Notebook: (2) Translation

We depend for translation on small publishers operating on the near side of ruin most of the time

First US editions of Karl Ove Knausgaard (2012), Jon Fosse (2006), Roberto Bolaño (2003), and Elena Ferrante (2012), from Archipelago, Dalkey Archive, New Directions, and Europa publishers, respectively, all still independent

Read Part One of this post here

A swelling suspicion of foreignness in the early 2000s (remember “Freedom Fries”?), reinforced by the increasingly commercial imperatives of a consolidated publishing industry coalesced with new technologies to prompt an efflorescence of smaller publishers seizing the opportunity to publish international writing, often with financial support from its home countries: New York Review Books in 1999, Archipelago in 2003, Other Press, which began publishing literature in 2004, Sandro Ferri’s Europa in 2005, Chad Post’s Open Letter in 2008, New Vessel in 2012, Deep Vellum, The Center for Translation’s Two Lines Press, and Restless Books in 2013, and Transit Books in 2015. Smaller publishers looked to translation of major writers not being served by commercial publishing as a way to build a substantial list. Then-director of Graywolf Press, which would become one of the most august of the independent publishers, Fiona McCrae, said in 2008, “Philip Roth is not going to suddenly be published by Graywolf. So you see who is the Philip Roth of Italy or who is an interesting writer out of Sweden.” She echoed a story publishing legend Carol Brown Janeway passed on about her former boss Alfred Knopf, that he told her he first published translations because American authors would not appear with a Jewish publisher.