishers also publish a great deal from countries whose books do not sell as well. Charity? No. They publish out of a sense of what it means to be a publisher. Still, this does not alter the fact that foreign literature does not sell well in the U.S. Most foreign governments will provide a percentage of the cost for the translation itself (usually around 50%, which means that the U.S publisher must still absorb the rest of the cost), but no money for any other costs of publishing a book. If a 200-page novel from France will cost about $8,000 to have translated, then an American publisher (at least one willing to put up with a fair amount of bureaucracy, as well as not knowing at the time a contract is signed whether funding will in fact be forthcoming) may get about $4,000 reimbursed after the book has been published and long after the publisher has had to pay the translator, as well as pay almost all other costs associated with the book. The total cost for producing the book (author advance, production, printing, marketing, editorial, and other overhead expenses) will be, let’s say, about $35,000. After the paltry review coverage and after sales of 2,000 copies (if one is lucky), about $16,000 comes rolling in, for a loss of $15,000. But, indeed, those of us who do translations know that they often will sell, after returns, only about 700 copies, for a loss of about $25,000. (I should say that, in the spirit of bad business practices, this number of copies will gradually increase over the years if the publisher keeps the book in print, and may even increase dramatically over a long period of time if the publisher can cultivate a readership for the author, but the costs of keeping the book in print also mount as the years go on.)

Every publisher in the United States, from Knopf and Farrar, Straus & Giroux to the smallest of publishers, knows these dismal numbers all too well. The small press, or the nonprofit press, certainly cannot absorb these losses for long; and I don’t see any good business reason for large houses to do so either, and they usually don’t. Therefore, few foreign works get translated. And foreign editors and government officials wring their hands at the injustice.

What to do? Or rather, what could foreign governments do?

The solution here is rather obvious, but I have yet to encounter a foreign government official who wants to accept this solution. Foreign governments should significantly subsidize the translation and publication of literary books from their languages into English. If France, for instance, designated as little as one million dollars annually for literary translations (translation costs, plus all the other expenses I’ve cited above), that would result in at least forty works––perhaps as many as sixty—of French literature being translated. And let’s assume the Germans, Italians, Swedes, Belgians, Spaniards (who have an interesting practice, I should point out, of awarding small translation subsidies that they then never pay for!), Portuguese, Austrians, Swiss, and Russians did the same; that would be 400 translations per year. And at that level of support and through marketing ingenuity made possible by that support, readership problems begin to diminish; there may never be an enormous readership for foreign literature in the United States, but five to ten thousand people starts to seem plausible, even if the books have to be given away to libraries and classrooms. And these numbers mean a total potential reading audience of two to four million each year.

But not only don’t foreign governments like this solution, they do not even like helping an American publisher or editor travel to their countries to find books to be translated. A strange national pride seems to emerge when such requests are made, and the national pride dictates that Americans should be humbled by the opportunity to spend a few thousand dollars to travel to their countries in order to find books on which they can then lose thousands and thousands of more dollars. In short, foreign government officials, as well as publishers, have made an art out of moaning, and this moan apparently for them takes the place of the literary art that never makes its way to the United States.

One might argue (and one would be entirely correct) that foreign agencies, such as ministries of culture, should care more about their literature making its way to the United States than should American foundations or government. And yet, all parties seem to have about the same commitment to or interest in taking action.

Of all of the above, the one that has the best possibility for change is foreign governments. Or to put it this way: there is no hope whatsoever that philanthropy in America is going to get smarter, nor are the book review editors and other media going to become more interested. If change is to be set in motion, it will have to be through the foreign governments themselves.

Postscript. Just as I was finishing this article, Stephen Kinzer ran a piece in the New York Times (July 26) repeating many of the same clichés and arguments cited above. There is a long lament from the head of the German Book Office in New York (an office whose purpose is to promote German books to the U.S. market) citing figures that nearly 4,000 American books were bought for translation into German in 2002, but only 150 German books were bought for America (no distinction here was made as to literature verses Hollywood biographies, political books, etc.). But let’s guess here that there were probably 1,500 or so American literary books purchased for translation and probably only about thirty-five German works. And the publisher for Northwestern University Press is cited as saying that Northwestern is cutting back its translations, despite having sold 40,000 copies of their Nobel Prize winner (keep in mind that publishers always inflate such numbers because the real numbers are so embarrassing). Cliff Becker of the NEA is quoted giving the usual arguments about how embarrassing it is that Americans know so little about the rest of the world despite being the most powerful country in the world (true, true). Mr. Kinzer then says that a number of American publishing houses (Random House; Farrar, Strauss & Giroux; Knopf; Norton) make “special efforts” still to seek out translations (my guess is that all three houses combined published approximately fifteen original literary translations in 2002: why is it that journalists are so easily misled?), but that other large houses do not so seek. (The fact is that none of them are seeking.) A commercial publisher is then quoted as saying that Americans just can’t get a lot of the references in foreign literature, and therefore aren’t interested. All of which adds up to business as usual: a journalist who doesn’t know where to go to get other viewpoints, commercial houses who claim to carry on the good fight despite the odds, and then the wringing of hands by a foreign-rights person who does not address any of the real problems presented by translations; nor does she point out that her own country supports translations by providing (if the American publisher is fortunate) 50% of the translation costs (yes, that’s 50%, which leaves the American publisher––usually a small press that can’t afford any of the costs—with the other 50%).
Will any foreign governments out there get the message?