Notebook: (1) Translation
Notebook: (1) Translation
That a prize known for the size of its haul should be translated literature’s one moment in the American sun seems either ironic or fitting …
Last week, the relatively youthful (at fifty-four) and commercially successful South Korean novelist Han Kang received the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. Journalist Alex Shephard, who has for years run a highly diverting Nobel watch for The New Republic, wrote with n+1 editor Mark Krotov that “the fact that the Academy has alighted on a deserving, interesting winner of the prize continues to be strange and miraculous.” Author Amber Sparks tweeted that Han Kang’s win “seems to have united literary twitter in approval? Shockingly? Everyone is happy?” Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov continued cheekily that recently the Swedish Academy, the institute that does the literary selecting for the Nobel Foundation,
has done its best to act as a redoubt for capital-G global, capital-L Literature. When we started writing our little jokes about the Nobel Prize in Literature nearly a decade ago, there was a lot to make fun of … [for instance] sensing growing irrelevance, that Prize staggered randomly (and, if the reporting is to be believed, drunkenly) between relative unknowns and global superstars and genres.
But now, the Prize constitutes a kind of defense of literature in an era where it is constantly sullied and devalued. The Swedish Academy has cast itself as an island of seriousness in a swirling ocean of garbage and filth. Making fun of the Nobel Prize in Literature is, and will always be, fun to do: It is incredibly funny that a group of stuffy academics who live in a fake country that has only produced one worthy piece of art (ABBA Gold) get to give a prize for being the best at doing literature. But this iteration of the Swedish Academy does sometimes make it hard, in large part because they are doing a kind of service: Highlighting meaningful, resonant work from across the world in an era where … that just doesn’t happen very often [ellipsis theirs].
(I’m not sure how one demarcates fake countries, and I personally like lots of Swedish books, especially those by Tomas Tranströmer and Stig Dagerman and Elsa Beskow, but we’ll move on.)
In Korea, where they had until recently doubted they would ever be smiled upon by the Swedish Academy (though as Publishers’ Weekly noted the win coincides with a more expansive presence for South Korea across popular culture), there was particular celebration that the award had been given to a woman, as even though “much of the most groundbreaking and provocative contemporary Korean literature is being written by female novelists,” according to The New York Times, the literary establishment remains dominated by men.
This tilt into relevance for the Nobel comes after a scandal over sexual misconduct and influence peddling racked the Swedish Academy to the point of suspending the literature Nobel in 2018. Some years earlier one of its eminences had not made friends when he judged Americans “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” “too isolated, too insular” to participate in “the big dialogue of literature.” That a prize whose notoriety stems not from the wisdom of its record but the size of its haul (11 million Swedish kronor, or $1.06 million US dollars, this year) should be the occasion for translated literature’s one big moment in the American sun seems either ironic or fitting, as translation is recurrently the most cash- and attention-strapped corner of American reading life.
In 2007 publisher Chad Post launched a blog called “Three Percent” in order to draw attention (successfully, it turned out) to the perilous state of translated literature in the US. The blog was named for the share of American books published annually that are translated from another language, as established by Bowker, the register for the ISBN numbers that track books through the distribution system. (Chad Post noted even more dolefully that only a fraction of the 3 percent consists of literary work—more like 0.7.) In 2008 he established a “Translation Database” to test the figure, providing depressing annual affirmation of the durably low numbers of newly translated works of fiction and poetry.
This number is in stark contrast to the rest of the world, where books, like other cultural forms, are overwhelmed by outsiders, mostly us. According one study, 12.28 percent of books in Germany are translated, 15.90 percent in France, 33.19 percent in Poland, and 19.7 percent in Italy. According to another, between 1979 and 2007 the proportion of translated books with English as their original language increased from 40 percent to around 60 percent worldwide. Recently the trend has become even more pronounced as the transnational force of TikTok has encouraged young people to buy (if not read) book in English rather than translated from. These are usually cheap imports priced under the price-supported (contra our custom) local product. An Amsterdam bookseller lamented that the local young “will never read in Dutch.” (International booksellers gathering in the UAE last year, by contrast, reported that “reading books in English is an aspirational activity for some.” Aidai Maksatbekova, owner of IQ Bookstore in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, said English-language books “make us feel close and connected to the international community of book lovers and readers.”)
Before we lash ourselves too much over our provincialism, book scout Emily Williams offers (well, offered, but they still seem to me germaine) some contextualizing observations. Foreign publishers are not notably more cosmopolitan than we, she argues, they just all speak English, for reasons external to book publishing, and because America has a “strong culture of commercial fiction,” like our culture of commercial film and music, “a certain savvy in picking the right American books to translate developed into a valuable editorial skill in markets abroad.” “There is no comparably mature translation market for any one language in the English-speaking world,” she continues. “The fact that books coming into the American market come from many different countries and languages makes it harder for editors here to develop the expertise in what any market has to offer.” It’s also easier for English-speaking authors to establish a presence in countries where English is often understood. Translator Edith Grossman has repeated the widely whispered dictum that “no writer who has not been translated into English can hope even to be considered for the [Nobel] prize in literature, because English is the one language all the judges can read.”
In 2010 Amazon launched a translation imprint that focuses on translating commercial writing into English, following the numbers for what it knows to be popular works abroad, an outlier reversing the usual commercial practice here but echoing the practice abroad. Sandro Ferri, the founder of Europa Editions, an American outpost of an Italian original which saw a giant success in the US with novelist Elena Ferrante, has written that “European culture in the last century has often been overwhelmed by the energy of American culture and has thus confused its own identity.” He thinks that this underlines what European literature has to offer Americans: “Europe is experiencing its own modernity. The diversity within its changing borders is even greater than in the USA. The conflict between tradition and innovation is probably fiercer than in America and its representation can be dramatic and interesting.”
Han Kang may be a successful writer in America now, but as is the case with most literary translation here, the work of bringing her into American view was done by a small publisher and a hardworking translator. Deborah Smith, a twenty-three-year-old doctoral student who had only recently begun studying Korean, approached a now-defunct UK publisher called Portobello about publishing Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian, and they brought out her translation two years later in 2015. The book had been widely translated into other languages and was picked up in the US by Hogarth, a division of Random House, and shortly after received the UK’s International Booker Prize (an honor that is “increasingly serving,” as Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov note, “as a kind of feeder prize for the Nobel”). Interestingly, Korean readers, who found the book “extreme and bizarre,” were surprised by its success abroad; it may be a book that benefits, at least commercially, from translation. (There was a bit of a controversy over whether Deborah Smith had in fact sweetened it for English-language readers, see Tim Parks in The New York Review of Books and Charse Yun in the Los Angeles Times, and Deborah Smith’s reply in the LA Review of Books. Tim Parks has written in the past about the incentives for international writing to bend itself toward the prospect of translation into English, which include more likely consideration for big prizes. For a robust appreciation for American audiences of Han Kang’s work see Pachinko author Min Jin Lee in The New York Review of Books.)
As Jill Schoolman, founder of Archipelago Books, one of a fresh vintage of smaller, translation-only publishers in the US, has observed, back in the 1950s Helen and Kurt Wolff of Pantheon (see our consideration here) made a strong mark bringing translated literature into the American mainstream, and “many large houses and university presses kept the doors to international writing open into the 1970s.” By the early 2000s, however, when she launched Archipelago, “those doors were shut.” Cliff Becker, literature director at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1999 to 2005, who collaborated with one of the few houses still aggressively pursuing international literature in the early 2000s, John O’Brien’s Dalkey Archive, to open an expansive translation program, saw the attitude as an extension of the xenophobic post-9/11 moment, telling The New York Times
It is not an exaggeration to refer to this as a national crisis. I am a citizen of the most powerful country the world has known, a country that asks me to be part of its decision-making process on a whole range of things. If I'm not able to experience other cultures, not even from a place that is as easy to reach as the printed page, that is outright dangerous.
A swelling suspicion of foreignness (remember “Freedom Fries”?), reinforced by the increasingly commercial imperatives of the consolidated publishing industry, sufficed nearly to expel international writing from the commercial mainstream in those years.
Read Part Two of this post here!
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Read more of her Notebooks on publishing, bookselling, and the book life here.
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