Notebook: Book-Neighbors

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Authors Herta Müller (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2009) and Durs Grünbein (here in Book Post) read at “Sprachlos die Sprache verteidigen [Speechless, Defending Speech]: A Reading for Ukraine,” an event on February 26 organized by Surhkhamp Verlag editor Katharina Raabe featuring the work of Yuri Andrukhovych, Yevgenia Belorusets, Yuri Durkot, Elena Fanailova, Alissa Ganieva, Artur Klinau, Kateryna Mishchenko, Valzhyna Mort, Katja Petrowskaja, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Maria Stepanova, and Serhiy Zhadan at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. Photos: Gerald Matzka/picture alliance via Getty Images)

How does writing make it out of one language and culture and into another? In America, as we’ve noted here before, only 3 percent of the work published each year originated in another language, and that includes cookbooks and textbooks and the like. Many writers of global reputation owe their presence before the huge American audience to small presses operating on a shoestring—if they are present here at all. At a symposium I attended recently, academics and small publishers faced off a bit over the difficulties small presses face providing students with the texts of major writers that academics reasonably assume should be readily available for their syllabuses. The work of keeping American civilization in conversation with the rest of the world is carried out on friable, shifting ground.